Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from the last week.
Because things are as they are, Waskindleuser has just started rereading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man:
This book is beyond description. I first read it for my university course and with the current situation in America, I felt the time was right. The book is a masterpiece.
And RickLondon has just “devoured” Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye:
This is an excellent novel about African American life in 1940s Ohio. It’s a short book, but Morrison packs so much in about class, injustice and race, written in beautifully vivid prose. I’d highly recommend it.
Elsewhere, storm46 has just finished Below Deck by Sophie Hardcastle, an Australian writer:
I really liked this book, mainly because the writing was beautifully lyrical, and the characters engaging. It is not giving anything away to say that there is a rape in the story but Hardcastle depicts the ambiguities, the blurry nature sometimes of such an event. A brave move. The novel deals with Oli’s introduction to the sea and her love of it until the event which traumatises her, and leads to the difficulties she faces coming to terms with it. I think Hardcastle did a brilliant job of that and I would recommend the book.
The Black Echo by Michael Connelly has impressed dylan37:
My first trip underground through the darker corners of the LA night with Detective Harry Bosch. A compelling tale of tunnelling into bank vaults, corrupt cops, incompetent investigators, black coffee and cigarettes. Bosch ticks all the right noir boxes - sleepless Vietnam vet, chequered back story, and some smooth one-liners. Throw in a femme fatale, late nights and a bug on the telephone, and I’m hooked.
A moving appreciation of Marilynne Robinson from conedison:
How someone so decent, so ultimately beautiful can actually thrive amidst a race up to its hairline in savagery is a kind of miracle. I think Robinson literally stuns her readers into a contemplation that saddens with the acute awareness of how painfully unique a writer she is. Robinson’s work is a gentle laser that cuts cleanly through all artifice. I’m grateful that I share my brief blink of an eye on this planet with her. She enriches my life.
conedison also has a question:
Can anybody think of any novel besides Lonesome Dove (which I’ve just finished rereading) in which the main protagonist dies before the so-to-speak final act?
Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes has surprised vermontlogger:
Raced through the first volume of this lauded biography. The reputation is deserved. Truly you see Coleridge the man – the astonishing Cambridge drop-out, enlisted dragoon, versatile journalist, 30-mile-a-day fell-walker, and restless husband, who dazzled the Wordsworths, Lamb, Hazlitt, Davy and everyone else with his immense reading and impetuous brilliance. I had a general idea of his magnetic conversation but no notion he could throw off a Unitarian sermon at will.
Once There Was A War, a collection of John Steinbeck’s reports in 1943 as a Second World War correspondent based in the UK, North Africa and Italy has transported greenmill:
Steinbeck’s non-fiction writing shares the lack of artifice apparent in his best novels, and has a level of immediacy and intimacy that transports the reader to the time and place of the action wonderfully well. The pieces here make no attempt either to demonise the soldiers and civilians on the other side, or to paint “our” boys as gung-ho heroes, choosing instead to highlight the anxieties and vulnerabilities of all the participants many of whom, on both sides, have been unwillingly cast in their wartime roles… A truly great writer.
JayZed recommends The Professor’s House by Willa Cather:
Perhaps the bleak cynicism about the materiality of modern life struck a chord with me; I was also struck by the Professor’s mid-life crisis and his having to learn to “live without delight”. I enjoyed the almost dreamlike quality of the central section with Tom Outland and the lost city in the mesa - somewhere I’d like to escape to during lockdown.
Finally, PatLux has been reading Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News?
One of the characters has just popped into the Oxfam bookshop on Morningside Road in Edinburgh to pick up a book written by another character. So next time I get to visit wonderful Edinburgh I will donate my copy to the Oxfam bookshop on Morningside Road. Hopefully it will still be there.
Yes, let’s hope so.
Interesting links about books and reading
Readings on democracy, fascism, and the uncertain space between.
AO Scott on Wallace Stegner “the dean of Western writers”.
Elizabeth Lowry rereads A Passage To India.
A teacher’s list of children’s books about race has gone viral.
Book Riot attempt to explain why and when publishers release hardcover books in paperback.
Small presses are the coral reefs of publishing says Kevin Duffy of Bluemoose.
“Has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American negro?” Listen to James Baldwin.
If you’re on Instagram, now you can share your reads with us: simply tag your posts with the hashtag #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection in this blog. Happy reading!
