Finished reading The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard. This is the 'expanded and annotated edition'. No illustrations though. It's sort of an experimental novel where each little paragraph takes a big jump from the one preceding it ( Read more... )

Finished reading Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac, translated by Henry Reed. The old man of the title is a father who has given all of his fortune to his two daughters, and they now live in luxury ignoring him while he lives in a downtrodden boarding house. There's subplots with a young law student courting one of the daughters, and an ( Read more... )

Finished reading The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by David McDuff. A fictionalized account of his own time in a Siberian prison, it sketches the habits, living conditions, and the personalities of convicts and jailers ( Read more... )

Finished reading The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The book has sometimes been translated as A Raw Youth or An Accidental Family. The narrator is a young man about 19 years old who has been raised in boarding schools and such, and is finally traveling to Petersburg to meet his real (not ( Read more... )

Finished reading The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett. Follows the story of the tutor of a family that is staying at a gambling spot in Germany following different social intrigues interspersed with the seductive lure of gambling, mostly roulette in this short novel ( Read more... )

Finished reading The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett. A short novel about a government clerk who is frustrated by a lack of success in his career and his personal life, and then encounters his exact double, with the exact same appearance and name. The double somehow gains a better reputation than the original ( Read more... )