Lists
Lists and indexes collected in one place.
- Kate Atkinson - Cold Histories
Gripping and incredibly well written. Perhaps too many shadows of 90s lad culture ?
- Vicente Luis Mora - Centroeuropa
One of the best I’ve read in a very long time. Magical realism in a muddy field in 1800s Prussia.
- Andrew Michael Hurley - Starve Acre
Grief and isolation and the crimes of the past. Very bleak and atmospheric.
- Oliver Burkeman - Mediations for Mortals
Essentially 4000 weeks chewed over and formed into daily nuggets. Very good all the same.
- Ben Gazur - A Feast of Folklore
Nice round up of a lot of peculiar traditions and beliefs. The devil will steal your potatoes!
- Bae Suah - Untold Night and Day
Loved this. Dream-like is an overused descriptor but this deserves it. Shadows, images, symbols, collapsing in on themselves in a hot Seoul night.
- Ray Bradbury - Dandelion Wine
Very lovely but a little empty. It’s a thickly textured slice of summer as a child, full of little scenes and stories. Pleasant.
- Richared Brautigan - Trout Fishing in America
A very 60s slice of American surrealism. Little vignettes of life, only loosely connected, vaguely revolving around trout.
There is some amazing imagery and very funny bits.
- Italo Calvino - Mr Palomar
27 little vignettes of Mr Palomar looking at things and pondering.
Ranges from the visual to the metaphysical with a structure that becomes apparent as you read. Small, deep and rather wonderful.
- Paul Loomans - Time Surfing
A zen approach to time management. A lot of nice ideas but the main approach doesn’t really do it for me.
- Dashiell Hammett - The Dain Curse
A detective novel split across 3 acts, managing to take in ghost story, action, and all sorts. Fast paced and good fun.
- Javier Marías - Berta Isla
A spy thriller that avoids the spying bits (and really the thriller bits too). A novel of absences and missing people.
It’s a good read but it astonishingly long for a story in which everything happens ‘off screen’
- Percival Everett - The Trees
At once fast paced comic thriller and an exploration of American racism past and present. Fantastic.
- Nigel Slater - A Thousand Feasts
Little snippets and moments of quiet appreciation and small joy, from rose bushes to cups of tea. A calming read.
- Percival Everett - So Much Blue
Three crises overlap in a story about secrets that’s funny, tragic and moving.
- Marghanita Laski - Little Boy Lost
A powerful little story of a father seeking his son among the corruption of post war France.
- Des Fitzgerald - The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow
Fascinating and funny tour of urban planning and 21st century thinking, but it does not offer many alternatives to the ideas it dismantles.
- Richard Flanagan - Gould’s Book of Fish
- Tasmanian penal colony. Paintings of fish. Great
- Benjamin Myers - The Perfect Golden Circle
- Crop circles in the 90s. Decent
- Donna Tartt - A Secret History
- College weirdos get weirder. Uneven. Great bits
- John Lanchester - Mr Phillips
- Well written but a bit hollow. Dated
- Geraldine Brooks - Year of Wonder
- Plague village. Beautifully written but unrelentingly horrible
- Leonardo Sciascia - The Day of the Owl
- Very short but totally gripping. A murder in Sicily. Does the mafia even exist?
- Pen Vogler - Stuffed
- Totally fascinating history of British food and politics
- Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Castle
- Well this was weird. Intense and spooky novella of two creepy sisters and their murderous past
- Toby Litt - Corpsing
- A decent page-turner thriller. Feels a bit early-noughties bloke-lit. Intentionally, I think.
- Elspeth Barker - O Caledonia
- An astonishing book. Gothic and gloomy, but funny too.
- R.F. Kuang - Yellowface
- Nice idea, but waaaay too much social media. Reading about Twitter is boring.
- Kate Atkinson - Shrines of Gaiety
- Post-war Soho drinking dens. Police, dancers, missing girls, dope. Fabulous stuff.
- Angela Carter - Nights at the Circus
- Utterly insane. From music hall to Siberia, with clowns, tigers and shaman.
- Patrick Hamilton - Hangover Square
- Fascinating slice of hard-drinking 30s life. Went on a bit too long.
- Susanna Clarke - Piranesi
- Possibly my favourite book. A whole world of imagination with some very dark twists.
- Susanna Clarke - Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell
- It’s long! Victorian novel meets magic and fantasy. Very well written.
- JG Ballard - Cocaine Nights
- A re-read. Is it my favourite Ballard? Dystopian Costa del Sol magic.
- Slutty Chef - Tart
- Pretty slight but a fun read. Did not make me want to work in a kitchen.
- Benjamin Myers - Beastings
- Utterly bleak frontier western in Cumbria. Compelling but horrible.
- Ali Smith - Gliff
- A little underwhelmed. Amazing writing (as always) but the dystopia was underdeveloped.
- Oliver Burkeman - Four Thousand Weeks
- Anti-productivity approach to accepting you’ll never magically get everything done.
- Agatha Christie - The Secret of Chimneys
- Utterly ludicrous but quite fun. Where are the Herzoslovakian crown jewels?
- Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days
- Really very silly and no hot air balloons at all!
- Georges Perec - The Art of Asking Your Boss For a Raise
- A single sentence across 80 pages of circumperbulation