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

Let’s start with some remarkable last words, courtesy of playitagainstu:

Thieving, lying, disobedient, immoral, lusting after every female he encounters and harbouring secret erotic fantasies -is this the villain of a trashy novel? No, it’s that venerable enlightened philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who holds nothing back in his fascinating The Confessions (1781). I’m only up to age 16 so how he gets from social rebel to Social Contract I’m sure will be very enlightening.

I must mention one incident which has got to be up with the best ‘last words’. The teenage Rousseau obtains a place as lackey in the Turin household of the cultured Mme de Vercellis, a childless widow dying of cancer. He becomes her favourite and is by her bedside at the end:

“Finally, when she could no longer talk and was already in her death agony, she broke wind loudly. ‘Good,’ she said, turning over, ‘a woman who can fart is not dead.’ Those were the last words she spoke.”

Nanpilgrim has just finished Neil Gaiman’s American Gods:

I feel kind of empty without it. The story is unrolled at a smooth, tranquil pace. I found that the characters grew upon me, particularly the zombie wife. Gaiman is an excellent writer, a trickster extraordinaire, who kept some of his surprises in plain sight. I really enjoy the premise - similar to that in Adams’ wonderful Long Dark Teatime of the Soul - that all the gods humans have imagined into being continue to exist even after we have lost interest. I look forward to perhaps reading Norse Gods.

Meanwhile, BMacLean is in the middle of EF Benson’s first novel, Dodo:

We tend to draw sharp lines between different eras of literature so it was a bit of a surprise to find that this book often reads like something from the 1920s: the cleverness, the acerbic wit, the blasé, iconoclastic set of rich young things with nothing to do ... it all feels so modern that I have to remind myself that, when it says so-and-so drove to here or there one morning, it means they took a horse and carriage, not an automobile.

But it could be simply that I haven’t read much from the 1890s before and thus unthinkingly lumped the decade in with the rest of the 19th century, when it was actually looking forward to the 20th as much as or more than it was looking back towards the immediately preceding era.

Dark Pines by Will Dean, a more recent debut, receives a recommendation from roadwaterlady:

It reminded me of The Dry by Jane Harper in an odd sort of way. That had a sense of menace from the heat in the small Australian town and Dark Pines has the same sense emanating from the cold trees in the Swedish forest. The book is a tad over wordy at times and I guess the next will be tauter but it’s a good first.

Roald Dahl’s Switch Bitch has pleased MosquitoDragon:

I was in absolute heaven with the two Uncle Oswald stories in this. I was thinking the genius of Dahl was his ability to just grab hold of you by the septum and drag you helplessly into the story - his ability to maintain pace and intrigue is really second to none. But later on it struck me that what I really love about Dahl is his subversiveness. He revels in his naughtiness and that is just so refreshing in these weird times where our talent for being offended has been surpassed only by our willingness to be ruled by bigots and robots. Pick up an old Dahl book and give yourself a holiday from today’s reality...

Alternatively, you could try some hard reality from the 19th Century. Edward P Jones’ The Known World had “enthralled” julian6:

A complex ever revolving narrative of slavery before the American Civil War, this book’s unhurried and cool analytical tone makes it almost seem like a documentary chronicle. The punches it delivers are the stronger for being delivered so dispassionately. The anger is held in, and checked by its almost clinical exposure of events. The revelation that freed black slaves themselves became slave owners lies at the heart of the book. This illustrates the depth and pervasiveness of the cancer that slavery became... The Known World is a book of understatement which can, as the Ghost in Hamlet states, “a tale unfold whose lightest word” will “harrow up thy soul”.

Finally, Neeskens has just finished Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Volume One:

A very elegantly written and interesting memoir. Dylan is excellent at creating a mood and painting a scene. Almost no name dropping apart at all from his own artistic heroes (writers, musicians, actors). I hope he gets around to volume two.

I hope so too. Although I have an uncomfortable feeling that he might not bother...

Interesting links about books and reading

• Surprising reading matter has been found on the wreck of Blackbeard’s ship.
• Why it’s okay to recycle ideas in literature.
• Everyone’s still enjoying Fire And Fury.
• Can we all please stop shelving books with the spines facing in?
• Enjoy the cover artwork of Dutch surrealist Karel Thole.

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 lives 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!