0574 | Against the Day | Thomas Pynchon
Absolutely pointless and not worth anyone’s time, this is a novel by a man entirely self-absorbed. It says nothing about any particular era, has no characters more three dimensional than…
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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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0568 | The Accidental | Ali Smith
This is a quirky story told from the perspective of each member of a family who rent a holiday home in the English countryside for the summer. When a mysterious…
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0564 | The Well of Loneliness | Radclyffe Hall
With the expiration in the EU of its copyright, this initially suppressed novel is now, somewhat ironically, in the public domain in Europe. Almost 88 years to the day after it…
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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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0558 | The History of Tom Jones | Henry Fielding
Anyone with a modicum of experience reading literature knows that a “very influential novel” from nearly 300 years ago will consist of pretty much every stereotypical literary device that could…
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0557 | The Life and Death of Harriett Frean | May Sinclair
This is a very short novel but that doesn’t stop Sinclair constructing a complex character who spends her life bound by moral boundaries. Harriett grows up with parents who ensure…
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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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0554 | Gabriel’s Gift | Hanif Kureishi
Oh my… but this was so profoundly awful on every level that I can hardly believe I read it, let alone that for some unfathomable and criminal reason, it was…
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0546 | Adam Bede | George Eliot
The only reason that this got a “good” rating from me and not “okay” was the legacy of the novel in terms of its depiction of country life at the…
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0543 | The Last Chronicle of Barset | Anthony Trollope
My first Trollope and what a one to start with! An exquisitely constructed Victorian world inhabited by vivid characters and a strong plot to carry them along with. Trollope contrives a…
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0542 | Threepenny Novel | Bertold Brecht
This was a strange one. I had no idea about any of the background to the novel at all, not even the play it’s based on, John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera….
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0541 | The Black Prince | Iris Murdoch
What a great read this was. I can also imagine that Murdoch had immense fun writing it too, because that comes across in the writing for too often to be coincidental….
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0536 | The Cement Garden | Ian McEwan
Leaving aside any controversy about whether McEwan borrowed the plot for this novel from another source, for an author’s first effort, this isn’t half bad at all. Macabre, disturbing and…
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0535 | The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul | Douglas Adams
This is not one of Adams’ best. I sincerely hope it’s his worst because if there is a worse novel by him out there, it must be atrocious. An explosion…
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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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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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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…
