literature - Adrian Masters

Salman Rushdie ‘Two Years Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights’ re-read

October 11, 2015

If you’ve read any Salman Rushdie previously, you’ll know what you’re letting yourself in for: a tumble of stories, ideas, jokes, allegories and references to books, films, politics, music, art, comic books and contradictory opinions. He specialises in having his cake and eating it and this book is high on the cake-having and eating. And like … More Salman Rushdie ‘Two Years Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights’ re-read

Salman Rushdie, ‘Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights’

September 24, 2015

I don’t know what to make of this yet. Obviously, I’m already a fan so I already enjoy all the Rushdie traits: linguistic japery, strangeness, pop-culture mingling with high-culture, the dizzying tumble of stories and ideas. I haven’t been able to get a handle on it properly in my first reading but I have a feeling … More Salman Rushdie, ‘Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights’

‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel García Marquez

August 21, 2015

This was the long-delayed fulfilment of a promise to myself to read Marquez who always seemed so off-putting. How wrong I was. Not that this long, strange novel isn’t without it’s challenges. There’s no plot as such, just a long stream of strange and wonderful things happening to the Buendía family over more than a … More ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel García Marquez

Joseph Conrad, ‘The Duel and Other Stories’

August 20, 2014

Much as I love Conrad, he can be a bit hard-going and I’d held off going back to him after struggling through ‘Chance,’ which is a great story suffocated by way too much of Marlow’s ponderous opinions. By contrast this volume of tales shows off Conrad at his best: strange stories of people buffeted by … More Joseph Conrad, ‘The Duel and Other Stories’

Review of ‘His Last Fire’ in Wales Arts Review

August 14, 2014

Only a couple of weeks late but my review of Alix Nathan’s ‘His Last Fire’ has been published by Wales Arts Review. Click here to read it. While you’re there, there are lots of goodies to keep you reading for ages. Most likely, by the time you do there’ll be a new issue with even … More Review of ‘His Last Fire’ in Wales Arts Review

‘The Sea, The Sea,’ by Iris Murdoch

August 12, 2014

I’ve just read ‘The Sea, the Sea’ in two long chunks over two days which left me with that sensation that you get after consuming a really fine novel of being bigger, more important for having absorbed it. It’s a wonderful novel: an astonishing story, utterly unpredictable, of a self-important theatre director whose determination to … More ‘The Sea, The Sea,’ by Iris Murdoch

‘The White Goddess’ by Simon Gough

June 7, 2014

There’s a point near the end of this extraordinary novel when the poet Robert Graves is lost in obsessive rage and his accountant tells him ‘to grow up, to stop behaving like a child before it was too late, before he lost all credibility with his peers and his public.’ The accountant, however, is the … More ‘The White Goddess’ by Simon Gough

Poems That Make Grown Men Cry

June 1, 2014

What a lovely way to discover new poems this book is. The title is deliberately provocative and makes you (well me) say to yourself ‘Well that didn’t make me cry’ after reading each selection. In fact none of them made me cry or even become slightly teary which may say more about me than the … More Poems That Make Grown Men Cry

Books as ‘tools for living’

June 1, 2014

Sarah Crompton, writing in the Telegraph, puts very succinctly the way I feel about books and reading and, specifically, that it’s impossible to measure the way that reading fiction shapes your personality. You can read the whole article here. She’s referring to Toni Morrison’s talk at Hay-on-Wye, a Twitter campaign to come up with 10 favourite books … More Books as ‘tools for living’

‘Em and the Big Hoom’ by Jerry Pinto

May 9, 2014

This is a curious book. It’s deeply touching but in some important parts the emotional engagement is lacking. What I mean by that is that the narrator, his sister and even his father, the ‘Big Hoom’ of the title never seem to become much more than the supporting characters that they are. I never felt … More ‘Em and the Big Hoom’ by Jerry Pinto

Adrian Masters

Journalist. Broadcaster. Author

Tag: literature