“Collected Fictions” by Jorge Luis Borges
With this book, I have to admit defeat, or at least a change of plan. I wanted to review every book I read on this site, but I can’t review this. How to reduce the life work of one of…
“The Writer as Migrant” by Ha Jin
These are three essays on the notion of migration for the writer, mostly explained through other writers such as Nabokov, Conrad, Kundera and Naipaul. In the first essay, The Spokesman & the Tribe, Jin explores the balance between the individual…
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Leo Tolstoy
A man dies slowly and in great agony. He ponders the meaning of life, and this increases his anguish: even worse than the physical pain of a slow, lingering death is the spiritual anguish of realising he has wasted his…
“The Iron Duke” by L. Ron Hubbard
I don’t generally read this kind of thing, but it was given away free by a very nice lady on the L. Ron Hubbard stand at the London Book Fair earlier this year. I don’t like to write anything off…
“In Dependence” by Sarah Ladipo Manyika
I love the opening line of this book: “One could begin with the dust, the heat and the purple bougainvillea. One might even begin with the smell of rotting mangos tossed by the side of the road where the flies…
“Birchwood” by John Banville
This book has very clear echoes of Proust, both in the writing style and in the sense of nostalgia that pervades the story of aristocratic decline. The references are clear and deliberate – in the very first chapter, Banville’s narrator…
End of the sea code
Saw this very sad snippet of news in the 29 August edition of Freedom magazine: At least 73 migrants have died at sea after ships repeatedly passed them by despite their being in difficulty after their dinghy ran out of…
“Fire Horses” by Mark Liam Piggott
Joe Noone seems to have it all – a beautiful house built into a Mallorca hillside, a comfortable lifestyle, a beautiful girlfriend. Yet it’s New Year’s Eve 2007 and as fireworks go off around him and people celebrate, he seems…
“T.S. Eliot” by Peter Ackroyd
I hardly ever read poetry, but for some reason T.S. Eliot’s poetry speaks to me. Perhaps it’s because, like Eliot, I used to work at a bank in the City of London, and the feeling of his poems is the…