0484 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë
Well this got off to a pretty good start with some excellent characters and plenty of tension between them. And then, about halfway through or even, probably, less than that,…
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0480 | The Sea, The Sea | Iris Murdoch
Now this was good, an excellent novel which, if it wasn’t quite as long as it is, could be read several times in order to savour every last bit of…
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0477 | Emma | Jane Austen
Probably one of the most accessible Austen’s brings my reading of her works to a close. Emma wasn’t too bad actually. Of course, there’s the usual love triangle and convoluted…
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0476 | ADMT XII: Hearing Secret Harmonies | Anthony Powell
And so it ends; the final volume in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is complete exactly 365 days after I started it. Was it worth it. Yes,…
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0474 | ADMT XI: Temporary Kings | Anthony Powell
Nearly done and the penultimate volume of Powell’s panoply was quite a good read. Considering the parallels with Proust, it was inevitable that at some point, we end up in…
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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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0471 | ADMT X: Books Do Furnish a Room | Anthony Powell
By quite a margin, I found this to be the most readable of the entire series of volumes so far. This is because Powell develops a number of minor characters…
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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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0468 | ADMT IX: The Military Philosophers | Anthony Powell
Not my favourite in the series by any means, this volume charts the end of the war and Nick’s subsequent demobbing. The writing carries on in its normal vein with…
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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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0464 | ADMT VIII: The Soldier’s Art | Anthony Powell
Well, WW2 is well and truly raging now and a number of fairly well-known characters start to become its victims as Nick Jenkins continues to become further involved in the…
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0461 | ADMT VII: The Valley of Bones | Anthony Powell
For me, the beginning of three books that make up the war trilogy section of A Dance to a Music of Time was an entertaining read with more of a…
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0459 | Oliver Twist | Charles Dickens
Yet another Dickens down. The 1001 list is cram full of them. Twist is bit like Pride & Prejudice; a lot of us know the storyline but have never actually…
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0452 | Fear of Flying | Erica Jong
This book took me very much by surprise. There were mixed reviews online but I thought it was a very bold work of genius. When you consider that this was…
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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…
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0447 | A Tale of a Tub | Jonathan Swift
Swift is better known for his later works (Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal in particular) and having read those before turning to this, it’s easy to see why. In fact,…
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0446 | The Enigma of Arrival | V. S. Naipaul
Once I’d settled into this, it was a beautiful read. Naipaul is a Nobel Laureate and so you expect that the prose will be challenging. But while A Bend in…
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0445 | ADMT III: The Acceptance World | Anthony Powell
I felt this was the strongest volume so far of Powell’s 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time. Things seemed to have bedded into a nice rhythm as the characters…