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Aug 19, 20231 min read
1087. Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
Haven’t read this since I was at school, but P now has the collected works. Austen does write perfect prose, which is a joy to read. I...
May 26, 20231 min read
1069. Susanna Moore - The Lost Wife
The author wrote a good and lurid novel about police corruption in New York - ‘In the Cut’ - some years ago. This is completely different...
Jan 3, 20231 min read
1039. Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights
I found this very difficult. Difficult to work out who the characters were and their interrelationships. Unlike most 19th century novels,...
Nov 5, 20221 min read
1027. Anne Brontë - Agnes Grey
The first of, I think, the only two novels she published before her very early death. A simple story about a 19th century ‘middle class’...
Nov 1, 20221 min read
1026. Graeme Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project
Bought this as listed for the Booker prize (2016) and in the crime section at Waterstones. It is very good and I can understand the...
Oct 26, 20221 min read
1024. Samantha Ellis - Take Courage
Subtitled ‘Anne Brontë and the Art of Life’, this is very good. Effectively an impressionistic biography of the Brontë family (who all...
Sep 17, 20221 min read
1012. James Joyce - Ulysses
I don’t normally write up a book I haven’t finished, but I will make an exception here. I have read it before (on holiday in Majorca...
Jun 14, 20221 min read
989. Charles Dickens - Martin Chuzzlewit
I always try to take a Dickens or big 19th C novel on holiday. If Galbraith can be prolix and needs editing, what do you say about...
Jun 5, 20221 min read
986. Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea
Good to read a serious book, after a recent diet of (too much) crime. I had never heard of this but it is extraordinary. Jean Rhys was...
Apr 27, 20221 min read
970. Tricia Cresswell - The Midwife
Very good for a first novel, written by a full time NHS doctor, but better than the last two or three by well established writers....
Apr 3, 20221 min read
963. Daphne Du Maurier - Jamaica Inn
This is quite good. Published in 1936, it is set in Cornwall/Devon sometime I think in Victorian England. Weirdly coincidental to read...
Mar 4, 20221 min read
952. Hallie Rubenhold - The Five
The first book group book. About the five victims of Jack the Ripper. Not the sort of thing I would normally read. Written by a feminist...
Feb 18, 20221 min read
948. Henry James - Washington Square
A serious and classic novel in response to the above thoughts; I am not sure if I have read this before, although we bought it in 1978!...
Feb 16, 20221 min read
947. Adam O'Riordan - The Falling Thread
Pleased that the local library is open again post lockdown; I am probably borrowing too many books, and the choices there are quite...
Dec 17, 20211 min read
923. Lucy Worsley - Jane Austen At Home
This is really good – I expected a rather frothy and lightweight book from a woman who likes to prance around in period costume in her TV...
Sep 17, 20211 min read
895. James Robertson - News Of The Dead
Book of the year, so far. Beautifully written. About a single location – Glen Conach – in the Scottish highlands over several centuries....
May 21, 20211 min read
861. William Boyd - Love Is Blind
Local library now open again, post lockdown, so opportunity to try some books. This was very good – an almost 19th century novel written...
May 7, 20211 min read
858. Henry James - The Portrait Of A Lady
I have read this before, I think a very long time ago, as I had forgotten most of the plot. Long, hard work, but brilliant. The plot can...
Mar 30, 20211 min read
853. George Eliot - Middlemarch
Remains, probably, my favourite book, but it is seriously long! (although lots of distractions over the last few weeks – cricket,...
Jun 15, 20161 min read
314. Émile Zola - Claude's Confession
Zola’s first published novel, a bildungsroman about a young man who shares a garret in Paris with a working girl, and cannot decide...