Tag: historical fiction
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When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
Early contender for best read of 2024. A slim, readable and unforgettable thing.
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The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
This was pretty captivating, but a little long. I don’t think it’ll make any all-time lists, but it was a very good read. It’s a family drama that spans 70ish years. It’s broken up into ten parts, each beginning at a slightly different time or place. It’s very concretely rooted in the history of southern…
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Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
This was challenging and excellent. For the first hundred pages or so, I constantly felt like I wasn’t paying close enough attention, then it all came into focus and took off like a rocket. Rushdie’s writing is dense and demanding. Every day, I had to talk myself into picking this up. Then as soon as…
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A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
I could have read a thousand more pages of this. Opening this book was like curling up with a dog and a blanket and a warm beverage. It was so warm and charming and comforting. Towles can write. The story itself was somewhat small in scope, but it didn’t matter. Almost every page had a sentence…
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Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor
This is a fairly unoriginal story told in a somewhat original way, very successfully. It grabbed me on page 1 and took over my day. Kapoor’s writing, from both a content and style perspective, is a lot like Don Winslow‘s, but better. Pages fly by with fast-paced dialogue and four or five word paragraphs. You’re a…
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White Teeth by Zadie Smith
This was impossible to put down. The characters leap off the page, the writing is filled with energy and charm. Loved it.
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Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Despite this being way outside of my usual taste, I really enjoyed it. The last section dragged to some degree, and the climax was a little more convoluted than it needed to be, but Clarke’s writing is so readable, funny and clever that I couldn’t put it down.
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Middlemarch by George Eliot
This took a long time, and at times I wanted to toss it in the grass, but I am going to miss this book. It was comforting and calming, but also challenging. It is another book I spent a lot of time reading about when I wasn’t reading it. The story of George Eliot, the…
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Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann
Like East if Eden, this was a book I reluctantly picked up, then couldn’t put down. It took a while to get into – a cast of thousands and a million details, but it eventually gets laser-focused on certain characters and dissects events in incredible depth. The writing is so immersive I would be reading for…