The Guardian's Blog, page 129

Did PG Wodehouse succeed in creating a world beyond class?

There's no mistaking his world is a privileged one, but the warmth of his writing and his characters make it difficult to protest

Last week I opened by quoting contributor AlanWSkinner. This week I'm going to do the same again - not least because I slightly misrepresented him by cutting him off halfway through.

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Which books will survive rising sea levels?

With a world set to be changed irrevocably by Antarctic ice melt, it's unsettling to wonder about the reading that will remain relevant

Over at independent press Melville House's excellent blog Mob
yLives, marketing manager Dustin Kurtz is asking an intriguing and horribly depressing question. "When the globe is hit with a 10ft rise in sea level, which of our books will suddenly become fantastic?"

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Scottish war poetry fights for both sides in the independence battle

A century on from the first world war, its poetry sheds intriguing light on the questions of nationhood awaiting an answer in this autumn's referendum

For readers of English verse, the term "war poetry" evokes a very specific set of images: mud, blood, lions led by donkeys, ferocious irony and English village greens to be defended. In effect, the canonical parameters of modern English war poetry were established during the 1914-18 period, on the back of the work of a handful of English-born male writers. In recent decades, these parameters have loosened, especially with the wider recognition of the poetry written by women during and about the two world wars. This act of recovery has expanded our view of what war poetry might be, but there is still much to be done.

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Bad grammar: rogue apostrophes and bizarre spelling - in pictures

In honour of the Bad Grammar awards, we asked readers to share examples of grammatical gaffes by institutions or people who should know better and you sent in more than a few rogue apostrophes and a wide variety of other errors. Here is a selection of your contributions

See all the photos on GuardianWitness

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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.

Perhaps the less-than-inviting weather in the UK is partly responsible for the large number of books devoured and discussed by TLS readers this week, but there were plenty of contributions from other parts of the world too.

A few weeks ago, I had a misadventure with Neuromancer by William Gibson. I love the Matrix trilogy of films (which used a lot of the ideas in Neuromancer), quite like speculative fiction and sci-fi in general. Gibson's ideas were doubtless very brilliant and prescient, but I found the book unreadable. I decided that page 100 was more than enough benefit of the doubt (for a book that was not very long) to have given it, and calmly closed it never myself to open it again. I generally hate giving up on books (silly, I know, but it makes me feel weak) but I think when you feel like you are reading a computer instruction manual in a foreign language, so great is the volume of invented terms, the time is right to give up.

Waiting for two, new arrivals in the post leafing through the first book in Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet, I realised that his twin protagonists, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, strangely reminded me of Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. For those of you who like me are fans of the Aubrey/Maturin novels, I heartily recommend McCrae & Call. I think the greatest pleasure derived from both is the deft interweaving of their disparate personalities which culminates in such a satisfying literary fabric... Together, they represent some of the most enjoyable reading I've ever had.

After several serious reads, I've decided to go the other way and read something deeply silly. Cinder is a sci-fi fairy tale where the titular heroine is a cyborg mechanic. There is also a deadly plague, issues of cyborg rights, possible war with the evil queen of the moon, and of course an upcoming ball. It even finds time to feature a Rapunzel-like hacker imprisoned in an orbiting satellite. Like I said, very silly, but when you spend a good portion of your day reading scientific papers not every leisure book needs to be serious.

One chapter in. It's going to be brilliant, I can tell.

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By ericabuist

7 May 2014, 17:42

I enjoyed it a lot, and was particularly taken by his style - simple yet pungent. It was strong on the minutiae of the rural scene too, and I wonder if it might fall within the spreading sphere of "the New Nature Writing", which has perhaps now reached into fiction (I started wondering whether this might be happening when I read Cynan Jones' The Dig a while back).

I ... have no idea what to make of it. It's very experimental and I like the idea of him trying to write a book that almost unfolds in real time but as a writer, he excels at glacially paced mood pieces so condensing everything into small, timed chapters doesn't really work and the tone is so all over the place that it becomes a mess. This is mostly intentional as we only get small fragments of each characters story, an aspect which worked very well but the main thread of the girl who can't wake up ends up feeling pointless; magical realism is a difficult thing to pull off and he usually does it well but it doesn't fit with anything else and his cinematic storytelling doesn't work either. It's a rare criticism to say a book I didn't like should have been longer but had he got into his usual rhythm, maybe he could have done something with it.

Anyone else a fan of the terrific Craig Russell series of Lennox novels? Set in suitably noirish Glasgow of mid 1950s, there is an irresistible mix of Chandleresque wisecracking and witty Glasgow patter. Incredibly atmospheric evocation of the period. Very hard-boiled, for lovers of the genre. I have read 3 so far, and look forward to the rest. I am surprised that series has not received more critical acclaim. Marvellous detail on industrial Scotland. Cracking good read.

While the standard and comfort of life of the 17th century clergyman poet is more like our own safe Western lives, the work of the poet who witnessed the to us almost alien horrors of the 20th century feels more familiar to us...

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By Jantar

7 May 2014, 15:13

A terrific read this week, a story-teller with a tale, and teller of stories. Michael Paterniti takes us to a dirt village in rural Spain, post Franco, a quest for a cheese he came across editing a newsletter for an American deli. The Telling Room is the tale of specific sheep grazing on particular herbs, hand milked, and wheels maturing in a cave underground. And it's rich in people and place; with grudge harboured over decades. It's a writer and his craft and it has me looking for Guzman on the map and wondering what tales Paterniti might want to tell us in the years ahead. But for now go and meet Ambrosio. You won't be disappointed.

I devoured Friday Night Lights in a few days, and it's a book that left me seriously reconsidering some things I'd taken as given. I'm no lover of the line of thought that sport and popular media are intended to stultify the oppressed class and keep them docile, I think it's on its own somewhat reductive and undervalues art and sport as cultural forces for good. But reading Friday Night Lights and learning about Carter High School and Gary Edwards, about the crushing nihilistic apathy that had set in across post-industrial Texas in the 1980s, about the lack of prospects that the students the book concerns faced and the way in which state education was being ground down by a mixture of policy and pressure from sporting bodies, made me reconsider.

Also thought Id try a Simenon, so I read the short but perfectly formed Pietr the Latvian. Maigret is an interesting and entertaining take on the detective genre. Its nice to have someone whos a clued up and intelligent investigator but ultimately relies on force of will to get results, especially after reading so much Sherlock Holmes recently, where the fun is all in the seemingly superhuman (but actually perfectly rational) insights. Im not going to be rushing to read the full Maigret series (partly because there are loads) but its always nice to discover another author with a large body of work you can keep as a stand by.

In a week when #WomenInTranslation month is announced for August, I find I'm already deep into the theme, reading this wonderful stream of consciousness narrative, translated by J.M. Coetzee.

A slave woman reflects on life from the hollow of her refuge in a boabab tree.

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By RedBirdFlies

6 May 2014, 17:29

I'm about half way through Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun, almost certainly because somebody mentioned it on these pages (I probably choose about half my reading these days based on the comments here). I'm not quite sure that I'm enjoying it - perhaps it's better to say that I'm in awe of the writing. I certainly felt much more engaged while reading A Dead Man in Deptford. Perhaps I simply liked his Marlowe better than his Shakespeare, who I'm finding a bit of an annoying tit. I'm amused that my kindle dictionary is unable to offer definitions for so many of the words Burgess uses, so I'm just going with their sound and context (not unlike reading WS for me really).

Beautiful, witty, thought provoking and insightful. Art finally makes sense now.

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By saadskhan

9 May 2014, 0:53

Samarkand was really a novel of two halves. The first part, about Omar Khayyam in Persia, Samarkand and elsewhere was superb: readable and interesting, and full of engaging characters. The second half, set in the 19th century and really about modern Persia through the eyes of one of those forest gump style characters who happens always to be in the room when enormous events occur, is much less engaging, and much more annoying. Had the book stuck with Khayyam, I'd have enjoyed it more. As it is, it's an uneven book that I'd nevertheless recommend, with reservations.

Reader, I finished The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. (...) I don't know whether this is as good a book as it could be although it has won so many prizes. The writing owes much to other literature, Harry Potter, Dickens and others. It is a post-modern book in that it concerns itself with surfaces...

Tartt writes of the painter Fabritius that, "It's there in the light rinsed atmosphere, the brush strokes he permits us to see, up close, for exactly what they are - hand worked bristles visible...where paint is paint and yet also feather and bone." And for me this is precisely what bothers me about the book, that we can see too much of its workings, too much of the paint as it were. I think that the book is far too long and self indulgent and could do with a comprehensive edit. I reckon that it could lose a third of its length and not lose much of its substance.... And yet, and yet...I do think it was worth reading, and in a reading life where time was not an issue I would consider reading it again, knowing where I could skip passages and not miss anything of importance.

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Classics question: when does a novel gain this status?

Sitting on this privileged shelf in a bookshop confers a lot of kudos, but close examination leaves you wondering why

At the first bookstore I worked in, The Great Gatsby wasn't a classic. Fitzgerald slugged it out in general fiction, side by side with Faulks and Fleming. Fleming wasn't even in crime and thrillers; no, James Bond languished in fiction too.

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Tony Parsons could read plenty of crime novels with heart if he wanted to

Crime writers are understandably outraged that the Man and Boy author says their genre lacks feeling. Can we compose a corrective reading list for him?
Decca Aitkenhead interviews Tony Parsons

Let's all raise a cheer for the (murder of? cabal of? gang of? what's the collective noun for a group of crime writers?) crime novelists who have ever so kindly decided to provide a reading list for Tony Parsons. Parsons, whose previous literary ventures have erred on the side of lad lit, has just made his first foray into crime writing with The Murder Bag, and has been doing the publicity rounds to promote it.

His interview with the Guardian's Decca Aitkenhead, while perhaps most notable for its revelation that Parsons is planning to vote Ukip, also provoked the ire of those more, shall we say, versed in the genre for his comment that he wanted to write a thriller "with a heart", because he loves crime fiction, "but what it tends to lack is the emotional power of a book like Man and Boy".

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Poem of the week: Anne Cluysenaar's Diary Poems

Two entries from a poet's calendar use similar forms and language to engage with matters very grand and very small

Anne Cluysenaar's recent collection, Touching Distances: Diary Poems is a poet's calendar, framed by the Decembers of 2010 and 2012. Each "entry" is headed by a date, sometimes with an additional subtitle. All consist of four unrhymed quatrains. The occasions encompass dreams, memories, visits with friends, anecdotes about the birds and animals on the writer's Usk Valley smallholding, and despatches from the wider world.

Out of 75 poems, 50 record the deep winter months, December, January and February. I've chosen two of my favourite winter poems, January 1 and January 13. Despite the shared season, they convey the lively-minded variety of Cluysenaar's inspirations. Both are from the 2012 segment of the book.

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The best books on China: start your reading here | Pushpinder Khaneka

From a previously banned novel about rural hardship to a collection of short stories exploring everyday lives

Blood, sweat and tears and the pungent smell of garlic run through Mo's gritty tale of penury and powerlessness in rural China.

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Top book-recommendation platforms: what are your favourites?

From Goodreads to Jellybooks and from Whichbook to My Independent Bookshop we round up the best places for reading recommendations on the web. But do you use them? Which ones do you prefer and why? Or do you resort to more traditional methods to find your next read?

As Penguin Random House launches a social network for book recommendations seen by some as welcome support for independent booksellers we take a look at reading recommendations on the web. What are the best platforms for social reading? Which, if any, are you using and what are your tips for sharing your reads online?

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