Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Let’s start in the middle - of nowhere. Valerian Albanov’s In the Land of White Death: An Epic Story of Survival in the Siberian Arctic has impressed goldgato:
This is the amazing story of the 1912 Brusilov Expedition to the Arctic and the desperate attempt by a handful of men to make it back alive. I wasn’t thrilled about Albanov’s constant markdowns of his fellow team members, but it was quite an exciting read.
Meanwhile, greenmill has been in the Australian Outback with Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain:
About her childhood on a remote sheep station in Australia in the 1940s and her realisation as a young adult, (feted as a gifted intellectual in Sydney but drawn back to the solitude and hard scrabble life of the Outback) that in the end she could never be who she really wanted to be in the country she loved. Her descriptions of the struggle between duty to a lonely and unfulfilled mother, and her overpowering need to get away and rewrite Australian history in a non-British Empire idiom are intense and moving. A marvellous read.
The Inimitable Charles Dickens made one of his regular appearances last week, with SydneyH enjoying Oliver Twist:
I had in mind a sort of over-sentimental depiction of an orphan begging for more food, and a number of reviews I’ve encountered which have represented it as a flawed early text. What I found was a brilliant, cruel satire in the manner of Jonathan Swift, which morphs into an adventure narrative in which a gang of criminals are rounded up for retribution. Critics of Oliver Twist find that it fails as both a Naturalist text and as a work of social criticism: the plot becomes implausibly elaborate, and the good characters lack personality; and Dickens doesn’t stay true to his earlier satire of working-class hardship, passing on opportunities to emphasise the conditions of child-criminals and prostitutes. But I feel that he succeeds in avoiding the heavy-handed Social Realism of Hard Times, and in crude patches in some of his later works. The novel’s dramatic qualities for me outweigh its many imperfections.
HaveOneOnMe3 has a lot to say about Renata Adler’s Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker, which she “flew through it in a couple of sittings”:
I guess it’s because the backstabbing, cronyism, the cliques, the subtle politics of power in an office space - it’s a microcosm of society.
Finally, Magrat123 finished The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim “and it was just delicious”:
In 1922 a couple of unhappily married women arrange to go without their husbands for a month’s holiday in a castle in Italy, rented to them by its wealthy English owner. To defray expenses they add to the party a famously beautiful but discontented young aristocrat and an elderly widow (65 she is, oh dear!) whose disapproving view of the world was fixed in her Victorian childhood when she was patted on the head by literary lions like Browning and Tennyson.
What ensues is witty and very funny, confusion and misunderstandings leading to all sorts of farcical events, in the style of Wodehouse but underpinned by considered social commentary. And, be still my beating heart, it finishes with happy endings all round!
The perfect place to wrap up for the week.
Interesting links about books and reading
- The Times Literary Supplement is 6,000 issues old.
- “Like many nerdy kids, I don’t know how I would have survived without being able to escape into books”: Ready Player One author Ernest Cline is one of us.
- Look out space time continuum! Dennis Johnson the rebel hero publisher at Melville House almost agreed with Donald Trump about something.
- On the completely unrelated topic of insane fascists, Evan Kindley writes about Ezra Pound’s legacy in The Nation.
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!
