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Jaroslav Hasek - The Good Soldier Schweik
Ok, to begin: The Good Soldier Schweik is, insofar as the term means anything, my ‘favourite’ book. Certainly it’s one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read, and re-read several times. This...
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Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums
Jack Kerouac is one of the best, if not the best, author that I’ve ever found. Especially since he was an author with a wide and varied body of work. Jaroslav Hasek (see below) wrote one very good book...
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Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club
This is a superb novel, arguably one of the last classics of the 20th century. Published in 1996, and only Chuck Palahniuk’s second novel, it was later made into an equally excellent film with Edward...
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Charles Bukowski - Hot Water Music
The sun shone through the window. It was just before noon. Hot water gurgled through the pipes of the building.Hank Chinaski got up, went to the bathroom, and vomited.He came back into the living room,...
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Keith Hemmerling - Law School Suicide (**Guest Post!**)
p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } “You’re not gonna know who you’re watching up here, a madman or just a guy trying to make a whole lotta hell out of a bad situation…a whole...
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Knut Hamsun - Hunger
p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } Knut Hamsun's Hunger is, quite seriously, Fight Club coming straight from the 1890s. Some argue that it was the inspiration, effectively, for...
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Flann O'Brien - The Dalkey Archive
p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } Hopefully I can keep this post a good deal shorter than the Knut Hamsun review – the trouble is, classic novels seem to have a symbiotic...
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Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels
Desolation Angels is one of Kerouac’s later books, first published in 1965, nearly a decade after On the Road. Clearly, it is somewhat more advanced in both style and content, and can seem a little...
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Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels (A Photographic Interlude)
I've recently returned from a short hiking holiday in the Welsh mountains of Snowdonia, a holiday on which I brought Desolation Angels along with me to read. Call me an idealist, but part of me was...
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Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels (Yet Another Extract)
Like On the Road, Desolation Angels is primarily a novel of many journeys, with Kerouac as ever trying to live out (and describe) the American Dream as idiosyncratically and as anti-materialistically...
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Brendan Behan - After the Wake
p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } Brendan Behan was a mid-20th century Irish writer, and another great example of drink-sodden Irish literature. Even better, he reminds me of...
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James Joyce - Ulysses (I)
"Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthnthnthnthn.Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.Horrid! And gold flushed more.A husky fifenote blew.Blew. Blue bloom is in...
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Flann O'Brien - On the (Vico) Road
p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } I was fascinated upon first reading The Dalkey Archive, many years ago, as the very first page began with a wonderful lyrical description of a...
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James Joyce, Ulysses (II)
p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow...
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Robert M. Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } Now that Ulysses is out of the way, it’s time to start on another mammoth book. Zen and the Art of the Motorcycle Maintenance is a pretty well...
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Phaedrus vs. Omar Khayyám (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, revisited)
p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } (Now with Pt.III)I’m a great believer in intertextuality… I love making comparisons; or rather, connections. As the quote goes, “Only...
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Don DeLillo - Underworld
p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } Another really mammoth novel, and again this time from America. Underworld deserves comparison to Ulysses, a fact I mentioned here. If not for...
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Into the Wild/10 Bulls
p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } ILast weekend I went to see this film, Sean Penn's Into the Wild, and I think it might be a masterpiece. Or at least, there are reasons for...
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Alan W. Watts - The Way of Zen
p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } Zen Buddhism"has directness, verve and humour, and a sense of both beauty and nonsense at once exasperating and delightful. But above all it...
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Terry Pratchett - Hogfather extract (Pt. 1)
p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } Sky One, 8.00-10 PM, 24-25th December"The beggars stopped singing, except for Arnold Sideways, who tended to live in his own small world.‘-...
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