Arukiyomi

Context: Finished off in the garden while housesitting for some friends.

REVIEW
Forget Jane Eyre. Yes, I said forget her. There is such a huge chasm of difference between these books that you’d hardly think they were by the same author.

I speak not of plot. No science fiction or detective thriller is Villette. It’s still the well-worn (though not too worn at that time) romantic drama. But I speak of the style. This foreshadows and must have influenced Middlemarch with its insights into human character.
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Context: Finished this off on my in-laws’ decking in the garden.

REVIEW
For a long time I’ve been wanting to get my hands on the first book in His Dark Materials trilogy and I finally found this copy in a charity shop. It wasn’t at all what I expected. For those North American readers of the blog, note that in your continent, this book is sold as The Golden Compass for reasons that elude me.
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Context: started this on a walk in the country in Portugal with my family.

REVIEW
Never heard of this and would never have done if it wasn’t for the 1001 list. It’s books like this that justify lists like these. It’s not Tolstoy and it’s not Solzhenitsyn (rest his soul,) but it is Russian literature and it had quite a lot in common with both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky which I appreciated.
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Context: Read this a chapter as a time as part of my daily devotional and finished it
on the plane back from Portugal to the UK.

REVIEW
This is one of those Christian classics that you’ve heard about for years but few people have actually read cover to cover. A friend let me choose from a box of books going free and so I picked myself up a copy. Glad I did.
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Context: Finished this in the taxi from my mum’s in Portugal to the railway station.

REVIEW
It’s quite something to write a novel in a language foreign to your own. But to even attempt to write one in a foreign language that is based on elements of culture that are foreign to your own is sheer folly. That is unless you are a genius like Ishiguro.
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Context: Finished this off in my mum’s jacuzzi.

REVIEW
Now that Middlesex has been removed from the 2008 edition of the 1001 list, Eugenides’ work is represented by this one novel alone.

There are going to be many who will argue for Middlesex to be reinstated if not alongside this but even to replace it. I won’t be one of them. Middlesex is a very good novel. This though is so good, you might not even realise it.
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Context: Read most of this in the forest at the end of my mum’s garden in Portugal.

REVIEW
Sometimes I read a book, get to the end and wonder why the author wrote it. Iris Murdoch presented my sister with her degree it turns out and, if I ever meet her myself, I’d like her to present me with a reason why she wrote this novel.

It was her first and, on the strength of it, I’m surprised she went on to do as well as she did. Mind you, Woolf started with The Voyage Out so there’s hope for us all.
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Context: Read this in a day and finished it with the cat next to me in the study at my mum’s place in Portugal.

REVIEW
Poignant, evocative, thought-provoking and strong. The Reader is an excellent novel which fits more into its few pages than most novelists manage in a lifetime of works.
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Context: Finished off in the garden of my mum’s house in Portugal.

REVIEW
I’d read a bit of Ackroyd’s non-fiction as well before this and know that while he can start off pretty well, he can get bogged down into the minutae of stuff that surely fascinates him but leaves the average reader cold. Was I surprised?
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Context: Started this in the UK and finished it off on the lawn at my mum’s in Portugal.

REVIEW
I know this book has had a lot of praise and so I had high expectations from it. It was clever yes but it wasn’t as earth-shattering as I’d been lead to believe from the cover reviews. In fact, I almost doubted it entirely when I saw it was “Richard and Judy Book of the Year.”

Still, it had an important message and one which, I’m thankful to say, was clearly communicated.
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Context: Finished this in a day on my bed at my mum’s place in Portugal.

REVIEW
This started off as an unassuming romance novella but, before long, I realised that I was involved in an exploration of issues much deeper and very relevant to the contemporary world.
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Context: Finished this off in bed at my in-laws’ place near Cambridge, UK.

REVIEW
Nothing much to report here. This was an entirely predictable Bronte piece which, unlike her sisters, Anne doesn’t push as far as it could have gone.
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Context: Read this on and off on the bench in my in-laws’ garden.

REVIEW
What a strange book this was. It was nothing like I expected at all and, despite having finished it, I’m really not sure at all why Waugh wrote it. Neither was he either it seems as his preface says that this was a “totally unplanned novel” which describes a generation that he was part of, albeit peripherally.

In this sense then, it shares many things in common with On the Road, a classic description of a forgotten generation and certainly one which was written with so little planning that Kerouac sat down and typed it out without stopping virtually.
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Context: Read this while staying at my in-laws where I gave the spare room a much needed seeing-to.

REVIEW
This book I liked. It’s the story of your average disfunctional American family which could, of course, be your average westernised family pretty much anywhere. As such, I related to it a great deal. (Click to read my review…)

Context: Finished this off at a friend’s house in Hertford, UK.

REVIEW
Liechtenstein was my 57th country and so I could fairly claim to have travelled a lot. One of the privileges that travel brings me is the ability to get some perspective on British culture. In this book, Swift demonstrates this as Gulliver heads out to ever more distant and distinctive lands. In his closing comments, he reflects on the purpose of travel: “a traveller’s chief aim should be to make them wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.”

If I’d read this before, I would have written this in my passport on one of those useless pages entitled “Notes.”
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Context: Finished this under a holly tree, by a pond at a friend’s house in Hertford, UK.

REVIEW
This novel is scarcely 200 pages long. Yet Woolf manages to load every sentence (dare I say every word?) with such imagery that you feel like your reading something weightier than Lord of the Rings.
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Context: took me a long while to read this and some of that time was spent exploring St Andrews in east Scotland.

REVIEW
This is a deceptively long book. It looked around 300 pages but stretched to 570. Not that it was overlong but there were times when I wished it had been shorter. Still, it was an interesting glimpse into a life that is no longer which is probably a good thing.
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Context: Finished this off on this bench at our friends’ house in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

REVIEW
Like, Coetzee, Toibin writes in sparse prose that is so wonderfully crafted in this novel that he manages to load each sentence with pages of meaning. This is a poignant, thoughtful and, at times, tragic novel that takes the reader on a journey through a man’s thoughts and memories. I loved it.
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Context: at home with 1000 copies of the book that need to be sold sitting by the back door!

REVIEW
It’s not every son who has the priviledge of blogging his dad’s own book. Seeing as it’s father’s day here, I think it’s appropriate that I avail myself of this privilege right now.

It’s a book about dieting, what’s wrong with it and how to be free of it while still finding a healthy approach to eating. This is my dad’s first and, it isn’t at all bad.
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