Alexander Masters first met Stuart Shorter in Wintercomfort, a Cambridge institution for helping the homeless. Stuart was an ex-convict, a junkie and an alcoholist; he suffered from borderline personality disorder and muscular dystrophy; he was prone to self-mutilation and outbursts of anger; and…

Although José Saramago appears to be quite popular, I consider All the Names to be one of his lesser-known works. I have several acquaintances who read Blindness, or The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, but relatively few who read All the Names. But as it happens to be one of my favourite novels…

This novel was one of my favourites when I was a highschool student. I borrowed it more then once from the library, and I longed to own my own copy but I was unable to obtain one. I have no idea what might have first drawn me to this book, as the cover of the Hungarian edition is an eyesore, and the…

In the last ten or so years I read all of Bret Easton Ellis’s work, actually, I think I read all his books more than once. But I don’t think I read them first in the proper order – if there is such a thing as a proper order. I recall that I first read The Rules of Attraction after…

Once I read some praise for this novel, and I liked its title very much, so I’m sure I would have read it sooner or later. Then not long ago I came across another blog post about this novel in which the blogger mentioned that A Heart So White is full of eight-line sentences and highly…

It was some ten years ago, when the movie version of American Psycho was released in Hungary, that I first came across Bret Easton Ellis’s name. I didn’t watch the movie then (and even though ten years passed, I still haven’t seen it yet), but I was intrigued by what I read about…

I read The Wasp Factory for the second time last year. I first read it when it was published in Hungarian three or four years ago, but then early last year I came across several reviews and rather heated discussions regarding this book, so I thought I might refresh my memories.   The Wasp…

I was wandering around aimlessly in one of my favorite bookstores a couple of weeks ago when I came across this novel. I had never heard about it before, but I loved its title and cover from the very first moment. I checked what the novel was about and read the selections from the favorable reviews…

This was the second novel I read by J. M. Coetzee. The first, Waiting for the Barbarians put me into a state of intense mental misery for days, however, I didn’t doubt for a minute that I would read other books by Coetzee – not because I’m masochistic, but because I’m…

In Cold Blood has been one of my favorite books for a long time. It happens every two or three years that it suddenly pops into my mind what an exquisite book it is, and then I get a craving to re-read it immediately. This is what I did now, and my opinion did not alter a bit: I still consider this…