Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week. With the state of the news in the world at the moment, we can all be forgiven for seeking some escapist reading – and Hilaris is definitely going big this month:

At least three of you - paulburns, WebberExpat and katcalls – are reading China Mieville’s Kraken; paulburns says:

Its Harry Potter on steroids and hallucinogens... Its all Mievelle of course, but vaguely Lovecraftian and Clive Barkerish. A wonderful book so far.

Kemster finished Despair by Vladimir Nabokov and loved it:

It’s just so disdainful and contemptuous and downright nasty. This tales HH (Hermann Hermann) is an even bigger misanthrope than Lolita’s (Humbert Humbert) and even more devious but he’s no less funny for it.

As they are starting Nabokov’s Pale Fire next, LeoToadstool has a tip for all in the same boat:

If you’ve got one of the old Penguin paperback editions, I would advise against reading Mary McCarthy’s “introductory essay” before you start reading the book, as it is spoiler-ific, and really should not have been titled as such (it is good to see such pieces starting to be published as afterwords as opposed to “introductions”).

roadwaterlady is reading Jessie Burton’s latest book, The Muse:

Hmmmm... Not sure about this one. For ages I found the characters flat and I could not care about them, nearly abandoning the book. But it started to pick up over half-way through and the early Spanish Civil War caught my interest. The story gathers strength and while I never warmed to the people in it, the book has some merit.

iamSHERLOCKED has been reading Daphne du Maurier’s short stories:

Having finished Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds and Other Stories,’ I’ve ventured for ‘The Breaking Point: Short Stories’ to read for the next few days. I quite enjoy short stories, I think they can be full of impact and surprises, and often leaves you wanting more, which is all part of the fun... I still don’t trust birds after reading that story.

Finally, let’s end on a lovely note – PatLux’s account of selling books at a stall in Luxembourg:

Today I was proud to be a British European book lover. I took a stall at a fete in my Luxembourg neighborhood where I sold some of my English books bought at charity shops. One Estonian woman bought Chris Cleave’s INCENDIARY (I had read it and loved it) and her friend opted for David Mitchell’s THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET (I had given it up after a few pages). They immediately lay down under a tree on the grass in the sun behind my stall and immersed themselves in the books. A Spanish woman who had lived in Edinburgh talked with me who longs to live there about the fact that she had read all of Rankin’s Rebus novels. Hence she didn’t buy the one I had read last week and was selling but she did pay a euro for one of my Henning Mankell mysteries that she hadn’t yet read. I also chatted at my stall in a mix of English and French with an Albanian teenager who loves learning English via watching films and listening to music. I gave her my three unread Pullman HIS DARK MATERIALS books for a euro and her delight was eminently visible. While buying three of my books a fellow Brit convinced a Frenchman to buy from me Jeanette Winterson’s astounding WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL? and she told him it might very well change his life. I also observed him sitting under a different tree reading the opening pages. A glorious European simple sunny summer Saturday with face-to-face intercultural communication engendered by books in paper format. Blissful.

As L8_Chris said: “Lovely. It’s like we’re part of the same continent!”

Interesting links about books and reading

• Aleksander Hemon on the Euros: the wonderful Hemon has been writing the occasional recap of his time watching the 2016 Euros for Slate; how often do you get football coverage that starts with description like this?: “I watched Thursday night’s game between France and Germany in a biker’s bistro... where the Croatian-born bartender actually growled at me when I asked for some water. It was fucking great.”
  
• How the French reread Proust: according to Lit Hub’s Laure Murat “there are three kinds of people and they all reread Proust”. An exploration of whether Proust could be considered France’s national writer.
• Some recommended summer reads – in poem form: while poet Brian Bliston was not asked to contribute to the Guardian’s summer reading guide, he has helpfully written his up – as a poem on Twitter. Thank you Brian.

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.

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. Happy reading!