Nathanael West writes some wonderful modernist prose in this two-story volume. The Day of the Locust is about life in Hollywood, as seen from the eyes of a certain Tod Hackett, who comes to Hollywood to make his fortune. Behind the sartorial splendour he finds the true nightmarish reality of life, grim and moribund as [...]

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This purports to be the classic guide to world literature and is pretty good in its recommendations. Without further ado, here is a complete list of the top 100. The books in bold are the ones I’ve had the fortune to have read. The Epic of Gilgamesh The Iliad The Odyssey The Analects The Oresteia [...]

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The Mayor of Casterbridge is literary gold from the pen of Thomas Hardy, a writer of no mean feat who captures the nature of an ebullient and regretful man with perfection. Michael Henchard is the man who sells his wife and child in a drunken fit one night, only to have it haunt him for [...]

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Easily the toughest-to-read book I’ve read this year, Ulysses is in a league of its own. “I gave up after one chapter”, said the librarian to me as she handed me the tome. Throw in several other discouragements and you know that I was itching to get started. You don’t need to know Latin, or [...]

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The Red Badge of Courage is a sterling antiwar novel by Stephen Crane that examines the case of one Henry Fleming, a recruit in the Civil War who signs up against the wishes of his mother. Signing up was an act of defiance and nascent masculinity that was supposed to affirm his status as a [...]

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The Past is a Foreign Country is a great little book about a guy who gets derailed on the way to a good life. Giorgio is a studious kid with a regular girlfriend and a potential career in jurisprudence ahead of him, when he meets a guy named Francesco and decides to go play some [...]

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The Snows of Kilimanjaro is just what you’d expect from Papa, top notch writing that strikes you right between the ribs and the eyes at the same time. This book is a collection of Hemingway’s best short stories, the finest of which are set in the Dark Continent. We see the eponymous story, which has [...]

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Harriet Baxter is a young English lady of means who goes to Glasgow in 1888 for the International Exhibition. By sheer chance, she saves the life of an older lady, who happens to be related to Ned Gillespie, an artist of note who is as yet unknown but destined to make a bigger splash in [...]

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The Lost Chord is a book that weaves mysticism with music to give us a book told from the viewpoints of two generations, the ancestors in mediaeval Germany and their modern descendants in current-day Montreal. What ties them together is the effect that playing four specific chords in a sequence has on people. On hearing [...]

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Castle Waiting is another one of these graphic novels you pick up because it holds some promise and luckily, it didn’t disappoint. Linda Medley melds together several disparate elements into a melange of Eurasian fairy tales that hold your attention for the duration of the book, which is more than can be said for some [...]

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