0646 | 10:04 | Ben Lerner
Life’s too short to figure out books like Lerner’s. It’s not hard to read. It’s not actually anything except an attempt by a man to show us he understands the…
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0640 | 1000 Years of Annoying the French | Stephen Clarke
This millennial look at the history of Britain and France is told with wry, sometimes childishly irritating, and rarely laugh-inducing humour. It’s pretty comprehensive, coming in at just under 650…
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0639 | City of God | E. L. Doctorow
If you’re after a pacy novel with a great storyline and memorable characters that zips you from A to B in a rush of finely written prose, you’ll need to…
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0636 | Ada | Vladimir Nabokov
This was very, very hard going. Nabokov is not an easy man to keep up with when he puts all the power of his mind into something, and he just…
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0635 | House of Leaves | Mark Danielewski
One of the weirdest books you’ll ever read and it looks like he put a tremendous effort into pulling it off. Does he succeed? Not for me, he doesn’t. This…
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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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0628 | Slaughterhouse Five | Kurt Vonnegut
What a genius this man was to write a novel so short, so deceptively simple, so (frankly) bonkers and yet so very relevant not just for the age in which…
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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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0621 | Rabbit Redux | John Updike
After Rabbit, Run comes this. Rabbit’s now settled down but he’s definitely not put the past behind him. He’s in a real dead end job instead of a pretend one,…
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0620 | Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov
It is the mark of genius that most of the world doesn’t get what you are trying to do at all. Such is the case with Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a…
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0619 | Americanah | Chimamanda Ngozi Aidichie
Recently added to the 1001 Books list in the new October 2018 edition, this title was worthy of its inclusion capturing, as it does, the state of race in a…
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0618 | Rabbit, Run | John Updike
A long time ago in a galaxy far away, I was given a copy of Rabbit is Rich by mistake for a birthday present. I’d asked for Pulitzer Prize winning…
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0617 | The Secret History | Donna Tartt
Tartt’s debut novel of a small college clique deciding to knock off one of their own rambles on a bit but is generally an easy read. It suffers from readers…
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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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0610 | Fall on Your Knees | Ann-Marie MacDonald
About as uplifting as digging out a mass grave, MacDonald’s portrayal of an immigrant family shattered from within by abuse isn’t going to win anyone’s most-loved novel awards. It’s memorable,…
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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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0601 | The Man who Loved Children | Christina Stead
Once you’ve got over the fact that this isn’t a sinister title in terms of today’s worries about child abuse, you discover that this is, in fact, more of a…
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0598 | Everything is Illuminated | Jonathan Safran Foer
This is at once one of the funniest and also one of the most tragic novels I’ve experienced in a long time. Safran Foer’s tale of the history of his…
