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

I’m happy to say that the theme of benevolence and gentle persuasion on TLS has continued. samye88 reports:

Here is another illustrious success of TLS the platform and its friendly nudgers. Many thanks to Yosserian and lljones, I went back to reread Margaret Atwood’s ‘Cat’s Eye’ last week, a book I read more than a decade ago or rather glanced through without realising what a gold mine it really is. As Yosserian rightly said, this book is not as dazzlingly complex like the more famous Alias Grace or Blind Assassin, but it is a tour de force Bildungsroman that plumbs the emotional depths and testifies truthfully the growth journey experienced by every awkward/shy/‘different’ child struggling to fit in at school, find and secure friends and win their approval, paying a staggering price for it along the way...

I’m also pleased to report that even though summer may be waning here in the UK, there’s still enough strength in the sun to influence reading choices. MsCarey says:

Now the sun’s come out (in SE England at any rate) I decided I needed a beach read. Spent some time going through the shelves and emerged with The Corrections. My first Franzen. So far it’s doing the job perfectly. Intelligent, entertaining and very readable, just what I want from a beach read. The only thing puzzling me so far is that at times it feels very familiar and I can’t acount for that. Book wise, I mean. Not that my family are in fact the Lamberts.

Another sun-drenched recommendation came from d1st1ngu1shed:

My Family and other animals, which I have not read before. I’m listening on audio. Most amusing. In the past I have avoided reading certain books simply because they are popular, although on the rare occasions when I’ve enjoyed a very popular book, my interpretation/explanation of it, gets a lot of attention (from those I want to impress!). Perhaps I’m catching up by reading totally unfashionable writers like Durrell, and enjoying the entymology immensely, having been a bee breeder myself in the inter regnum.

Elsewhere, julian6 gives a fine review of Happenstance by Carol Shields:

I have been immersed in the gentle progress of Carol Shields’ book Happenstance. Two parallel books in one giving first the husband’s and the wife’s perspective on a week in their life when circumstances mean they will be apart. Dialogue is used with a sure ear and appreciation of comedy. Shields largely eschews drama and calculated incident and plot for for a gentle unfolding of inner thoughts - a quiet revelation of what a marriage has truly meant.

Another, rather different, meditation on marriage came from SydneyH:

I’ve finished Love In The Time Of Cholera, by Garcia Marquez. Like the other two novels I’ve read by this author, it’s magnificent, and not just because it has my all-time favourite love letter: “very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant”. Unlike One Hundred Years of Solitude, it isn’t set in the Colombian jungle, but in the decaying mansions of a former slave-trading colony on the Caribbean coast. I have just a couple of reservations. One is that I felt the novel wandered a bit towards the end. The other thing I’m unsettled by is that Garcia Marquez has a preoccupation with men who fall in love with teenage girls.

Naturally, this prompted further discussion of the evils of eggplant (aka ‘aubergine’) from nina1414:

I can completely understand not wanting to eat eggplant. I eat it every time I order my favourite meal on Saturday when I’m in town and wish I could remember to say “no aubergines, please”. I would have thought that after 8 years, I’d have come to like it, but I don’t.

More seriously, tamewhale got stuck into the complicated nature of love in Marquez’s famous novel:

My feeling about Love In The Time Of Cholera is that all the forms of love in the book are at least flawed and perhaps repulsive. It starts off with this supposedly grand romantic idea of someone waiting their whole life for one woman but Florentino only “waits” by his own narrow definition. In fact, he cuts a swathe through the women of his city. On the other hand, Fermina’s marriage to Dr Urbino is in part one of convenience and social acceptability but ironically, out of that comes a steady, forgiving love that lasts and weathers many troubles. I’m not saying the latter is preferable but the novel questions how our ideals of romantic love match the realities of loving day to day. I found the part where Florentino seduces a teenager repulsive, but it came as the culmination of a series of increasingly questionable loves, including a couple of infidelities and a woman who will not have anything to do with any man except the one who assaulted her. All of these affairs are relayed to us by Marquez in the same romantic style but underneath made me steadily more and more uneasy. By the time we are repulsed, it is in some sense too late, we are complicit.

Finally, MildGloster has been enjoying Geoff Dyer’s brilliant Out Of Sheer Rage:

Basically Dyer writing a book about trying to write a book about D. H. Lawrence; it’s obsessively digressive whilst being simultaneously obsessed with its subject — not least because it actually is full of rage; heartfelt, silly, pointless, undignified, very, very funny rage.

MildGloster then went on to quote a fine passage “about the act of finishing a book which I liked and which I think is very true”:

I wanted them [Lawrence’s letters] not to end. And yet, at the same time that I was wishing they would not come to an end, I was hurrying through these books because however much you are enjoying a book, however much you want it never to end, you are always eager for it to end. However much you are enjoying a book you are always flicking to the end, counting to see how many pages are left, looking forward to the time when you can put the book down and have done with it. At the back of our minds, however much we are enjoying a book, we come to the end of it and some little voice is always saying, ‘Thank Christ for that!’

I sometimes even get the same feeling when reading articles. (Although the end of one of my own is probably not the best place to admit to that...)

Interesting links about books and reading

• Italian 18-year-olds are to be given €500 each to encourage “cultural consumption.”
  
• An interesting new sport: synchronised shelving.
• An interesting article about World of Books the biggest book industry player you’ve never heard about - and one of the few companies that actually makes money from books.

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