Like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, I bought this on the basis of a Bryan Appleyard article where he mentioned Hazzard as one of his contenders for greatest living novelist; in fact, he entertained the possibility that The Transit of Venus was ‘the most perfect novel written in the past 100 years’.
I was less taken by this one [...]
This is one of the great novelistic portraits of London: a London full of smoke and fog, seedy backstreet pubs, horse-drawn cabs, and gaslights. That’s what I like best about it, really, the London it creates and the grotesque characters that inhabit it: Verloc himself, the secret agent and seller of pornography, his coterie of seedy, ageing [...]
The definite article in the title seems a little hubristic. I don’t know if this is the definitive biography of Shakespeare — haven’t read any of the hundreds of others — but I certainly enjoyed it.
I don’t know if I completely trust Ackroyd as a historian; it’s probably unfair, but I just get a nagging sense sometimes that [...]
Or to give it its fuller, more informative title: Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened. It is what it sounds like: a brief (under 200 pages, including the index) overview of dating technologies for a general audience: radio isotope dating, dendrochronology, Antarctic ice cores and so on. And I enjoyed it; [...]
The full title is The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714; i.e. the century in question is the longish C17th from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the death of Queen Anne. I guess most centuries are centuries of revolution somewhere, and in one way or another, but the C17th was the only time the English have had an actual [...]
I picked this up to read again because I’ve just read a biography of Stalin. I think I first read 1984 when I was really quite young — certainly no older than my teens; in fact I may have made a point of reading it in 1984, when I was nine or ten — and [...]
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a biography of Stalin, focussed on his domestic life and the tightly-knit group of people around him: his own family, and politicians, bodyguards, and their families.
As a piece of history, it’s very impressive. It’s clearly the result of a huge amount of research by Montefiore: he [...]
Ooh, I’ve been meme-tagged by Sherry Chandler.
Look up page 123 in the nearest book, look for the fifth sentence, then post the three sentences that follow that fifth sentence on page 123.
Well, the actual closest book is Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Yay. So I’m going to ignore mere physical proximity and pick the [...]
I bought Housekeeping because of an article at the end of last year where Bryan Appleyard made some suggestions of great artists working today. One of his two greatest living novelists was Marilynne Robinson; I don’t always find myself in sympathy with Appleyard, but with a recommendation like that it seemed worth a punt.
It is [...]
The Leopard has been on my to-read list for some time and I’m glad I finally got round to it. It’s a novel, written by a Sicilian prince in the 1950s, about the declining aristocracy in Sicily in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The leopard of the title is the Prince of Salina, whose [...]
I thought I ought to reread some of those Great Novels which are sitting on my shelves and I haven’t read for years. I’m not sure why I picked up Moby Dick in particular, but after a few pages I was thinking oh, man, I’d forgotten how funny this book is, and so brilliantly written. [...]
Since I’ve recorded [nearly all] the books I’ve read since March this year on a special book page, and it’s possible to view them ordered according to my rating, I hardly need to to do a books of the year post. Here are some links to some of the longer posts I did about books:
The [...]
According to the blurb, this is Roth’s masterpiece. To which all I can say is… meh.
I don’t know. It’s a good book, a broad-sweep fat novel of the old school, but I wasn’t blown away by it. I don’t think Roth is much of a prose stylist, for a start. Perfectly competent, and sporadically rather [...]
The full title is The Bible: The Biography, which at least clears up any possible implication that Karen Armstrong might be claiming authorship for the actual Bible.
I finished this last week sometime, but I’ve been putting off writing about it, mainly because reading a book by someone who knows vastly more about the subject than [...]
I highly recommend this fascinating book; it seems to be out of print, but there are lots of second-hand copies on Amazon. As the title suggests, it’s about poor mad George III. And even Americans, brought up to think of George III as a tyrant, might have a little sympathy for him after reading this.
It [...]
This is a biography of Charles Darwin’s grandfather. He was a doctor by trade, and one of the most highly rated in the country, but was one of those classic Enlightenment figures whose interests included botany, meteorology, physics, chemistry, engineering, philosophy and just about anything else that came his way. And for a few years [...]
This is a Hungarian novel from 1937. I don’t really know much about it; I found it while I was sorting books into some new bookshelves. It’s the kind of thing I can imagine myself buying, but I don’t actually remember doing so. But it had lots of glowing blurbs on the back, including one [...]
This was a welcome relief from my ongoing attempts to get Internet Explorer to behave itself. Making Money picks up the story of Moist von Lipwig, the former con man who took over Ankh-Morpork post office in Going Postal. In this one Vetinari offers him the chance to run the Mint.
I said that one of [...]
Full title: 40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin®, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania. In other words, it’s about the trial in Dover, Pennsylvania where the school board tried to put Intelligent Design into the biology classes and were found to be in breach of the constitutional separation of church [...]