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

First, let’s enjoy Larts on Simenon’s The Blue Room:

It’s brilliant. Tense, compact and beautifully realised. From the graphic sex scene at the start through Tony’s fear, bewilderment, realisation to the fairly shocking finale, Simenon keeps the pressure on. It’s a very modern novel and it’s left me wondering why I’ve read hardly any Simenon.

There are almost 500 more novels where that one came from – and I’m yet to encounter a bad one.

Elsewhere, it also possible to say a great deal in just one post, as AhBrightWings did in this fine review of William Hamilton Maxwell They Came Like Swallows:

In his introduction William Hamilton Maxwell explains that it’s really more memoir than fiction. His mother died in the 1918 flu epidemic and he spent the rest of his life striving to work through and past this monumental loss ... I love that such immensity is encapsulated in a slender volume of prose so beautiful it often reads like poetry. Sometimes we learn why a novel has become a classic. I had just watched again the PBS special, “The Great Flu Epidemic” (the single most harrowing hour of TV you’ll ever see) in which Maxwell is interviewed, and decided to pick up this book. Watching a man in his late eighties attempt to voice what that loss did to him so moved me that I had to round it out with his fictional voice. Finishing both, I thought, not for the first time, that what makes us human is the ability to rise up to loss, adversity, and sorrow with art. Maxwell’s remarkable mother lives again on the page and you wish, turning the last page, that you had known her.

Here’s an equally impressive appreciation of Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld from Oudtshoorn:

The first book of his that I read was an autobiography, The Story of A Life. As a nine-year-old he saw his mother murdered by a Nazi collaborator in Czernowitz, which was then in Romania. He and his father were force-marched to a slave-labour camp in Ukraine. It was early in the war (1941/42), camps were not yet the fortresses they were to become, and Aharon’s father encouraged the boy to escape. Aharon did this, and spent the rest of the war wandering through forests and fields, occasionally with a companion, but mostly alone. Finally, in 1948, he managed to arrive in Israel. All his novels stem, in a multitude of ways, from those agonising beginnings of a terrified child wandering for years through a rabidly anti-semitic Europe. His novels are quietly brilliant works of art. I have read 18 of them, and still have quite a few ahead of me. Mr Appelfeld is well into his eighties, and I’m trying to slow down my reading as I dread the day when I’ll no longer have any new books from him.

Of course, quality reviews don’t have to be positive. I got the impression that WebberExpat didn’t enjoy Robert Heinlein’s (classic!) Starship Troopers:

This wasn’t even a scifi story, it was a love letter to the military life from which he got booted, being tubercular. It was like the first half of Full Metal Jacket, without Private Pyle. Or action, Or drama. Or intelligence. Or insight. Seriously, Merchant Ivory flicks had more action than this balderdash.

Finally, Carmen212 is one of many who has enjoyed the work of the late Philip Kerr:

I am collecting all his Bernie Gunther audiobooks, the newest is out next month. I want to read them (again) in order. I have been a huge fan since about 2004 when I discovered him. Bernie Gunther is a one-of-a-kind detective in a very specific and awful time.

He will be sadly missed.

Interesting links about books and reading

• This interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, approaching his 99th birthday, is glorious.
• Remembering Philip Kerr.
• There is a lot to learn from the history of Chinese typewriters.
• Do you dare try Paul Bowles’ love potion?
• An interesting attempt to make Didcot more interesting.
• The New York Times on the new vanguard: 15 “remarkable” books by women.

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!