Rather than bore you with long reviews I will do the one liner reviews of the books and when I am less lazy I will insert links where u can read more in-depth about these books (but don't hold your breathe for you surely will suffocate...) So here they are in random order...
- Paulin Reage The Story of O - I blogged this already
- Iain Banks - the Business - zzzzzzzz, seriously once one of favourite authors, each book gets progressively worse...
- Iain Banks - Dead Air - see above
- Philip K Dick - A Scanner Darkly - sci-fi for hippies - blech
- Michel Houellebecq - Atomised - Excellent, threw me off balance but in a good way
- Michel Houellebecq - Platform - not very good, gratuitous sex and violence
- Kazuo Ishiguro - Never let me go - thought provoking, well written
- Kazuo Ishiguro - Remains of the Day - full of pathos, also well written (I should read more of his stuff in the future)
- Jack Kerouac - On the Road - I hate the beat writers, not sure why i actually read this
- David Mitchell - Black Swan Green - very different to his other books, still enjoyable
- JM Coetzee - Disgrace - wow
- Liz Jensen - Egg Dancing - frivolous on the surface, but truthfully more than just entertaining (this was the second one of hers I have read, will try more in the future)
- Haruki Murakami - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - not his best effort, but still good
- Herman Hesse - Siddhartha - better than Steppenwolf
- Zoe Wicomb - Playing in the Light - probably the best SA author you have never heard of
- Damon Galgut - The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs - brilliant!
- James M Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice - I liked this
- David L Hayles- Cannon Fodder - Black Humour short stories - fun
- Tom Bissell - God lives in St. Petersburg - Nice stories, same themes tedious though
- Melinda Ferguson - Smacked - It smacked me for sure, highly recommend
- Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master & Margarita - it is one of the best books of all time as everyone says
- Pierre Peju - The girl from the Chartreuse - forgettable
- Isabel Allende - House of the Spirits - I re-read this actually - it still kicks arse over anything Garcia Marquez ever wrote
- Michel Faber - The Fahrenheit Twins - excellent short stories (will read more of him)
- Chuck Palahniuk- Diary - Enjoyable but nothing in it really
- Kate Atkinson - Emotionally Weird - fairly good, may read more dunno
- Ian McEwan - Atonement - I don't get it to be honest, another favourite author I am growing to dislike. And I still have Saturday to read on my shelf - may just skip it to be honest
- Albert Camus - The Outsider - much better than The Plague
- Ernest Hemmingway - The torrents of Spring - Still not a fan
- Edgar Allen Poe - The murders in the Rue Morgue - another reason why I hate the crime genre
- Haruki Murakami - Birthday Stories
- Ian McEwan - Saturday (shudder...)
- William Styron - Sophie's Choice
- JM Coetzee - Life & Times of Michael K
- Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's
- James Clavell - Shogun
- Anton Chekhov - The Steppe & Other Stories (this will be a second volume of his I have read- can't wait)
- Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha
- Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime & Punishment
- James Frey - A Million Little Pieces
- Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time (because I don't read that much non-fiction)
2 comments:
Emotionally Weird is one of kate Atkinson's stranger books - I adore it. Try Case Histories next - it is exceedingly enjoyable. She is my favourite author. I loved The Master & Margarita, I always recommend it to people. I still think Choke was Palahniuk's best book. Atomised was the single worst reading experience of my life. I swear I almost died of pointlessness. I hate that author's work so much - Karen Litte agrees with me. She tried reading Lanzarote and just managed to escape choking on her own vomit. You really enjoyed it? You must have a strong stomach, then.
Thanks for the Kate Atkinson tip :)
Regarding Atomized, I have to respectfully disagree - there is so much in there to unpack regarding personal isolation, his strong opinions re modern society, religion etc. If you described Platform or Lanzarote (aka Platform lite) then I could agree, but in Atomized there is loads of thought provoking substance.
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