Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Let’s start with some immortal classics. The first volume of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit has won over goldgato:
Every time I begin a Dickens book, I always shuffle around and decide I will not like it. And then, of course, I can’t stop reading. This is a sooty type of book, full of darkness and destitution. While none of the characters wowed me, the wonderful writing kept me enthralled. Eagerly looking forward to the second volume (“Riches”). Time shall show us.
AlpineJoe has just finished Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen by PG Wodehouse “for about the seventh or eighth time”:
Wonderful, wonderful book, the key of which is a cat that is friends with a horse, who is due to race soon. Cue the usual dramas – an overbearing aunt with money on the rival horse, a woman who gets accidentally engaged to Bertie Wooster, her true love, several others and a personal favourite of mine, Major Plank, and his anecdotes about Equatorial Africa.
If she ever turned into a werewolf, it would be one of those jolly breezy werewolves whom it is a pleasure to know.
And ajo1 recommends Meditations by Marcus Aurelius:
In an age where the lunatics have definitely taken over the asylum it behoves one to take a mental stand against the prevailing insanity and say enough is enough. Stoic thought does provide a bulwark against the constant blitz of insipid political news that currently is engulfing the world and enables one to find focus and space to concentrate on the important issues of human existence.
Elsewhere, Carmen212 has taken important lessons from Lethal Warriors by David Phillips:
It’s everything you wanted to know about PTSD. Harrowing is too benign a word … It’s like the brainwashing of The Manchurian Candidate. These Army infantry guys have their brains changed. They are trained to react in an instant – loud noise shoot, slamming door shoot. They are totally altered human beings, their brains are defective and it happens in all wars in all times. Even back to Homer. They come home after two or three or four! deployments. WW2 had half a million GIs returned stateside in 1942 because of “shell shock” ... you can see why I couldn’t stop reading.
Bloodbrothers, a 1970s novel by Richard Price, has done the business for julian6:
He has a wonderful ear for the dialogue of urban America. It is proving to be an absorbing, funny and sometimes quite searing book. Never affected or attention seeking just interested in its subjects and sympathetic to their plight.
Finally, another classic. Gretsch83 has just read Puckoon by Spike Milligan:
A great big, hilarious, fantastic mess of a novel which I loved twenty years ago and just as much this time. As with Spike’s TV output, it’s incredible how much his written work so clearly inspired many that came behind him.
Interesting links about books and reading
- Bacon and cheese bookmarks: it really happened.
- More proof that the world is broken: there is an Amazon category for Single Women Fiction.
- Watching books burn with the director of the new Fahrenheit 451 TV series.
- The long history of the maternity manual.
If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, or film your own book review, please do. Click the brown 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!
