I came across the title of this novel on a blog somewhere. Actually, it was only mentioned in passing, but I liked its title immensely so I checked what the novel was about, and then, convinced, I jotted down the author and the title on a slip of paper and put it away to a place where I was surely…

This book was passed around in the blogger community, not because it was that good, but because it was the kind of book not easy to get hold of here, and I thought I might as well read it when it came my way. The Average American Male isn’t the kind of book which is bound to stay with me for a…

I read about this book on one of my favourite blogs and I immediately felt that this was a novel I must read. After a couple of months I did get around to reading it, and Hotel World turned out to be exactly as wonderful and heartbreaking as I expected.   The events and characters of the novel…

Last year I read Yann Martel’s popular, highly praised, Booker-winning novel, Life of Pi, and I liked it a lot. However, there was one small detail in Life of Pi I could never quite forgive or forget: a character in the novel claims that I will surely become a believer in God after reading…

Recently I came across the title of this novel in several different places all over the web, and in these cases, though I’m not a particularly mystical person believing in signs, I tend to think that perhaps these coincidences happen for a reason, and I should take a closer look at the book in…

I never used to like Hemingway’s writing. I read a couple of his books as a high-school student, but I could never learn to like his spare language, his macho protagonists reeking with testosterone, and the whole masculine, brutal world in which his novels are set. Then as a university student…

I read Cormac McCarthy’s highly praised novel The Road last year, but I wasn’t at all convinced of McCarthy’s exceptional talent. However, I continued to read with interest the blog entries about his work, and I was intrigued by the fact that he manages to evoke highly different…

I read The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter a couple of years ago, and it was such a good novel that I definitely wanted to read more by the author. Plus, as I was an English major student at the university, it is still important for me to get to know the work of such seminal authors I only heard…

I read a very good and enthusiastic post about The Afterparty on Kimbofo’s blog a couple of months ago, and based on her post, it was pretty easy for me to draw the conclusion that I would probably like this novel. Sometime later, I read an equally good, though critical post about the book on…

I came across this novel in a blog somewhere, though I can’t recall exactly what I read about Frey’s book that made me want to read it immediately. Anyway, I asked my sister to get the book for me from the library – and not buying my own copy proved to be a good idea, as this novel…