Having read two books in just over three months I finally broke out of my reading rut this month:
The Dog of the South -
Charles Portis - 7/10 - Not quite to the standard of 'True Grit' but still a solid, if quirky read. A modern day, well 50's, western come road movie in book form.
White & Red -
Dorota Maslowska - 7/10 (re-read) - Potty-mouth Polish Journalist writes potty-mouthed Druggy novel. So Potty-mouthed I decided to read it again.
Dreamers -
Knut Hamsun - 7/10 -
Full review.
Ideas That Changed the World -
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto - 8/10 - 178 inventions, political & philosophical ideas all jazzed up with pretty pictures to make a coffee table book for the chattering classes. I liked it.
Scenes from the Bathhouse -
Mikhail Zoshchenko - 6/10 - Soviet era b@st@rd son of Gogol. Humorous short stories, more like sketches actually, which have aged a bit too much.
Eats Shoots & Leaves -
Lynne Truss - 6/10 - Take away the overly strained attempts at humour and you're left with a reasonable punctuation guide, which I should have read more carefully.
Soul -
Andrey Platonov - 9/10 -
Full review.
The Helmet of Horror -
Victor Pelevin - 8/10 -
Full review.
A Clockwork Orange -
Anthony Burgess - 9/10 - Put this book off for to long as I thought the slang would make it a pain to read. Turns out most of it is anglicized Russian and even my, very, basic grasp on that language allowed me to read it with ease. It's a classic, but we all kinda know that.
Things Fall Apart -
Chinua Achebe - 8/10 (re-read) - I have a couple of other Achebe books on order, so I found time to re-read this corker of a book.
Pelagia & The White Bulldog -
Boris Akunin - 8/10 - I'd already read four of Akunin's Fandorin series, so I knew what to expect from this, a good old fashioned detective story with a bit more meat on the bones than usual and a turn of the 19/20th century Russian setting.
Playing for Keeps -
Alex Stewart - 5/10 - Bog standard sporting autobiography, seems to have been written without disturbing the author’s sleep patterns.
K-S
