Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

Lina Sagaral Reyes is re-reading Joan Didion’s Democracy:

I exhumed Didion’s Democracy, today and began re-reading it from its last page, where, Didion writes on the third paragraph: “ A year ago when I was in London the Guardian ran a piece about Southeast Asian refugees, and Inez was quoted...” Published in 1984, I bought this hardbound copy in 1998 for P75 (barely GBP1) from a bookshop called Bookshop.

We saw an interesting discussion about Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Lila. conedison said:

Lila’s a novel immersed in Christian theology. I’ve always believed that if someone’s religion makes them a better, more decent human being, then their faith is of great value, but if it doesn’t, then it’s worthless. Does Marilynne Robinson’s Christianity make her a better person? I don’t know. What I do know is that she’s written a beautiful novel with a particular gift for paring her words down to their emotional essence.

Lila ostensibly takes place in 1940s Iowa, but I so often felt that Robinson’s characters were inhabiting an 1880s world. There was almost nothing 20th century about their lives. The only thing that actually bothered me, though, was the book’s sequential nature. I found Robinson’s use of intermittent flashbacks diminished the force of her narrative. Once Lila finds sanctuary, looking back at her harsh past no longer retains the same dread, the same power ... How could it? No matter. Marilynne Robinson is a magnificent stylist whose sentences often carry the force of blows to your heart.

TimHannigan shared:

In the days before 25th December I found myself craving a chunky piece of fiction that would have me turning pages, but wouldn’t make me feel like I’d binged on junk food. I’m getting towards the bottom of the John le Carré barrel, but that was where I immediately thought to turn. Happily and fortuitously, however, my mum pressed a book on me that had been pressed on her by a friend, and it did the job perfectly …

I had never heard of Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, despite the fact it was made into a movie. But it was really good – a kind of mash-up of the best in American fiction, from courtroom drama and police procedural to frontier epic, and with a peculiar hint of long-form narrative journalism a la In Cold Blood. And then, within all that, some intense journeys into human emotion. Oh, and did I mention the very fine prose? A great Christmas read.

Then on Christmas Day I wanted a quick hit, a single short story. So I got down the mighty Junot Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her, one of my favourite reads of the last year or so. I meant only to read the first one, but it’s short, and they are so, so, so good, so I ended up chomping through the whole thing. Man’s a bone fide genius, I’d say.

MsCarey loved “pretty much everything” about The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber:

It has plot, character, landscape, religion, dystopia and funny little aliens. But what I loved most of all was the sheer storytelling skill. It’s hard to explain the sense I had that Faber was revealing his tale word by word and ensuring that I was being given each word at precisely the right moment. It’s a wonderful book.

Over on Twitter, Charlotte Cross revealed her reading tower:

LeoToadstool finished Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North before the old year was out and, in spite of a good start, was left disappointed:

The narrative suffers from severe structural flaws which, to my mind, prevent it from becoming the masterpiece hailed by the Booker judges. The POW scenes of Australian soldiers slaving on the Burma Railway are stark, harrowing and brilliantly evoked. If Flanagan had made the soldiers’ experiences on “the Line” the sole, or major, focus of his narrative, it would have been a much better novel. Instead, we are treated to cliché-ridden middle/old-age male angst, an insipid romance subplot (it is no surprise that one scene was up for the Bad Sex in Fiction award), melodramatic set pieces (some of which hinge on unlikely coincidences) and a prose style in love with its own grandiloquence. To top it off, plot threads are tied up much too quickly and neatly at the end, by which time I hardly bothered with the book or its characters anyway. So you can probably guess which book turned out to be my biggest disappointment in reading of 2014.

goodyorkshirelass talked of the TLS addiction:

Not so long ago I delighted in writing regularly to family and friends. You remember letters, pen applied to paper or those art cards many of us stationery obsessives accumulate. They were overtaken by chatty, informative emails, often to different recipients, making full use of cut and paste, excising baffling references to Auntie Gertie or Uncle Bill that would reveal that the communications weren’t quite so personal as they first appeared.

Now. Now. Pen, paper, cards, all cast aside, information for family and friends of many years fails to make it to the the keypad. I hover over this site, trawling for ever more books to add to the TBR. More, more, give me more. Is there a cure? I fear not.

And finally, we enjoyed a subthread about writing – or not – on books, which we recommend going back to. As usual, there were really varied and strongly felt views on the subject – allow us to point to this relatively recent open thread, and gallery, we did on this practice.

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.

And, as always, if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see us covering beyond TLS, do let us know.