Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
“I’ve had a bit of a reading glitch the past number of weeks and had been unable to make much headway with whatever I picked up,” says captainlego. But Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and a trip to Paris solved the problem:
I thoroughly enjoyed his recollections of his time in Paris in the early to mid 1920s. As luck would have it I was staying in the 5th Arrondissement, which is where he mainly lived during this period; so it was wonderful to be walking the same streets and stopping off in the same cafes.
El Doctorow’s classic New York novel The Waterworks has gripped safereturndoubtful:
New York in 1872 has grown to a population of almost a million. A freelance journalist goes missing after telling his editor that he just seen his own father, who died the year before, though he had no sort of relationship with him, a man who had earned his fortune running slave boats along the Atlantic Coast. Always there is the spectre of corruption, of bribery and extortion headed by the gangster Boss Tweed. As gripping as the plot is, NY itself is very much the star of the show, a place imprisoned in thuggish corruption, where the police conspire with, rather than against, crime, a maze of alleyways crawling with the street-urchins who survive on the city’s garbage, darting beneath the wheels of carriages, acting as newspaper-sellers, and loitering at the edge of squalid saloons. It is brought wonderfully to life in his writing.
Meanwhile, nina1414 takes us to the Dodecanese with Lawrence Durrell and his Reflections On A Marine Venus: A Companion To The Landscape of Rhodes:
The best bits were about Durrell and his companions and life on the island of Rhodes when he was sent there in May 1945. They were delightful. My favourite phrase was “ferociously unshaven gentlemen”. I don’t know why - but I was taken by that.
At the end, there is a calendar of flowers and saints. And a footnote acknowledges the help of Dr Theodore Stephanides - the Theodore of Corfu, I assume. For some silly reason, it made me happy to see his name. He was such a nice character in the Gerald Durrell books and, from what I can gather, well respected by his fellow Greeks as an academic.
The Devil’s Diary by Patrick McGinley has delighted BaddHamster:
Set in Donegal in the 1980s it tells of strange goings on in a seaside town. A priest disapproves of modernity and the introduction of a cash economy. His mysterious brother returns from overseas and may or may not be a little mad. And there’s something shady about their childhood days. Beautifully written, you can practically smell the turf fires and the seaspray and a creepy plot that threatens horror with every turn of the page. I’d never read McGinley before, but I’m delighted to make his acquaintance now and roam the spooky hills after dark where all manner of shenanigans may be transpiring, just out of sight.
ID583532 “wasn’t looking forward” to reading Welcome to Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo, “but I did and how glad I am that I did”:
It was a terrific read! I loved the detail and vibrancy of the description of life in the city of Lagos, the delta and rural regions. The characterisation was excellent and the dynamics of the relationships engaging and convincing. There was no happy ending as such (and how could there be?), but the ending was largely positive and the message hopeful.
This year’s Man Booker Prize International winner, Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi, has intrigued Rex Bowan:
It started by reminding me of The Waves but by the end, with the village, the confusing shifts in perspective, the barrage of history and madness revealed at the end of the book, it brought Faulkner to mind even more. I was pleased to read something experimental but I didn’t feel like my understanding or knowledge of Oman grew as a result of reading it.
Finally, Vicc is “slowly reading” The Narrow Road to the Interior by Matsuo Bashō translated by Sam Hamill:
Such a joy. A few words painting wonderful pictures of Japan in the 17th century. Calming and serene with beautiful haiku. Even the difficulties and sadness are something Bashō accepts:
Through nine hellish days of heat and rain, all my old maladies tormenting me again, feverish and weak, I could not write.
Altair meets Vega
tomorrow - Tanabata -
already the night is changedWhat an antidote to the world of today.
That does indeed sound like a tonic.
Interesting links about books and reading
“I’ve never met anybody who hated as many people as Lillian Ross did,” writes Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review Of Books.
Carolyne Larrington on the Poetic Edda and our renewed relationship with Norse myth.
Alexis De Veaux on the creation of the Stonewall story.
Colson Whitehead is on the cover of Time Magazine.
Marie Curie’s notebooks: fascinating, world-changing and still dangerous.
If you’re on Instagram, now you can share your reads with us: simply tag your posts with the hashtag #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection in this blog. Happy reading!
