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Jan 15, 20211 min read
842. Émile Zola - Madeleine Ferat
Contemporary with 'Thérèse Raquin', this is not that interesting. Set in French 19th century bourgeois society, a story of a rather dull...
Dec 24, 20201 min read
837. Émile Zola - Thérèse Raquin
I am reading these in chronological order as I find the complete works pretty un-navigable on my kindle. I have read this before, but...
Jun 19, 20181 min read
602. Edith Wharton - The House Of Mirth
Not a lot of humour or mirth in this. I enjoyed The Age of Innocence (593) and thought I would try another Wharton. Proved to be (by the...
May 18, 20181 min read
593. Edith Wharton - The Age Of Innocence
I have tried (I don’t think successfully) to read this is the past, but it is brilliant. The themes are all Henry James, but the cultural...
Apr 6, 20181 min read
583. Anthony Trollope - Barchester Towers
I have never read this before and perhaps because I am not in a very receptive phase didn’t enjoy it, although struggled to understand...
Nov 26, 20171 min read
552. Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives And Daughters
Tried to read this, I think 5 years ago at Stuart’s in Spain, but gave up. These 19th century novels are incredibly long, but I got to...
Oct 28, 20171 min read
545. Nicolai Gogol - Dead Souls
Been meaning to read this for years, strange and paradoxically both difficult and easy to read. Very long and unfinished, in fact Gogol...
Aug 10, 20171 min read
511. Thomas Hardy - Tess Of The d'Urbervilles
Triggered by 509; these Victorian (or maybe post in Hardy’s case) novelists are so prolix; 450 pages. The plot wasn’t that similar to...
Jul 27, 20171 min read
509. George Eliot - Adam Bede
I have never read this, and enjoyed it, perhaps, more than I expected. Eliot is a heavy themed writer, swinging between good quality...
May 16, 20171 min read
487. Kate Atkinson - Behind The Scenes At The Museum
Possibly her first (famous or actual first?) book. Good, but difficult and hard work. The main narrative is a Tristram Shandy like...
Apr 17, 20171 min read
481. Lynne Truss - Tennyson's Gift
I gave up on this before even discovering what Tennyson’s Gift was. A tedious reconstruction of a (possible or actual, I never got that...
Feb 4, 20171 min read
465. Helena Kelly - Jane Austen: The Secret Radical
Very good book; ‘academic’ Lit Crit, but well written and argued. My problem was an ignorance of Jane Austen’s novels (which I must now...
Sep 16, 20161 min read
429. Paul Scott - A Division Of The Spoils
These are big long books and it has taken a week to read each one. Guy Perron (Charles Dance on the TV) finally appears in this one and...
Aug 12, 20161 min read
424. Ivan Turgenev - Fathers And Sons
This is a lot easier than Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky; a quite light social comedy on the surface, although the central figure Bazarov...
Aug 5, 20161 min read
422. Patrick White - Voss
I am not sure that (if ever) I have read this since 1976 (when it is signed as a Xmas present for P). It is quite hard going, but pretty...
Jun 7, 20161 min read
408. Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
I always try to take one big, difficult book on holiday, and am not a fan of Dickens, but persevere. Fairly typical of what I dislike...
Apr 3, 20161 min read
389. Emily Bronté - Wuthering Heights
Hadn’t read this before; quite hard work but interesting book, particularly given publication pre 1850. Maybe there were lots of similar...