Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
I’m a sentimental, emotional, man. I’m sensitive. I feel. I feel big. And Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 Extremely Loud & IncrediblyContinue Reading
I’m a sentimental, emotional, man. I’m sensitive. I feel. I feel big. And Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 Extremely Loud & IncrediblyContinue Reading
I bought this for two pounds in a Walthamstow Oxfam. Definitely worth it. A tiny little picaresque novella, less thanContinue Reading
B. S. Johnson’s final novel, the first part of the never-completed Matrix Trilogy, has been out of print for decades.Continue Reading
Today I have made a fantastic discovery: if you stay sober, it is possible to read and enjoy poetry afterContinue Reading
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That’s right, more poetry. I’ve gone poetry mad. I’ve got at least two more poetry books on my shelf andContinue Reading
Life goes on. The worst thing that can happen in a life is not the end of the world.* This,Continue Reading
Sherwood Anderson, and more specifically his volume of interconnected short stories, Winesburg, Ohio, has had an odd history. Once considered aContinue Reading
I made a mistake. Open. Frank. Honest. I made a mistake. Several people have told me to read Roberto Bolaño.Continue Reading
I will be the first to admit that I’m not an expert on poetry. That I don’t read enough poetry.Continue Reading
This book took quite a bit of searching to find. I first read about it in Jonathan Coe’s Like A FieryContinue Reading
Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant is a fun romp through the bachelor pads, newspaper boardrooms, restaurants and theatres of glamorous,Continue Reading
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This is a stunning, beautiful, deeply moving novel that had me in streams of tears, laughing from the pit ofContinue Reading
Sheila Heti’s brand new* How Should A Person Be? is a charming – and very contemporary – autobiographical novel detailing aContinue Reading
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This is a beautifully crafted and elegantly written novel, a complex and intelligent exploration of ego, aging and self-fabrication. WrittenContinue Reading
Tropic of Cancer, to use a colloquialism Miller might have approved of, is a cunt’s hair from being EXACTLY myContinue Reading
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is an aggressive, brutal, novel that tears a reader through the depths of starvation, disease andContinue Reading
Please watch my new short film where, a la B. S. Johnson, I openly discuss the way I see theContinue Reading
Like the fashionable urbanite I am, yet again I’ve arrived late to a party. The problem with encountering something highlyContinue Reading
Building up towards my planned reading of Ulysses in August, I decided to try a different, shorter, Modernist classic. This was Woolf’sContinue Reading
A Death In The Family revolutionised the way I thought about literature. The honesty, the transparency, in Knausgaard’s autobiographical proseContinue Reading
I first read B. S. Johnson years after first learning of him. His (somewhat infamous) “book in a box”, The Unfortunates,Continue Reading
I decided to treat the whole of 1Q84 as a single novel, rolling through from the first volume to theContinue Reading
At the risk of losing my hard-won feminist credentials, I’m not certain I really enjoyed this. The first hundred pagesContinue Reading
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This essay comes packaged with a 1940 book review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in a lovely paper pamphlet. I bought itContinue Reading
When I drew up a list of experimental novels I felt I should read before my return to university inContinue Reading
I thoroughly enjoyed The Bell Jar. And I realise “enjoyed” might not sound like the appropriate word… I loved Plath’sContinue Reading
I found myself, as I neared the end of this, oddly, unexpectedly, moved. This novel charts Kerouac’s last year orContinue Reading
Jonathan Franzen, the best-selling, critically lauded author of The Corrections and Freedom, also penned two other long novels before heContinue Reading
I used to love Charles Mingus before I read this.
I was up a tower in Siena this afternoon and was gifted this beautiful view of the red-tiled roofs ofContinue Reading
This is a very serious book. It’s a deeply realist exploration of a single day in a Soviet-era prison camp,Continue Reading
Black Hole is a graphic novel, all about the socio-psychological repercussions of a sexually transmitted disease afflicting a bunch ofContinue Reading
This is absolutely my kind of thing. Stylistically experimental, full of various exploratory digressions and displaying a full and rounded insightContinue Reading
This is a strange and complex novel. A long, winding, dense and serious tome that manages to be set hundredsContinue Reading
(Caption: My weekend was made complete by the late discovery of Saint Agur Delice – a new product, introductory offer,Continue Reading
(Not a flattering picture…) Poetry. Contemporary poetry. Not something I grapple with regularly/have ever consciously grappled with before. This oneContinue Reading
It’s a Booker winner. And you can kind of tell. It has that well-crafted, stylistically-interesting, intelligent – but with a narrativeContinue Reading
This is a chilling, haunting novel that has, more than anything else I’ve read recently, really loitered in my thoughtsContinue Reading
This book was a Christmas present. So I didn’t buy/choose it myself. I went in blind. James Frey is anContinue Reading
A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven by Karl Ove Knausgaard Kanusgaard is my favourite contemporary writer, entirely because ofContinue Reading
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace When this is good, this is very, very good. When it’sContinue Reading
One of the main reasons why I’ve set this up is in order to (intelligently) review what I read, getContinue Reading