0590 | The Adventures of Augie March | Saul Bellow
Another Bellow, another fellow. This time it’s Augie, a Jewish kid from the ghetto who we follow entirely randomly as he grows and flows out into the world and all…
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0586 | The Master | Colm Tóibín
It’s been a while since I read this, but the impression it made on me hasn’t left. Tóibín has written a melancholic novel of a man much misunderstood it seems….
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0580 | Vernon God Little | DBC Pierre
Pierre’s adventure tale of the pursuit of poor little Vern by virtually the entire machine of ‘Merica is a combustive mix of satire and suspense. The pace doesn’t let up….
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0578 | The Recognitions | William Gaddis
The literary critic jack green is probably best known for insisting that his pseudonym be written, like adidas, without capital letters. He’s arguably less well known for lambasting those critics…
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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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0571 | Sister Carrie | Theodore Dreiser
This is the story of a young woman who, somewhat naively, leaves home to make a life for herself in Chicago. Unlike most novels of this sort, where the author quite…
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0567 | Falling Man | Don DeLillo
Many years ago, Underworld scarred me for life. Then I read White Noise. Had it not been recommended by a great friend, I would never have returned to DeLillo. I was…
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0566 | Journey to the End of the Night | Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Here’s a novel powerful enough to suck the life out of Amazon’s entire self-help catalogue in seconds. In terms of sheer pessimistic cynicism of humanity, Céline’s Night is unparalleled with its tale…
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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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0556 | Tropic of Capricorn | Henry Miller
Following on from recently finishing Tropic of Cancer, Mrs Arukiyomi picked this one out for me. I thought I was in for the same rollocking ride that Miller took me…
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0552 | The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath
From the very first classic opening line through to the end, this is a page-turner. Plath wrote this very quickly and it shows in the effervescence of the prose. However,…
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0549 | The Human Stain | Philip Roth
This is Philip Roth in his element, cruising along drawing on contemporary themes in public and political USAnian life and distilling them through the lens of a single individual who,…
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0547 | The Art of Fielding | Chad Harbach
No, no, no, no…. NO! This is absolutely NOT the kind of novel we should be seeing on the 1001 list. Absolutely not. This is not a novel anyone needs…
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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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0526 | Tender is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald
A lot more readable than The Great Gatsby which I read many years before Arukiyomi was born, this was a decent enough novel. I found that as long as I…
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0525 | Less Than Zero | Bret Easton Ellis
Written when he was just 21, Easton Ellis, made quite an impression on the literary scene with this tale of the morally impoverished youth of wealthy Los Angeles. In it, he…
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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…