“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger
When I talked about why I blogged, I used to use this book as my stock example. Here I am in September 2008, for example: The original idea of this blog was to provide somewhere for me to record the…
“The Paperchase” by Marcel Theroux
Damien March, a bored BBC journalist on the night shift, suddenly inherits a house on an island off the coast of Cape Cod from his long-lost uncle Patrick. There is a condition, however – he must preserve the house exactly…
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera
I’ve listed Milan Kundera as one of my favourite authors for a while now, but oddly I’d never read his most famous book until now. It was definitely no letdown – the same philosophical style I’ve come to expect, but…
“The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov
The devil is unleashed in Stalinist Moscow. The funny thing is that while the devil kills, maims and causes havoc throughout the city, he is very far from a traditional definition of evil. In fact, the character struck me as…
“The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga
I didn’t like this book when I started it. Even when I was browsing it in the bookshop, I wasn’t that keen – I only bought it because it was half-price and it had won the Booker Prize. Surprising, then,…
“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…
“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…