The Guardian's Blog, page 115
July 28, 2014
Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
Welcome to this week's blog. Here's a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
MsCarey is reading a "hot weather read", The Persian Boy by Mary Renault, by day, and spy stories by night:
The Persian Boy is the second of Renaults Alexander the Great trilogy and it is a complete joy. It is a pleasure to be in the hands of a writer who is so sure of what she is doing. Espionage-wise I have just finished Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon, a writer who is new to me and I dont really know what I think. Great setting, some interesting history although I could have done with more, style both staccato and cryptic and annoying at times.
Narcissus and Goldmund (by Herman Hesse). Elegantly beautiful and painfully gentle. As much an adventure story as an homage to aesthetic sensibility. A delicacy in the telling and profundity in the characterisation. And what's not to love in the intellectual, spiritual and sexual awakening of an innocent. Obviously I've read it several times before as no doubt you have but this return visit is particularly enjoyable as I reacquaint myself with old friends. And even a few pages a day fills the soul with light. Exquisite.
After 'The Stranger', I thought it would be adventurous to explore existentialism. 'The Fall' seems like one step ahead.
Sent via GuardianWitness
22 July 2014, 7:24
Rereading Middlemarch about 30 years after I first tackled it. This time round I'm struck by how tiresome Dorothea Brooke is (an irritating hero is always a brave thing for an author to try), more sympathetic towards poor old Casaubon, and surprised by how often the author's asides and sharp observations make me chuckle. Never really "got" Eliot before but it's never too late to reappraise!
@GuardianBooks Stoner was excellent. This is shaping up to be even better. pic.twitter.com/nqpIDz6Q7m
@guardian @GuardianBooks Tenth of December by George Saunders. Dark, disturbing, and making me laugh out loud on the train.
At the weekend I finished of a volume of David Mamet plays, the last of which was Speed the Plow. Interesting, and I'm wondering about checking out the production with Lindsay Lohan later this year, but I do see something of a formula to Mamet's plays now.
Combines a convincing and witty evocation of Moscow in 1913 with an understated love story, overlaid lightly by nature mysticism - excellent book.
Sent via GuardianWitness
28 July 2014, 9:41
Continue reading...
A book for the beach: The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson
Sunbathing bores me, I'm too old to build sandcastles, and I neither swim nor surf. For me, the inevitable summertime trip to the beach is not about any of these things; it's an opportunity to inhabit, however briefly, the margin where land and sea engage in a constant, ever-changing relationship that is one of the great drivers of life on, and the life of, the planet. It's a zone of interchange between the three great planetary ecosystems of earth, air and ocean and one which played a crucial role in the evolution of life itself. A trip to the seaside is an opportunity to contemplate the sea in all its multifaceted glory.
However, if, like me, you're no expert, you'll need a guide to take along, someone who knows the science of the sea and can communicate it clearly and alluringly. You're unlikely to find anything better than Rachel Carson's 1951 The Sea Around Us, the first, and still perhaps the best science bestseller. It wasn't her first attempt at capturing the oceans between the covers of a book; 10 years earlier she had published Under the Sea Wind, a set of short stories in which sea life is narrated through the eyes of birds and fish. This first book was a critical but not a commercial success and disappeared until the success of The Sea Around Us brought it back into print.
Continue reading...
Poem of the week: Virginia Woolf's Angels 1919 by Patricia McCarthy
This week's poem, Virginia Woolf's Angels 1919, comes from Patricia McCarthy's new collection, Horses Between Our Legs, a collection which includes the poem that won first prize last year in the National Poetry Society competition, Clothes that escaped the Great War.
Continue reading...
July 25, 2014
The first Asian American superhero
While the debate around the extent to which a female Thor and a black Captain America will boost diversity in comics continues, Gene Yang and Sonny Liew last week released The Shadow Hero, their 176-page book narrating the origins of the first Asian American superhero: The Green Turtle. If the name is unfamiliar, it's because the story of the Green Turtle is one of those strange, cult tales that the medium seems to regularly harbour, complete with underdog and a dash of intrigue.
In 1944, Chinese artist Chu F Hing, tasked with creating a new superhero, bought to life the Green Turtle. Adorned with a green skullcap, mask and cape emblazoned with a large turtle, he whizzed around Asia protecting people from the occupation forces of the Imperial Japanese Army. The story goes that Hing was keen to make the character Asian American, a request that was perhaps unsurprisingly refused by his bosses, 1940s society not being ready for a non-white hero. The resultant comic, however, gave birth to a myth of its own.
Continue reading...
A book for the beach: Beastly Things by Donna Leon
There's a body in the canal, a bloated man with a neck the size of the avarage waistband. Stabbed. No identification. One shoe. So begins the 21st in the Commissario Brunetti police procedural series by Donna Leon, all set in and around Venice. This one takes our hero across the bridge connecting the city to the mainland and Mestre, where his sensibilities are assaulted by the irksomeness of traffic jams, the alien manners of upmarket shoe retailers and a visit to a meat processing plant that will have you retching. Turns out Brunetti remembers the victim from a farmers' protest some years back. Turns out he was an animal lover, a softy vet, and a happily settled family man until
Brunetti is unlike other fictional cops. Not for him angsty theatrics or the need to wallow in existentialism. He has no special powers of instinct or insight. He collars his crims by plain old hard work, and when there is a choice between nailing a suspect and a lunch of meatballs with children Raffi, Chiara and beloved wife Paola, the grub wins every time. Add a glass of prosecco, let him stretch out on the sofa and the dude will start quoting Virgil.
Continue reading...
July 24, 2014
Quiz: can you identify these fantasy books by their covers?
Comic book covers quiz
Crime fiction covers quiz
Science fiction covers quiz
Classic novels covers quiz Continue reading...
A book for the beach: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
On 10 March 1868, Jules Verne was excited. He was deep in the first volume of his latest book whose working title had recently changed from Journey Under the Waters to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and it was going well. That day he wrote to his editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel: "Oh my dear Hetzel, if I don't pull this book off, I'll be inconsolable. I've never held a better thing in my hands."
I can't think of a better thing to read on the sands. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is arguably Verne's masterpiece. As a classic it has aged wonderfully well: it is escapist fun, but still retains its literary and scientific significance. To dismiss it as simply an adventure story does it a disservice. Yes, Verne's oceanic journey around the world is a ripping yarn, but it is also an eerie tale of isolation and madness, packed full with geographical and scientific accuracies that make the fantastic uncomfortably believable.
Continue reading...
Man Booker prize 2014: a judge speaks up for the longlist
Justine Jordan: A more global, less diverse list
Gallery: The longlist in focus
Part of the job of judging the Man Booker prize is to choose a group of books that will stand the test of time, that will bear the weight of any reader's return. What these novels on the longlist have in common, therefore, is the extent of their ambition and their reach.
It's a list for time travellers: Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake begins in the year of the Norman conquest, and is told in a bravura language unaltered by Latinate influence the book was crowd-funded, to boot. David Mitchell, in The Bone Clocks, and Howard Jacobson in J, lead us out into the future in very different ways a real departure for Jacobson. In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan takes on the legacy of the second world war for both Australians and Japanese; Neel Mukherjee, in The Lives of Others, chooses Calcutta in the 1960s for his setting: and yet both these books cast a sharp beam on the present, too as does The Wake.
Continue reading...
Rereading Stephen King, chapter 30: Gerald's Game
Picture the scene: I'm 13, and I'm tearing through King novels at a frankly terrifying rate. I'm reading them all, revelling in their strange worlds, their broken protagonists, their aliens and vampires and ghosts and madness. I know what sort of writer King is, and he's the writer for me. Everything I love, it's there in his stories. Then my father gets a new King novel when we go on holiday, and I read it. I'm puzzled.
Continue reading...
July 23, 2014
A book for the beach: Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger
Franny and Zooey is just 157 pages long. I write that not to advocate it as a quick read or even to suggest that it might be cheap (although both might be handy for the beach). I point it out because its length is wildly deceptive. For within what Salinger himself described as a "pretty skimpy-looking book", he manages to steamroll a sizeable chunk of the human condition.
Published in the New Yorker in 1955 and 1957 as a short story and a novella, Franny and Zooey first appeared together in 1961. The curtain rises on Franny as the eponymous fresh-faced American college girl, Frances Glass, arrives by train to meet her boyfriend, Lane, ahead of a big university football match. But over lunch, Franny's skittish, intellectual gaiety begins to crack, revealing a bitter abhorrence of phony experts, narcissistic ambition and above all, ego.
Continue reading...
The Guardian's Blog
- The Guardian's profile
- 9 followers
