0630 | The Holder of the World | Bharati Mukherjee
Had I not been held captive in a stifling, airless bedroom of a beach bungalow in Zanzibar by the worst sunburn I’ve ever had in my life AND a foot…
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0624 | Three Trapped Tigers | Guillermo Cabrero Infante
Nothing to see here people. Move along. At least, if you’ve read any Sterne (1759) or later Joyce or Tristram Shandy or Ulysses (1904) in particular, you will find all…
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0613 | Great Apes | Will Self
20 pages into this, you’d be forgiven for thinking Will Self was a meaningful pseudonym. Pretty much from the get go, this seems to be all about convincing us how…
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0603 | The Savage Detectives | Roberto Bolaño
The Guardian describes this as a “a shaggy dog story.” Merriam-Webster defines that as “of, relating to, or being a long-drawn-out circumstantial story concerning an inconsequential happening that impresses the…
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0592 | Cause for Alarm | Eric Ambler
Dear me, this hasn’t aged well at all, and I couldn’t wait to get to the end of this one. According to Wikipedia, Ambler is known for his thrillers. I…
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0578 | The Recognitions | William Gaddis
The literary critic jack green is probably best known for insisting that his pseudonym be written, like adidas, without capital letters. He’s arguably less well known for lambasting those critics…
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0567 | Falling Man | Don DeLillo
Many years ago, Underworld scarred me for life. Then I read White Noise. Had it not been recommended by a great friend, I would never have returned to DeLillo. I was…
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0556 | Tropic of Capricorn | Henry Miller
Following on from recently finishing Tropic of Cancer, Mrs Arukiyomi picked this one out for me. I thought I was in for the same rollocking ride that Miller took me…
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0547 | The Art of Fielding | Chad Harbach
No, no, no, no…. NO! This is absolutely NOT the kind of novel we should be seeing on the 1001 list. Absolutely not. This is not a novel anyone needs…
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0533 | The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby | Charles Dickens
A very, very long time ago, when he was just a wee lad, Arukiyomi attempted to read this and didn’t get too far. This time, I listened to this via…
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0507 | Amadis of Gaul | Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo
If you’re a bloke, you’ve got five choices: king, knight, wizard, giant or dwarf. If you’re a woman, you’ve got two: queen or damsel. There aren’t any normal people in this…
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0500 | Joseph Andrews | Henry Fielding
A picaresque novel and as such, eminently forgettable and largely tedious. I can understand the importance of the book for the time it was written in, but unless you really…
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0494 | The Blithedale Romance | Nathaniel Hawthorne
I find Hawthorne tedious at the best of times. This was no exception. So, there’s this utopian get together called Blithedale and it all starts off wonderfully with everyone pulling…
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0492 | Rameau’s Nephew | Denis Diderot
This was not for me. A philosophical treatise comparing the viewpoints of a moralist with an amoralist set up as a chance meeting of two guys in a cafe. I…
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0489 | Nemesis | Philip Roth
And so back to Philip Roth after a long break of nearly six years and The Plot Against America which I thought was excellent. Nemesis is also, like Plot, set among…
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0486 | The Water Babies | Charles Kingsley
This was not for me. Yes, I understand the importance of the book at time, how it was a satire on Darwin’s classic and the fact that it predates Alice…
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0466 | A Line in the Sand | James Barr
What the chart of my progress below does not reveal is that the day I started this was in fact in May 2013 whereas I didn’t finish it, after a…
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0449 | Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency | Douglas Adams
Read the Hitchhikers’ Guide ‘trilogy’ many years ago, so this is the first of Adams’ books that I’ve read since then. I loved the books I read back then. I…