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Jun 1, 20221 min read
984. Luca D'Andrea - The Wanderer
Probably the worst book I have read for a while; don’t know why I bothered to finish it. Set in North Italy, near the border with Germany...
Nov 7, 20211 min read
914. Cristina Loggia - Lucifer's Game
This is a pretty good WW2 thriller, set in Italy. It reminded me a bit of Sebastian Faulks’ Charlotte Grey. I didn’t like the title, as...
Oct 14, 20211 min read
906. Sophie Grigson - A Curious Absence Of Chickens
I can’t pretend to have read this cover to cover, as it is half recipes and half Sophie Grigson’s emigration from the UK to Puglia, which...
Aug 6, 20211 min read
882. Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell To Arms
I enjoyed this more than I expected. I can’t see anything special about his prose style. But I enjoyed this as a novel about an American...
Dec 22, 20181 min read
646. Elena Ferrante - The Story Of The Lost Child
The 4th and final novel of the sequence. I never normally read books out of sequence but P had this from the library and we have watched...
May 13, 20151 min read
302. Katherine Webb - The Night Falling
One of Paddy’s cast off’s (like no.300 above). I read too many ‘feminine’ books because they are there available. This was quite good,...
May 3, 20151 min read
300. Sarah Dunant - Blood And Beauty
This is a fictionalised account of the Borgias. The writing is poor; the characters very stereotyped and lacking in character. Reads...
Mar 22, 20151 min read
290. Penny Feeny - That Summer In Ischia
Superior chic lit really. Quite a good plot, about the current lives of a couple of gels who went child-minding in Italy in the late 70’s...
Nov 17, 20131 min read
164. Andrea Camilleri - The Dance Of The Seagull
Inspector Montalbano populates BBC4 Saturday evenings in the gaps between big, dark Scandinavian thrillers (or currently Borgen, which is...
Jun 23, 20131 min read
122. Anthony Burgess - Earthly Powers
Wow, probably the read of the year. This is a huge book and possibly very underrated. The central character, whose name I forget, is a...
Jun 5, 20131 min read
113. E. M. Forster - Where Angels Fear To Tread
Probably enjoyed this less than I expected, although not in a very receptive mood when I read it. The plot is fairly far fetched; English...