Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
R042 has started reading The Sound and the Fury, his second Faulkner novel:
It’s every bit as good as As I Lay Dying. Faulkner can write, almost effortlessly, the nastiness of unpleasant people. His characters can be cruel to the extreme yet it is written believably, because it is written from the perspective of people who are being put down – children, the mentally ill, or in As I Lay Dying a pregnant woman in an age where that was not easy.
jmschrei continued his exploration of Balkan literature with an interesting Montenegrin novel:
In Hansen’s Children, the young Montenegrin author Ognjen Spahic takes the fact that the last leper colony in Europe is located in south-western Romania where ageing lepers are living out their last years, and re-imagines a leprosarium with almost medieval qualities set against the backdrop of the final year of the reign of Ceausescu. (Hansen in the title is the scientist who discovered the bacillus responsible for leprosy.) Brutal, fantastical but with a satirical black humour the setting creates a vivid allegory for both the Romanian situation and the Balkan conflict that will soon follow. Bizarre but oddly moving.
ID1541580 has set himself a completist challenge: to read everything Conan Doyle wrote about Sherlock Holmes - in Spanish (see left):
At the beginning of 2015 I decided to face the reading of the biggest book I’ve got in my shelves. It’s so long that I’m still in progress after a month. This is actually a volume which joins the nine books on Sherlock Holmes. “Todo Sherlock Holmes” (“Whole S.H”) is the most remarkable Spanish version of the short stories and novels about the British detective. Absolutely entertaining and advisable.
MsCary is having a tough time with Emma Healey’s Costa first novel prize-winner Elizabeth is Missing, leading her to reflect on the experience of sticking to a bad read:
All in all I’d rather be sticking pins in my eyes. I was so bored by page 46 that I did what I never do which was to read the last couple of pages. I was delighted to find that it turns out exactly as I expected and bolstered by smug self-righteousness I can now manage twenty pages a day and at some point it will all be over. I know my suffering is nothing compared to that of @Oranje14’s with The Savage Detectives but I really think reading any book you dislike intensely is a circle of hell all of its own.
... which prompted TimHannigan to ask this question:
Oh god... Can you imagine? The question is, would it be worse to be trapped on the proverbial desert island with a mountain of books [you really dislike], or with no books?
Meanwhile, over on Twitter ...
@GuardianBooks This week I'm reading #Kant, #Zola and #Schumpeter. pic.twitter.com/XMVnwpShv3
— Emline Heron (@pass_apprentice) February 19, 2015
@guardian @GuardianBooks this week's read about the people who transport everything we use on a daily basis #maersk pic.twitter.com/Ui7FlfPbix
— Sarah Fish (@sarahfish19) January 26, 2015
Interesting links about books and reading
- If you still haven’t read, My Own Life, author and neurologist Oliver Sacks’s moving piece in the New York Times about discovering he has terminal cancer, do so now. It’s worth a full read, but we felt compelled to highlight this particular paragraph:
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Thanks also to PaulBowes01 for sharing it with other readers.
- One man’s quest to rid Wikipedia of exactly one grammatical mistake: “He has, like, 15,000 edits, and he’s done almost nothing except fix the incorrect use of ‘comprised of’ in articles.” In Medium.
- Snow Days: one for all of you enduring mind-boggling weather conditions across the pond ... Stephen Burt on why snow makes American poetry American, for the Poetry Foundation.
- A curious case of writer’s block: A patient arrives in a therapist’s office complaining of writer’s block ... And things get odd.
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.
