0731 | The Tale of Genji | Murasaki Shikibu
It’s saga time! Cue three (or maybe four) characters whose names you can remember! Cue football stadium of characters whose names you cannot! Cue love! Cue forbidden love! Cue death!…
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0728 | Creating Loving Attachments | Kim Golding and Daniel Hughes
If you’ve managed to make it to adulthood without suffering trauma, you should be thankful. A very large number of us did not have that privilege. As a result, each…
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0727 | The Body | Bill Bryson
Can’t go wrong with Bryson really. He’s readable, amusing, and in the case of his latest spate of fact-filled releases, very informative. Bryon’s Body fits the bill (no pun intended)…
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0721 | Heartbreak Tango | Manuel Puig
Now here’s a Latin American novel that I would heartily recommend. Despite the fact that it deals with their endless fascination with what they term as ‘love’ (cf. Love in…
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0718 | Fantômas | Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre
Every now and then on the 1001 Books list, a novel comes along which is a complete walk in the park, takes absolutely no effort to read and is over…
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0714 | Corrections in Early Qur’an Manuscripts | Daniel Brubaker
Dr Brubaker’s work has caused something of a minor stir in the centuries-old arena that is Christian-Muslim dialogue. While the world waits for publication of his more technical doctorate-level work,…
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0713 | The Thirteen Clocks / The Wonderful O | James Thurber
Thurber’s wonderfully bonkers children’s books were so short that Puffin reissued two of them in one edition in the 1960s. This is very convenient because Thurber’s writing is the kind…
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0702 | Did Muhammad Exist? | Robert Spencer
Oh, what a question? How could you even ask that? But, yes, this is exactly the kind of question Islam should be subjected to. For the last 200 years, beginning…
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0697 | The Madness of Crowds | Douglas Murray
Boy, I needed this. A birthday present from my sister that really hit the spot. Murray is a gay Spectator magazine columnist so not exactly the kind of writer I…
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0692 | The Professor’s House | Willa Cather
This is the moving story of a man reaching the end of himself. In many ways, it reminded me of Rosshalde. We have a man who has achieved much yet…
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0660 | The War of the End of the World | Mario Vargas Llosa
A very good long read which has all the intensity of the most roasted Brazilian coffee you can imagine. There’s a lot of conflict here so steer clear if you’re…
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0659 | Reasons to Live | Amy Hempel
A book of short stories that are very easy to read and very engaging. I would probably read this again if I came across it again. Sadly, I had no…
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0647 | Labyrinths | Jorge Luis Borges
When you read, you bring something of yourself to the book so that you can interpret what you’re being told according to your previous reading, your life experience and your…
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0637 | Rosshalde | Herman Hesse
This beautiful, sad and moving book is the story of a man at odds with life, himself, his wife and his sons. I enjoyed it very much. Living in luxury…
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0629 | The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy | Lawrence Sterne
This is a novel that has, since it’s publication in 1759, divided opinion throughout the ages. It certainly divided mine as you can tell from the review radar below. While…
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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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0627 | The Untouchable | John Banville
I last read Banville nearly a decade ago. The Sea and The Newton Letter didn’t impress me much. This one was better than both of those put together, I thought….
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0623 | The Story of Lucy Gault | William Trevor
What a beautiful novel is Trevor’s paean to loss, regret and life itself. I can’t tell you how it cleansed the palate after the first three books of Updike’s Rabbit…
