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
Category: Book Review
The Sweet Smell of Psychosis by Will Self
I bought this for two pounds in a Walthamstow Oxfam. Definitely worth it. A tiny little picaresque novella, less thanContinue Reading
See The Old Lady Decently by B. S. Johnson
B. S. Johnson’s final novel, the first part of the never-completed Matrix Trilogy, has been out of print for decades.Continue Reading
Alien vs. Predator by Michael Robbins
Today I have made a fantastic discovery: if you stay sober, it is possible to read and enjoy poetry afterContinue Reading
Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa by Benjamin Constable
This is a brand spanking new book, given to me before its UK release by a friend with connections. Ooooh.Continue Reading
Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander
Hope: A Tragedy is a dark, funny novel. Hilarious, yet also quite serious, it is the narrative of the mentalContinue Reading
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
I’m going to be utterly uncharacteristic and not write a glowing review of a book. I found Rabbit, Run a bitContinue Reading
Nil Nil by Don Paterson
That’s right, more poetry. I’ve gone poetry mad. I’ve got at least two more poetry books on my shelf andContinue Reading
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Life goes on. The worst thing that can happen in a life is not the end of the world.* This,Continue Reading
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson, and more specifically his volume of interconnected short stories, Winesburg, Ohio, has had an odd history. Once considered aContinue Reading
Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño
I made a mistake. Open. Frank. Honest. I made a mistake. Several people have told me to read Roberto Bolaño.Continue Reading
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
I will be the first to admit that I’m not an expert on poetry. That I don’t read enough poetry.Continue Reading
Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry
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
Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant is a fun romp through the bachelor pads, newspaper boardrooms, restaurants and theatres of glamorous,Continue Reading
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
Leaving the Atocha Station is a recent novel written by a young American poet who spent a year living in MadridContinue Reading
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
This is a stunning, beautiful, deeply moving novel that had me in streams of tears, laughing from the pit ofContinue Reading
How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti’s brand new* How Should A Person Be? is a charming – and very contemporary – autobiographical novel detailing aContinue Reading
Maldoror and Poems by Lautréamont
Maldoror is a fucking weird book. It was written in the late 1860s by Isidore Ducasse, a young South American-bornContinue Reading
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
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 by Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer, to use a colloquialism Miller might have approved of, is a cunt’s hair from being EXACTLY myContinue Reading
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is an aggressive, brutal, novel that tears a reader through the depths of starvation, disease andContinue Reading
Sad Man On A Beach
Please watch my new short film where, a la B. S. Johnson, I openly discuss the way I see theContinue Reading
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Like the fashionable urbanite I am, yet again I’ve arrived late to a party. The problem with encountering something highlyContinue Reading
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
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 Man In Love: My Struggle Book Two by Karl Ove Knausgaard
A Death In The Family revolutionised the way I thought about literature. The honesty, the transparency, in Knausgaard’s autobiographical proseContinue Reading
Like a Fiery Elephant by Jonathan Coe
I first read B. S. Johnson years after first learning of him. His (somewhat infamous) “book in a box”, The Unfortunates,Continue Reading
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
I decided to treat the whole of 1Q84 as a single novel, rolling through from the first volume to theContinue Reading
Nights At The Circus By Angela Carter
At the risk of losing my hard-won feminist credentials, I’m not certain I really enjoyed this. The first hundred pagesContinue Reading
On The Films of B.S. Johnson, mainly Fat Man On A Beach
I don’t feel – because I’m not – qualified to term my analysis of this collection of BS Johnson’s shortContinue Reading
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
This essay comes packaged with a 1940 book review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in a lovely paper pamphlet. I bought itContinue Reading
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
When I drew up a list of experimental novels I felt I should read before my return to university inContinue Reading
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
I thoroughly enjoyed The Bell Jar. And I realise “enjoyed” might not sound like the appropriate word… I loved Plath’sContinue Reading
Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac
I found myself, as I neared the end of this, oddly, unexpectedly, moved. This novel charts Kerouac’s last year orContinue Reading
Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen, the best-selling, critically lauded author of The Corrections and Freedom, also penned two other long novels before heContinue Reading
Beneath the Underdog by Charles Mingus
I used to love Charles Mingus before I read this.
On Daniel Craig as James Bond on Roofs
I was up a tower in Siena this afternoon and was gifted this beautiful view of the red-tiled roofs ofContinue Reading
One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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 by Charles Burns
Black Hole is a graphic novel, all about the socio-psychological repercussions of a sexually transmitted disease afflicting a bunch ofContinue Reading
Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith
This is absolutely my kind of thing. Stylistically experimental, full of various exploratory digressions and displaying a full and rounded insightContinue Reading
The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
This is a strange and complex novel. A long, winding, dense and serious tome that manages to be set hundredsContinue Reading
Jean Baptiste Baigorri’s Cramond Island by Irkus M. Zeberio
(Caption: My weekend was made complete by the late discovery of Saint Agur Delice – a new product, introductory offer,Continue Reading
Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds
(Not a flattering picture…) Poetry. Contemporary poetry. Not something I grapple with regularly/have ever consciously grappled with before. This oneContinue Reading
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
It’s a Booker winner. And you can kind of tell. It has that well-crafted, stylistically-interesting, intelligent – but with a narrativeContinue Reading
The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
This is a chilling, haunting novel that has, more than anything else I’ve read recently, really loitered in my thoughtsContinue Reading
The Final Testament of the Holy Bible by James Frey
This book was a Christmas present. So I didn’t buy/choose it myself. I went in blind. James Frey is anContinue Reading
Catch-up Book Reviews Part Three
A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven by Karl Ove Knausgaard Kanusgaard is my favourite contemporary writer, entirely because ofContinue Reading
Catch-up Book Reviews Part Two
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace When this is good, this is very, very good. When it’sContinue Reading
Catch-up Book Reviews Part One
One of the main reasons why I’ve set this up is in order to (intelligently) review what I read, getContinue Reading
Triumph Of The Now 