Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

This week, we’re welcoming new readers to this blog. Nicolas Cannon wrote:

The Western Lands, by William Burroughs – the darkest of satire, and filled with more wit, imagination, and creativity than anything else I’ve ever read, and what’s best, whenever I read it, I have the sound of Burroughs himself reading it in my head!

I’ve also become a recent convert to Audio books, Peter Hook narrating his own book on Joy Division was wonderful, both laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreakingly sad at times.

Another newscomer was koochacoo, who arrived with some handy advice for travellers:

I was travelling in Iran last week, and whilst there, read the Persian classic The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat, which didn’t work for me at all. The Kafkaesque style was disorientating, repetitive (although I understand that this was all intentional), but did not resonate with me emotionally. It read like one of the myths from Harry Potter, or something Paulo Coelho would write.

I also read Reading Lolita in Tehran, which, although I’d not read the books that her literary criticism addressed, I found really engrossing. The parallels with the Islamic Revolution in Iran and her experiences at this time of profound social change I found to inflect my understanding and experiences of the country I was travelling in.

Jenny Bhatt was reading, among other things, Fay Weldon’s Wicked Women:

Such delicious fun. The first story, End of the Line, reads like it ought to be in a TV show or something. Actually, several of her stories here feel like that, which is to be expected, given how much she’s also written for radio and TV. I’ve watched a fair bit of her TV work but this is the first of her fiction, I think, that I’m reading, oddly enough. And, I might just have to seek out some more of her work. I do agree with reviewers who’ve drawn comparisons between Weldon and Dorothy Parker. Many of these stories have carried on the Parker tradition.

slovenia46 was ambushed by an unhappy ending:

Perhaps this has happened to you. I was deeply engrossed in Dennis Lehane’s Live By Night to the point where, when I put the book aside, it took some 5 maybe 10 minutes to reorient myself to my world. I was engaged with and cared deeply about the characters, they were so vital, so “real: the settings so vivid! Then 50 or or so pages from the end, a possible conclusion to the novel occurred to me, a conclusion I desperately did not want. And, sure enough, that ending did indeed come to pass and, to exaggerate a bit, I was wracked with the pain of it for an hour. I should have known better and put the novel aside that night and finished the last 15 or so pages the next day. But I didn’t and couldn’t fall asleep for that hour of mourning. The power of fiction amazes me over and over again.

We enjoyed a Saul Bellow-related discussion, including this comment from conedison:

Last night I read aloud to my wife (we do this) a Bellow short story, A Father-to-Be. Several times, his prose was so powerful that either my wife or myself or both of us just stopped and laughed. When in full flow, Bellow’s gift is nothing less than breathtaking.

EnidColeslaw made us chuckle:

This morning I had to stay in the metro station a little while longer to finish the first part of Knausgaard’s first volume of his “autobiographical” writings. In the first part, we linger over his childhood and teenage years, in often embarrassing detail. If I had a penny for every time Karl Ove has to open a beer bottle with a lighter, and ends up asking someone else to open it for him, well ... I would have enough to buy myself ... a flapjack, I guess?

After having read about his “road-trip” in the NY Times Magazine, I have to admit I was expecting something a tad more enthralling, but the subtitle of this volume being “A Death in the Family”, I can only imagine that we will descend into harrowing territory in Part 2 ...

Do check our open thread about disturbing fiction, which was inspired last week’s comments. Meanwhile, here is another great question posed last week:

My question for discussion this week is one I got asked by somebody else, so I thought I’d pinch it as a) it’s a good one, and b) it made me chuckle, so here it is: If you could punch a particular book in the face, which one would it be? My original answer was The Body Artist by Don DeLillo (for obvious reasons), but thinking about it again I think I would now choose An American Dream by Norman Mailer, for being so pleased with itself ...

It was asked by judgeDAmNation, and here are the replies. What book would you punch?

Interesting links about books and reading

• The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison: The New York Time Magazine’s profile of the writer who, at 84, is about to publish a new book and sits comfortably as one of the greatest authors in American history, “even as her uncompromising dream for black literature seems farther away than ever.”
• A Guide to Thesis Writing that Is a Guide to Life: a piece about Umberto Eco’s 1997 manual for students – still as valid today as it was then; and very much about more than writing thesis.
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Graduation Speech: what the “Ghost Dance” of the Native Americans and the French Painters Who Led the Cubist Movement Have in Common: it seems like looking back to old speeches and wisdom is a trend – and one we welcome, for what it’s worth. This Vonnegut extract, from his 1994 talk at the University of Chicago, has been doing the rounds on the literary corners of the internet, and is well worth reading.
• Framing the Story: the TED Radio Hour, a radio programme that discusses ideas based on TED talks, devoted this week’s show to storytelling explored from different perspectives – including a delightful audio story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
  
• Great Poetry by Your Favorite Fiction Writers: The New York Public Library has compiled a list of poetry collection by (mostly) fiction writers, including Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver and Jorge Luis Borges.

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.