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A wise friend of mine rejects the idea of there being such a thing, because it suggests that novels are like horses and the race makes assessment into a simple matter of comparison in a single field of endeavour.
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Is Wuthering Heights the Best Novel Ever Written?
Posted in Observation, Reading with tags book-review, books, Emily Bronte, gothic, gothic novel, In Search of Lost Time, literature, Pyramids, Robert McKee, Taj Mahal, War and Peace, Wuthering Heights on March 22, 2026 by Jarrod Boyle
The Monk
Posted in Observation, Reading with tags book-review, book-reviews, books, Fiction, Gothic literature, literature, Matthew Lewis, The Monk on February 9, 2026 by Jarrod Boyle
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A very literate friend of mine once described The Monk as the most boring book ever forced upon him by an educational institution. Any book that comes to take up that kind of notoriety is often contingent on timing: my friend was 19 when he encountered The Monk, and it may have become his central focus of regret in signing up to study Gothic literature.
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The Magic Mountain
Posted in Reading with tags book-review, books, Dickens, Dosteyevsky, Fiction, Judi Dench, literature, Nobel Proze, Pavel Tsatsouline, reading, Shakespeare, Sonnet 26, The Graham Norton Show, The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, War and Peace on March 26, 2025 by Jarrod Boyle
The internet is like having a giant bilge pipe mounted above the armchair in your lounge room with all kinds of garbage gushing out of it. There is hardly a moment to take stock and discriminate amongst the torrent of what’s raining down upon you.
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Theme Park at its Darkest 