Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including a reader tackling Hamlet for the first time, having somehow managed to avoid spoilers, an eye-opening Zimbabwean novel, great women writers to read in translation and good end-of-summer reads with a certain Hollywood spirit.

Unsure what to read next, Swelter decided Jaws by Peter Benchley would be a “good, not too demanding end-of-summer choice”. However...

I tend to buy books which were the basis for movies I like and I was sure I had an old paperback copy I’d picked up somewhere for a quarter or fifty cents. The book was not on my shelves, but in alphabetic proximity to Benchley, Peter was Bemelmans, Ludwig, a very old and decrepit paperback of Dirty Eddie, a comic novel from 1947 about the making of a Hollywood musical comedy which ends up starring a pig, the titular Dirty Eddie. It’s a very funny book; besides coming up with comic situations, Bemelmans inserts humour into passages of exposition, such as his description of the studio president. This book would appeal to fans of the movies Sunset Boulevard and Barton Fink, both of which I suspect may have been influenced by the novel. One scene involves a silent movie star entertaining a guest by showing one of her own movies with a running commentary on her marriage to the co-star; one of the major characters is a leftist writer from New York City brought to Hollywood on a studio contract.

As far as literary first times go, tackling Hamlet is a pretty great one, finds frustratedartist:

I’m taking it slowly, looking up all the references, and listening to the Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench etc audio performance as I go. It’s uncanny; again and again, every few lines I come across familiar phrases or passages, sometimes whole speeches, but I’d never come across them in context before. Again and again I get that moment of recognition that you often get when reading a classic for the first time.

I’ve got to the end of Act 4, and apart from the fact that I know Ophelia is going to drown herself (that much is clear from Millais’s painting) and that it’s hard to believe things are going to end well for Hamlet or his uncle Claudius, it being a tragedy, I really do not know what is going to happen. I have a dim memory from somewhere that a duel is involved. Anyway, it’s very exciting.

All I can say so far is that a lot of the time Hamlet seems like a deranged psychopath, and a compulsive wisecracker with a strong streak of emotional cruelty. And then there are moments when he seems like a far nobler figure than everyone else in the play. A bit like Don Quixote, who we can see as either a dangerous schizophrenic or at the same time as a prophet with something godly about him. In fact, who is both those things at one and the same time.

We saw high praise for Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man:

• It’s after midnight here, and I’m thoroughly thrilled by Invisible Man. There’s a scene, when the ill-fated narrator delights in eating yams. The description of his innocent delight is one of the most touching moments I have ever encountered. And it made my mouth water. –Vogelmonade
  
• Invisible Man turned out to be the most surprisingly enthralling book I’ve yet read. I picked it up knowing it was an important book, a social touchstone, that I’d heard since high school should be read, but I found myself completely taken up by the narrator’s voice. The rhythm of the book and the pace of the events kept me glued, it’s one of those odd, unexpected joys in which I found my personality disappearing and my brain adopting the central character’s. –WebberExpat
• I become irritated by lists of “best” books because I think they’d lead to much better discussions if they were presented as what they really are: lists of worthwhile books that readers might like to read if they haven’t and talk about if they have. But I’m nothing if not inconsistent and I have no problem at all with anyone (even me) saying that Invisible Man is the best American novel (or just writing, period) since at least 1900. It’s a wonderful book in a great many ways, but to pick only one: this month the Reading Group has been discussing Murakami and sometimes touching on how he frequently talks about jazz and particular jazz recordings. Anyone who finds that interesting might like to see what a real jazzman (Ellison was a trumpeter) does with sentence- and paragraph-length themes. There’s a big difference between talking about jazz and using it.

jmschrei recommended the following great-sounding books by women in translation:

With Women in Translation month (the initiative of an Israeli blogger) drawing to a close I can report that of the seven books I’ve read this month five were women in translation. Although I am not sure how I feel about this type of focused agenda reading, two of the books I read were, for me, outstanding. One was The Elusive Moth by Ingrid Winterbach [translated from the Afrikaans by Iris Gouws and the author], and the other is Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk [translated from the Polish by Antonia-Lloyd Jones].

First off it is a gorgeous book, a treasure from the tiny Prague-based publisher Twisted Spoon. Secondly it is magical, almost impossible to capture. Set in the mythical village of Primeval somewhere in Poland, it follows the lives and experiences of the people of this village and its surrounding communities through the twentieth century from the start of WWI to the rise of Solidarity. Three generations of the miller’s family form the backbone of the story but there is no overriding or direct narrative. Rather it dips in and out of the “Times” of various characters, places, even objects in this world which is overseen by a God who does not fully understand Himself and His angels. In her cosmology everything is interconnected and has a soul. When I discovered that Tokarczuk trained as a psychotherapist and cites CG Jung as a major influence it begins to fall into place. An unusual but simply mesmerising read

Quote of the week courtesy of AggieH: “The best books are rarely ‘about’ what they’re about,” as part of a conversation about Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov – a novel (only partly) about a couch potato who naps his life away.

Interesting links about books and reading

• Things We Don’t Write: K. Anis Ahmed on the Murdered Writers of Bangladesh: an insightful, terrifying piece about the horrible conditions of the writing life in Bangladesh, where writers are targets of religious extremism. Four bloggers have been killed in the country in 2015, and dozens more live in fear of becoming the next victim. In Electric Literature.

• The Silent Music of the Mind: Remembering Oliver Sacks and Tell-Tale Hearts: Brain Pickings blogger Maria Popova’s beautiful rememberance of the neurologist; and Radiolab’s recent episode featuring him reflecting on his life, his loves and his endless sense of wonder.
  
• 22 Essential Women Writers to Read in Translation: picking up the theme mentioned above, this is an excellent list sure to make your TBR pile grow immediately. In Flavorwire.
  
• Stephen King: Can a Novelist Be Too Productive? In which he comes to the defence of prolific novelists in the New York Times: “My thesis here is a modest one: that prolificacy is sometimes inevitable, and has its place. The accepted definition – ‘producing much fruit, or foliage, or many offspring’ – has an optimistic ring, at least to my ear.”
• Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked: The Awl lists magazines secretly financed by the CIA during the Cold War, because socialists “were about the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism”.
• A Conversation With Claudia Rankine: “It was a conscious thing to move the book away from scandal and towards white alliance,” says the author in an interview with Buzzfeed.

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.

If you’re on Instagram and a book lover, chances are you’re already sharing beautiful pictures of books you are reading, “shelfies” or all kinds of still lifes with books as protagonists. Now, you can share your reads with us on the mobile photography platform – simply tag your pictures there with #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection here.

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