0634| The Virgin in the Garden | A. S. Byatt
The influence of Iris Murdoch on Byatt seems to be very apparent here. Virgin reads like an intellectual’s version of Murdoch’s The Bell, written 20 years earlier, but without as…
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0633 | Sabbath’s Theater | Philip Roth
Not the most pleasant read anyone of us will experience. Just under 500 pages describing the purposefully repugnant Mickey Sabbath. While the more prudish among us will simply stop reading,…
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0631 | Fingersmith | Sarah Walters
Before we’ve reached the 100th page of this, Ms Walters can’t hold it in any longer: Maud stood very still, her pink lips parted [ooh er], her face put back,…
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0622 | Rabbit is Rich | John Updike
More of the same from Updike with two exceptions: less happens and there’s more graphic sex. Quite why this novel, of the three Rabbit novels so far, won the most…
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0616 | There but for the | Ali Smith
My second Ali Smith, and I’m starting to get the idea now. Ask questions about who people are by rotating the point of view to show us that, as many…
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0615 | Brooklyn | Colm Tóibín
Last summer’s The Master had me wanting more of Tóibín’s writing. So, this summer, I picked up a copy of Brooklyn to see if he could transport me back to the…
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0607 | Martin Chuzzlewit | Charles Dickens
Dickens takes a cultural diversion to the USA in this one (in order to boost flagging sales of the installments the book was released in) and it’s a plot diversion…
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0605 | Daniel Deronda | George Eliot
So often Eliot is held up as the paragon of 19th century English prose. Here is yet another novel to demonstrate why I simply cannot afford her the accolades that…
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0602 | Hallucinating Foucault | Patricia Duncker
Not really sure why this is on the 1001 books list. Didn’t grab me. Seemed a bit too much like navel-gazing for the Cambridge set (e.g. “we went to Browns…
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0593 | Women in Love | D.H. Lawrence
Back when I lived in another world, I listened to The Rainbow, the first of this two volume story of the Brangwens of Nottinghamshire. Rainbow scored 59%. This one has…
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0590 | The Adventures of Augie March | Saul Bellow
Another Bellow, another fellow. This time it’s Augie, a Jewish kid from the ghetto who we follow entirely randomly as he grows and flows out into the world and all…
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0581 | He Knew he was Right | Anthony Trollope
Trollope’s story of a marriage and a life destroyed by the jealousy of a husband could have been a vivid portrayal of how delicately married life can be balanced. Instead,…
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0573 | The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England | Ian Mortimer
I kind of like history and so, when I started to dip into this in a bookshop, I thought it would be right up my street. In the end, I…
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0562 | Inferno | Henri Barbusse
Not a very long novel and not a completely entertaining one either. Barbusse has constructed a hotel room where the unnamed protagonist discovers a hole which allows him to see…
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0560 | Love in a Cold Climate | Nancy Mitford
Semi-autobiographical, this is the story of people who have nothing much better to do than worry about their social position in the upper echelons of the British class system. Yawn….
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0555 | Sexing the Cherry | Jeanette Winterson
This is a tricky book to read and understand. Obviously, Winterson is a leading apologist not only for feminism but also lesbianism so you can expect that to feature to…
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0550 | July’s People | Nadine Gordimer
I’ve read a fair few books from South Africa that deal (unsurprisingly) with the issue of relationships between the black and white communities. Nadine Gordimer’s novel is, sadly, not the…
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0544 | Justine | Lawrence Durrell
Nope. This didn’t quite do it for me. Don’t get me wrong, Durrell can write beautiful prose, and I honestly thought that this would completely entrance me and that the…
