Most readers in Britain are so well-supplied by books in their own language that they rarely venture into reading books in translation and therefore miss out on the best literature of other European nations. About a third of titles reviewed on A Common Reader are European books in translation and I am pleased to add [...]
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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 290 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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I came to this book, Seeing Things by Oliver Postgate, with a mild sense of curiosity, expecting it to be a quick skim-through rather than an in-depth read. How wrong I was. Within a few pages I was hooked on this witty, beguiling life-story, a tribute to a man who reminds us how much we [...] Sometimes you read a book which opens your mind to a world so different to your own that you wonder at the diversity of the human race as you say, “these people are so unlike me”. I am not a gambler and I don’t play poker, but I found For Richer For Poorer thoroughly entrancing [...] I find that some of the most interesting history books are those which focus on a neglected aspect of a person or event and Conspirator, Lenin in Exile, provides a fascinating and very readable portrait of Lenin and his long-suffering wife Nadya during a period of their lives which few bother to study. Helen Rappaport’s [...] I suppose one of the quickest way to get an idea about someone is to look at their bookcase, or even better, to talk to them about books which have inspired them and guided them through life. Quite a few writers have been tempted to write about their life in books – I’m thinking about [...] From 1837 to 1841, John Clare, the peasant poet, was a patient in a private asylum in the Epping Forest. Clare and his wife Patty had six children and life was proving increasingly burdensome to Clare, who began to suffer bouts of severe depression, leading to alarmingly erratic behaviour and serious delusions. In The Quickening [...] I never associate jigsaws with summer, mainly because there is just too much to do in the real world outside rather than delving ever-deeper into the intricate detail of those little cardboard shapes. Its different in winter, when afternoons become shorter, and for several days I can get absorbed in assembling the chosen picture, stopping [...] I’ve seen Icon Books Introducing series in the bookshops but it was only when confronted by a long train journey with my current novel finished that I finally dived in and bought one. I don’t think I’ve read a graphic book before and I was suprised by how much I enjoyed reading Introducing Kafka with [...] The Oxford University Press website helpfully gives a list of potential readers of their books and in the case of Death and the Author, the expectation is as follows: a. Anyone with a interest in D. H. Lawrence; b. anyone interested in exploring what it is like to have a disease for which there is [...] This final volume, Coda, in Simon Gray’s diaries will be warmly welcomed by anyone who has followed Gray’s progress from The Smoking Diaries to The Last Cigarette, in which he documented his life in characteristic candid and confessional style. When Gray died in August 2008, Ian Jack, the then editor of Granta and a close [...] |
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