|
||||
|
. . . 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 
|
Note – since publishing this review, I have been sent some interesting personal reminiscences of Jan Karski which I have published in two parts here (Part 1) and here (Part 2). I have recently been engrossed in a first person account of the Polish resistance movement in World War II Story of a Secret [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] So far, my reading of Don Quixote has shown me that its humour is its strongest feature, quite apart from the compelling drama of the ridiculous “adventures” and the lyrical tales which are told along the way (by the way, the idea of reading Don Quixote over ten weeks came from Stu of Winstonsdad’s blog). [...] |
Subscribe in Google Reader:
|
||
|
Copyright © 2012 A Common Reader - All Rights Reserved |
||||
