What is The Grand Book Review?

This Blog is a book review. "How very original," I hear you think (loudly). I know. Well, this idea originates from me feeling drastically overwhelmed by the lack of books that I have read, when I compare myself to the many other voracious book-consumers that study English alongside me. It seems mad that I should be studying a degree so immersed in literature when, really, I have read very few books. And so, with a bit of searching, I came across the Guardian's '1000 Books Everyone Must Read' (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction), and realised that I had read 22 of them. That's little over 2% of what are considered essential books. So I chucked the books into a randomiser (in particular, http://www.random.org/), and have decided to review them, as I read them, one by one. This will be slow - and I mean slow - because I'm doing this alongside my course reading, and so the reviews will appear rather infrequently.

At the top of each review, I will put in bold which of the categories the novel has been deemed to be a part of, according to the Guardian, so you can decide whether or not you'd like to read the book based on that. Just a warning, though; the category really is a very rough guide, and the novels often stray into a number of other categories.

The categories are, incidentally, Comedy, Crime, Family and Self, Love, Science Fiction and Fantasy, State of the Nation and War and Travel.

So that's all there is to it, really, and now I'm just writing because I like the sound of my own keyboard.

The next book I'll be reading will be Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith, so if, Heaven forbid, you should wish to accompany me, go ahead.

Please, if you have any comments on my reviews, I welcome them. Consider this a book group, rather than a book review - debate, discuss and shout me down, by all means. Thanks for reading.