Book of the Week

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Juan Garcia-Rodenas tackles Tolstoy's rollicking historical novel. 

War and Peace is considered by many to be one of the greatest novels to have ever been written in any language. The story follows three Russian families, Bolkonsky, Rostov and Bezuhov, during the Napoleonic Wars, arguably one of the most interesting periods in history. The story begins in 1805 and ends later, after the Napoleonic era.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - A Hundred (ish) Years On

Just over a hundred years since the publication of James Joyce's bildungsroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Lower Eighth Paulines share their opinions on this seminal novel.

Book of the Week

Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Recommended by Mr Kemp

Of all the books I have read this year, Swing Time is the one so far that kept me most emphatically hooked.

Reading often tilts between being a pleasure and a duty: a book that you pick up for the sake of the latter often blooms into the former (and the former can metastasise onerously into the latter). So if you just want that pleasurable and engrossing experience, the literary blockbuster, go on Amazon right now and read this no further. But, fundamentally, the book’s just not great. It’s patchy and lazy and all over the place. Smith absolutely knows her way around a sentence, and it is a truism to assert that she is a fine writer of comic set pieces, memorable characters, and good, ‘snappy’ dialogue. But this one doesn’t work. It’s a bust for many small reasons, and they probably look like one big reason when seen from a certain distance.