hux

This was a fun read. I won't go into too many details regarding the plot because the book is very much dependent upon its plot as it moves along. Suffice it to say a man (a fugitive) on the run from the Venezuelan authorities hears of an isolated island in the Pacific that has a reputation for being a place that is uninhabitable for people and he chooses to hide there. On the abandoned island there is a large dilapidated building (referred to as a museum), a Chapel, a swimming pool and a small mill, and the man lives in the museum alone. That is until, one day, a group of strangers suddenly ar

This book is sublime. That much is clear but how much of it is fiction and how much is simply Dazai's final thoughts on the world (he committed suicide after this book was completed) is hard to tell. Actually, that's not true. At no point did I ever feel I was reading about the fictional Yozo. I always felt that I was reading Dazai's thoughts. And yet fact and fiction are sometimes the same thing. The book is presented to us as an epistolary novel. A series of notebooks that have been found and explore the mind of a character called Yozo. As a boy he quickly fails to grasp human beings and

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai Been wanting to read this for a while.

How are we defining difficult? Some literary fiction is immensely readable, some is appalling. I suspect that's true of most genres. I sometimes wonder if the notion of 'difficult literature' isn't actually something the literary establishment deliberately promote themselves. They want certain books to have touch of snobbery to them. The very notion that books can be difficult might be what puts some people off. Then again some people just like some escapist detective nonsense.

After reading the first 15 pages, I wanted to put this book down and quit. The narration was all over the place and had a style reminiscent of stream of consciousness without ever quite being stream of consciousness. I hated it. But I continued regardless and gradually the narrative style started to pull me in. The writing is lyrical and disjointed but flows in a way that mesmerises. I've never really liked stream of consciousness writing but this was wonderful to read with a strong sense of the characters and the world they inhabit without ever describing anything in the traditional sense. It

Well, it's arrived so here goes...

The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller. Never heard of this woman or her work but she won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2009 for goodness sake so she must worth reading. Right? We'll see. This book is apparently her most commercial.

I found this. Apparently it's common in literature in general but I'd honestly only ever noticed it when reading a kindle book. http://wormhole.carnelianvalley.com/on-the-reasons-for-censoring-names-and-places-in-victorian-literature/

I decided to read this because it was free on Kindle. My only real knowledge of Black Beauty came from snippets of the Thames TV show of the mid-70s which made it seem like Black Beauty had various weekly adventures (essentially a horse version of the Littlest Hobo). But actually, the book is a life story, one narrated by none other than the horse (very original for 1877) and has short pithy chapters which presumably explains why it became so popular with children. It's essentially the tale of all the people that own Black Beauty through his life and the various jobs he has as a working hor

That reminds me. I'm currently reading Black Beauty on Kindle and every now and then there'll be a name of a person or a street but it will be blank (or a solid black line) such as 'I went to meet him on B------- Street and etc.' I've noticed this before with other classics I've read on Kindle but never known why.

A book will always have a sensory tactile pleasure to it which an electronic device can't ever replicate. I've read a few books on Kindle and the experience was fine (though when I want to quickly read a chapter, it becomes a pain to click on the icon, wait a thousand years for it to load, then click on the book I want, then wait another thousand years before the thing comes up). And I agree with the article about having a better sense of mapping where you are with a real book. There's a sense of knowing where, both in terms of the chapters and the book as a whole, cert

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (because it's free on Kindle).

I demand a referendum!

I'm not asking for a prime time show. Stick it on channel 4 at midnight on a Wednesday and make sure the guests all have five pints before they go on.

LOL, I don't doubt that they're university educated. That's part of the problem. I'd much rather see members of the public (certainly non-BBC carousal types) or actual writers speaking about books that are more obscure. Plus, most of the books they'll be promoting on the show are the very same books that probably need the least promotion. Shows like this don't lead to more (or better) shows, they usually just lead to more of the same (the great British book-off can't be that far away). There's a handful of exceptions to this and I noticed Rick Stein chose 'The Leopard' which is a book I love.