Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, in which we’ve seen quite a lot of September reading blues – but don’t despair: you still recommended excellent reads.
SharonE6 has been “getting a bit demoralised with my reading this year as nothing has been really grabbing me”. However:
I’ve just read We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (recommended by my son) and loved it. It’s a dystopian novel completed in 1921. George Orwell was heavily influenced by it when he wrote 1984. People have numbers, not names and live in glass buildings. Almost every minute of their day has set actions/tasks. It’s pretty chilling, particularly the ending, and it seems odd never to have heard of it until now.
ejb199 shared:
I have a huge pile of books from carboots ready to take to my nana (she can’t get out to the library as has stopped driving. i often send her stuff from Amazon too). Anyway on this pile was a book that caught my attention – Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. The Japanese/American relationships caught my attention and I thought I would give it a go before I see my nana this weekend. Well, I am 100 pages in and enjoying it so far. A fisherman is found dead at the start and the rest of the story takes place in a courtroom, flashing to and from events in the past.
TimHannigan replied:
I read Snow Falling on Cedars at Christmas last year, and thought it was wonderful – a novel that on the one hand, despite being fiction, felt like a piece of classic American long-form narrative journalism – a careful reconstruction of a crime and its investigation, and on the other was an intimate portrait of longing. I’d never even heard of the author before being given the book, and haven’t read anything else by him since.
This sparked a fascinating conversation about the book, the author and the genres of narrative nonfiction and memoir, taking in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Hunter S Thompson – read it here.
MildGloster has been reading Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet:
It’s a truly strange novel; odd, and magical, and really funny, too. Its protagonist is ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby, whose delightfully imperturbable nature makes up much of the humour. At the beginning of the novel a neighbourhood friend gifts Marian a beautiful baroque hearing trumpet, through which the first thing she overhears is her son and daughter-in-law conspiring to put her away in an old people’s home; soon enough she finds herself in this “Institution” and from there the novel manages to get even more bizarre — which is a very good thing.
Good to see conedison and TimHannigan back, and in fine form.
Interesting links about books and reading
- Omission: John McPhee tackles in the New Yorker how to know what to leave out when writing. “What is extraneous to the message and what can the reader determine for herself without being told?” summed up Swelter, who recommended it.
- The Rise of Twitter Fiction: an analysis of the use authors make of social media, in The Atlantic.
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Joyce Carol Oates’ Memoir Revisits the Farm and the Family that Shaped Her: “I like to work alone, to walk around, to be out in the orchard. I had my special places where I walked along the Tonawanda Creek. I had my bicycle. I spent a lot time thinking, and daydreaming and making up little stories, just kind of imagining things.” In NPR.
- Ten Poems and One Contributor’s Note You Should Strongly Consider Reading... Continuing with the yellow-face controversy surrounding the 2015 Best American Poetry compilation, we enjoyed this piece from the Boston Review.
- The First-Person Industrial Complex: this Slate piece about the seemingly uncontrolled proliferation of the harrowing personal essay online, was hotly debated on Twitter. Here, the Guardian asked the views of editors at leading sites.
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.
