Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about working on TLS so far is the friendliness of the discussion and the positive influence commenters have on each other. Case in point from katcalls:
A big thanks to @MildGloster for the extra prodding to start Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I’m well into it and enjoying it immensely. Its genteel humour is just what I need at the moment.
And who wouldn’t want a dose of genteel humour? Although, other kinds of comedy are available. Swelter, for instance, has been getting to grips with the brilliantly abrasive Joseph Heller - and raises an interesting question:
Thanks to the Reading Group, I’ve just re-read Catch-22 and then decided that if I don’t read the sequel, Closing Time, right now, I never will. “Never” might arguably be a better option, but since I posses a copy, I hate to let it go to waste. Last year as part of my Thomas Berger project I re-read Little Big Man and immediately followed it with The Return of Little Big Man. That wasn’t an especially bad book, but nothing approaching the standard of the original. I guess I can do this once a year, though I am not encouraged by either example to make sequel-reading a regular habit.
Have there been any good sequels, ones that at least approach, if not equal or exceed, the achievement of the original?
I came up with a few, excluding series books like Sherlock Holmes and Flashman, or romans-fleuve like A Dance to the Music of Time.
The Lord of the Rings (as sequel to The Hobbit)
Gormenghast (Titus Groan)
Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer) – However, for me this one really goes off the rails in the last third, precisely the part where it is most emphatically a sequel.
Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest (Rabbit, Run) – I thought Rabbit Redux not so good except for making the word “redux” current again; I think these are actually sequels and not a “series”, though it’s a judgment call.
Other suggestions so far have included Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Trilogy, Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday (sequel to Cannery Row), and Tom Drury’s Hunts In Dreams (the beautiful follow-up to the astonishing End Of Vandalism). I’m sure there must be more.
Since I started on a stridently positive note, I also thought I’d take the opportunity to wish R042 a happy birthday. Not least because of this intriguing comment about gifts:
I was given two books I am looking forward to settling down with; TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country.
The Lawrence seems a monster of a book, but I am hugely interested in reading it; as a wargamer I have of late taken a significant interest in military history and the story of this campaign seems extremely interesting to me.
It will be fascinating to hear how the TE Lawrence goes down.
Meanwhile, altocontralto has been reading some important classics from two of Lawrence’s near-contemporaries:
On holiday, I continued my 20th century classics project with two I’d been meaning to read for a while. EM Forster’s Maurice was an interesting read, and a very necessary one, giving a real insight into the psychology of a gay man in the repressive 1910s. The writing itself - I tend to read for beauty as well as meaning - wasn’t especially luminous, although there are some important speeches, but I’m given to understand that the book isn’t considered to be quite as accomplished as those published during his lifetime. The other book I read was Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which came as a bit of a shock... A much more thoughtful and melancholic read than I’d been expecting, and all the better for it.
Elsewhere, I am taking the following from normanshovel as a possible future cue for the Reading Group:
Love for Lydia. HE Bates is a seriously underrated writer.
The follow-up comments were notably enthusiastic. PatLux said:
Thanks for the reminder of a writer whose work I enjoyed decades ago. Fair Stood The Wind For France comes to mind as well as Love For Lydia. There must be oodles of Bates’s books quietly resting on the fiction shelves of UK libraries just waiting to be borrowed and enjoyed. Use the public libraries or lose them.
Ieuan added:
The Stories of Flying Officer X (retitled as The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories) is wonderful, always has me in floods of tears when I read it. I think it’s out of print, but if you spot it in a charity shop I can only suggest you grab it, you won’t be disappointed.
Finally, another update what is turning into an epic read of everything Ellroy by paulburns:
Put aside James Ellroy’s Blood’s A Rover, which I’m only a little way into, to read the second volume of his Underworld USA trilogy, The Cold Six Thousand, which arrived in the mail yesterday. I think this was a wise decision, because within pages it was clear the trilogy is sequential and each book is definitely not stand alone, as the publishers or a reviewer, have claimed. And I’m loving it.
He must be getting towards the end of Ellroy soon - but there’s good news:
Also ordered Clive James’s Play All. As a box set addict, I couldn’t resist.
I’m sure we’ll all look forward to hearing about that too.
Interesting links about books and reading
- Another gorgeous gallery from the Dangerous Minds blog. This time, David Pelham’s 1970s Penguin SF covers.
- Enjoy these Faber Nature Poets designs too.
- Oh no! Amazon have got hold of some more new robots.
- Got any plans for the next three years? Let this novel containing 2,225,000 words scupper them all.
- New Beacon books are about to celebrate 50-years of publishing, bookselling and campaigning for BAME writers and readers.
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. Happy reading!
