Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel about the Biafran war, told from the perspective of three people on the Biafran side. It switches back and forth between their lives pre-war and the war years. Adichie is too young to have been part of the war herself, but I gather from the Author’s Note that her parents [...]
Posts tagged with ‘novels’
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‘The Transit of Venus’ by Shirley Hazzard
27 May 2008 – 4:39 pm
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 [...]
‘The Secret Agent’ by Joseph Conrad
27 May 2008 – 1:55 pm
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 [...]
1984 by George Orwell
19 March 2008 – 2:11 pm
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 [...]
‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson
20 February 2008 – 3:00 pm
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’ by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
27 January 2008 – 11:16 am
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 [...]
Moby Dick
6 January 2008 – 11:39 am
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. [...]
‘Journey by Moonlight’ by Antal Szerb
15 October 2007 – 10:08 am
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 [...]
‘Making Money’ by Terry Pratchett
26 September 2007 – 4:00 pm
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 [...]
‘The Satanic Verses’ by Salman Rushdie
15 August 2007 – 2:10 pm
I bought The Satanic Verses in irritation at all the fuckwits who were complaining about Rushdie getting a knighthood. Not surprisingly perhaps, having bought it as a gesture rather than because of an urgent desire to read it, it ended up at the bottom of my to-read pile. It didn’t help that it has a [...]
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
13 May 2006 – 11:49 am
The NY Times ’sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years”‘. You can see the list of works that got more than one vote here. I’ve read [...]
‘Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’ by Susanna Clarke
1 December 2005 – 11:23 pm
I’ve just finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, which I found a bit disappointing. My problem, I realised after a while, was that I was expecting literary fiction and it was actually genre fiction.
Which is a slightly difficult statement to justify. It’s not literally true - there is no genre the book [...]
‘Blood and Roses’, ‘Being in Being’, ‘Don Quixote’
14 May 2005 – 5:59 pm
some thoughts on Blood and Roses, Being in Being, and Don Quixote
I recently finished Don Quixote (the new Edith Grossman translation). I read about half of it in my teens, before getting sidetracked, and decided that the 400th anniversary was a good time to have another go at it.
DQ is a great idea for a [...]
Cloud Atlas
27 March 2005 – 2:18 am
I recently read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It’s structurally odd - six stories which are all set in different historical periods and linked - but not causally.
i.e. the first strand is written as a journal, and the second has a character who finds the journal in a library and reads it, but is otherwise [...]