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
Category: Book Review
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 