Tag: Literary Fiction

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

    Picked this up shortly after reading The Poisonwood Bible, and you can see the influence this book had on it. Parts of Kingsolver’s book feel like the same story told from the opposing perspective. No doubt that was Kingsolver’s intent, and she did it well. Anyway, this is great – classics are often classic for a…