Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, on subjects ranging from how authors’ personalities influence our reading experiences to the pleasures of browsing, via many lists of the books our readers have enjoyed most this year – plus our favourite literary links.
MsCarey shared her enthusiasm for In The Light Of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman:
I loved it. It’s a properly big book which thinks seriously about all sorts of things and is unashamed to do so. What makes it exceptional though is that the writer is as adept at the central story as he is with the intellectual whys and wherefores. There are all sorts of fascinating digressions but it’s still a page-turner because you are so desperate to find out what has happened to the central character, who is beautifully drawn. The narrative moves from Oxford to London to New York to Islamabad to Kabul to Bangladesh in order to illuminate some of the big events of the twenty-first century. Supremely entertaining and clever light years beyond my puny abilities. This is a debut novel and I can’t wait to see what Zia Haider Rahman will write next.
This prompted an interesting discussion about whether knowing about an author’s personality – particularly if we have got a bad impression of them – can influence our reading experience.
FreethoughtRules just finished The Blessing by Nancy Mitford:
Good if you like a bit of subtle social commentary about the differences between cultures, in this instance, the French and the English. It is a reflection of Mitford’s own life, an Englishwoman who lived in Paris for a number of years. I’m quite obsessed with the lives of the Mitford sisters (check out Mary S Lovell’s biography, it is wonderful), so I thought I better get round to reading one of Nancy’s novels. I was very pleased to find that it was as amusing and engaging as I hoped it would be, as I imagine she was.
RedBirdFlies is reading Reader for Hire by Raymond Jean: “Wishful thinking, naive audacity & a seductive voice fuse into the near respected profession of Reader in Raymond Jean’s homage to the art of reading, recently translated into English.” [See picture on the left]
In praise of browsing:
I have been wavering on my TBR list of fiction and non fiction, and the best I could do was browse 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, a collection of largish volumes of related books, (paintings , classical recordings, movies, news stories) with resumes of a wide range of books. I say browse, there are many ways of reading, but browsing suggests this hot lazy summerlike perusing of books, poems , newspapers, magazines etc, interspersed with youtube and other internet delights, to amuse a leisured soul.
At the moment I am trying to transform from a night owl to a morning lark, but it is hard going changing the habits of a lifetime, is it best to read in the quiet of the night after a tiring day, or in the early morning after a refreshing sleep? – by Stantom.
We’ve really enjoyed seeing your lists of the seven books you’ve most enjoyed this (school) year – more to come on that soon. Dip into the rest of the thread too for many more top sevens.
Interesting links about books and reading
- Battle Lines: Why jihadists write poetry, and how reading it can help understand them. In The New Yorker.
- Keeping Quiet: Sylvia Boorstein Reads Pablo Neruda’s Beautiful Ode to Silence: a true gift from Brain Pickings. Do “make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet…”
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Breaking Bulgarian: Why translation can be heartbreaking, and almost physically painful. In Publishing Perspectives.
- Listicles, aggregation, and content gone viral: How 1800s newspapers prefigured today’s Internet, on NiemanLab.
- And while we wait for the Baileys Prize, our colleagues over at The Pool have beautifully running extracts of the shortlisted books.
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.
