Jonathan Coe

The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter

Mr. Wilder & Me by Jonathan Coe

September 28, 2021 by jeverett15 Leave a Comment

Today Billy Wilder is remembered as one of Hollywood’s greatest film directors, but because his masterpieces are all in black and white, many film buffs might not realize that he continued making movies all the way until 1981. Jonathan Coe’s novel Mr. Wilder & Me finds the director shooting one of his later films, 1978’s Fedora. On the outs with the Hollywood studios, Wilder is forced to accept foreign money to finance the picture, which he films in Greece, Germany, and France. The return to […]

Ten mostly good fiction books

Normal people by Sally Rooney

Conversations with friends by Sally Rooney

The amateur marriage by Anne Tyler

The pull of the stars by Emma Donoghue

Middle England by Jonathan Coe

Holes by Louis Sachar

The princess bride by William Goldman

The legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

The great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

May 11, 2021 by The Book Omnivore 2 Comments

Normal people by Sally Rooney I’d watched the series before I read the book and yet the series didn’t put me off reading it. I suffered through it, just as I suffered through this book about Marianne and Connell. Two kids who go to the same school, and then later on to the same university, their lives entwined. We witness their strange dance as they struggle to communicate plainly with each other and fail again and again. Marianne is a broken person. Connell is sort […]

Tragedy had struck the Winshaws twice before, but never on such a terrible scale.

What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe

December 29, 2020 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

A truly bizarre and inventive novel from the mid-1990s by the British writer Jonathan Coe. I’ve read one of his later novels later and really enjoyed it and IT oddly felt like a first novel, while this novel, earlier feels more mature in some ways. We meet Michael Owen, failed novelist (well, successful, but now fading) who has been commissioned by a spinster aunt of a rich land-owning British family to write a definitive biography of the family. The Winshaws are a corrupt and awful […]

On a clear, blueblack, starry night, in the city of Berlin, in the year 2003, two young people sat down to dinner.

The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe

February 7, 2020 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

This is the first of three (current, I guess) novels about the same set of characters…well educated, initially precocious, young people from Birmingham trying to figure out life in these 1970s England in the middle of the Wilson administration. The novel focuses primarily on Benjamin Trotter and his sister Lois, whose nephew is telling the story to a new acquaintance, and niece of a more ancillary character in the novel (the ending indicates that her story is forth coming in the second novel). Most of […]

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