0540 | 2666 | Roberto Bolaño
Dear Lord, spare me. Another title from Latin/South America and yet another novel that I could have done without. What the heck is it with that continent that I just…
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0539 | Dangling Man | Saul Bellow
Dangling man? Dangling reader more like! Another Bellow under the belt and that’s a good metaphor as yet another protagonist spends most of the novel navel-gazing. Bellow won the Nobel,…
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0534 | Loving | Henry Green
Really didn’t get into this. It’s not helped by the unorthodox dialogue which I had a hard time following at times. There are some half-memorable characters in here but the…
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0530 | The Unfortunate Traveller | Thomas Nashe
Here’s a funny old book. Not very long, for which I am thankful, and possibly the only Tudor ‘novel’ on the 1001 list, for which I am also thankful. It’s…
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0524 | The Colour | Rose Tremain
This was removed from the first edition of the 1001 Books list and it’s not hard to see why. Although Tremain can write a decent yarn, there’s nothing here that…
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0521 | The Midwich Cuckoos | John Wyndham
This is a truly original bit of sci-fi which, although not terribly well written, has a great plot and, as all good sci-fi must, continues to raise relevant questions for…
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0518 | The Female Quixote | Charlotte Lennox
For its time, this is a pretty readable and engaging bit of writing that isn’t overlong and makes clever use of wry humour as it takes a dig at romance…
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0516 | The Adventures of Roderick Random | Tobias Smollett
Having read Peregrine Pickle, the novel Smollett wrote after this one, three years ago, I kind of realised that, like with Henderson and Herzog, I’d read these the wrong way…
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0515 | Henderson the Rain King | Saul Bellow
Boy this took ages to read. Just couldn’t really get into it until the last 100 pages or so. Couldn’t really place my finger on why, but I think it…
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0509 | Tipping the Velvet | Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters can spin a yarn. She can conjour up a world. She can keep you entertained. But what she absolutely can’t do is create realistic characters or convince me that…
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0504 | Dirty Havana Trilogy | Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Very glad to get this one out of the way. Gutiérrez has great ability as a writer and has created some very memorable vignettes of characters and situations in mid-1990s Havana….
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0490 | The Wings of the Dove | Henry James
The only James I’d read prior to this was the novella The Turn of the Screw which I didn’t blog at the time. It did little to prepare me for…
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0481 | The Marriage Plot | Jeffrey Eugenides
You’ll think this is pretty good if you come to it without having first read Middlesex or The Virgin Suicides. You’ll think he’s a witty, clever incisive writer who has…
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0478 | The Third Wedding | Costas Taktsis
The Third Wedding is the story of two Greek women and their lives from the 1920s through until the years following WW2. One is called Hecuba. The other, who narrates…
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0472 | Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen
Eminently forgettable. Two months after finishing this, I started recording my initial thoughts about Emma by saying that I only had one Austen novel to go to complete her works:…
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0470 | Roxana | Daniel Defoe
Now, if you’ve read Moll Flanders, you’ll be forgiven if you think you’ve read this somewhere before. You have. Kind of. Just as Moll gets left with no other social…
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0465 | The Lusiads | Luís Vaz de Camões
There’s no doubt that this deserves its place on the 1001 books list. There’s no doubt that this is one of history’s greatest works, an epic poem of both literary…
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0435 | Our Mutual Friend | Charles Dickens
Haven’t read any Dickens for a while, not since Hard Times almost five years ago to be exact and this was the second time that I attempted this particular tome….