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

Oranje14 expressed joy for Ali Smith’s writing in a rather cheerful way:

Really enjoying The Accidental by Ali Smith. One of the passages in the book was so well written I wanted to shout out and share it with everyone on the bus. But I didn’t.

VelmaNebraska shared:

This week I was stunned by the gorgeous, unblinking precision of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays. It’s a book that plunges straight into the louche world of California in the early 1970s, teasing you with unspoken gaps that seem slight but dig deep. I actually felt woozy while reading it. Amazing.

laurenraeedwards is enjoying Night and Day:

I picked this book up after seeing it on one of those lists of fiction titles that have a political bent - one of the characters is a campaigner for votes for women. I’m currently two thirds of the way through and desperate for the pace of the story to quicken. Woolf obviously writes beautifully but a whole page can be devoted to accessing someone’s bearing or interpreting a slightly haughty look. Progress in the relationship between the three central characters is therefore slow. However it is an enjoyable, if slightly trying read, and the dated references to catching the “omnibus” on the Strand are quite charming. I don’t feel particularly connected to the characters - they aren’t particularly sympathetic - but I am looking forward to seeing what choices they do, eventually, make.

Robert Rudolph shared:

Re-reading Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which I found in its graphic novel adaptation a few weeks ago. A lot of noir thriller along with the science fiction. The scene where the three fugitives take refuge in the almost abandoned apartment complex deserves the same praise that Chandler gave to Hammet: “he wrote scenes that never seemed to have been written before.” (The graphic series has new illustrations but only 1960s Dick prose, and has a number of short essays by writers who knew Dick or were influenced by him. A few odd loose ends, though.

doctorwalex is reading a “reluctantly acknowledged masterpiece”:

SnowyJohn is taking Robert McFarlane’s The Old Ways with him on holidays, which prompted a discussion about the writer. TimHannigan said:

I’ve read all three of Macfarlane’s books, and for me it’s The Wild Places which is, in MsCarey’s words, the real stunner. I might even go so far as to say that it approaches Kathleen Jamie’s dizzying heights.

Mountains of the Mind was also great, but not as spectacular. But The Old Ways had some big problems as far as I was concerned. It was, without doubt, beautifully written throughout, with no end of exquisite set-pieces.

But following a theme from past weeks on TLS, it was a book crying out for an editor - not this time an editor of the copy-checking, or even general-tightening-up-of-the-narrative variety, but a proper arse-kicking developmental editor, thundering in at a very early stage and to give Macfarlane a whipping he wouldn’t forget.

Time to tackle Auden for caminoamigo:

We enjoyed many sub-threads last week, from long books and e-readers to bookmarks .

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.