On 1 November 2016, I turned 30.
I decided, in a move I may regret, to write a short piece on every book I read over the following 12 months. I call the project TARP: The Adult Reader Project.
TARP is an exercise in writing on the spur, as well as a catalogue of literature I have no desire either to promote or disparage. Everything is entered, whether Greek classic or Haynes Manual, and all observations are subjective and my own.
These are my thoughts as I creep towards advancing age; I broadcast them freely without rhyme or reason. Hopefully, my reviews will be opaque enough to hide behind.
Click the links to follow.
No. 1 – Scriabin by Faubion Bowers [Biography]
No. 2 – Stormy Applause by Rostislav Dubinsky [Autobiography]
No. 3 – Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel [Short Fiction]
No. 4 – Leningrad by Brian Moynahan [History]
No. 5 – Stalin’s Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan [Biography]
No. 6 – The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem [Short Fiction]
No. 7 – Moscow Tales ed. by Helen Constantine [Short Fiction]
No. 8 – The Futurist Cookbook by F. T. Marinetti [Food]
No. 9 – The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino [Short Fiction]
No. 10 – Newton’s Swing by Chris Paling [Fiction]
No. 11 – A Romance with Cocaine by M. Ageyev [Fiction]
No. 12 – Selected Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva [Poetry]
No. 13 – This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin [Music]
No. 14 – Fear of Music by David Stubbs [Music]
No. 15 – Selected Poems by Aleksandr Blok [Poetry]
No. 16 – The Great Wall of China by Franz Kafka [Short Fiction]
No. 17 – The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam [Poetry]
No. 18 – Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova [Poetry]
No. 19 – Lexicon of Musical Invective by Nicolas Slonimsky [Music]
No. 20 – Napoleon Symphony by Anthony Burgess [Fiction]
No. 21 – The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge [Fiction]
No. 22 – The Return of Munchausen by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky [Fiction]
No. 23 – Great Russian Short Stories of the Twentieth Century ed. by Yelena P. Francis [Short Fiction]
No. 24 – The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov [Fiction]
No. 25 – Diaries and Selected Letters by Mikhail Bulgakov [Epistolary Anthology]
No. 26 – Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam [Memoir]
No. 27 – Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol [Fiction]
No. 28 – Little Apple by Leo Perutz [Fiction]
No. 29 – Portrait of a Man by Georges Perec [Fiction]
No. 30 – Cement by Fyodor Gladkov [Fiction]
No. 31 – The God That Failed ed. by Richard Crossman MP [Politics]
No. 32 – As kingfishers catch fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins [Poetry]
No. 33 – Nadja by Andre Breton [Fiction]
No. 34 – Words in Commotion by Tommaso Landolfi [Short Fiction]
No. 35 – And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov [Fiction]
No. 36 – On Booze by F. Scott Fitzgerald [Anthology]
No. 37 – Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge [Fiction]
No. 38 – Selected Poems by Charles Baudelaire [Poetry]
No. 39 – The History of a Town by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin [Fiction]