Welcome to this week’s blog. Christmas provided time for reading and reflection for many of our readers, who also shared fascinating thoughts on their 2014 reads. Here is a small selection from the last few weeks’ thread. And thanks for your lovely comments and kind sentiments – warmest wishes from the Books team!

laidbackviews had a great kick-off to 2015:

Absolutely stonking start to 2015. For I’ve just finished Samarkand, an early novel by Amin Maalouf. The author is Lebanese, lives in Paris and writes in French. Samarkand first appeared in English in 1992, since when over 20 reprints have been required.

He takes us back to the 11th century, and a young lad, Omar, who gazes at the stars and does a bit of philosophy. He has the habit of composing the odd quatrain, or rubai as they are known down in the souks. He is given a jotter, hand pressed and carved, to write down his verses over the years. As a tribute it is later illustrated.

Legend has it that the Samarkand Manuscript, Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyaat, went down with the Titanic. Maalouf spans the centuries, spins the yarns, takes us to places and in times that we can but imagine, from the Court to the harem, and the intrigues of it all. And then to Paris. Brilliant stuff. Need to see what else Maalouf has penned.

Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks was highly praised by MsCarey:

I found Buddenbrooks a perfect immersive read for the holiday period. I read it primarily as a hugely entertaining saga of prosperous family life in nineteenth century Germany and took less notice of some of the themes that preoccupy the writer. (Not that I ignored them altogether. By the end the word that was shrieking in my mind wasn’t “decline” but “decay”.) I was interested that Mann didn’t make the family’s fortunes a stand-in for the state of Germany but that he viewed their misfortunes almost entirely due to their own characters. Most interesting of all was that the book was published in 1902. That means I have to now read something by him written after the war and see what impact it had on him.

Nicolereal shared this lovely picture of music-related books she read last year:

SharonE6 finished The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy over Christmas:

I can’t say I enjoyed it. Too many unlikeable characters – after a while it can be a bit wearing reading about the bad things people do to each other. It’s well-written, though. A worthy Booker winner? I’m not sure. For three quarters of the book, I thought not, but the last quarter swayed me towards saying yes. Then I started to think about what a Booker prize winner should be. A classic in the making maybe? Something powerfully moving? Probably no easy answer – different readers would want different things.

An interesting conversation developed about how our relationships with books and authors change when we read more titles from a particular writer and these make us rethink our previous conceptions. jmschrei said:

It is funny how our relationships with books change. [...] I adored Cloud Atlas and was rooting for it in 2004. I have grown to seriously dislike the book and David Mitchell’s work in general over time (The Thousand Autumns sealed the deal). I know it is me, not a lack of respect for him per se. He is simply not my author. It is like a love affair that, after it is over makes you wonder, what did I ever see in that book/author?

Interesting links about books and reading

• The TBR20 Project: Taking A Break From Too Many Books: a writer has set out to read 20 books before buying any more, and has written an excellent blog with which many of you with TBR-pile problems will empathise – as did many Tweeter users, who started sending her pictures of the 20 books they were going to tackle before letting themselves get tempted by new titles. Thanks to AggieH for sharing this.
• How I Read: a compelling article by Tim Parks for The New York Review of Books about reading techniques and tools.

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.