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May 24, 20202 min read
782. Lawrence Durrell - Mountolive
No 3 in this wonderful quartet. Mountolive is a career diplomat, who early in the book is posted to Alexandria where he has an affair...
May 21, 20201 min read
780. Lawrence Durrell - Balthazar
I think I summarised this quite well when I first read it (no.352), nearly 5 years ago. (no.779 above is a better summary of Justine than...
May 19, 20201 min read
779. Lawrence Durrell - Justine
I thought I would give these, or at least one, another go. They are quite difficult and I think I enjoyed it much more 2nd time round....
May 14, 20201 min read
776. George Eliot - The Mill On The Floss
I think George Eliot is my favourite 19th century novelist. This is brilliant. I first read it as an A level set text probably nearly 50...
Apr 15, 20201 min read
766. Dante - Inferno
1/3 of The Divine Comedy. Inspired to give this a try, partly because Dorothy Sayers translated it, but I couldn’t find her version on...
Mar 1, 20201 min read
751. Anthony Burgess - Earthly Powers
Re-read this, possibly influenced or inspired by discussion about religions with Robert Spicer (738) and then reading Burgess’ book about...
Feb 6, 20201 min read
748. James Joyce - Dubliners
Triggered no doubt by no 746, I read these for probably the 3rd time in my life and enjoyed them more than previously. But enjoyed may...
Feb 3, 20201 min read
747. George Orwell - Coming Up For Air
This was on the radio and bits of it were set quite locally in Binfield, so I thought I would give it a go. Bits I liked, for instance...
Jan 2, 20201 min read
740. Graham Greene - The End Of The Affair
I haven’t read this for years; it is quite a difficult book and one’s memory of it is slightly overwritten by the film. Bendrick’s anger...
Dec 1, 20191 min read
732. Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
Never read this before and I thought it was really good. She writes clean, strong, prose and there were lots of bits of plot that are...
Sep 27, 20191 min read
716. George Eliot - Middlemarch
I think reading 714 in Malaga exercised my reading muscle and perhaps that was why I couldn’t be bothered with 715. I think, on the 3rd...
Sep 10, 20191 min read
714. William Faulkner - Light In August
Always try to read one big chunky classic novel on holiday and chose this, for some reason this year. A big and difficult novel, about...
May 30, 20191 min read
687. Ivan Turgenev - Fathers And Sons
Although I think regarded as a classic of 19th century Russian literature, I thought this had dated badly and didn’t really enjoy it. My...
May 26, 20191 min read
686. John Fowles - The French Lieutenants Woman
Bought 1977, so probably haven’t read for 40+ years! Brilliant, hasn’t aged at all and I had minimal memory of either the book or (I am...
May 12, 20191 min read
682. William Golding - The Pyramid
A strange book about English provincial life, set unclearly in time, but I think in the 1930’s. The central figure is an adolescent boy...
Mar 26, 20191 min read
670. Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
This was an S&P purchase from Lymington market back in May 1979 and neither of us had ever read it. So that is 40 years of life on...
Mar 20, 20191 min read
669. E. M. Forster - A Room With A View
So pissed off with my new kindle (see 667) that I will read anything in paper rather than spend money with Amazon. But I can’t get on...
Feb 22, 20191 min read
661. Daphne Du Maurier - Rebecca
This was very good; neither Paddy nor I had read it before, but it is a rattlingly good plot with bits of Jane Eyre influence. A gauche...
Jan 5, 20191 min read
647. Fydor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
This is a huge and very challenging book. The basic plot is relatively simple – three brothers with an unpleasant and dissolute father,...
Nov 30, 20181 min read
643. Albert Camus - L'etranger
Inspired I think by no. 641 to re-read this as the books are thematically quite similar, in that both have an obscurely motivated murder...