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Enid Blyton beats Shakespeare! It had to happen. Blyton is more reader-friendly. I am surprised Agatha Christie didn’t beat Shakespeare. But she’s also in the top 10. Here are Britain’s best loved storytellers, according to a survey by Costa Book Awards, formerly the Whitbread Literary Awards. See there is only American in the top 10:
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Oscar and Lucinda won the 1988 Booker Prize and was made into a beautiful movie, I am told, and it is easy to see why. It vividly recreates 19th century England and Australia as it tells an impassioned love story. And it is clever. When Lucinda the heiress confesses her love of gambling to Oscar
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I read for pleasure, so I have read only one book by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn: One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. But I remember how highly regarded he was, winning the Nobel Prize in 1970 and becoming more famous after The Gulag Archipelago came out in the late 70s. All his books including Cancer
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Atonement is a brilliant novel. Ian McEwan performs literary magic playing with appearance and reality. But he also probes character and morality and ends with an expose of how the law can hinder justice. Even when Briony Trallis realises who the perpetrator is of the crime she witnessed as a girl, she cannot expose him
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Rabbit at Rest by John Updike John Updike is a perfectionist — not a flamboyant writer. He can make even the shocking seem almost natural. In Rabbit At Rest, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom ends up in bed with his daughter-in-law, Pru. Imagine how the scene would have played in a Greek tragedy. But here it becomes
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I finished reading Rabbit at Rest by John Updike and the only word for it is Wow! Here is a great writer who knows how to bring scenes and characters to life. He is not flashy or literary, just a supremely gifted writer who can describe a person or a scene with the telling detail,
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These songs are for John Updike fans. It’s one of the last songs Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom hears on the radio driving from his old home in Brewer, Pennsylvania, to the condo in Florida, where he and Janice have retired — only Janice is not with him, not on this drive almost at the very end
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These songs are for John Updike fans. It’s one of the last songs Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom hears on the radio driving from his old home in Brewer, Pennsylvania, to the condo in Florida, where he and Janice have retired — only Janice is not with him, not on this drive almost at the very end
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These songs are for John Updike fans. It’s one of the last songs Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom hears on the radio driving from his old home in Brewer, Pennsylvania, to the condo in Florida, where he and Janice have retired — only Janice is not with him, not on this drive almost at the very end