Currently viewing the tag: "book review"

“The Problems of Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell

By On 31 October 2011 · 8 Comments

This book is pitched just at the right level for me. I am interested in philosophy, but don’t have enough knowledge of it to be able to understand some of the more complex works. I tried Wittgenstein recently, for instance, and it didn’t take. But this short introduction to some of the basic problems [...]

Continue Reading →

“C” by Tom McCarthy

By On 17 October 2011 · 11 Comments

Well, that was a bit different. Don’t come to this book expecting plot, character development or anything like that. The main character, Serge, is like a conduit for signals from the radio that his father is experimenting with when he’s born and that he himself develops a fascination with as he gets older. He’s [...]

Continue Reading →

“Half Blood Blues” by Esi Edugyan

By On 10 October 2011 · 13 Comments

This book has it all: a compelling story, a great setting (black jazz musicians in Nazi Germany and occupied Paris), lyrical prose that perfectly captures the voice of the bass-player narrator, Baltimore-born Sid Griffiths, while also weaving in elements of the music it describes. It has jealousy, betrayal, a nice twist in the ending, [...]

Continue Reading →

“The Flanders Road” by Claude Simon

By On 3 October 2011 · 14 Comments

Not an easy read, this. The style is experimental, with prose that mimics the way we think rather than the way we’d normally tell a story. So there’s a lot of jumping around from memory to memory by association rather than logic or chronology. The sentences are often long and winding, with digressions and [...]

Continue Reading →
JulianBarnes

“The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes

By On 19 September 2011 · 28 Comments

I bought a signed copy at Highgate Bookshop, took it home and read it from cover to cover without stopping. That’s partly because it’s a short book (150 pages, with fairly large type and liberal use of white space) but also because it really drew me in and made me want to read more. [...]

Continue Reading →

New review for On the Holloway Road

By On 15 September 2011 · 10 Comments

On the Holloway Road picked up a good review from Emma over at Book Around the Corner yesterday. I don’t normally tell you about every review, but I wanted to highlight this one particularly because of a beautiful description of my main characters, Jack and Neil. Emma compares them to Sal and Dean in [...]

Continue Reading →

“Maybe This Time” by Alois Hotschnig

By On 7 September 2011 · 12 Comments

I found this a very unsettling collection of short stories. I mean that in a good way. Being unsettled is often the prelude to thinking about things in a new way, and to me that’s one of the most important functions of literature.

The stories are very varied in style and content, but many [...]

Continue Reading →

“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion

By On 29 August 2011 · 11 Comments

“You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

This book has simple sentences like this scattered through it. They’re things you know, but forget. Your loved ones will die, so make the most of the time you have. I suppose I don’t like to look at members of my family [...]

Continue Reading →

“The Generation Game” by Sophie Duffy

By On 22 August 2011 · 9 Comments

An interesting premise: the book starts with a woman in hospital talking to her newborn baby girl. She starts to tell the story of her life, beginning with her own birth in St Thomas’s Hospital in 1965 and going right up to the present day.

“I’ll tell you my story. Our story. Because there’s [...]

Continue Reading →

“Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell

By On 18 July 2011 · 8 Comments

Homage to Catalonia is many books in one. It is a piece of journalism – Orwell initially went to Spain in the 1930s to report on the Spanish Civil War. It is also a war memoir, because Orwell was immediately convinced that enlisting in the fight against fascism rather than merely writing about it [...]

Continue Reading →