Last weekend on a trip to Bath visiting family there was a chance to pop into the Oxfam bookshop and pick up some books. Because of the rece...

Although this is not a difficult book to read it has been a real challenge this week to find the time to squeeze it in and so it will have t...

If you ever intend reading this book then please do not read this post any further because it will spoil everything for you. The ending remi...

As I get to the end of The Tin Drum before the moment is passed there was a great passage at the start of the book where Grass talks about h...

I wrote this on a particularly bleak day (a bit like today)... Oh no, only twenty seven people have visited the blog today. Only twenty seve...

This book gets more enjoyable as it gets closer to its conclusion with Oskar becoming much more of a rounded personality as he leaves the ob...

The piece in The Guardian by Gunter Grass with the author outlining his defence of not only being involved with the Nazi party but then sub...

Those people who like dictionary definitions get one from Voltaire on optimism with Candide having to explain it to a man with only one leg ...

Oskar seems to become a living version of the figurehead Niode touching those he comes across with bad luck and with Danzig in flames and hi...

A colleague at work casually walked past my desk and picked up Candide and asked what it was like. Having been told it was meant to be a wit...

If it was not for the events happening all around Oskar in terms of his trip to see the French coastal defences and the collapse of the Germ...

One of the reasons for reading Theodore Dreiser was because my parents live in the suburbs of Chicago and his most famous novel, Sister Carr...

The optimistic Candide finds life testing to his limit as he finds his love and then is forced to part from her in order to save his own ski...

A new series started on BBC One tonight about How We Built Britain and it started in the East and it started with the Ship of the Fens Ely ...

One of the standout articles in the newspapers this weekend was a piece in The Guardian by Gunter Grass talking about, and trying to justif...