Welcome to this week's blog. Here's a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Two of you were delighted by a week of catch-up reading:
Missbabs said:
Recently read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time and its brilliance is overshadowing everything else. Other fiction seems obvious, trite and bland, it's a bit like watching Midsomer Murders after Wallander. So now I'm reading Vincent Van Gogh's letters and crying a lot, also Stephen King's On Writing.
proust, meanwhile, was bowled over by a more recent work:
Finally getting round to Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways. Evocative, atmospheric, beautifully written, extraordinarily well informed with range of references.
Hypnotic writing, surely something of a contemporary classic.
Over on Witness, Madeleineann illustrated her reading dilemma of the week:
AggieH admitted to feeling frustrated:
I used to abandon two or three books a year. This year, I’ve abandoned two or three a week. Either I’m getting worse at picking them or I’m getting pickier.
She proceeded to give an eloquent critique of two of the books she is currently not reading – Jan Kjærstad’s The Seducer and Amity Gaige’s Schroder. Is anyone else noticing a change in their book abandonment patterns?
Jantar was having a more satisfying time:
I'm still reading - as slowly as I possibly can – Taddeusz Rózewitcz's painfully well-written book Mother departs. It's not a family memoir, nor a collection of poems, nor a suitcase filled with photos and small objects that all contain past lives & loves & regrets – and it is more or less all of that. I have no way of describing this book really but it is one of the most impressive books I've read in quite a long time. TR (and his family) lived through most of the horrors last century dealt out in Europe and he wears the scars but his writing –however harsh he is on himself and however disillusioned he gets about mankind's ability to learn from experience – has a lightness of touch that is at times almost unearthly.
sanda1scuptorNYC finished an "almost perfect" book, The Golem And The Jinni by Helene Wecker:
I'm glad I didn't notice the small letters on the bottom of the ebook cover, calling it "fantasy and historical" because I'm not a fan of fantasy, but I don't think it's fantasy so much as mysticism involving Arabian (especially Syrian) immigrants and Polish Orthodox Jews about a jinni and a golem, respectively. It's almost as if Wecker picked up a spirit from Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Isaac B. Singer, Polish Jewish writer, was living in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at the time of his death, and there's a street, W.86 St. off Broadway, with the name "Isaac B. Singer Way" on the street sign above the Street number; the street where he lived. I will always delight in remembering a radio news reader, announcing his death, "Isaac Bashevis, the singer died...")
Dylanwolf had his hands full with a quartet of books by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector:
TheGhostKingdom talked of why Philomena, by Martin Sixsmith, made a special impact:
As a male Irish adoptee and father of two boys, this is a killer to read – but strangely comforting. After holding in the pain of parts one and two, I stopped in fear of part three. I know how my adult life went off the rails. I dreaded it, but in true adoptee style, I grabbed some Scotch and had a good cry, then forged ahead. Part three was just as difficult to read as the first half, but for very different reasons. Structurally, I love the interjections by the author at the end of each part – reminds one that it is a biography, and it really did happen. I think I'm ready to face reading the final act!
Finally, rolypolyladybug is in for a treat with these Civil War recipes.
If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, or film your own book review, please do. Click the blue button on this page to share your video or image. I'll include some of your posts in next week's blog.
And, as always, if you have any suggestions for topics you'd like to see us covering beyond TLS, do let us know.
