0444 | Private Eye Annual 2013 | Ian Hislop (Ed.)
I haven’t bought an annual since… oohh… probably since Beano days back in the early 80s. But having moved to a country where Private Eye is probably banned and would…
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0443 | ADMT II: A Buyer’s Market | Anthony Powell
The main characters are all now well into young adulthood and most of this volume of Powell’s epic 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time revolves around social occasions…
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0441 | Season of Migration to the North | Tayeb Salih
This little novel packs a huge punch even today, 50 years after it was published in a Sudan that was in no way ready hammer blow of this magnitude to…
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0438 | ADMT I: A Question of Upbringing | Anthony Powell
And so we’re up and running with volume 1 of the 12-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time. Once I discovered Powell’s prose to be very accessible, in…
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0436 | The Child in Time | Ian McEwan
McEwan’s third novel and the earliest that I have read wasn’t too bad. It’s about a guy who is estranged from his wife after the abduction of their child in…
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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….
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0430 | Tono-Bungay | H. G. Wells
The last of Wells’ works that was on my tbr list for the 1001 books. Wells occasionally delights me, but, on the whole, though I do regard him a genius…
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0429 | A Pale View of Hills | Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro has written some of the best books I’ve read. This is not one of them. Granted, it’s his first published novel so this is understandable. But this one simply…
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0428 | Cecilia | Fanny Burney
Absolutely awful, long-winded and over-elaborate. The novel doesn’t deserve a lengthier review than that. Evelina was bad enough, but Burney has yet another novel, Camilla, on the 1001 list. If…
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0426 | The Sense of an Ending | Julian Barnes
This is a book about time and what it does to us. In particular, it’s about how time gives us a different perspective and how, horrifically, it can bring us…
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0424 | The Secret Agent | Joseph Conrad
Been quite a while since I’ve read any Conrad. In fact, I started this back in about 2006 but never finished it. This time, I listened to it on Librivox…
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0422 | Jude the Obscure | Thomas Hardy
My my, Hardy does it again. What an excellent novel, all the more so because of the personal price it cost him. In dealing with the subject of marriage and…
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0421 | Persuasion | Jane Austen
Well, having finished this, I’m persuaded that Austen is one of the most, if not the most, hyped authors of English literature. Yet again, we find a love triangle and,…
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0419 | The Tenant of Wildfell Hall | Anne Brontë
I usually breathe a sigh of relief when I finish a “classic” like Wildfell Hall. I certainly did after Persuasion which I shall review shortly. But Anne’s classic has a…
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0418 | The Great War for Civilisation | Robert Fisk
Like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, this is the agonising tale of humanity bravely told. Fisk displays the full range of his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Middle East, knowledge…
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0415 | Henry VIII: King and Court | Alison Weir
There, in a charity shop, completely unblemished as in a proper bookshop, lay Weir’s encylopaedic description of one of the most magnificent courts of English royalty. And it was mine…
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0413 | Bring up the Bodies | Hilary Mantel
The second installment in Mantel’s chronicle of the life of Thomas Cromwell is as good, if not better, than the first. This trilogy is turning out to be a classic…
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0412 | Excellent Women | Barbara Pym
Never heard of Barbara Pym, let alone read anything by her. But she turned out to be a sardonically witty writer with a lot to say about life, particularly relationships…