0215 | 11th Month, 11th Day, 11th Hour – Joseph E. Persico
Context: Finished this off, appropriately, on Remembrance Sunday here in the UK. This morning we’d attended the Remembrance Service at our local church. REVIEW My mate Gareth lent me this…
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0212 | The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
Context: finished off a huge bar of Dairy Milk while reading this. Thought I’d better get some before Cadbury’s stops being British forever… REVIEW This is a definitive novel. There’s…
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0208 | What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt
Context: Did my first ever work on a car engine while reading this. I replaced the rocker gasket. Now I feel like a real man! REVIEW Now, I’ve read a…
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0205 | Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig
Context: Finished this off at our friends’ place in the Arabian Ranches, Dubai. REVIEW Heard, as many of you will have, about this book for years and never met anyone…
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0204 | Do You Know What You’re Doing Lord? – Carol Anderson
Context: Finished this off as the wife was cleaning jewellery which had gone mouldy whilst in storage in Papua New Guinea. REVIEW In the missionary-lore of Papua New Guinea, the…
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0203 | The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Context: Read this while we visited the SIL base at Ukarumpa in PNG and stayed in this house. REVIEW Edith’s own unhappy marriage and explorations of marital crises in Ethan…
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0200 | The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
Context: Read this on Holloways Beach, just north of Cairns as we settled into the sand for a day. REVIEW A true war story is never moral. It does not…
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0199 | Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
Context: Was reading this by the side of the pool at our host’s place when we couchsurfed Cairns. REVIEW What name beginning with W could possibly be so bad that…
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0197 | To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway
Context: finished this on our AirAsiaX flight from Stansted to Kuala Lumpur. Malaysian food was lovely. REVIEW This is not a well-known Hemingway as far as I’m aware. Nevertheless, it’s…
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0195 | The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
Context: Broke the back of this one whilst outside in the garden reading on some deceptively comfortable garden furniture. REVIEW Philip Roth’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel American Pastoral didn’t really do…
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0193 | The Radiant Way – Margaret Drabble
Context: Finished this off in a brand new armchair at my mate’s house. Gorgeous chair from Marks & Spencers. Perfect for reading in. REVIEW Fifty pages into this, I was…
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0174 | Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
Context: Started to learn to play the piano at some point in the months I spent reading this. REVIEW Many of you know that I’m pretty fixated with the 1001…
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0172 | The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
Context: We spilled pesto on the bed just as I was finishing this off after dinner – mad rushing of covers to the bathroom but all is fine now. REVIEW…
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0169 | Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Context: Took this along as Mrs Arukiyomi and I walked up the hill at West Wycombe and took in this view of High Wycombe from our favourite bench up there….
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0165 | An Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
Context: while I was reading this, our clothes dryer died in the garden and we had to string up an emergency washing line REVIEW A friend bought me this for…
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0163 | Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
Context: Listened to this courtesy of librivox.org while walking to and from work through the bluebells in Dell’s Wood. REVIEW Long ago, when my mother-in-law and her sister asked me…
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0160 | The Road – Cormac McCarthy
Context: Listened to this in a day while preparing food in the Wycliffe kitchens. REVIEW This surprised me. Wasn’t what I thought. I thought it’d be some esoterical account of…
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0157 | The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Context: Finished this off as we packed up to head away for a holiday over Easter weekend. REVIEW Steinbeck establishes himself, in my mind, as the USAnian Orwell with this…