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.

MsCarey has just finished Master and Commander and is submerged in a Patrick O’Brian binge – which is not stopping her from pursuing other reading urges:

It was a strange sensation to be entertained so thoroughly and educated so charmingly by a book where I understood only three words in every four. Intelligent and satisfying storytelling. I will definitely be back for more. The lexicon, A Sea of Words, arrived just after I’d finished but I’m dipping in happily already in anticipation of Post Captain.

And now I’ve had one of those powerful urges for a particular read which sweeps aside all the books one has planned on reading. In this case it was an overwhelming desire to read something about India so I’ve just been out and bought William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns. Hoping this will do the trick.

Greg Crowley is reading In the Light of What We Know for the second time, and shared:

Beautifully paced writing with a finely balanced structure. This book is a critique of class, liberal idealistic hubris, contemporary colonialism and the complicity of the “locals”, greed, and the financial services that both make and unmake us. It’s also an exercise in epistemology and emotion, an unusual combination that works because of the nature of the book’s principal characters, their interaction and the writer’s capacity to merge ideas, events and people. Above all, it is a story of a friendship that is deep and flawed and ultimately a betrayal, the friendship being a mirror to the international events that are both centre-stage and a backdrop. Am buying copies for my friends.

Our readers have been on a quest for a book that has been unanimously praised by this community. Could Stoner be the one? On the subject of John Williams, Petra Breunig has just finished Butcher’s Crossing, about a man who leaves Boston student life behind and heads for the Wild West.

It takes a while to get into the story but then it hooks you with great pictures and situations that are not lost even in the German translation.

Andrew Kennedy was inspired by Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death to “construct this contemporary and personal take on a still life”:

Inspired by the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish “vanitas” and “memento mori” paintings, personal symbols representing attempts to cope with, forestall and deny one’s personal, increasingly imminent, annihilation ... I particularly like the Warhol postcard (in place of the traditional skull) echoing the relative fifteen-minutes of fame quotation. Other personal possessions (such as my camera, running top and watch, perched on the edge of the abyss) denote me; the blingy candle needs little explanation: time is short ...

jmschrei shared some praise of the highest order:

I just stepped away from my IFFP shadow jury marathon to slip in Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (tr. Lisa Dillman). Two words: Read it! In nine short chapters you encounter all the magic of Alice in Wonderland, the darkness of Dante’s Inferno, the dystopia of McCarthy’s The Road. This infectious, gritty novel traces the passage of a streetwise young Mexican woman named Makina across the waters to the US to find her brother and deliver a message from their mother. Along the way she must make deals with shady characters, risk detection and interpret the strange land and peoples she encounters. The language is wonderful, at times completely original, to capture the feel of the original as the translator explains in her afterword.

Interesting links about books and reading

• Knausgaard or Ferrante? “What’s at stake when we opt for sun over snow, anger over awkwardness, herring over prosciutto, women over men, the north over the south, 1955 over 1985? What does our preference for Knausgaard or Ferrante say about us?” An excellent read comparing the two titanic novelists of the moment, in The New Yorker.
• Integrating Libraries and Bookstores: In Theory – A reader pointed us to this article outlining an idea for for saving bookstores and making libraries more robust in the US. In Publishing Perspectives.
• Childhood’s End: on death and growing up with Ray Bradbury, and why the Fahrenheit 451 author “writes as movingly and evocatively about boyhood as any other American writer”. In Electric Literature.
• The Writer’s Room: It’s always nice to peek into writers’ personal spaces ... Surrounded by photographs, family mementos and the clamour of everyday life, seven authors – including Tom McCarthy and Peter Carey – offer a glimpse into the spaces where they create. In The New York Times Magazine.

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.

And, as always, if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see us covering beyond TLS, do let us know.