After finishing Dorian Gray I decided that the next book I was going to read was Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. I haven’t read as many novels as I would have liked this year, so I thought I’d finish off 2009 with something substantial – and Mann’s debut is certainly that. Actually I’ve been wanting to read [...]

Dorian Gray

Just finished reading Oscar Wilde’s `The Portrait of Dorian Gray’ and like any other great piece of literature it’s going to take me a while to digest the bulk of the ideas contained within– but I’ll give a few initial impressions anyway. For a start, I think Wilde succeeds superlatively well in giving sophisticated voice [...]

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Seems like I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about American idealism and about the mythology of the American dream recently; what with the fever pitch of Obama’s inauguration having passed only a week ago it’s been hard to avoid. I just finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn last Sunday. For many people Twain’s [...]

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

Last month on the train back home to Glasgow I finished ‘Hunger’ by Knut Hamsun, a book I’d been reading for the last month or so. It’s fair to say I had been a bit intimidated. ‘Hunger’ has a daunting reputation as one of the cornerstones of modern literature and I’d been hearing about it [...]

The Trial

This is a rewrite of a review I wrote about 3 years ago. Just finished reading the Trial by Kafka. It’s one of those books that’s always referenced – and principally among Kafka’s oeuvre – whenever someone’s trying to evoke the feelings of dread helplessness and vulnerability of those unfortunates who find themselves at the [...]

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse

I’ve just finished Hesse’s Steppenwolf and I have to say I was extremely impressed. I hadn’t really expected much of the book given that I found my first encounter with Hesse’s work, reading the Glass Bead Game four years ago, had left me disappointed. I had found that book rather dull. The problem was I [...]

Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’

Here’s a review of Mansfield’s The Garden Party I wrote a while back. I’ve made a few corrections to it:  Recently, I got a bit caught up reading The Garden Party, a collection of Edwardian author Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. First off, I liked her name. It seems strangely familiar at first, but that’s largely due to [...]

The Fabulous F. Scott Fitzgerald

Over the past couple of years I’ve started to become very excited by literature and I can pinpoint this new found passion to first reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Before that I would read a novel by some great writer, and although I might find it engrossing, enjoying and appreciating it on different levels, I was never gripped or enflamed by the [...]

Dostoevsky’s Devils*

WARNING: I give away important plot details in what follows. ‘What constituted the turbulence of our time and what transition it was we were passing through I don’t know, nor I think does anyone, unless it were some of those visitors of ours. Yet the most worthless fellows suddenly gained predominant influence, began loudly criticising [...]

RIP Kurt Vonnegut

Writer Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84 Another great man passes on…I came to Vonnegut late on, but when I did discover Slaughterhouse 5 what a fucking revelation!