Book Reviews

Articles in this section

• Some Mario Vargas Llosa books

  10 March 2009 by Ray

  The Cubs and other stories (1959)
  This was Mario Vargas Llosa’s first published story, about growing up and learning about life on the streets in Lima, a theme he developed extensively in his impressive first full-length novel The Time of the Hero (La ville et les chiens). Darned interesting. (...)

• Some W.G. Sebald books

  10 March 2009 by Ray

  Vertigo (1990)
  This is a literary essay on memory and the tricks it plays on us by a modern master of evocative, erudite, clear-sighted prose. Sebald takes us in the superb opening chapter with Stendahl through the Alps during Napoleon’s Italian campaign to meditate on the contrast between (...)

• Some P.G. Wodehouse Books

  9 March 2009 by Ray

  Very Good, Jeeves!
  Although I have always been a P.G. Wodehouse fan (how can one possibly not be?), I have tended to avoid the Jeeves books on the (foolishly mistaken) grounds that they would be too predictable, preferring the almost-always-wildly-funny collections of stories about Archie (...)

• Pepe Carvalho: a Spanish Hercule Poirot

  17 September 2007 by Ray

  The Quintet of Buenos Aires by Manuel Vasquez Montalban is a big, rather verbose, but all in all quite captivating plunge into the darker side of life in contemporary Argentina as we follow the investigations of an odd-ball but very distinctive detective from Barcelona named Pepe Carvalho, who (...)

• "The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus", edited by Brian Aldiss

  30 July 2007 by Ray

  This is a really outstanding collection of science-fiction stories from the late forties and fifties, the golden age of sci-fi in my humble and no doubt biased opinion, that being the period when I first discovered the genre, which was all the rage then, in my youthful days. But it was (...)