I have just published my latest website statistics. I am not sure if they mean anything, but I note that I have read books from thirteen more countries than six months ago (Bermuda, Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Madagascar, Maldives, Moldova, San Marino, Seychelles and Uzbekistan) and have reviewed sixty-six books during that … Read more
Why do we seem to like Hitler in our fiction? Last year saw the English translation of Laurent Binet‘s HHhH (HHhH) and next year will see the publication in English of Timur Vermes‘ Er ist wieder da [He’s Back]. Now, the latest twist on the Hitler story is another French book, this one by the … Read more
Having read John Lanchester‘s article on the lack of novels involving the London Tube system, I decided to create a list of novels (partially) set on the London Underground Railway. While I did find a few, there were not many impressive works, with far more films, including one that did not make Wikipedia’s list (see … Read more
The most recent addition to my website is Carlos Rojas‘ El Ingenioso Hidalgo y Poeta Federico García Lorca asciende a los infiernos (The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico Garcia Lorca Ascends to Hell). This is the second in the loose trilogy,the first being El valle de los caídos [The Valley of the Fallen]. This one, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Christos Tsiolkas‘ Dead Europe. I had previously read his The Slap but was not terribly impressed with it. I was not terribly impressed with this book, either, though it is certainly more interesting than The Slap. It tells both the tale of a thirty-six year old gay Australian … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Joseph McElroy‘s Actress in the House. This is another somewhat odd novel from McElroy, his first in fifteen years (and the next one won’t be till June 2013, ten years after this one). It starts with an actor slapping an actress, playing his sister, very hard in the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Carlos Rojas‘ El valle de los caídos [The Valley of the Fallen]. This book is the first in a trilogy by Rojas concerning Spanish history. Despite the title, named after a Francoist monument to the fallen in the Civil War, it does not involve the Civil War but … Read more
The latest addition to my website is António Lobo Antunes‘s Conhecimento do Inferno (Knowledge of Hell, an earlier novel by Antunes but still very much in the style of his later novels. It is the story of a psychiatrist called António Lobo Antunes who is travelling from the Algarve to Lisbon by car and is … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Amélie Nothomb‘s Ni d’Ève Ni d’Adam (Tokyo Fiancée), another quirky novel from the Belgian author. This one, like many of her other books, is about one of her visits to Japan and the main theme is Western-Japanese cultural differences. As the English title indicates, she meets a Japanese … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rachel Joyce‘s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. This is one of those quirky English novels about a seemingly normal and boring Englishman, who suddenly does something unexpected. In this case, Harold Fry, who is retired from working for a brewery and is living with his wife Maureen, … Read more