The Waves
A perfect novel, making the second perfect novel I have read, after Ulysses. I could maybe write more, but what is the point of writing, when it already has been done, perfectly?
5
2666
For a long time, I have believed that a truly great novel is one which contains a sliver of divinity, something which makes me want to believe in the power and glory of God. As an atheist, that feels like...
Spadework For A Palace
Manic, wonderfully manic, brilliant.
Long Walk To Freedom
Pale Fire
Pale Fire is a delightful escape-room of a novel, with layers of meaning, unreliablility, and puns that might seem a bit highfalutin but crucially does not take itself seriously. The conceit of a somewhat crazy man telling a story through...
Molloy
Maybe I am biased, predisposed by the forces of Canonized Culture, to find such great beauty in the stream-of-conscious depiction of a man (two? or just the one?) on an odyssey of his own making in Ireland - but this...
The Wretched Of The Earth
Brilliant! Thought-provoking and insightful into the forces and structures of decolonialization, and a bit challenging. The prefaces by Sartre and particularly Homi K Bhabha (sesquipedalian though it is) do an excellent job of contextualizing the rest. It is a bit...
And Then There Were None
Reading Christie I am frequently struck with the thought: why isn’t Christie more popular? And then I remember that she is the best selling novelist of all time - Wikipedia currently has her tied with the bard, but he was...
Debt
I was, to be frank, prepared to be bored by this - “debt” is a dry, intuitive concept which seemed little deserving of 500 pages of exegesis. The book seemed vaguely Important and not a bit hip, but not…interesting. Then...
The Brothers Karamazov
I got into, started studying and eventually made a career out of computer programming because first I wanted to make clouds. The wispy vortices, plastic and mutable at a timescale just longer than that which is immediately perceptible, seemed the...