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Jan 6, 20221 min read
931. Graham Greene - Our Man In Havana
One of his ‘entertainments’ which I don’t on the whole enjoy. The conceit is quite amusing, a vacuum salesman in Havana is recruited by...
Mar 9, 20201 min read
753. Marina Lewycka - Various Pets Alive & Dead
Paddy recommended this. I found it slightly hard going although as I got into it I wondered why. Maybe re-read on a beach. 3 main...
Feb 10, 20201 min read
750. Mick Herron - The Catch
Am writing this on 20 February and can’t honestly remember anything about this book. These are a bit of a cheat. It is part of a series...
May 19, 20191 min read
684. Sebastien Faulks - A Week In December
Enjoyed this a lot (must have read it before). Quite similar, structurally, to John Lanchester’s ‘Capital’, but Faulkes is a better...
Feb 12, 20191 min read
658. John Boyne - A Ladder To The Sky
Book of the year so far, by a novelist I had never heard of, although apparently quite prolific (wrote ‘The Boy in striped Pyjamas’ which...
Jan 12, 20191 min read
650. Susie Steiner - Missing Presumed
No coincidence (and no relative I assume) but started re-reading this only for my Kindle to die. So unfinished. Finished this after...
Dec 11, 20181 min read
644. Jonathan Coe - What A Carve Up!
Quite a long read, but have been very busy with work; maybe a summer holiday beach book. Quite a difficult read, very funny in places but...
Nov 28, 20181 min read
642. Jonathan Coe - Middle England
A book about Brexit, by the author of The Rotters Club, and a sequel in that some of the characters recur. Quite an angry (I presume)...
Oct 11, 20181 min read
631. Kate Atkinson - When Will There Be Good News
So this is no.3 Jackson Brodie, and again very good – I wish she had written, or would write, more. This one begins with a family...
Sep 28, 20181 min read
628. Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog
This last of the Jackson Brodies’ restored my faith in Kate Atkinson after the disappointing 625. This is a brilliant book, clever,...
Jul 28, 20181 min read
613. Craig Brown - Ma'am Darling
A pretty atrocious book about a pretty atrocious person (Princess Margaret). Subtitled ’99 Glimpses of’ her, not one of these was...
Jul 10, 20181 min read
610. Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men
I have read this before (499, Malaga last year). It is a good book, pretty weird, and my summary at 499 hasn’t really changed. Unclear...
Apr 1, 20181 min read
582. Kate Atkinson - Emotionally Weird
I have tried, I think, to read this before. It is quite a weird book, a slightly surreal campus novel set in Aberdeen or possibly Dundee...
Mar 10, 20181 min read
576. V. S. Naipaul - A House For Mr Biswas
Another Susan Hill recommendation. I don’t think I will follow these anymore as our tastes don’t match at all. This is an early novel by...
Aug 19, 20171 min read
515. Matt Haig - The Humans
Possibly book of the year so far! An alien descends to earth (or in fact wakes up naked on a motorway near Cambridge) having been sent to...
Jul 7, 20171 min read
506. Joanna Cannon - The Trouble With Goats And Sheep
I didn’t enjoy this much, at least until very near the end when the subject became a little clearer. So, (as everyone says nowadays), it...
Jun 20, 20171 min read
503. Kate Atkinson - Case Histories
The first Jackson Brodie novel; this is classy ‘detective’ writing compared to some of those above. As I have read a lot of these before...
Apr 29, 20171 min read
483. Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies
A strange book, based among the poor working and criminal class in Modern Cork city. Couldn’t really work out the genre; crimes, but no...
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...
Jul 7, 20161 min read
417. Paul Torday - The Death Of An Owl
Yet another via P as I can’t choose books for myself at the moment. This, sadly, was completed by his son as Torday died just before it...