Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

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

We really enjoyed finding out more about authors and books about life in China, past and present, from AggieH:

I didn’t expect Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl to live up to the critical praise. I was wrong. It is a great collection, both in terms of literary quality and contemporary cultural insights.

I didn’t get on quite as well with Zhu Wen’s I Love Dollars and other Stories. I can’t explain it properly, but there was a disjointedness about the writing that I found jarring. But still some very interesting writing & thinking.

I unreservedly recommend Can Xue’s Vertical Motion. The term Kafkaesque is notoriously misused, overused & abused. These stories deserve the term. Disconcertingly normal disconcertion: Can Xue, Etgar Keret, Marcel Aymé & Franz Kafka. If you fancy a taste, one of Vertical Motion’s stories, Red Leaves, can be read free here at Bellatrista magazine.

Kurt Skeels wants us to guess ...

The conversation about the Booker winner continued. SharonE6’s verdict:

Flanagan is good at showing (without overtly commenting on it) how the atrocities continued by all sides after the war. This feels like a worthy winner of the Man Booker. [...] It’s one of those books that just stays with you. Flanagan is very good at showing (rather than simply telling) how those who survived could never be the same again. His book has made me very aware, too, of how random life is – the pot luck of having a relatively comfortable life or finding yourself living through a complete nightmare. It made me feel quite terrified about life actually. It’s very graphic in places but I forced myself not to skim. And he gets the balance right – it’s not endless chapters of unremitting violence. I wouldn’t have been able to read that. It’s interspersed with life before and after the war, which makes it more poignant. I won’t say any more – don’t want to spoil it for you.

And speaking of awards, LeoToadstool picked up his first Patrick Modiano book, The Search Warrant:

It’s an absorbing little volume, if a little odd as well. While marketed as fiction, it’s more a semi-fictionalised account of the author’s investigation into the case of a Jewish schoolgirl who went missing during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. The geography and architecture of the city, both past and present, plays a central role in the story, as the narrator recounts his wanderings through haunted streets, piecing a story together with what little information he can gather. The Search Warrant is whetting my appetite for more Modiano.

holly124 is listening to what sounds like a wonderful series of readings from American authors, recorded 50 years ago and reissued by Calliope Author Readings:

It was also great to see great conversations on this blog about transitional books from children’s to adult books, inspired by last week’s TLS thread. You can still join the discussion!

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.

Interesting links about books and reading

Since you usually share interesting pieces from around the internet, and we also find links we like every week, we thought we’d have a go at regularly featuring them here. A couple of links to kick it off:

• This essay by Bryan Vandyke on The Millions: Reading together even while reading alone. Suffice to say that the first line goes like this: “I probably shouldn’t admit that I keep an Excel spreadsheet to track what books I’ve read in a given year.”
• The Strand’s Stand: How It Keeps Going in the Age of Amazon: we know some of you share our love for that wonderful New York bookstore, and we really enjoyed this piece about its history and how it manages to stay relevant.

In addition, we know some of you have been noticing the changes in our website. The whole Culture section will be changing soon, and we are convinced that this will improve your experience as readers. We will be publishing a Books blog post outlining the changes and how they will affect the Books community – rest assured that spaces like TLS will continue to exist, and this will hopefully give them a better display. There will be a fixed space for Tips, Links and Suggestions on the Books site, as always – but in the meantime, in case of temporary glitches or problems, we suggest checking the Books Blog or the series page.

In any case, as always, we value your feedback and suggestions, so do get in touch! Feel free to express them in the comment thread below, or you can email me at marta.bausells@theguardian.com. And, of course, if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see us covering beyond TLS, do let us know as well.