Recent reads over the past couple of months:

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre (as posted briefly above). My kind of thing. If anybody's read it you'll know why. It's tremendously written. Nothing provokes me like existential angst, day-to-day inertia. It's the adolescent in me, I suppose. I've been flirting with that sort of stuff for years now, but you might say I'm courting full-on nihilism these days. It's liberating, it's refreshing. I am Antoine Roquentin.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. I dived into the deep end of Joyce's dense waters a while back when I started Finnegans Wake, and, submitting to defeat, I met a similar end when I ventured into Ulysses a short time after. So this is the first Joyce I've got all the way through (Dubliners awaits, and to be fair I attempted the other two a while before I left high school). This is good stuff, though; craving out a character in a mixture of styles (according to his age; it begins in baby-talk and ends in quite dense lexis), but not only a character, but the whole notion of the "Artist" as a cultural concept, a historical figure which outlives the forgings of time. I loved it; I related to Stephen's transformation from inherited Catholic to self-aware sceptic.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Woolf's legacy hasn't really done her justice. She's a fantastic linguist, shrewd humanist and powerfully articulate intellectual. Her stream-of-consciousness writing darts from one character to another in the turn of a page, or even in the same sentence; it's in the same style as Mrs Dalloway (masterpiece), but remains somehow more difficult; it might also be more ambitious. A success on all accounts, at any rate. Fans of Robert Altman's cinematic aesthetic (roaming, flexible, casual though disciplined and always omniscent camera) would like Woolf's literariness.

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. Little-known writer and seemingly little-known short novel, at least until fairly recent rediscovery by academics. It's brilliant; it's conducted mostly in present tense but unfolds as a sort of mirage of dreamy memoirs; what's being told has already happened. Beautiful, tragic, funny and perceptive. It is at once realistic in its depiction of poverty, but Rhys invokes in it a sort of attraction, one which I for one was seduced by.

Currently reading Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. Having seen the film (which needs a rewatch), it's telling of Mann's incredible evocation of time and place through detailed imagery that Dirk Bogarde with thin-rimmed specs sitting in a striped deck-chair on a lonely beach is a distant memory. Lovely stuff. I expect to finish it later tonight.