Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including books that demand hugs, funny reads and the complications that can arise from lending books you love to someone you love.
LiteraryWanderings commented on Us by David Nicholls and The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes:
I found Us so disappointing. Without wanting to spoil the plot I found that I didn’t invest with the characters at all and therefore didn’t really care what happened to them. I found this so sad as I’d saved the book to read whilst I was away as the perfect holiday read. Did anyone else feel the same? If you’d recommend any of his other works (other than One Day) I’m all ears.
[About The Sense of an Ending,] it’s the only book that I have finished reading and then immediately starting reading again. I found that his style was so approachable and intriguing, and it’s only as the book unfolds that you start to realise how well-crafted it actually is.
Laura A has just finished reading Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson.
It is wonderful. It is a privilege to go on such a journey. Do not read this book without the closeness of a person to hug you though, you will certainly need a hug, and a box of tissues. It is such a beautiful book that I have already had copies sent to some of my friends so that they can also experience the emotional workout for themselves.
SydneyH asked:
I was looking up Samuel Beckett texts last week, and a number of people have said that either Murphy, Watt, or Molloy is “the funniest book I’ve ever read”. It made me curious. What is the funniest book you’ve ever read?
And conedison told of a nightmare-inducing conundrum:
Do you ever let someone borrow a book that really matters to you? Last night my youngest daughter who’s leaving the country for her gap year asked me if she could take with her my copy of Stoner. Actually, she asked her mother to ask me on her behalf, figuring it would be harder for me to say no to both of them. I went into my daughter’s bedroom, told her it was ok and then she asked me if she could make pencil marks in it ... the horror, the horror.
Interesting links about books and reading
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#Actual Asian Poets: 35 writers on actual Asian poets by whom they feel transformed. In Literary Hub.
- Elena Ferrante’s Unruly Bodies: Worry, exhaustion, menstruation: the Italian author writes about all the subjects we’re scared of. In The New Republic.
- 400 Years of Nonsense About Don Quixote and Don Quixote: Sloppy, Inconsistent, Baffling, Perfect: two opposing takes on a 400th anniversary revision of Cervantes’s classic, on the New Republic and Literary Hub. This got our readers talking, too.
- Birthday Letter: Sylvia Plath and “Daddy”: fifty years ago today, Sylvia Plath sat down at the writing desk Ted Hughes and her brother had made for her from a plank of elm, and she wrote her most famous poem. The Paris Review revisits it.
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 lifes 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.
And, as always, if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see us covering beyond TLS, do let us know.
