Welcome to this week’s blog – and Happy New Year! Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

Here’s a tip for living courtesy of goodyorkshirelass:

The remarkable Diana Athill, on reaching 100, asked by by Jim Naughtie what keeps her cheerful, replied firmly, “books”.

On the subject of swagger, VelmaNebraska has been reading The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein:

At first I was mainly bemused or amused by her chutzpah - especially the way she always refers to herself in the third person as either ‘Gertrude Stein’ or ‘Miss Stein’ and pronounces on her fabulousness (an example: “The young often when they have learnt all they can learn accuse her of an inordinate pride. She says yes of course. She realises that in english literature in her time she is the only one. She has always known it and now she says it.”) But slowly I made my way beyond the gossip and rather marvellous self promotion, into the rhythm of her sentences and paragraphs (as Miss Stein learned from listening to her poodle lapping water, “paragraphs are emotional and sentences are not”), and found great joy in the way she is able to create meaning with vagueness (example: “This worked very well at first but finally did not work well”).

Since it’s still just about Christmas, let’s take a Dickens recommendation from paulburns, who has been reading the mighty Nicholas Nickleby:

One of my favourite Dickens despite its sixth chapter where he runs out of story for the second number and pads it out with two of his worst short stories. It has some of his most dastardly villains - the usurer, Ralph Nickleby; the Squeers family; the odious and ancient Arthur Gride; and the appalling Sir Mulberry Hawk. Then of course there is the hero Nicholas himself, who really is a bit of a prig, and amply demonstrates the oppressiveness of Victorian era patriarchy. Kate Nickleby, another of Dickens’s feisty heroines, despite her temporarily obeying Nicholas’s forbidding her to marry above her station. (The evils of the patriarchy will have you sighing all the way through this novel.) The annoying Mrs. Nickleby, probably the first of the foolish middle-aged mothers who reach their apogee in Mrs. Chuzzlewit. And of course the wonderful, heart-wrenching Smike.

On a rather different note, Swelter recommends a novel approaching its 50th anniversary in 2018, and still sounding unlike anything else:

Ratman’s Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert is told as a series of undated notebook entries by an unnamed downwardly mobile young clerk who befriends and trains a family of rats that eventually grows into a small rodent army that he uses as an instrument of crime and personal revenge. Once you accept the premise, the diary-like format makes for a headlong read with some suspenseful set pieces. There are echoes of Hamlet and revenge drama, as well as enough occasional allusions to class conflict and economic injustice to allow the reader so inclined to see the rats and their leader as a revolution of the downtrodden.

Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong has pleased LLCoolJ:

Thirty-year-old Ruth, recently ‘unengaged’ and taking stock of how she got to where she’s at so far, returns home to help care for her father as he slips further and further into the bogs of dementia. It was just the right combination of ‘froth and fribble’ with a sting – often laugh-out-loud hilarious, often heartbreakingly poignant. I haven’t spotted any mention of whether Khong has personal experience with dementia sufferers, but she must. She captures the ludic nature of the day-to-day business of caregiving brilliantly. I loved it.

Finally, Jai R. Emmett reports on Conquest Of The Useless, director Werner Herzog’s reflections on creating his classic film Fitzcarraldo:

The man can really take you places whether in film, writing or simply speaking about his passions and his sublime pessimism.

Sublime pessimism might just be the perfect place to wrap up on 2017. But here’s to the New Year. Let’s hope it’s a good one.

Interesting links about books and reading

• Francis Ford Coppola tells the New York Times what he’s been reading.
• Charles Dickens didn’t invent Christmas after all.
• The Ayn Rand institute has given away four million books. This is not a good thing.
• “It’s for Shakespeare to penetrate the heart of a prince, and for me to study his cuff buttons.” Hilary Mantel on royalty from the LRB archive.

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!