( The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth )

( C by Tom McCarthy )

( The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig )

The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh. I don't really do crime, but I felt like I needed something to keep me awake and it's shelved often enough in Fiction that I got it out of the library anyway. Set in Glasgow, features a gay antiques dealer who's a bit of a loner and finds a nasty photograph in a house. There's a reveal at the end but it doesn't ( Read more... )

( Catch-22 by Joseph Heller )

( The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson )

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. I didn't get it. At all. I could see the point of writing one story where a detective goes a bit mad and is not sure whether he is hunting or being hunted, but why three? It wasn't as if Auster did anything interesting with it beyond the bare fact of reversing the trope. The language was very stale, not ( Read more... )

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Haunted house story that never gets round to any revelation about whether the house is actually haunted, let alone what by. I never like it when writers do that; I think they lazily think ah yes, hinting at something is cleverer than actually doing it but what they end up doing is building a story about people ( Read more... )

The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Basically a Harry Potter/Narnia/The Secret History crossover. So it has a certain interest and it's quite good at trying to get down to brass tacks with what learning magic would be like, and that longing to be rescued from everyday life and enter another world. On the other hand the writing's very average and the ( Read more... )

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel. About a medium haunted by people from her dreadful childhood. At first I enjoyed the sinisterness but at some point after it stopped hinting it crossed the line and started reminding me of those magazines with headlines about being raped by aliens and Mum serving up Dad for Christmas dinner. It was also too ( Read more... )