I have enjoyed Alberto Manguel’s book about reading for many years now (A History of Reading, A Reader on Reading, The Library at Night and others). It was with some trepidation that I came to my first work of fiction by Manguel - would he be able to create fiction as well as he critiques it? I [...]
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. . . written by Tom Cunliffe, of East Sussex, England (to read more about me see my About page).
It consists of book reviews and more general articles about reading and currently receives over 10,000 unique visitors each month. So far 288 book reviews have been published. My currently-reading shelf:  This website is archived for posterity in the British Library's UK Web Archive 
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In The Perfect Nazi, Martin Davidson joins quite a long line of authors who have written about the Nazi past of their relatives. Perhaps the best book in the genre is The Himmler Brothers, by Katrin Himmler – a difficult book to surpass in view of the noteriety of the author’s grand-uncle and grandfather. But [...] Mrs Common Reader and I been looking after our little grand-daugther this week as she’s got Rubella and can’t go to her nursery. Reading has had to come second to dressing dollies and pushing shapes through holes. However, this morning, I’m grabbing the chance to scribble a few lines before Grandpa duties commence. Reading a [...] Peirene Press has made quite a splash with its first three elegantly produced novels. All three are translations from European languages, all are short (approximately 125 pages) and they all share a precision of writing which might make other novels seem verbose and over-long. Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, the third in [...] Update 13 October 2010. Depite my prediction below, The Finkler Question DID win the Booker Prize. My congratulations to Howard Jacobson . Howard Jacobson’s novel The Finkler Question is another Booker long-list selection, and I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t make the short-list, although my guess is that it won’t actually win the prize. Howard Jacobson [...] I’ve been reading David Crystal’s A Little Book of Language (review to come) in which he describes the origins of language, how we learn to speak, the variations of accents and dialects and just about everything else which concerns a linguist. This made me think of other books – all favorites of mine – which [...] Reading two books at a time I’ve never liked reading more than one book at a time, and so its not been particularly easy to interrupt my current book to return to Don Quixote which I am reading over the course of ten weeks. However, I soon get back into the tales of the valiant [...] Unusually, A Common Reader is writing a bad-tempered review. I can’t see how The Slap could attract any other sort, because its a truly “feel-bad” novel with almost nothing to recommend it. Usually a Booker long-listing is some sort of recommendation that a book may be worth reading. However, I found The Slap to be [...] If ever there was a candidate for next year’s Booker Prize, then this is it. I’ve never heard of Lousie Dean before, even though The Old Romantic is her fourth novel. She won the Betty Trask award in 2004 for Becoming Strangers and has also been long-listed for the Booker while also winning the Guardian [...] Well, that’s about 280 pages of adventuring with Don Quixote so far. Fortunately, Miguel de Cervantes has turned out to be the writer everyone says he is and my interest has been held. I’ve pulled out three themes from this week’s reading: Wilderness Spain is a country of mountain ranges and high sierras and in [...] |
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