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Reservation Blues 77 reviews
Sherman Alexie
Grove Press, 2005
Confronting Racism
+ Music and Salvation
+ a song of power, remembrance, loss, vitality, and love!
Alexie at his best. With humor, irony, and compassion, this novel mirrors the hopelessness of being born, raised and a resident of the reservation.
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Catch-22 832 reviews
Joseph Heller
Simon & Schuster, 1996
Incredible
+ Great Characters Living With Death
+ War Classic
I almost didn't include this book in my reading list - thank goodness I did in the end!
Although set during a war, the theme is about survival, insanity and humanity.
The language is disturbingly funny and can drive anyone crazy.
The story is not told chronologically, which makes it a ...
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The Trial40 reviews
Franz Kafka
Schocken, 1999
Was it really an unfinished business????
+ One of the most important writers of the 20th century
+ What a wonderful nightmare!
+ great thinker, creative writer
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Sixty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)18 reviews
Donald Barthelme, David Gates
Penguin Classics, 2005
Brilliant but not for Everyone
+ MR BARTHELME
+ A Collection of the Highest Order
+ Me and Mrs. Mandible
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The Moccasin Telegraph and Other Stories (Penguin Short Fiction)
W. P. Kinsella
Penguin (Non-Classics), 1985
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Jacques the Fatalist (Oxford World's Classics) 9 reviews
Denis Diderot
Oxford University Press, USA, 1999
An interactive literary device
+ very entertaining
+ It's written on high
+ Buried Treasure
+ Burning Read
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Otherwise Engaged (Sunrise Key)
Suzanne Brockmann
Loveswept, 1997
The local tycoon, Preston Seaholm, rescues pretty widow Molly Cassidy from a treacherous fall and decides she will make the perfect alibi to fend off unwanted advances from fortune seekers, only to find himself falling in love.
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The Ginger Man 66 reviews
J. P. Donleavy
Grove Press, 2001
My hero
+ A manifestation of human desire in its physical state - JP Donleavy is brilliant!
+ Funny as Hell, True as Heaven
+ A Joy
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The Princess Bride: S Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure671 reviews
William Goldman
Del Rey, 2000
Romance and adventure and political documentation!
+ Great story, questionable reading.
+ True Love and High Adventure Indeed!
+ Real Fantasy
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Watt18 reviews
Samuel Beckett
Grove Press, 1994
Roller-coaster existentialism, and fun, too!
+ Brilliant and Insane
+ It's so hard to get good help in a Beckett novel...
+ Funny AND Avant-garde
+ After a lifetime of reading, one of my five favorites
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Money63 reviews
Martin Amis
Penguin (Non-Classics), 1986
Stellar comic novel
+ DIARY OF A LOUT
+ A savage funny monologue
+ Money- the new face of the British novel
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The Bear Went Over the Mountain: A Novel (Owl Book)91 reviews
William Kotzwinkle
Holt Paperbacks, 1997
One of the funniest books I've ever read
+ Every re-read makes me laugh again
+ Funny and funnier and smart and smarter than your hairy honor student
That's all I have to say about it, except I've lent this book far and wide to a diverse audienceof friends and family, in terms of age and sense of humor. Every one thought it was a scream and just adored it.
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The River Why, Twentieth-Anniversary Edition92 reviews
David James Duncan
Sierra Club Books, 2002
Wise Like A Fish
+ A Great Read
+ This is some story!
+ Brilliant
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Killoyle: An Irish Farce3 reviews
Roger Boylan
Dalkey Archive Press, 1997
An Irish Nabokov
+ oh, the footnotes!
+ no title
Killoyle is a book to be savored -- if you try to rush through it, I don't think you'll enjoy it. Roger Boylan's style demands a thoughtful, reflective pace of reading. I think of Boylan as an Irish Nabokov. Like Nabokov, he is a virtuoso of language who apparently writes for the pure pleasure of ...
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Zuleika Dobson (Modern Library Paperbacks)24 reviews
Max Beerbohm
Modern Library, 1998
Beware of this Time Piece and English Humor [59]
+ "Is it satire or parody or nonsense or what?"
+ Highly Developed British Eccentricity!
+ One of the great farces ever written
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Bouvard and Pecuchet with The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (Penguin Classics)5 reviews
Gustave Flaubert
Penguin Classics, 1976
Essential reading for the 80's generation-disco desperates
+ Masterpiece of Comedy
+ Odd but interesting book
+ Sharp satire, fuzzy edition
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The Full Catastrophe5 reviews
David Carkeet
Linden Pub, 1990
Understated comic genius
+ The second volume of a trilogy
+ How can someone so smart be so naive?
+ Laughs on every page!
+ Hilariously inventive!
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House Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy4 reviews
B. S. Johnson
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1986
a black comedy set in an old people's home
+ A phenomenal technical achievement
House Mother Normal tells the story of a night in an old people's home as told by eight of its residents - all with varying degrees of senility - and their perverted carer, the "House Mother" of the title. Each of the nine narratives is synchronised in time and within the text, so that a ...
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The Feast of Love: A Novel156 reviews
Charles Baxter
Vintage, 2001
A Fabulous Feast
+ Better for the Young
A gorgeous, lush, heartbreaking, glittering exploration of romantic love in all its forms. The style takes a little getting used to, but once you're in, you're hooked as Baxter spins you through the lives and passions of a handful of related characters. Rich, wise, and funny, the book is a feast ...
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Cosmicomics33 reviews
Italo Calvino
Harvest Books, 1976
A home in Cosmos
+ The Greatest Book Ever
Ever since our ancestors started looking into the night sky, the saw patterns and connections between the stars, moons and planets, and used stories and myths to imbue those patterns with meaning and structure. With the big hindsight of the scientific worldview, all those ancient stories may seem ...
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