Arukiyomi

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Context: finished this off on the ferry from Turkey to the Greek island of Samos.

The final book of four gothic novels that I’ve been reading over the last few months. For the others, see my reviews of The Castle of Otranto, Vathek and The Monk.

REVIEW
This novel was quite disappointing I found. I don’t really think that Mary Shelley is much of a writer despite her having come up with a great idea for a story. In fact, I’m pretty sure that, had she not had such a famous husband and therefore been so well-connected, this story might never have become more famous than he himself is.
(Click to read my review…)

Context: Finished this off on the bus from Istanbul to Izmir.

REVIEW
Absolutely loved this from beginning to end. After reading a couple of other Gothic novels that were hard going (i.e. The Castle of Otranto and Vathek), I was really worried that this was going to be 300 pages of turgid melodrama. Far from it.
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Context: Started this in the Romanian town of Sighisoara (in background), birthplace of Vlad Tepes who some claim to be the model Stoker used for the character of Count Dracula.

REVIEW
Read this entirely in Romania but, despite the immensity of the Dracula legend there and the terrific amount of tourism it generates, Stoker apparently never visited the country. That’s not all he seemed to be ignorant of.
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Context: Started reading this in The Idiot restaurant in St. Petersburg.

REVIEW
This is my third Dostoevsky and I’m really beginning to develop a taste for this guy and starting to understand more about why he writes and what he has to offer us who read it.
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Context: After the wife had read this, I polished this off whilst in St. Petersburg

REVIEW
Not a bad book at all actually despite the fact that this was the third time I’d attempted to read this. I enjoyed McCourt’s style and the wry way he has of looking at life
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Context: read this on the train to St Petersburg from Moscow

REVIEW
A bonkers adventure really of Vathek’s passion ending predictably enough.
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Context: Finished this in a day on the Trans-Mongolian railway somewhere around Novosibirsk.REVIEW
I’ve read, and greatly enjoyed, Status Anxiety and The Romantic Movement by de Botton and I honestly didn’t think this book was up to the standard of the others.
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Context: Finished on the Trans-Mongolian Express as we headed from Irkutsk to Moscow.

REVIEW
This is stellar piece of research and the book, once you get used to Montefiore’s style, is an enjoyable read, if that’s the right adjective to use for a biography of one of the world’s greatest murderers. But something about the book didn’t feel quite right.
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Context: Finished on the Trans-Mongolian railway somewhere in the Gobi desert.
REVIEW
A very compelling description of the infamous Russian camp system which strikes a great balance between the politico-historical background and the daily lives of the inmates.

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Context: Finished this in Shanghai at the house of my mate Gavin
whose collection of novels got me back into fiction after many years away.
REVIEW
According to Menzies, it wasn’t the explorers of the western powers that ‘discovered’ the world, it was the Chinese and they did it in 1421 way before anyone else. Hence, the title of this book that somebody bought me for something some time ago.
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Context: Finished this at Stephen & Abigail’s house where we first met Matthew their son.
REVIEW
Finally read this book. Twice I’ve started it and I realised I needed to finish it before I got on the ferry to Shanghai because it’s banned in China and I didn’t want it taken off me in customs. (Click to read my review…)

Context: Read this as we travelled from Korea by sea and train to Japan.REVIEW
This started out as an interesting alternative to American Psycho, which I read before Arukiyomi got off the ground. It was like Psycho with far less of the sex and gore although Ellis still seems to have a need to fill sections of his novels with graphic descriptions of both to the extent that you wonder whether it’s him and not his characters which has the problem. Best skipped over in my opinion, despite any literati claims to brilliant descriptive writing - it is, after all, easy to describe the graphic but far harder to describe the mundane.
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Context: My mate Chuck suggested I read this. I read it in a day
as that’s all the time I had at his house in Kumamoto, Japan.REVIEW
Not bad but certainly nowhere near as good as I’d been led to believe by the comments of some others who’d read it, this book follows the tradition of Christian allegory but adds in some metaphysical twists.
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Context:company on the train from the tea hills to Colombo in Sri Lanka
REVIEW
This is a mammoth book at 1474 pages and, although it wasn’t always easy going, it was much much more pleasurable to read than I expected it to be.
(Click to read my review…)