Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
The hardy readers of TLS seem intent on taking on tough ones at the moment. Like thesecretorganist, who has been reading the complete short stories of Flannery O’Connor:
They’re really quite monumentally grim, but also utterly thrilling and compelling. I don’t often read short story collections all at once like this, but I’m amazed how quickly I’m getting through them. She really captures the cadences and inflections of the voices of the American South.
SydneyH has just battled through Washington Square by Henry James:
Early on, I was wondering why I keep doing this to myself - why do I keep reading so many texts by this author who is so committed to dreariness? The introduction has a brilliant quote on the matter of the novel’s tedium:
‘[It] no longer has to be likened to watching paint dry. Thereafter, at the very least, alert readers experience the fascination of observing how grass grows.’
The most interesting part of the book for me is Mrs Penniman, Catherine’s buffoonish aunt, who is enthralled with Romantic ideas. She is quite amusing for a James character, though it’s clear that she is a vehicle for expressing his disdain for imagination and popular fiction. I don’t think I would recommend Washington Square.
The delightfully named safereturndoubtful has three facers for us:
It’s been a particularly dark week of reading starting with Eric Beetner’s The Devil Doesn’t Want Me, and finishing with Bohjalian’s The Sleepwalker. Both were good reads, but the highlight was Desperation Road by Michael Farris Smith, an appropriate title, as it is in effect a two word summary of the novel. The action takes place on and around the highway outside a small Mississippi town. The story is centred around the axioms of bearing a grudge and when to let it go, and of revenge and forgiveness. Amidst the despair on Desperation Road is there any hope at all?
And BMacLean tells us about finishing Zola’s Earth “a couple of nights ago”:
Depressing book, even by Zola’s standards, especially towards the end. But I just found out that the ostensible protagonist, Jean Maquart, returns in The Debacle, so I’m looking forward to that one even more now.
But at least BMacLean has now entered greener pastures, with our Reading group choice for March: “Just started Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers and it’s a cracking read so far.”
Talking of green pastures and cracking reads, paulburns is in for a treat:
Ordered a couple of boxed sets of Wodehouse’s Jeeves Novels... at age 11-12 I chuckled my way through the Jeeves Omnibus, laughing so much my father and his then partner (who lent me the book) had to take it off me now and then and tell me to go and do something else because they thought I might make myself sick laughing.
VelmaNebraska has also been having fun:
I finished China Miéville’s The City and The City last night and totally enjoyed it on so many levels (and there are quite a few). It works as a crime thriller: there’s a murder; there’s a body; there are some cops; they work together; oops, there’s another body. It works as a complex psychogeography of nationalism: since it takes place simultaneously in two uncannily familiar cities that occupy the same space but are in different countries. And it works as a kind of speculative philosophical tract: is it possible for us to ‘unsee’ what is prohibited to us through disciplinary regimes of conformity? Cool.
And let’s wrap up with another strong recommendation from hippyhappy976:
I’m still reading Forever Amber.... life for Amber in that big ol’ London has been nothing short of eventful. This book isn’t slow paced by any stretch of the imagination. And also the historical narratives are so well researched, I cannot knock this book at all.
Interesting links about books and reading
- This collection of book covers placed over people’s faces from the Librairie Mollat in Bordeaux is perfect.
- A provocation on the subject of book art and book browsers who don’t browse hard enough.
- Oh my God! Jane Austen was killed by arsenic (until you get to the end of this curious article, when it turns out that really, maybe not).
- Fiction doesn’t just come in novels. A touching blog about small ads in Metro.
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!
