I’m glad this book has such a loud cover (even more so in reality than in the picture), otherwise I might not have noticed it. And I’m glad that I went back to the book store to buy it one day after I first spotted and fingered it, and finally left it in its place, thinking that I…

Iain Banks is a great moralizer. All his books I’ve read so far (mostly science fiction novels, apart from The Wasp Factory) were full of „big” moral issues so I wasn’t surprised to find that Complicity is also a heavily moralizing fable. In this novel the characters…

I first fell in love with the cover of the Hungarian edition of this novel. The English-version cover also captures the mood and atmosphere of the story and the two protagonists’ longing well, but I found the Hungarian cover even more evocative. I could spend hours watching the young girl…

I read Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth several years ago (I might even have read it twice, I don’t remember now), and I liked that book so I thought I might as well read something else by her as well. On Beauty is Smith’s third novel, and it’s also worth reading.…

One of my blogger acquaintances mentioned that this novel features a lot of witty literary jokes and sarcastic remarks, and I happen to like things like this so I quickly got hold of the novel and read it. Well, in fact, I wasn’t that quick with the reading, because around halfway through…

This novel is less than 130 pages long in my edition, so I supposed I would read it in half an evening. But even though I was prepared for the unflinching brutality of the book, I couldn’t bear to read more than two chapters in a single sitting, so it took me days to get to the end. The…

The protagonist of Emily Arsenault’s „scholarly detective novel”, Billy is employed by the biggest dictionary publisher of the US after graduating from university as a philosophy major. Life in the office is far from being exciting: the dictionary editors spend their days…

It used to be a habit of mine that whenever I wanted to have an easy and compelling read which required no brain-work whatsoever I read a book by Ben Elton. I read most of his novels over the years, and though they left me with no lasting impressions and I have no intention or craving to re-read…

One of my blogger friends mentioned that this novel is narrated in the first person plural and as I happen to be a sucker for novels using interesting narrative techniques and as I have read only one other book so far with a first person plural narrator (Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris)…

I used to be a fan of Nick Hornby but after his novel How to Be Good I stopped reading without discrimination everything he published because the didactic quality of his writings started to annoy me big-time. Starting from then, I usually read one out of every two of his books, but with each new…