Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Let’s start with a rush of enthusiasm from WildIrish, who has been reading A Terrible Country by Keith Gessen:
Brilliant! Impeccable writing that is Gessen’s own-tragic-lighthearted-humorous-yet-wise-beyond-his-years-voice; instantly relatable. Why have I never heard of this amazing book? This is one of those rare novels that I try to read slowly because it’s so good that I wish it would never end. It still whips by at terrifying speeds and cannot be put down. This book has literally attached itself to my hand…
Sadly, I am nearing the end of this truly marvellous novel. All I can say is, if you don’t read A Terrible Country, you will have missed out on one of the finest books this year … I would hug this Writer. And I’m NOT a touchy person at all.
Tessa Hadley’s Bad Dreams has had a more muted (but still significant) impact on allworthy:
Tessa Hadley’s short story collection Bad Dreams is quietly impressing me. Stories pack a punch and a great deal said in little space. Surprise you too.
The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton has impressed Magrat123:
It is a remarkably accomplished debut novel, a real tragical romance; both it and the faithful, sumptuously realised TV version had me reaching for the tissues. Burton has done a lot of research – which she details in the nowadays obligatory endnotes – but it is worn lightly and the reader is never subjected to expository lumps.
Vesca recommends Hawthorn and Child by Keith Ridgway – so long as it isn’t habit forming:
I’ve been trying to get through (and rid of) some of the unread books on my shelves lately, so started with Hawthorn and Child by Keith Ridgway, which I went into expecting a supernatural detective story, and finished with something less absurd but much more actually mad. Things connect, obliquely, nothing is really resolved, everyone’s not ok, and horrible things happen. I would recommend it but I wouldn’t want this to be the kind of thing I read all the time.
Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox is a book that “has it all”, says Carmen212:
I love this book. It tickles my code nerd. It was Alice Kober who made all the breakthroughs but she died young and her work was coopted. Fascinating story: Kober was a brilliant woman and devoted decades to breaking the code. She came so close. I love the intricacies of code-breaking … Linguistics, history, cryptology - has it all!
Dennis89 has just finished Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald:
A rather dark and brooding semi-autobiographical novel set in the 1920’s concerning the background, journey and ultimate collapse of a brittle yet somewhat essential marriage between a young psychiatrist and his wealthy though troubled wife.
I particularly enjoyed the Triptych structure of the novel set in a non-chronological order … just as one part was starting to become a slight drag the next instalment injected some much needed depth and acceleration to the story. I felt the compression and elongation of timescales within the novel was a literary trick well used. An enjoyable read in a similar vein to The Great Gatsby and ideal as a sweltering summer escape!
Finally – and still on the subject of the heatwave – Enrique Vila-Matas’s Vampire in Love “deserves a better write up that I can manage this evening (it’s hot, I’m tired),” says dothebathosphere:
It’s a collection of 19 short stories spanning Vila-Matas’s career (a “greatest hits” I suppose rather than thematic collection). A few are slight (just a couple of pages) but most are substantial, and two are absolutely note perfect and mini masterpieces (A Permanent Home & The Boy on the Swing).
Tonally it’s a bit sharper than the last Vila-Matas I read (The Illogic of Kassel), in that book I was a worried that Vila-Matas was being a bit too cute but here the narrators are anything but (octogenarians waiting for their eldest offspring to die, rude and drunk house guests, down at heal and spectacularly overweight actors...), yet often times they achieve what I’ll coin as a “curmudgeon sublime”. Most excellent.
Curmudgeon sublime! Sounds fantastic.
Interesting links about books and reading
Here’s the winner of this year’s Hemingway look-alike competition.
Slate recommend 100 books for ambitious teenagers to devour this summer.
Karin Slaughter killed a character with antifreeze; Peter Swanson used cashews and a missing EpiPen: inside the devious minds of thriller writers.
A system for spotting fake reviews is getting bad (fake) reviews and this it kind of feels like a metaphor for everything.
In the New Yorker, Jill Lepore says that Herman Melville “wrote most of Moby-Dick on land, in a valley, on a farm, in a house a-dither with his wife, his sisters, and his mother.”
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!
