Tag: Literary Fiction

  • The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis

    This was probably a lot more salacious in 1973, but I still find that somewhat hard to see. It’s a few weeks in the mind of a horny kid as he tries to seduce an ‘older woman’. It’s Amis’ first book. I read a bunch of Amis in the mid/late-2000’s and mostly loved it, so…

  • 1Q84 by Hiroki Murakami

    This is simply too much. It’s repetitive and unrewarding. Maybe if it had been published as 3 separate volumes, it would have worked better, encouraging readers to let some time pass between sections. As a single serving it was like trying to eat a whole roast alone — it doesn’t matter how good it is,…

  • We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates

    This was my first Oates book, but it won’t be my last. I don’t know if it’s representative of her style, but I hope it is. It took longer than usual to warm to the writing style here — Oates includes flashbacks and digressions without any real warning, and it felt disjointed until about 100…

  • Rouge by Mona Awad

    I’m obviously not the target audience for this, but I really loved Bunny. This is sharp satire and truly original writing. The dreamlike storytelling and ever-increasing weirdness were absolute catnip to me. It was funny and clever. I absolutely devoured it. Until the spell broke at around the 2/3 mark. Suddenly the book felt tedious, and…

  • Broken Harbour by Tana French

    If you like crime fiction with literary ambitions, this is a must-read. I have now read every Tana French book (in the order I found them in used bookshops, not at all in sequence). I was beginning to worry that the one I read first —The Trespasser, which is one of favourite crime novels of…

  • The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

    The author loves these characters and this community. She makes each of them real, and I cared about them in a way that’s uncommon when I read fiction. Problem is that there are too many of them, and because of it, the story wandered too much for me. There were two competing narratives here, but…

  • Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind

    This was wild. It read like a fairy tale, and also like a waking nightmare. Each sentence was perfect, but as a whole the thing will scar you for life. It goes a lot deeper than it first appears to, chasing ideas of how scent works on a subconscious level. But also it is just…

  • Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

    So so good. Not as good as A Gentleman in Moscow, so if you haven’t read that read this first. I can’t say anything about this that hasn’t been said, I loved it and it’s almost perfect.

  • Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

    Still readable but at least one tier below his best. Weak Barnes is still pretty good though. The middle third of this book is a weird inclusion, and at least 25 pages longer than it should be. I imagine this will be one of the books recommended for Barnes completists only.

  • Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

    Alzheimer’s is one of the saddest things in the world. Except from one angle it can also be kind of beautiful: Actually, our bodies turn out to be quite merciful by nature, a little amnesia rather than anesthesia at the end. Our memory, which is leaving us, lets us play a bit longer, one last…