Literary fiction
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Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been on my shelf for a while. I was leant it by a friend and have been feeling bad about having kept it for so long. Lately, I’ve seen Adichie’s name mentioned in a lot of the media I read and it inspired me to…
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September’s book club book was Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes which is a novel set during the Vietnam War. I can’t really say what the book is about without cheating and looking at wikipedia because I only made it through the first hundred pages (of six hundred). In those first one hundred pages nothing happens. There…
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Another in my list of feminist classics I should have read but haven’t: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. It is the story of Anna Wulf, who has written a novel that was a huge success but she finds herself mentally and emotionally stuck afterwards. There is something about what she has written that disgusts…
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One of my top ten books is Possession by A. S. Byatt and so it stands to reason that I would like other books by the same author. I read Angels and Insects and wasn’t blown away. I bought Babel Tower and it has sat on my bookshelf for ten years. Part of the reason…
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The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig was the last Book Club book of 2011. I didn’t think I would enjoy it, but actually I loved it. Christine is a young woman living in Austria in the years after the first world war. Life is hard, there’s not enough money and the rooms she lives…
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This one raises an interesting question: is it ok to not like a book on this subject? The Auschwitz Violin by Maria Àngels Anglada, trans. Martha Tennent, is the story of a violin maker interned in Auschwitz who is ordered to make a violin for the camp Commander. He does this amid the starvation and…
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Book club is off with a bang this year. January’s choice was Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada (trans: Micheal Hofmann) and I loved it from the from start to finish. Otto, an ordinary German living in a shabby apartment block, tries to stay out of trouble under Nazi rule. But when he discovers his only…
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I’ve been putting this one off since the end of September. It felt a bit like hard work. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel was the Book Club book for September but this time I can’t blame the Book Club for making me read something I wouldn’t have touched otherwise because there was already a copy…
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You know there are some books that you’re really supposed to like, or at least pretend to like. A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul is one of those. All the world appears to think it’s great. This was the December read for my book club and I don’t think I would have ever…
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I’m working my way through Michael Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion series and recently I read Corum. Elric is one of my favourite characters in literature and I enjoy the self-conscious/aware nature of the multiple worlds cycle that is the Eternal Champion. Although one might argue that Moorcock is simply telling the same story over and…
Boudica Marginalia 