Tag: literature
Othello by William Shakespeare
About two months ago I spent a week in Finland, driving through the countryside from flea market to charity shopContinue Reading
Flaubert in Egypt by Gustave Flaubert (kind of)*
Flaubert in Egypt is ostensibly (though it isn’t) a book written by Gustave Flaubert about his hedonistic travels through EgyptContinue Reading
Victoria by Knut Hamsun
I know I should be spending my free time writing something that isn’t this blog. I know I should haveContinue Reading
A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride
Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing was a surprise critical smash in the heady days of 2013/14, atContinue Reading
The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
This week, I decided to dabble with a bit of Leo Tolstoy. I’ve never read anything by the big-hitting RussianContinue Reading
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
Child of God was Cormac McCarthy’s third novel, and is the first book of his I’ve read for a while.Continue Reading
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath
I intended to read Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams for a while, but held off doing so forContinue Reading
Penguin Modern Stories 7
I sourced this 1971 collection of short stories for one simple reason: ‘For Bolocks Please Read Blocks Throughout’, a B.Continue Reading
Chess by Stefan Zweig
Chess is an excellent little novella written by Stefan Zweig in the early 1940s. An Austrian who’d run from theContinue Reading
Working the Room by Geoff Dyer
As often happens with essay collections (particularly ones read for the writer’s personality rather than his or her topics), WorkingContinue Reading
Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
Phwoar! Actually, I retract that. Other than the bit where a priest is raped by a woman and two menContinue Reading
Commonplace Book by E. M. Forster
Over the last week I have read a strange text: Commonplace Book by E. M. Forster. Bits of it thrilledContinue Reading
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
I haven’t read a huge amount of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, only the very obvious one and probably the second mostContinue Reading
Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda
This will probably be my last blog for a while, as I have a couple of essays to write over theContinue Reading
The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
I am now in the second half of my seventeen day run working the equivalent of every day (that’s workingContinue Reading
A Dead Man In Deptford by Anthony Burgess
I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks and will continue to be horrendously so for the next few. I’ve beenContinue Reading
Dark As The Grave Wherein my Friend is Laid by Malcolm Lowry
Dark As The Grave Wherein my Friend is Laid is a strange book, and the first of the three (I believe)Continue Reading
Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry by George Bowker
I took a week to read this harrowing, depressing, heart-wrenchingly awful* biography of one of the most troubled, confused andContinue Reading
On Appreciating Graham Greene
I just reread Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair as it’s being discussed in a class I have this week.Continue Reading
Shall We Gather At The River by Peter Murphy
I picked this novel up from a massive pile of free books offered by my university a few weeks beforeContinue Reading
The Accidental by Ali Smith
I read and enjoyed Ali Smith’s There But For The whilst travelling last Summer, and was recently recommended this as aContinue Reading
Lunar Caustic by Malcolm Lowry
Malcolm Lowry’s books are all about depression and alcoholism. And most of them he was too drunk and sad toContinue Reading
Politics by Adam Thirlwell
I am having an absolute TRIUMPH of an evening. I have a negroni IN MY HAND, have just finished readingContinue Reading
Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
Without a shadow of a doubt, Big Sur is the best book by Jack Kerouac I have ever read. It wasContinue Reading
Paula by Isabel Allende
In December 1991 Isabel Allende’s daughter Paula fell into a coma. With little knowledge of how long it would lastContinue Reading
Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell
I had been intending to read George Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia ever since I encountered Down And Out In Paris And London,Continue Reading
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is a fucking emotional rollercoaster of a book. It tells the story, in great detail,Continue Reading
Three Tales by Gustave Flaubert
I found myself a copy of Flaubert’s 1877 short story collection Three Tales in order to read ‘Herodias’, his piece aboutContinue Reading
Umbrella by Will Self
Will Self’s 2012 novel Umbrella, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize that went to Bring Up The Bodies, is a sexy, war-y, JoyceanContinue Reading
The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene
Right. My blog is back in business, back to books. (As I’m sure you can see, my hair is far,Continue Reading
On Not Being Bowles-ed Over by Paul Bowles’ Let It Come Down
Spent two nights in Marrakech, ran into most of the people I’d met before, had a pleasant time, but I’mContinue Reading
Hanging out alone in Seville, reading Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives
Well, I’ve been away four days and have already completed my first read of the trip. Roberto Bolaño’s HUGE TheContinue Reading
Travelling People by B. S. Johnson
Today I have returned to the British Library in order to read more out of print books by Bryan StanleyContinue 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
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
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
On Cocaine at the Hay-on-Wye Festival
I stumbled, heady on free cheese and Spanish lager, into a temporary toilet cubicle at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, lockedContinue 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
On Today’s Self-Indulgent Recreational Activity
I have decided, mostly as a way of procrastinating before a) sending off my first novel to agents or b)Continue 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
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
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
Triumph Of The Now 