Post what you read this summer

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In descending order from most to least favourite.

The Human Stain (Philip Roth) - My second Roth, after American Pastoral. Roth went to the top of my reading list after finishing this masterpiece.

Adults In The Room (Yanis Varoufakis) - A tad too long but by far the best left critique of rapacious EU tyranny that I've seen.

Epic City (Kushanava Choudhury) - A poignant look at the extraordinary city of Calcutta, as well as nostalgia, national identity, and homesickness. Reading this made me realise just how bland and homogenised other metropolises are in comparison.

Libra (Don DeLillo) - A lot longer and tougher than the other DeLillo I've read (Mao II). Of the meme American writers DeLillo is the one I find most perplexing.

Blindness (Jose Saramago) - A little too self serious, but overall pretty fascinating in its depravity.

Waterland (Graham Swift) - A slow but enjoyable read full of incest and teen sexuality. Swift's descriptions of Fenland geography and the sexual history of eels was much more interesting than his musings on the nature of history and the Enlightenment (Eliot says much more, more economically in 'Gerontion').

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Oliver Sacks) - bizarre, sad, and hilarious case histories but the overarching theme of a humanistic approach to medicine was too loose to make a very compelling read. I'll try Awakenings instead.

The Festival of Insignificance (Milan Kundera) - My first Kundera. Short and slight, but any book that can make you feel warmly affectionate towards Stalin is worth a read.

Waiting For The Barbarians (JM Coetzee) - I expected racial politics but it was mainly just the self pitying whining of a horny old man. Only became really interesting in the last act.

Being Dead (Jim Crace) - The only book I actually disliked. This is a fucking awful book. I doubt Jim Crace has ever talked to a real human being, and he has nothing interesting to say about love, life, or death. His habit of inventing things like 'Amoebolites and monophyles', 'manac beans', and 'quivering sticks' is nothing but a sign of laziness and intellectual poverty.