Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including praise for reads that unexpectedly stay with you, poetic vignettes about a refugee’s experience and hilarious competition for library copies.
tyorkshiretealass has finished Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale:
Gosh it’s good; I’m really glad people here pushed me to read it. It does seem to be a bit “nothing much happens until you get to the end” but the language is so wonderful that I almost didn’t mind. And the world Atwood creates is so disturbingly close to actually coming to pass (the Particicution scene almost reads like a physical version of a Twitterstorm) that I ended up feeling incredibly disturbed. I suspect it’s going to be something that sticks with me for a while.
GrahamVingoe shared the following library issue, which made us get slightly stressed just reading about it:
This time last week I had embarked upon Jonathan Trigell’s The Tongues of Men or Angels but thanks to the good old “the minute I get a book from the library some bugger reserves everything I’ve got on loan” syndrome, I’ve had to give it a small break. I began Judith Claire Mitchell’s A Reunion of Ghosts but bogged down on that, so have turned to Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain, which I’m breezing through and enjoying. By the end of the week I suspect I’ll be starting Stephen Jarvis’s Death and Mr Pickwick or Seveneves but who can tell?
pubbore and Sara Richards praised the slow power of Laline Paull’s The Bees:
Finished The Bees – began very strongly, got a little flabby in the middle, picked up with a terrific (albeit slightly predictable) ending. But overall I thought the world of the bees, the life of the hive was brilliantly realised. –pubbore
I read The Bees about two months ago and endorse your opinion of the book. I found it stayed longer in my imagination than I thought it would and at the moment, with the weather being (whisper it) good I am out in our garden for hours at a time watching bees at work. I learnt a great deal from the novel about how a hive functions, and also how far bees travel and how high they can fly. The Bees is a novel well worth reading, but the writing needed tighter editing just to climb onto my hobbyhorse yet again. –Sara Richards
Interesting links about books and reading
- In the footsteps of Marco Polo: the journey that changed William Dalrymple’s life: “A terrific piece by William Dalrymple, the intro to the 25th anniversary edition of In Xanadu: A Quest, from that golden age that [reader] Tim Hannigan so enjoyed,” shared laidbackviews. On the Patrick Leigh Fermor blog.
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Why Love Lyrics Last: can love, and its songs, go on forever? From Shakespeare to the Beatles, Adam Gopnik examines the enduring appeal of love – and sex – in literature and music.
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Nell Zink’s Plan for World Domination: the latest Zink piece is, this time, on Vice: “People look to the tall white guys to be our avant-garde because they’re the ones who are not obligated to be political, in the sense of advancing some agenda” and many other gems.
- Quote Unquote: the following sentence (written as part of a book years ago) went viral recently – and its author had absolutely no idea that it had happened, or why:
Eating, and hospitality in general, is a communion, and any meal worth attending by yourself is improved by the multiples of those with whom it is shared.
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.
