Book 81 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver 8/10. Short book of short stories set in the American Midwest. Some of the stories are very short and the language is very spare so you really need to read between the lines to work out what is really going on. The tales are by turns funny, gripping and surprisingly profound. There are some really unexpected turns too. Worth reading.

Book 80 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 9/10. Really enjoyed this magical book which with its combination of allegory, Columbian politics and magical realism is a heady brew. A hundred years of the Buendia family is contained in the pages of the book which takes the village of Macondo from its founding by the first Buendia, through its development and survival through civil war, plague, pestilence and the ravages of foreigners and the banana company. Would have given it 10 if the book had had more of a story. Still a fantastic read though.

Book 79 The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey 7/10. Richard 111 history lesson in a 50s detective novel. Hero is a bedridden copper who passes the time in hospital by trying to work out who killed the princes in the tower. May have been a bit more shocking half a century ago before revisionist historians took over the subject. An interesting and quick read, but a bit too worthy.

Book 78 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy 8/10

Very accurate observations on relationships between man and wife involving two separate marriages. Jude meets his cousin Sue, the love of his life after being trapped in a marriage by a local girl. His pretentions to go to college and Sue's rather free thinking ideas about marriage lead him in the wrong direction. Hardy was criticised for his frank portrayal of his thoughts of how marriage didn't really work in the modern age and never wrote another novel after Jude. Some of the book is hard going and the end a rather depressing, but it is a good read.

Book 49 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

7/10 All seems a bit dated now. Burgess’s writing is clever but soul less I think. Obviously the imagery was and is iconic and the use of the slang language nadsat set the gangs apart and made this a unique novel. I did think that the theme of reform of a criminal by brainwashing has dated since the book was written over 40 years ago. I didn't really enjoy it.

Book 77 Alias Grace by Margaret Attwood 8/10.

Story of a real murder case from Canada in the 1840s. Grace Marks, a young household servant was implicated and imprisoned for a double murder but no one was really sure if she was involved in the actual killing or not. Attwood weaves her tale around Marks and the attempts of Simon Jordon to psychoalanlyse her to find out if the gaps in her memory are real or not. It's a good read and well written. As it slowly draws you in to the tale. you begin to realise that all is not quite what it seems.

Book 76 If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor.

8/10. Beautiful poetically-written story based around the doings of ordinary people in an unnamed city somewhere in England. Everything is revealed in it's own time and at such a slow pace that the feeling is one of impending menace, but we never lose sight of the humanity of the characters. We know something horrible is going to happen but you don't find out what til the last few pages. An absorbing read and another book with a cracking opening.