Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year, ‘The Last Hundred Days’ by Patrick McGuinness tells the story of a young British expat living in Romania at the time of the fall of Ceaucescu in 1989. Offered a job at a university, the unnamed narrator soon becomes embroiled in a web of corruption and betrayal. Loosely based on McGuinness’ own experiences, it is a shocking, sometimes brutal account of life under the shadow of a dictator and his rapid downfall. It is a story told with bleak authenticity. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Literature
The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness
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First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan
Having access to new university libraries means that I occasionally visit the fiction section and borrow books to read on the train while I commute (and when I say occasionally, I really mean pretty much every time I go to the library). I have read a lot of Ian McEwan’s more recent work but I haven’t been able to get hold of his earlier works until now. This collection of short stories definitely shows how far McEwan has come since his debut in the mid-1970s with ‘First Love, Last Rites’. Continue reading
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Book Igloo
This is a book igloo created by Colombian artist Miler Lagos. I could quite happily live here… not entirely sure how stable it is though. It would be kind of annoying if you really wanted to read one of the books that forms part of the dome but couldn’t remove it without the whole thing collapsing. Nightmare. Still super cool though.
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The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue
Having read some pretty strange books recently (The Unconsoled and The Unbearable Lightness of Being spring to mind), I really wanted to read something that was based upon some good old-fashioned story-telling and a linear plot. On one hand, I wanted a book that wasn’t too taxing on the brain. On the other hand, I wanted a book that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to read in public on a train. ‘The Sealed Letter’ by Emma Donoghue was just what I needed. Continue reading
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The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
I have read quite a few of Julian Barnes’ other novels over the last few months and I am a real fan of his work. I think I am now even more in awe of the power of his prose, having finally got hold of a copy of ‘The Sense of an Ending’ and devoured it in a little over two hours. Continue reading
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The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey
‘The Chemistry of Tears’ by Peter Carey tells the story of Catherine Gehrig, an horologist living in London who had an affair with her boss, Matthew Tindall, for thirteen years until his recent sudden death. In the midst of her grief, she is given the task of rebuilding a mechanical duck and discovers the journals of Henry Brandling, whose story set in the mid nineteenth century is also interwoven alongside Catherine’s journey through grief. Continue reading
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The Awakening by Kate Chopin
My postgraduate course is taking over pretty much my whole life at the moment. I am still finding the time to read non-academic books when I commute but I am getting very behind with writing up my reviews (also in the wrong order as I read this before ‘The Unconsoled’). I actually read ‘The Awakening’ by Kate Chopin during Banned Books Week at the beginning of October but have only just got round to writing this blog post. Hopefully, I will catch up by Christmas…!
‘The Awakening’ tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a young Creole woman trapped in an unhappy marriage who is capable of (shock horror) independent thought and marital infidelity. Her modern views on motherhood and femininity even cause her husband, Leonce, to seek medical advice. During a holiday, she meets Robert and falls for him. Inevitably, there are tragic consequences. Continue reading
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The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
Why did I do a Masters degree? WHY?! Yes, work is getting to me a bit already and it’s still only October. I would be blogging every day if I reviewed all the course books I am reading at the moment but I don’t want to turn this blog into A Little Blog of Political Economy and European Foreign Policy Books and Absolutely Nothing Else. That would be depressing and very very boring.
I think the last time it took me this long to finish a book was when I read ‘The Corrections’ by Jonathan Franzen. However, that was because I found it a slog to get through not because I was particularly busy at the time. During the holidays, I might have been able to read ‘The Unconsoled’ in about three days. Instead, during term time, it has taken more like two and a half weeks. For me, that’s an epically long time to spend on one book. But with ‘The Unconsoled’, I think it was worth reading slowly. Continue reading
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The Man Booker Prize 2012
So Hilary Mantel has done it again. ‘Bring Up The Bodies’ has been crowned the Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2012. Mantel won the Booker Prize for ‘Wolf Hall’ in 2009, the first part of her trilogy on the life of Thomas Cromwell, so this makes her the first woman and the first British person to win it twice. I’m sure I’m not alone in passing on many congratulations to Mantel for this huge and much deserved achievement. Continue reading
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Snowdrops by A. D. Miller
I’m a little bit slow when it comes to reading the Man Booker Prize winners and nominees. I haven’t read any of the books on this year’s shortlist yet and ‘Snowdrops’ by A. D. Miller is only the second book on last year’s shortlist that I have read so far. It tells the story of Nick Platt, a British lawyer in his thirties living in Moscow. After meeting Masha who soon becomes his girlfriend, Nick gets involved in a property deal. This being Russia, let’s just say it doesn’t go quite as planned…
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The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
‘The Reader’ by Bernhard Schlink tells the story of fifteen year old Michael Berg who has an intense affair with a much older woman, Hanna Schmitz. Years later, Michael discovers that Hanna, who was an SS guard at Auschwitz, is being prosecuted for war crimes after World War II. Michael, now a law student, watches her trial and tries to come to terms with the collective guilt surrounding Germany’s past. Continue reading
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Books That Disappointed Me
I wrote a post a while ago about the books I never finished but I have also read quite a few books I may as well not have finished. Amongst these, there were some that I had particularly high hopes for yet they turned out to be not what I was expecting at all – and not in a good way. Here is my list of my biggest literary disappointments:
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I read Love in the Time of Cholera and really enjoyed it so I was looking forward to reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. But why oh why oh WHY did all the characters have to have almost the exact same names across the generations?! Not knowing who was who really hindered my enjoyment of the book which was otherwise beautifully written. I might be willing to try it again someday but only when I have developed supreme powers of concentration and the ability to decipher a Colombian family tree. Continue reading
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The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
‘The Virgin Suicides’ by Jeffrey Eugenides tells the story of the five adolescent Lisbon sisters who all commit suicide. The youngest sister, thirteen year old Cecilia kills herself first and her death impacts the whole community, especially her other four sisters: fourteen year old Lux, fifteen year old Bonnie, sixteen year old Mary and seventeen year old Therese. The local neighbourhood develops an obsessive fascination with the mysterious Lisbon sisters with tragic consequences for all involved. Continue reading
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Does My Blog Harm Literature?
According to Peter Stothard, this year’s chair of the Man Booker Prize judges, book bloggers are harming literature. Well thanks, Peter. Thanks a lot. I’m sure there are many people who have come across my blog who might have been indifferent or in strong disagreement with my reviews but I never expected the whole concept of my blog to be accused of being detrimental to literature. That seems quite extreme to me.
I am not a professional critic. I enjoy reading books and nobody pays me to write reviews. I did not study English Literature at university. I do not work in publishing or journalism. As a blogger, I don’t have an editor to check my posts and I know my writing isn’t perfect. However, I completely reject Stothard’s assertion that blogging is drowning out ‘serious criticism’. He appears to have lumped all bloggers into the category of what he calls ‘unargued opinion’. Sure, there is an awful lot of badly written stuff out there, but it isn’t universal. Continue reading
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The downside of starting my postgraduate degree next week is that I will have a lot less time to read fiction and also a lot less time for blogging than I’ve had over the summer. The upside is that I now have access to different libraries and a 10% student discount at my favourite bookshop in the world, Foyles, so when I do have time to read for pleasure, I will be pretty spoilt for choice.
Last week, I visited the main university library for the first time and got hopelessly lost. Due to the absence of signs and being completely unfamiliar with the Library of Congress classification system, it took me nearly an hour to even find the sections relevant to my course. During my search, I happened to stumble across the Czech literature section and picked up a copy of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ by Milan Kundera as it was on my TBR list and isn’t available at my local library. I figured that even if I never found the books I had actually gone to look for, it wouldn’t have been a totally wasted trip. Continue reading
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The Hours by Michael Cunningham
‘The Hours’ by Michael Cunningham interweaves the parallel stories of three women from different generations across one day in their lives through their connection with the novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’. The writer Virginia Woolf is in the process of writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’ in the early 1920s as she battles mental illness. Claustrophobic post-war housewife Laura Brown bakes a cake to celebrate her husband’s birthday but all she really wants to do is escape and read ‘Mrs Dalloway’. Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway, is a modern-day New Yorker planning a party for her friend and former lover, Richard. As well as the obvious connection with Woolf’s novel, the women are all connected in other ways. Notably they are affected by the same themes including madness and sexuality.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
I have been meaning to read ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ for absolutely ages – as I’ve mentioned, I find it easy to take classic literature for granted, knowing that it will always be easily available especially in electronic format, so it tends to get pushed down to the bottom of my TBR list. ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ should have been bumped up to the top of my list sooner. The novel tells the story of a young man named Dorian Gray, who has a portrait painted of him by Basil Hallward. Dorian meets Basil’s friend, Lord Henry (Harry) Wotton, who believes that youth and beauty are the only things which really matter in the world and Dorian subsequently becomes heavily influenced by his ideas about aestheticism. However, the story takes a sinister turn when Dorian makes a wish that only his portrait should age and wither while he would look young forever, thus selling his soul for eternal youth. As you can imagine, the moral of the story is something along the lines of ‘be careful what you wish for’… Continue reading
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The Rise of eBooks: evil or essential?
The eBook debate continues to rage incessantly and provoke some very important questions. Is the controversy less about the value of books and more about the development of modern technology? Who are the winners and the losers in this supposed eBook revolution? Does it really matter what format books are available in? For many people, it certainly does.
Although I don’t actually own an e-reader yet, I do plan to get a Kindle soon (hopefully for Christmas this year) after borrowing my sister’s one earlier this summer. I will be using it almost exclusively for when I’m commuting by train as it is the practical side of e-readers which appeals to me the most.
Source: The Guardian
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Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The premise of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is the stuff of nightmares for bibliophiles everywhere. Ray Bradbury’s portrayal of a dystopian society in which books are outlawed would be like hell for all book-lovers: as we are told on the first page, Fahrenheit 451 is “the temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns”. The book tells the story of a fireman called Guy Montag, except he is not the sort of fireman we would normally imagine – instead of putting fires out, firemen in Bradbury’s not too distant future deliberately start fires in places where books are found. From the moment when his seventeen year old neighbour Clarisse McClellan asks him if he is happy, Montag starts to question everything around him especially when Clarisse disappears and his wife, Mildred, attempts suicide. Continue reading
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The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Although lots of people may say that you should never judge a book by its cover, in the case of ‘The Night Circus’ by Erin Morgenstern, I think it’s acceptable to do so. I love this book cover not just because it is very pretty but because I think it matches the story so well too. Lots of adjectives like ‘dazzling’, ‘enchanting’, ‘spellbinding’, ‘imaginative’, ‘captivating’ and ‘magical’ have already been used in the critics reviews on the cover to describe this book. I would like to add that it is also highly original especially for a fantasy story. Continue reading
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