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I'm happy you've enjoyed it after all :) So, what did you think of the Duke's literary analysis of Francesca's letter? I thought that was really the high point of the novel. It had me in stitches at its complete absurdity.

Horace Walpole. A brilliant politician and witty observer of his time, his achievements include: writing enough letters to fill over 40 volumes of enormous value to historians; causing a personal rift between Rousseau and Hume which involved almost every intellectual of the time (Rousseau’s...

I can see the argument in favor, but it's more a tale of disenchantment with a real ideology which aspired to create utopia on Earth and failed. For my part, and I realise how narrow minded I'm being, dystopic fiction should operate on an allegoric level

Demons: I read it right after finishing Crime and Punishment and craving some more Dostoyevsky, and finished it disappointed. There was a time I felt I wouldn't finish it at all. Full of great ideas, but lacks the energy that made the other novel so captivating. The French Lieutenant's Woman...

Here are a few novels that deal with music: The Tin Drum, Günter Grass The Piano Teacher, Elfriede Jelinek Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann I can't help noticing these are all German-language writers.

I can't blame you for interrupting your reading. Indeed the novel gives the impression it's going nowhere for the first one hundred pages, as beautifully written as it may be, and this was beginning to disappoint me too. But I think it's worth persevering until the Duke of Parma enters the...

A Plan for Escape narrates the journey of lieutenant Henrique Navers, in exile from France for mysterious reasons, to an unnamed prison archipelago in the French Guiana, where he’ll take charge of the penitentiary. Before departing from the mainland he hears ominous concerns that the prison...

Casanova in Bolzano concerns a fictionalised account of what happened to the famous seducer after he made a real-life escape from a Venetian prison; in Márai’s novel Casanova runs away, with his servant, Father Balbi, to a town called Bolzano, where a few years before he had fought a sword duel...

I only know Beatrix Potter's work from the Petter the Rabit cartoons I used to watch, with enormous pleasure, on weekend mornings when I was very young. I've made acquaintance with most British children's authors through television: A.A Milne, Edith Nesbit, Alfred Bestall (of the Rupert the Bear...

You might enjoy: Anatole France's The Revolt of the Angels, about Arcade, an angel who comes to Earth, reads Lucretius' De Rerum Natura and stops believing in God; Any of the Faust-related works by Christopher Marlowe or Goethe; John Milton's Paradise Lost; J. Cazotte's The Devil in Love...

I wouldn't consider myself a voracious reader, but I certainly read more than 3 books a month. Last year I used to read up to 9 books a month, but I commuted 4 hours a day which gave me a lot of time to read. Now I may read up to 5, a little on the train and when I have days off.

Sparkchaser gave me the idea of starting this thread after I commented that I didn't know of any sci-fi authors outside the UK and USA. He also pointed out the Russians as good examples: indeed there's Stanislaw Lem, author of the seminal Solaris, and Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris...

Marvel currently has two Punisher ongoing series: one is in the MAX imprint (for mature readers), and is written by Garth Ennis, famous for Preacher, Hellblazer and Hitman. Everyone says this is the best Punisher ever, but if you like Ennis' work, you're out of luck because he's just about to...

My first impression reading that list was, "oh look, the usual anglo-centric list"; but then I started thinking, "are there any actual non-American/British sci-fi writers, besides Jules Verne?" I honestly can only think of Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics.

Hm, maybe you should try Neil Gaiman's The tragical comedy or the comical tragedy of Mr. Punch...

Wasn't that the novel Roman Polanski turned into a movie starring Johnny Depp?

1) One Book that made you read it More Than Once: The Black Dahlia 2) One book you would want on a desert island: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 3) One book that made you laugh: Three Men on a Bummel 4) One book that made you cry: Crime and Punishment 5) One book that made...

I had the pleasure of reading this novel in college, in the context of Utopia in literature. It struck me how similar it was to Blindness and I wondered if Saramago had read it. I loved how effortlessly the author showed the fragility of mankind, and I was amazed at the man-hunting Triffid...

I love Poe; I always have pleasure reading a short-story here and there, although I have yet to acquire a complete collection of his work. He not only had a lovely understanding of the worse in Man, but he knew how to write good prose, which is a rare quality in horror writers.

You should probably enjoy David Stuart Davies' The Hentzau Affair, The Game's Afoot and The Tangled Skein, in which he writes new stories for Sherlock Holmes, including a meeting with Count Dracula! You may also enjoy Davies' The Shadows of Sherlock Holmes, a compilation of detective fiction...