Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, starting with talk of book-of-the-moment A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara:
roxanne12345 said:
I’m rereading this week – comfort books, including Jennings books from childhood. I finished A Little Life which is as brilliant as everyone says it is, but it was so emotionally draining I need a break from anything else too serious.
But we love a good debate in this column and were delighted to see Isabelle Leinster expressing a different reaction:
I’m about half way through A Little Life and I’m not exactly sure how I feel about it. It feels very similar to Donna Tartt’s writing style which is no bad thing, but I am not being sucked in and gripped by it. I’m becoming a little impatient with Jude and really it’s hard to imagine such a damaged man being a top flight litigation lawyer. Maybe it’s just me but not loving the book the way I thought I would.
WebberExpat is about halfway through George Gissing’s New Grub Street:
... and I’m finding it impressive. I’d never much heard of Gissing before lurking here in the TLS section, but I’m pleasantly surprised by him. He seems to write real people as opposed to flimsy characterizations, and find it hard to universally like or loathe either of his protagonists, which, for me, is a sign of lazy writing. His writing echoes quite a bit Zola’s without the benefit of the latter’s stunning descriptions of turn-of-the-century Paris. He also doesn’t quite to be quite so much doom and gloom as Zola, but who knows? I find Gissing so far surprising in that every plot point doesn’t quite seem to be telegraphed six chapters ahead of time. I seem to have a real affinity for the Naturalists, from Hardy to Zola and now Gissing, one after the other has taken a hold of me. I may need to toss in a light read after this one though. We’ll see how it wraps up.
julian6 has fallen in love with VS Naipaul - or at least with the landscapes he describes:
VS Naipaul revisits India, the land of his family’s origins in An Area of Darkness – he stays as guest and in a surreal sense as semi-proprietor in a strange hotel on the Dal Lake near Srinagar. I am dumbfounded by his exuberant lyrical descriptions – the boundless verbal dexterity caressing the landscapes he describes revealed in all their sensual colour. I could follow this guide to the ends of the earth and never cast one lingering look behind.
tyorkshiretealass has been catching up:
With access to the Internet finally restored, the first thing I downloaded to my Kindle was The Passage by Justin Cronin. I’d read about a fifth of it when I was backpacking in Australia a couple of years ago, but had never really got into it and then circumstances conspired so we had to leave it in Darwin, but it was something I always thought I’d go back to. Currently about a third of the way through this time and enjoying it a lot – it moves at a cracking pace and, despite the fact that it’s a hefty book (700-odd pages) so far none of it feels like padding or like you’re not getting to know the characters, even those who only appear briefly.
Interesting links about books and reading
- A Visual Timeline of the Future Based on Famous Fiction: future events as predicted by famous novels, on Brain Pickings.
- Saying Goodbye to a Secret Bookstore: “As word got around of the eviction, the crowds swelled. Brazenhead was on borrowed time, and no one knew how much.” On the New Yorker.
- Sylvia Plath’s 10 Back to School Commandments (1953): a recovered note-to-self type letter from the poet to herself with damn good advice. On Open Culture
- New York Review of Books Fills a Niche by Reviving Forgotten Works: Swelter recommends this New York Times piece on the US publishers “of such TLS favourites as Stoner and Life and Fate.”
- Lit as Last Bastion: Natalka Sniadanko on Supression, Solidarity and Language in Ukraine: a piece on the Ukranian writing life, on Electric Literature.
- Writers and their cats: for those of you who are Spanish speakers, this piece on Mexican site Sin Embargo goes through the cat friendships of authors like Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges and Ernest Hemingway. The pictures are worth it in themselves.
If you’re on Instagram and a book lover, chances are you’re already sharing beautiful pictures of books you are reading, “shelfies” or all kinds of still lifes with books as protagonists. Now, you can share your reads with us on the mobile photography platform – simply tag your pictures there with #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection here.
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.
