Welcome to this week’s roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Let’s start with a satisfied reader. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst has worked a treat for lonelybloomer:
Exquisite writing, brilliant rendering of class/racial/sexual tensions in 1980s Britain, but, far from being political, [a] beautifully personal and touching book about love. I can’t believe I spent so many years without reading it. So nice when it happens …
It’s 2017, so we should also have some rage. David Vann’s Bright Air Black has pushed the right buttons for allworthy:
Easily the best book that uses Greek myths (here Medea) that I’ve read. Loaded with anger. Believable how she would have taken that first step and then no turning back. Powerless as a woman otherwise. Not an easy read but very accomplished and well researched.
In non-fiction, Alexia_R has been investigating Jessa Crispin’s The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats And Ex-countries:
Mixed Feelings about this one. So the rough premise is that book blogger Crispin is feeling suicidal but instead of doing away with herself, decides to totally shake up her life by moving to Europe and musing on various underrated writers and arty types. Fine. Let me say right now that if you’re going to find extended sidetracks on the author’s on-off relationship with a married man indulgent and annoying, it’s probably not the book for you. But Crispin is honest and she can write.
As to why the book is called The Dead Ladies Project when not all its subjects are women – I have no idea. But there are some fascinating stories in there, in particular that of Claude Cahun, the surrealist lesbian who, along with her partner, resisted the Nazi occupation of Jersey.
And julian6 provides a fascinating report on Gerald Brenan’s South from Granada, a book about the author’s time in the Alpujarra, southern Spain, the 1920s:
Astonishing for its clear, very undemonstrative reportage, which takes in landscape, customs, beliefs and above all the characters of the region. At the time it was a very remote and backward place – perhaps he saw it as a refuge from the world after the horrors of the western front. It is hard to say, because there is such an absence in Brenan’s writing – he subdues himself to concentrate his gaze on the subjects around him. What you get is life without fake adornments. It is up to the reader to be either engaged by this or to feel a cold, sometimes perhaps rather forbidding, awareness of human life stripped down to essentials, lived close to the bone
Finally, WormelowTump has just finished Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett (“on the back of the Guardian article a couple of weeks ago”):
I must admit, for the first 70 pages or so I had to fight the urge to give up: there were so many archaic references I didn’t get, vernacular words I had never come across, and (crucially) I felt that Dunnett was withholding information that would have made things a lot clearer. However, once I let myself go wherever she wanted to take me, and stopped worrying that there were vital clues that I was missing, I fell more and more in love with the book. I ended up reading into the early hours of a night where I really could have done with the sleep. If anyone is toying with the novel, I really do recommend it (and I have asked for more Dunnett books for Christmas!)
See! It’s (nearly) always worth persevering...
Interesting links about books and reading
- Mark Thomson is enlightening on the sources of Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms.
- The Paris Review weighs in on the art of monstrous men.
- Historian Simon Winchester explains how the great Jan Morris changed his life.
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 lives 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!
