Five Favourite Novels
4 works · kept by Mine
Don't want to put both this and War and Peace. I know these can seem intimidating given their length and the fact they are "serious" 19th century Russian stuff written by a man with a terrifying beard, but they are just so brilliant. Anna Karenina is more conventionally a novel, war and peace is a big monster sprawling all over the place. But I love both. The good news is Tolstoy tends to write in short chapters and is constantly moving between his different narrative threads, so they are very rarely hard reading. With war and peace you may have to commit to giving it one hundred pages or before it really sucks you in.
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
For me the best novel written by an Englishman since the first world war. Did not know anything about it before I picked it up, so I won't say anything more.
At some point in my teens, having only read history for a few years, I decided to read a proper novel to see what they were all about. I went into the Easons on shop street and recognised the name Hemingway, so I started here. Hemingway is great, (For Whom the Bell Tolls is also a banger, and he has many great short stories), but this is still my favourite of his. Simultaneously uber macho and uber romantic, stylish, exotic, exciting.
Yes I am pretentious. Surely one of the best novels ever written, but I do prefer Tolstoy.