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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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London Review of Books As a book reviewer I like to read plenty of other reviews. This lets me keep in touch with what’s being published, and also to learn how other people approach the task of book reviewing. Earlier in the year I took out a trial subscription to the London Review of Books [...] A new novel from Portobello Books is always welcome – a guarantee of inventive and original writing, with Caesarion being a fine example of the type of fictional innovation we can expect from this imprint. In Caesarion, Tommy Wieringa has written an inventive, multi-layered novel, charting the childhood and youth of Ludwig (the Ceasarion of [...] This is the 250th full book review I have published on A Common Reader. It is not easy to work out what From the Mouth of the Whale is about at first. It seems to be a book of 17th century Icelandic myths, based on the life of the fictional Jónas Pálmason, “a poet and [...] Discovering Scandinavian crime novels can be quite an eye-opener, once you get past Girl With a Dragon Tattoo. There are just so many fine writers out there whose complex plotting and characterisation is the equal of any of more well-known English-speaking authors. Shadow, by Karin Alvtegen is an example of a book that only a [...] A new novel from Pushkin Press is always welcome and How I Lost The War proved to be as expected, a witty but thought-provoking read with bags of Italian flavour to transport readers into fragrant Tuscan summers – but this is no rural idyll, for it is about to be transformed by powerful forces of [...] Discovering Honoré de Balzac’s series of novels, The Comedie Humaine, has been perhaps the most satisfying of my reading experiences this year. The first book I read in the series was Père Goriot and in researching that I found that it was only one of 95 finished works. Evidently a life’s task to read them [...] It is well known that Iran is a country in which fundamentalist Islam vies with a more liberal culture for the hearts and minds of its population. Once, a westernised nation under the long-deposed Shah, it underwent an Islamic revolution in the late 1970s which saw its laws becoming antagonistic towards non-Islamic values. The [...] As an avid reader I enjoy “books about books” and this one certainly falls into that category. Imagine a couple of lovers of literature who get the opportunity to open a book-shop which only sells “good” books, those which meet a criteria of literary worth, deliberately ignoring the current literary prizes and the year’s [...] 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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