Photograph: Tacitus49/GuardianWitness
Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
We’re almost at the end of 2016, but we haven’t quite escaped its baleful influence. It’s certainly been playing on the mind of hippyhappy976:
I’m about quarter of the way through through Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles. I bought it before this year and intended to read it before this year. Oh how funny would it be if the international monetary system collapsed and the dollar was replaced by a kind of global Euro type common currency, which had been worked on by Russia and China for years? And what if China threatened the US and the US reacted because they asked for the +01 telephone code? HA! Oh how I laughed, but now... now not so much. Now, it has become a hard to read a book with a premise that seemed so fictional merely two years ago but has, by preposterous events, been turned into something of a survival guide.
Another kind of problem beset conedison - hyperlocal, but still irksome:
The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor arrived in the mail yesterday. I was loving it from the git-go - well, ‘loving’ - such unalloyed misery. I swear, the Irish are the Masters of Disaster. I reached p. 60 - they found Lucy - the doc said her broken ankle would lead to a limp she’d never lose. Went into town with my wife for a meal. In the Tube on the way home, waiting for the train, I put the book down on the bench. I wanted it out so I could start reading from the moment I sat down on the train. I got on the train. The book stayed on the bench. We went back. It was gone. I’ve never done this before. I’ve never left a book behind.
An awful feeling. Apparently, TFL Lost Property has over 300,000 items (!) waiting to be claimed. Do I wait to see if someone actually handed the book in? If yes, how long?
Ouch. I know the feeling. I’ve lost two books that way. Something Happened by Joseph Heller and Stranger In A Strange Land by Gary Younge. I was captivated by both of them... And have never managed to get back into reading them.
More fortunate was prickylia who safely finished A Lonely City by Olivia Laing:
I liked this book. Laing looks at loneliness as a city and through notable works e.g. Andy Warhol, the man who spent his entire life putting things and himself together, but was himself falling apart. Laing both conceals her own loneliness and reasons (some pride seems to be at play), but her thoughts still come through the things she peruses. Why do people share publicly? An attempt at being social or a fear of loneliness?
I love the ending where Laing says that she has not conquered loneliness by meeting someone, but rather by slowly understanding through works, that loneliness does not necessarily mean failure but just being alive. The acute senses that emerge out of loneliness is often beautiful. I think of Keats, Larkin.
Also touching on loneliness was SydneyH who had been reading A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans.
It’s about a neurotic aristocrat who shuts himself away in his manor and devotes his life to aesthetics. Along with his library, paintings, and collection of perfumes, there are tanks of coloured water in front of the windows, filtering the natural light to suit the ambience. He also has a tortoise with a shell covered in gold and encrusted with jewels, which promptly dies, unable to tolerate its own splendour. Sadly, this scene was actually based on a real incident. According to my introduction, Zola wrote a letter to Huysmans saying it was lucky it died - otherwise it would have crapped on the carpet... I would definitely recommend this text, which is probably most famous for corrupting Dorian Gray.
On the subject of French classics, here’s an unexpected but insightful link from TimHannigan:
I read Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, first part of the Border Trilogy.
It was, of course, wonderful. Huck Finn is somewhere there in the deep roots of the book, but much else besides – maybe even a flash of Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, though I might be imagining that. And there is language to stop over, to handle, to bite tentatively against. Glorious.
Finally, something good to come out of this year, as highlighted by RabBurnout:
Just finished The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney, winner of the Baileys prize for Women’s Fiction, 2016.
Disturbing, depressing, bleak and powerful are some of the words that might describe it. It is also very evocatively written and a compelling story, even though the narrative is fractured and keeps moving from past to present, character to character.
Interesting links about books and reading
- This site lets you do the sortes virgilianae – fortune telling via Virgil – online.
- And this one, let’s you take oracles from William Burroughs.
- We’re about to lose New Beacon books - and they’re blaming Amazon.
- Meanwhile, Authors United are still fighting the good fight - and their enemy just got even more powerful.
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. Happy reading!
