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Jul 19, 20231 min read
1079. William Boyd - The Romantic
Quite enjoyed this, but it was a pale imitation of Boyd’s brilliant 'Any Human Heart'. Set one hundred years earlier, and involving an...
Oct 7, 20221 min read
1019. Audrey MaGee - The Colony
Book of the year, so worth a re-read. Beautifully written, with sentences that bounce into quasi-verse and others that begin with one...
Apr 23, 20221 min read
969. Elena Ferrante - The Lying Life Of Adults
I enjoyed the beginning of this, but as it progressed the similarities to (and repetitions of) My Brilliant Friend began to proliferate....
Apr 17, 20221 min read
968. Elif Shafak - The Architect's Apprentice
This was quite hard work, but I ended up enjoying it, as the rather disparate plot elements were pulled together in the last 50 pages....
Mar 7, 20221 min read
954. Alison Lurie - Real People
I enjoyed this although it started slowly and ponderously. Illyria is a country estate, somewhere near New York, to which leading artists...
Mar 6, 20221 min read
953. Brian Moore - The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne
This is a wonderful book. Passion in the title has the ambiguity of sexual and religious passion. Judith Hearne, a lonely spinster in...
Aug 14, 20211 min read
884. Jodie Chapman - Another Life
This was very good, but I would have enjoyed it more if it had been written in a linear narrative, rather than with all the time shifts,...
Aug 11, 20211 min read
883. Nick Hornby - Just Like You
Quite enjoyed this. A romance between a 40 year old white woman, divorced with two kids, and a 20+ old black man, who works in the local...
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...
Jul 2, 20211 min read
874. David Nicholls - Sweet Sorrow
Quite enjoyed this; had heard it on the radio a year or two ago. A first love story, loosely structured around 'Romeo and Juliet' which...
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...
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...
Dec 13, 20201 min read
834. Emile Zola - The Dead Woman's Wish
I think 833 is the first book; this is the 2nd. Much more plot and characterisation, a dying woman entrusts her adopted son to care for...
Sep 3, 20191 min read
709. Julian Barnes - The Only Story
An odd book, by a writer I am not sure I really like. About a love affair between a 19 year old chap and a 48 year old woman, set...
Jul 20, 20191 min read
697. Julian Barnes - Before She Met Me
Needed something easy to read after the rigours of 696 so plucked this off the bookshelf. It is pretty low grade really – a tiresome...
Mar 31, 20191 min read
672. Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness Of Being
Haven’t read this for a long time but it is a brilliant book. About sex, love, metaphysics, and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in...
Feb 4, 20191 min read
655. Susan Hill - From The Heart
A library book of P’s. It is quite a slight book, with a heroine lacking in character and very reactive, although P says that girls were...
Nov 3, 20181 min read
636. Salley Vickers - The Librarian
One of Paddy’s library books; I have never heard of the author (although I think I may have read ‘The Cleaner of Chartres’), but this was...
Oct 18, 20181 min read
633. Pat Barker - The Silence Of The Girls
A retelling of ‘The Iliad’ from a woman’s perspective, so the central figure is Breisis (I think), a Trojan princess captured by the...