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

It’s been a week for discovering classic books. Some of them lost, some of them just, somehow, missed - as VelmaNebraska explains:

Feeling like I stumbled to the table way after all the other guests (just before pudding was served), this week I finished reading David Mitchell’s The Cloud Atlas. Ay Caramba, that man can write - or perhaps I mean plot. Although the individual layers were more or less satisfying on their own (my favourite sections featured Luisa Rey, but then I’m partial to a bit of go-girl-70s-paranoid-thriller), it was the way they fit together like a matryoshka doll that kept me delighted.

A “mesmerising tale of a young man learning to fly a Tiger Moth as giraffes ran wild below,” has recently impressed laidbackviews. It had unexpected provenance: the book was called Going Solo “and the young man was Roald Dahl”.

What a stunning piece of short autobiography that is. Just 200 pages or so, from those early days in East Africa, to war breaking out, joining up and learning to fly. Onwards to Greece, a handful of Hurricanes against what seemed to be entire Luftwaffe, and a pilot with only a few hours in a Tiger Moth in his log book. Astonishing stuff.

Then came Palestine, a landing strip in an olive grove and orphan refugee children, thoughts of a new state. The homecoming’s not bad either, mother and sisters having walked out of ruins and bought a wee pad in the country, as our hero didn’t then know.

Roald Dahl; there’s much more to him than you might think. Loved it.

Those who have read JG Farrell will understand why R042 isn’t at all surprised by the quality of his books - but this warm appreciation is still worth enjoying:

I’m probably around a third of the way through The Singapore Grip and it’s honestly hard to say how I could possibly rate Farrell’s three Empire novels in any kind of order. They’re all incredible.

The Singapore Grip is probably the funniest of the three, because its cast are almost entirely appalling people who you really should and do hate - which makes their steady, oblivious drift towards inevitable tragedy all the, if not sweeter, more acceptable. The Siege of Krishnapur played with your moral compass, I feel, putting a number of innocents guilty by association in peril brought about by their imperialist relatives. Less so in Singapore, where one feels the colonial attitudes are much more universally held and deeply ingrained.

More obscure, but also important is Emanuel Litvinoff’s Journey Through a Small Planet, as LeoToadstool explains:

[It is a] memoir of growing up in the East End of London when it was a still very much a Jewish ghetto, when Yiddish was the language of the streets whose denizens spoke of Odessa and Warsaw “as if they were neighbouring suburbs.” Once a well-read novelist and poet, Litvinoff, who died at the age of 96 in 2008, is almost completely unheard of today. My Penguin reissue of Journey Through a Small Planet seeks to remedy that, by appending the original text (published in the early 70s) with notes and other supplementary material – the most substantial of which is a sumptuous introduction by Litvinoff’s friend Patrick Wright, who recounts a tour they took of the East End in the 90s: despite the changes in architecture and demographics, Litvinoff retains an intimate knowledge of the streets that shaped him.

Finally, TotaalWolf recommends The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère, which has recently been republished:

Carrère unravels the true life story behind a gruesome murder with immense skill and adds some metafictional elements (which work in this instance) to writing as he wrestles with how to present the protagonists and frame the frankly bizarre back story of the murderer. You can understand why Carrère is so highly regarded - he seems to be a master of using factual happenings to explore themes and issues more suited typically suited to fiction.

Fascinating.

Interesting links about books and reading

• Umberto Eco on Ur-fascism and our duty to “uncover it”.
  
• The wonderful Jan Morris talks about the USA.
• Chris Kraus on Kathy Acker’s final year.
• John Lanchester is worried about Facebook.
• TLS regular safereturndoubtful is cycling down the USA and reading as he goes.

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!