Tag Archives: Novels

October 1, 2012 · 3:42 pm

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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September 29, 2012 · 2:17 pm

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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September 23, 2012 · 12:24 pm

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of BeingThe 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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September 19, 2012 · 3:07 pm

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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September 16, 2012 · 11:44 am

The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo

Earlier this year, I watched the first season of the TV series ‘Borgen’, a political drama set in Denmark, and got completely hooked to the point where I began to convince myself that I could speak Danish.  However, with the exception of reading the Millennium Trilogy a couple of years ago, I am definitely lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to jumping on the Scandinavian crime fiction bandwagon and this week, I tried to rectify that by reading ‘The Redbreast’ by Jo Nesbo. Continue reading →

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September 11, 2012 · 6:20 pm

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

‘Cold Comfort Farm’ by Stella Gibbons tells the story of nineteen year old Flora Poste who decides to track down her long lost cousins out in the Sussex countryside on Cold Comfort Farm after the sudden death of her parents.  As soon as she is confronted by her strange relatives, Flora immediately sets about trying to change things on the farm with each character having their own particular problem that needs resolving.  However, her modern middle-class outlook frequently clashes with the rural way of life as she helps them to adapt to the twentieth century.

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September 9, 2012 · 12:21 pm

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian GrayI 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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September 3, 2012 · 4:36 pm

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

‘Lucky Jim’ by Kingsley Amis tells the story of James Dixon, (a character supposedly inspired by Philip Larkin, as Wikipedia reliably informs me) who has stumbled into a job as a medieval history lecturer at a redbrick university in the Midlands mostly by accident.  Due to his northern, non-elitist background, he frequently finds himself out of place in academic circles and the story recounts the often farcical episodes of his early career.  At the beginning of the story, Dixon is worried that he will not be reappointed at the end of his probationary year but ends up making a series of gaffes in his efforts to keep his job as well as trying to deal with his on-off girlfriend, Margaret.  Continue reading →

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August 25, 2012 · 3:03 pm

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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August 23, 2012 · 6:01 pm

The Outcast by Sadie Jones

The OutcastSet in England in the 1950s, ‘The Outcast’ by Sadie Jones tells the story of nineteen year old Lewis Aldridge and his return to his childhood home in a small village in Surrey after spending two years in prison.  Tensions both at home and in the community soon become darker as it becomes clear that Lewis will never really be able to make a fresh start in Waterford and let go of his troubled past.  Never has the British stiff upper lip seemed so resistant to change. Continue reading →

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August 22, 2012 · 12:37 pm

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

‘Lolita’ by Vladimir Nabokov tells the story of Humbert Humbert and his obsession with twelve year old Dolores Haze also known as Lolita.  Humbert marries her mother, Charlotte, to be closer to Lolita and after her sudden death, Humbert becomes sexually involved with Lolita and they travel around the United States.  The themes of obsession and loss of innocence are dark and so is the humour in this densely written classic which is still as controversial today as it was when it was first published in the 1950s. Continue reading →

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August 20, 2012 · 12:12 pm

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

I will admit that I had never heard of ‘The History of Love’ by Nicole Krauss until relatively recently in spite of the huge number of endorsements it seems to have had from critics over the last few years.  The novel only came to my attention after reading some blog reviews recently which gave it extremely high praise so I decided to hunt it down at the library this week.  In a nutshell, ‘The History of Love’ tells the parallel stories of Leo Gorsky, an elderly man living in New York City who is unaware that a novel he wrote in his youth entitled ‘The History of Love’ was published under a different name, and Alma Singer, a fourteen year old girl who tries to track down her namesake from the same book who also happens to be the woman that Leo based his novel on.  However, this brief summary only scratches the surface of the intricately-drawn mystery at the heart of the story. Continue reading →

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August 17, 2012 · 12:20 pm

The Crossroads by Niccolo Ammaniti

‘The Crossroads’ by Niccolò Ammaniti is a dark-humoured thriller which won the Premio Strega – the Italian equivalent of the Man Booker Prize – in 2007.    Unsatisfied with their lives, Rino Zena, and his low-life friends Danilo Aprea and Quattro Formaggi (yes, it’s a nickname) plan to carry out a bank raid and come up with the supposedly perfect crime.  However, events soon take them in unexpected directions. Continue reading →

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August 2, 2012 · 6:34 pm

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Marriage PlotEven though I have read some very mixed reviews for ‘The Marriage Plot’ by Jeffrey Eugenides, I have still been really looking forward to reading it for months.  I thought it would be appropriate to read it now given that I had my graduation ceremony recently and this is the event where the novel starts.  Set in 1982, the story follows Brown University student Madeline Hanna, an English major writing a thesis on ‘the marriage plot’ of 19th century novels and the love triangle between herself, Mitchell Grammaticus and Leonard Bankhead before and after graduation.  (Unlike Madeline, my graduation day simply involved a lot of standing around in overheated rooms, posing for photographs I didn’t want taken and trying not to trip over my robes.  But whatever.) Continue reading →

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June 3, 2012 · 11:49 am

Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson

‘Before I Go To Sleep’ by S. J. Watson has been one of this year’s most talked about thrillers.  The plot centres around Christine who wakes up every day not knowing where she is, who her husband is or what has happened in the last twenty odd years of her life.  With her memories of the day being erased every single night, who can she trust?

The concept of memory loss is an interesting one and if it is done convincingly, like in the film ‘Memento’, it can be highly intriguing and enthralling.  The first part of the novel seemed very promising.  However, as I was reading the book, I found myself wanting to pick holes in the situation that Watson presents to us.  For a start, Christine’s journal entries are too detailed to be plausible  and are still written in the style of a novel (who has time to write 20+ pages in a day with complete dialogue?).  The fact that nobody checked up on Christine after she was discharged from hospital is also barely believable (but then S. J. Watson did work for the NHS so maybe the catalogue of failings in Christine’s care is based on truth…).   Continue reading →

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May 29, 2012 · 9:39 pm

A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines

Having got my craving for chick lit out of my system for another year, I have been reading ‘A Kestrel for a Knave’ by Barry Hines, one of the grittiest books I’ve read in a while.  Set in South Yorkshire in 1968 over the course of a single day, fifteen year old Billy Casper finds Kes, a kestrel hawk, who he learns to take care of and confide in.  It’s an accurate and poignant portrait of life in northern England at that time (so my mother tells me) and although the book has a very specific setting, it has timeless qualities and themes that would still resonate with disaffected youth today. Continue reading →

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May 22, 2012 · 6:34 pm

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

I thought I would hate ‘White Teeth’ given the tidal wave of hype which still seems to be continuing over a decade after the book was first published.  But Zadie Smith’s writing is warmer and less pretentious than I thought it would be and her sprawling take on multicultural London focusing on three families in the second half of the twentieth century is ambitious but not exhausting to read.  Although I had my doubts at the beginning, I found myself being carried along by the story to the point where I realised about 200 pages in that I was actually quite enjoying it.  Character observation is her main strength, and the dialogue is often very witty albeit in a wordy sort of way. Continue reading →

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May 17, 2012 · 7:01 pm

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

The Sisters BrothersI should probably stop underestimating westerns.  I read ‘No Country For Old Men’ a few months ago and really liked it. I went to see ‘True Grit’ at the cinema last year on a friend’s recommendation and really liked it.  This week, I have been reading ‘The Sisters Brothers’ by Patrick DeWitt having only picked it up on the basis of its Man Booker Prize nomination… and also really liked it.  Something tells me that I might not be as indifferent to westerns as I thought I was. Continue reading →

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May 14, 2012 · 8:34 pm

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Apologies for lack of posts this week but at the beginning of the month it was looking as though my blog word count was in danger of overtaking my coursework word count and as much as I like blogging I do kind of need a degree… So this week, in between revising for my first exam on Wednesday, I have read ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark – a short, witty novel about betrayal and shattering illusions.  Set mostly in Edinburgh in the 1930s, the crème de la crème of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls  are taken under the wing of eccentric Scottish schoolmistress Miss Jean Brodie whose influence on her impressionable pupils has huge consequences on all of their lives.   The plot is almost as unconventional as the characters and the structural complexity of the novel is extremely subtle making the reader feel almost as manipulated by Miss Brodie’s glamorously eccentric ways as her pupils are.  Spark’s method of revealing what happened to each of the Brodie Set before and after the betrayal is also very effective and shuttles backwards and forwards over time effortlessly.  Her dry wit is perfectly weaved into her deceptively simple style of writing with its sinister undertones.

Is Miss Jean Brodie truly evil or just an egoist?  Either way, she is certainly an immortal creation and the book remains in its prime some five decades after its first publication.

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May 3, 2012 · 6:07 pm

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

Being British, I know virtually nothing about baseball.  What I do know, I learnt from Charlie Brown in the Peanuts comic strip, meaning that in fact, I probably know even less than I think I do about what is probably the most American of sports.  Happily, as far as I can tell, this did not really hinder my enjoyment of ‘The Art of Fielding’ by Chad Harbach.  It does feature a lot of baseball especially in the first few chapters and some other passages which I admit were kind of lost on me.  But the book as a whole is more about relationships which is something anyone can identify with (baseball fan or not) and the college experience which most people can identify with (American or not). Continue reading →

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