After a week's break, TLS is back. Here's our customary a roundup of the books you were reading last week and what you thought of them:
DanHolloway:
I have just finished Adelle Stripe's third solo poetry collection, Dark Corners of the Land. Rooted in her native Yorkshire, this is nature poetry but not as we usually see it in the UK (somewhat more like the dark writing of the land in Irish writers like Conor McPherson). Both beautifully evocative and deeply unsettling, it is a book that balances the tension of feeling totally rooted in a place that one both loves and is disgusted by, and feeling utterly adrift in the world.
I halfway through The Twelve by Justin Cronin and yes, it's just as infuriating with its time-line as the Passage was. Still compelling reading, though.
I'm currently slaloming in and out of Wallace Stegner's and Saul Bellow's so-called 'lesser works' - just finished Bellow's, A Theft, and have just begun Stegner's, Recapitulation. The pure pleasure of being in such sure hands - each page, whether quiet or dazzling - sheer quality. In literary terms, with them, I feel as secure as if I were again a child, sleeping on my father's tummy.
Well I began re-reading Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor..' (shamefully, for the 3rd time) after reading an article on the Guardian about genre and whether it matters; because I'm a bit of a war nerd I hunkered down and tried desperately to get into Tim O'Brien's 'If I Die in a Combat Zone' after I'd finished 'Despatches' by Michael Herr but I find it - if I'm honest - a little dull, it's on hiatus; I'm quite happy and thoroughly enjoying Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom' (the newest book I'm reading at 2 years old) and hated every minute of the most recent novel I finished James Frey's 'Bright Shiny Morning'. It's been out a long while but if you stumble across it, don't bother. Rather irritating and prose and half-baked stories that are as cliche as.. er.. sliced bread.
Tell us what you're reading at the moment in the thread below, or if you've an idea for something we should cover on the site, please let us know.
Here's a list of some of the books we'll be writing about and reviewing this week with the usual caveat that it's of course subject to last minute changes.
Non fiction
• How Music Works by David Bryne
• A World at War by Taylor Downing
• The Influencing Machine by Mike Jay
• The Eagle Unbowed by H Kochanski
• The Million Death Quake by R Musson
• Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
• Dickens Scandal by Michael Slater
• Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-doctors in Victorian England by Sarah Wise
• Rod by Rod Stewart
Fiction
• Astray by Emma Donoghue
• Two Brothers by Ben Elton
• Dear Life by Alice Munro
• The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally