Books by Julian Barnes

3. Julian Barnes, Levels of Life .  A subtle and moving short tale which cannot be described without introducing spoilers.  Avoids the problems which plagues some of Barnes’s less-deep works.  Right now out in the UK only , U.S. release coming later in the year .

3. Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending .  This one just won the Booker Prize.  At first I thought it was contrived, then I realized it was deliberately contrived, and then I thought it was contrived in its deliberate construction of the contrivance, and so on.  I’ll try it again, in the spirit of being fooled by prizes, in the meantime you may be better off reading “spoilers” about the book before you start it, so you can skip right to your final opinion.

Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened Of .  I like some of Barnes’s work, most of all Flaubert’s Parrot , but I am embarrassed that such a shallow book would receive any favorable notice at all.