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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

Claire ArmitsteadGuardian readers

Reading the Winter Olympics in fiction

A surprising number of authors have competed for literary glory on the subject of winter sports. Here is some of the lineup

Protests from writers including Salman Rushdie, Günter Grass, Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen against the "choke hold" President Putin's anti-gay and blasphemy laws place on freedom of expression have been timed to coincide with the opening of the Sochi Winter Olympics. But that this is a political, not a sporting, objection is evident from the surprisingly long and fruitful relationship between literature and winter sports.

Robert Burns – curling
"Tam Samson's Elegy" is about a curler, using curling jargon in its fifth stanza. Debate continues to rage as to whether Burns himself curled.

Louisa May Alcott – speed skating
In Little Women, Laurie and Jo race on a frozen river, ignoring Amy who falls through the ice.

Edith Wharton – luge
Ethan Frome, Wharton's weirdest novel, climaxes in what Ethan and Mattie plan as a double suicide as they hurtle down a hill on a sleigh.

TS Eliot – bobsleigh
"... he took me out on a sled, / And I was frightened. He said, Marie,/ Marie, hold on tight. And down we/ went" (The Waste Land). An Austrian countess's pre-war memory images the German-speaking world's self-destructive plunge.

Agatha Christie – cross-country skiing
In The Sittaford Mystery the key to the case is a middle-aged major being able to ski six miles in 10 minutes on a gentle incline – a feat even an Olympian would find testing.

Ian Fleming – slalom, biathlon, skeleton
All in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, where Blofeld is based in the Alps. In the climax Bond pursues him on a skeleton bob, descending at 40mph-plus. The national icon's excellence on the flimsy one-man bob nicely foreshadows the run of medals in the one winter sport where Britain has been consistently successful.

Alan Clark – super-G
Each year in the Diaries, January finds Clark (who mimicked the 007 lifestyle in this and other respects) at his chalet in Zermatt, where he was an exuberantly daredevil, but oddly not very good skier.

James Salter – downhill
Salter's screenplay for the Robert Redford vehicle Downhill Racer, adapting an Oakley Hall novel, reflected the action man credentials of the former pilot, who has also written non-fiction about skiing. The sport is also at the heart of Louise Mensch's (aka Bagshawe's) bonkbuster Tall Poppies and Rachel Johnson's Winter Games.

Don DeLillo – ice hockey
Co-written by DeLillo using the pen name Cleo Birdwell (and since disowned), Amazons imagines a pioneering female NHL player. The critic Keith Gessen has nevertheless argued that "the great American hockey novel" has yet to be written.

Roberto Bolaño – figure skating
The Skating Rink, Bolaño's improbable debut, imagines a lovely Spanish pro skater, Nuria, having a rink built for her by a besotted bureaucrat after she fails to make the Olympics squad. Skating can also be found (as John Mullan's 10 of the Best noted) in The Prelude, The Pickwick Papers, Anna Karenina, The Catcher in the Rye and poems by EE Cummings and Margaret Atwood.

FictionWinter OlympicsWinter Olympics 2014John Dugdale
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Poem of the week: Black Beans by Sarah Kirsch

Composed of small, domestic details, this love poem is also an oblique reflection on materialism and East German communism

This week's poem, Black Beans (Schwarze Bohnen) is by Sarah Kirsch, the acclaimed East German poet who died last year, aged 78. It's from a new parallel-text edition of Kirsch's work, Iced Roses: Selected Poems, published by Carcanet and edited and translated by Anne Stokes.

Black Beans is an early poem whose reception itself is a political history in miniature. Stokes writes in her informative introduction that it "was singled out at the Sixth Writers' Congress in 1969 as overly subjective and negative. A few years later, however, in the wake of Erich Honecker's 'No taboos' speech of 1971, the same poem was held up at the Seventh Writers' Congress as an example of 'Socialist writing that encapsulated the complexities and contradictions of Socialist life'."

In an interview with Die Zeit in 2005, Kirsch said her poems were sparked off by "optical impressions". Although Black Beans isn't primarily a visual poem, the image of the "gorgeous/ Black beans" is clearly important. I almost said it "grounds" the poem, but that would be unfairly facetious. It gives it its title and the key metaphor – the hopeless, Sisyphean task of putting "the ground coffee/ Back together again".

Realism rules until this point. The long, repetitive, restless afternoon is characterised by lack of concentration. A book is picked up and abandoned; then the speaker takes us into her own head, and the same thing happens to her perception ("there is war"). It's not denied that "there is war", however: it's simply that the power of some undisclosed emotion or event makes the speaker "forget each and every war".

The fantastical coffee "episode" may be an assertion of the desire for psychological control. It's the point at which the Seventh Writers' Congress spokesperson could have discerned a literal Socialist paradox. Material goods in short supply are all the more treasured – eked out, recycled, re-used whenever possible.

Then again, the poem invokes the truism that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs – a universal law under every Ism known to mankind. The magical idea – omelette and eggs, cup of rich coffee and "gorgeous" coffee beans – is reinforced by the absence of punctuation, a feature of the whole poem, of course, but particularly assertive when it occurs inside the line: "Back together again gorgeous/ Black beans."

At this same point the anaphoric pattern ("In the afternoon") breaks down, enhancing the visual impact of the "Black beans". It's picked up once more, in line nine, a kind of punctuation-through-repetition, but then a more urgently-paced narrative takes over. The last three lines are a kind of "flash fiction". They bring us close to the speaker, generous in denotation but without filling in connective details. The pronoun "I" occurs only once in the English version, with an effect of acceleration and added mystery. If the speaker is a woman waiting for her lover, do we assume he has arrived and made love to her in between those lines? Do the making-up and washing activities bookend gratified desire, or signal the breakdown of reason?

Perhaps the last line ("sing don't say a thing") alludes to political astuteness. In a repressive society, the poet might favour the traditional "song" of love- or nature poetry in preference to political comments the censor could interpret as subversion. Singing and not speaking might also imply madness – an Ophelia-like love-dementia, where song becomes the only kind of speech available. The simple, cheery musical chime of the sing/thing rhyme in the English version lightens the mood and raises the possibility of a happy dénouement.

Black Beans may be a love poem but it's also a trenchant critique of materialism, capitalist or communist. Its narrator seems islanded among the good things of civilisation, the books and information, the coffee, clothes and cosmetics. At some vital, core level of her being, she remains aloof. What drives the poem is its inner narrative – the story of an "I" who perceives, thinks, knows, forgets, and apprehends the world with both sensuous admiration and desolate boredom. In a rare meeting of inner and outer possibility, this "I" at last finds a voice, and sings.

Black Beans

In the afternoon I pick up a book
In the afternoon I put a book down
In the afternoon it enters my head there is war
In the afternoon I forget each and every war
In the afternoon I grind coffee
In the afternoon I put the ground coffee
Back together again gorgeous
Black beans
In the afternoon I take off my clothes put them on
Apply make-up first then wash
Sing don't say a thing

Schwarze Bohnen

Nachmittags nehme ich ein Buch in die Hand
Nahcmittags lege ich ein Buch aus der Hand
Nachmittags fällt mir ein es gibt Krieg
Nachmittags vergesse ich jedweden Krieg
Nachmittags mahle ich Kaffee
Nachmittags setze ich den zermahlenen Kaffee
Rückwärts zusammen schöne
Schwarze Bohnen
Nachmittags ziehe ich mich aus mich an
Erst schminke dann wasche ich mich
Singe bin stumm

PoetryCarol Rumens
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A local cheer for National Libraries Day

Most of us who love public libraries usually have a particular one in mind. Mine is the terrific branch around the corner – please tell us about yours

We all know that libraries are our future, that librarians are pitched into battle on the frontline in the war for the imagination, but libraries aren't just about the big picture. With National Libraries Day hoving into view on Saturday, I'd like to tell you about my local library. Because Queen's Park Library on Harrow Road is just brilliant.

Here it is. It may not be one of the world's most beautiful libraries, but I love it. First, because for over three years, it has been an absolute life saver when trying to find something to do with a small child. We'd go probably twice a week, to choose another huge armload of picture books, and to take part in the regular singalongs put on by the fabulous, friendly staff there (hi Jonno). There's a lot of talk about depleted book stock in libraries: not here. The kids' books are refreshed regularly, with lots of brand new titles added on what seemed like a weekly basis, along with seasonal displays, chairs which turn into rocking horses when you tip them over, and a box of toys.

Second, because its adult fiction selection isn't half bad either. I'd have thought I'd have had enough to read at home already, given my day job, but it turns out I find the library invaluable. I use it for relaxation reading - all those books I wouldn't want to own, but which are wonderful to sink into after a tiring day, and which are nothing to do with work. Thrillers. Chick lit. A shelf's worth of Agatha Christie. Ruth Rendell. Bliss.

Third, because the staff are just so nice there. I need a picture book of The Wind in the Willows, I said. (There were reasons.) We trawled together through hundreds of piled-up titles to find the one they were sure they had.

I'm in Norway at the moment, where I was amazed to discover my local library has a small English-language section. But you have to be really quiet in there – tough with a three-year-old – and there are no singalongs. I'm missing Queen's Park library immensely – with all those terrifying figures about closures, I only hope it's still thriving when I get back.

LibrariesChildren and teenagersAlison Flood
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Our Island Story: Not as Conservative as David Cameron imagines

The PM is broadcasting his love of Henrietta Marshall's book while campaigning against Scottish independence. It's an odd choice of propaganda

Politicians, cynics like to imagine, publicise their choice of reading as carefully and calculatingly as they do their records on Desert Island Discs. This morning, when David Cameron declared his love of the Edwardian childhood classic Our Island Story, the fact that he did so in the course of a speech on the Scottish referendum may well have caused some to raise their eyebrows. In fact, though, Cameron has form when it comes to eulogising Henrietta Marshall's gloriously sweeping history of Britain. Four years ago, in the same survey that saw Nick Clegg nominate The Gruffalo, he picked it as his all-time favourite children's book. Clearly, then, Our Island Story genuinely does appeal to something in our prime minister's heart.

It is not hard to guess, of course, in the context of the possible break-up of the United Kingdom, what the appeal of Marshall's narrative might be to a Conservative leader. Toryism has its romantic as well as its utilitarian side, and Our Island Story portrays the rise of British institutions as a stirring tale of heroism and triumph. As well as Parliament and freedom under the law, Marshall casts the union of England and Scotland as something almost pre-ordained, and celebrates it with a strain of romanticism that owes much to that most influential of Scottish Tories, Sir Walter Scott. Marshall herself, though, was no Tory. The vision of British history as a progression towards enlightenment and liberty articulated in her book was famously cast by the historian Sir Herbert Butterfield as Whiggish – yet she was no Whig either. As Ted Vallance, the author of A Radical History of Britain, has pointed out, Marshall wrote her book in Australia, a country that by the early 20th century was way in advance of Britain in terms of its democratic fundamentals. Those who have never read Our Island Story should not be deceived by Tory enthusiasm for it into imagining it jingoistic. To read it is to discover what Vallance has aptly described as "the surprising radicalism of this deceptively traditional text".

The keynote of Our Island Story is an enthusiasm for the rights and freedoms of the people at the expense of those cast by Marshall as their oppressors. Kings who fail to do right by their subjects are forthrightly condemned. William the Conqueror, John and Charles I all duly receive black marks. Alfred, by contrast, is hailed as "England's Darling", less for his achievement in defeating the Danes than because "he did away with the laws which he thought were bad, and made others".

Marshall is even keener on rebels. Boudicca is praised for teaching the Romans that "the women of Britain were as brave and as wise as the men, and quite as difficult to conquer", and Wat Tyler for starting a rebellion that was "the beginning of freedom for the lower classes in England". Feminist and progressive, Our Island Story is a book that would have little truck with any Bullingdon school of history. Cameron may or may not appreciate it as such – but as a text for Unionists to rally around, it is certainly not only for Tories.

HistoryDavid CameronScottish independenceScottish politicsScotlandTom Holland
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Poster poems: Wind

It's whistling through all of our lives at the moment, so can you make it sing in poetry?

After weeks of storms rolling in off the Atlantic it's beginning to feel like the world is made of little else but wind. Power lines have come down with alarming frequency, uprooted trees block roads, and sleep is broken by noises that most closely resemble an express train screaming past the bedroom window being chased by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

With all this atmospheric activity going on, my thoughts have turned to the poetry of wind, a more extensive genre than you might at first think. Perhaps the best-known example is Ode to the West Wind, Shelley's meditation on the relationship between prophecy and poetry and on his own relationship with the cycle of life and death, decay and growth represented by the temporal sequence of the seasons. Just now the poem's conclusion, "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" can't help but seem a shade optimistic.

Another much-quoted wind poem is Shakespeare's Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind, from As You Like It. This is a poem of banishment, sung in the play by Lord Amiens who has chosen exile with his Duke over life under the corrupt regime that has seized power in their native city, and is a meditation on human fickleness, which is portrayed as being harsher than even the coldest wind.

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Fragment 3: Come, come thou bleak December wind, the wind represents a death that the poet welcomes like a lover, in a characteristically densely-knit skein of images. The poem shows Coleridge at his most despondent. The speaker in John Masefield's Watching by a Sick-Bed, on the other hand, is witnessing a fight between life and death in which he's hoping for a victory for the former. Again the wind stands for death and the land it batters stands for life, and the speaker is left to ponder why these two great forces expend such energy in combatting each other.

Indeed, in all of these poems the wind is forced to represent things other than itself, but Christina Rossetti, in Who Has Seen the Wind, is happy to allow it to simply be itself, invisible but powerful and seen by its effects on the world it passes through. It's a conceit that is further extended by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Wind where he writes "I saw the different things you did,/ But always you yourself you hid." From the child's-eye view of the poem's narrator, the wind is a playful if invisible fellow youngster. We seem to have travelled some distance from Shakespeare, though he, too, stressed this unseen aspect of the wind's nature.

Wind Song by Carl Sandburg is a prose-poem about conquering the problem of sleeping in the wind. It's a useful skill and one I'd love to master. Unfortunately Sandburg, being a poet, isn't entirely clear as to how it's done. Nevertheless, the image Sandburg evokes of the wind as both miser and wastrel, "counting its money/ and throwing it away" is one that is not easily forgotten.

The last poem I'd like to mention in this short selection of wind-related verse is the medieval Westron Wynde. I don't have much to say about it beyond mentioning, perhaps not for the first time, that it is one of the most perfect short lyric poems in the language, perhaps in any language.

And so we begin the second century of Poster poems challenges with an invitation to write poems on that most topical of topics, the wind. Whether you like it or loathe it, see it as a destroyer of sleep or just an impersonal force of nature, there's really no avoiding wind at the moment, so why not share your poetic responses to it here?

PoetryWeatherUS weatherWilliam ShakespeareSamuel Taylor ColeridgeBilly Mills
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The 100 books to actually read in a lifetime

Here's the full truth: some classic books feel so familiar to me that it feels like I've read them. I haven't

Last week I admitted to forgetting the vast proportion of what I read. Now, thanks to Amazon.com, I've another confession to make: there's a surprisingly large number of books which, if you asked me, I'd say I'd read - but which I actually haven't.

I was looking through Amazon.com's selection of "100 books to read in a lifetime", seeing how many of their "bucket list of books to create a well-read life" I had already ticked off, and thinking I was doing pretty well with 60. Then I remembered that I haven't actually read Midnight's Children – I just think I have, because I was meant to for my degree, and because I've started it a number of times, and because I've got at least two copies of it. Sorry, Salman. It's the same for Great Expectations – I assumed I must have read it, because I've read lots of Dickens … but no. When I rack my brains - turns out I haven't. And damn! According to Amazon, it's Dickens's best novel.

There's an embarrassingly large number of books on Amazon.com's list which have to be filed in my newly created "haven't really read them" category. The Corrections. The Age of Innocence. Out of Africa. I know what they're about, they feel like they are part of my mental library – but have I actually made my way through their pages? Sadly no.

If I am honest, I have read exactly 50 of Amazon's "100 books to read in a lifetime". Not that it's done me all that much good. I may well have read The Great Gatsby, but I can't remember much of it at all.

FictionAmazon.comInternetSalman RushdieCharles DickensAlison Flood
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Gary Shteyngart's little PR coups

The novelist, and now memoirist, is also an accomplished marketeer – as every 21st-century writer needs to be

Reading this on mobile? Watch Gary Shteyngart's trailer here

Literary memoir or romcom movie? As of this week Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure is both.

Shteyngart often comes across as a little shy, and that's certainly the impression you get from his recollections of an awkward, nervous childhood in the terrific new book, Little Failure. But it doesn't exactly match his adult talent for self-promotion. You can see the video above, so there's no need for me to spoil the jokes.

His last novel, Super Sad True Love Story, also came with not one but two videos – one portraying Shteyngart as a writer hailed for the originality he brought to fiction through not reading anyone else. Not being able to read, in fact.

The time when high literary status required a lofty disdain for all forms of publicity is past: if you want to get read you need to be "out there". These days, even Thomas Pynchon appears on the Simpsons, and if Harper Lee were to write a second novel, with her attitude she'd never a get a deal.

Gary ShteyngartFictionAutobiography and memoirThomas PynchonLindesay Irvine
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Raymond Chandler's arresting new formula for crime fiction

In The Big Sleep, published 75 years ago this week, the reading public met a very different kind of detective for the first time

Seventy-five years ago this week a revolution in crime-writing began when Knopf published The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler's first novel. Reviews in 1939 were wary and unenthusiastic, however, and only gradually was it recognised that Chandler had pulled off a bold fusion of highbrow and lowbrow – much-applauded by authors such as WH Auden, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but also much-imitated by fellow chroniclers of murder.

What was so new? Almost everything in the first chapter, which introduces Philip Marlowe as he visits the Sternwood family mansion. Marlowe speaks to us. Whereas Holmes, Poirot, Maigret, Sam Spade are observed externally, Marlowe is the detective as autobiographer, starting three consecutive sentences in the first paragraph with "I" (ending with "I was calling on four million dollars").

He is a private detective, yet not patrician. By showing him meeting his social betters, Chandler's opening contrasts him as a man of the people (like a cop in this, but too nonconformist to be one) with the likes of Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey, who don't need the money. Even calling on a potential client – Holmes waits for them to call on him, Poirot has agreeable invitations to country houses – sets him apart.

He is single, and attracted and attractive to women. The opening's flirtatious encounter with kittenish Carmen Sternwood differentiates him from his predecessors, who tend to be either sexless or married.

He is a dandy, as fond of fine clothes as he is of fine prose: the book's second sentence mentions his "powder-blue suit" and even describes his socks ("black wool … with dark blue clocks on them").

He is very literary. His first sentence – "It was about 11 o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills" – could be Scott Fitzgerald. In The Big Sleep the initial nexus of crime is … a bookshop.

He should not be confused with Humphrey Bogart. Bogart, 47 when he played the 38-year-old sleuth in Howard Hawks's film version, tellingly wore a dark suit and made Marlowe more of a gruff 30s tough guy (like Dashiell Hammett's Spade, whom he had played in The Maltese Falcon).

Marlowe makes jokes. Witty crime fiction existed before, but those allowed to be droll usually belonged to the leisure classes – noir's earlier hardboiled heroes were merely blunt. Made to the Sternwoods' butler, the wisecrack with which the chapter ends (told Carmen's name, Marlowe says "you ought to wean her. She looks old enough") is poking fun at toffs instead of toffs poking fun.

Over the 75 years since The Big Sleep appeared, the Chandler formula has been continually mimicked by detective writers looking for more class and literary novelists (including Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis and Roberto Bolaño) looking for a plot. Oddly, though, it's recently fallen out of fashion: in today's TV series and novels, the protagonists are either police detectives or eccentric geniuses like the modern-day Holmeses or Lisbeth Salander, not smart, self-employed regular guys. Only the humour is still there – from Sherlock to Saga Noren, today's sleuths have to be funny.

Raymond ChandlerCrime fictionFictionThrillersArthur Conan DoyleHumphrey BogartJohn Dugdale
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Don't be scared: dialogue without quotation marks

In one way, reported speech without inverted commas is more direct. But it's also making an oblique signal of the author's ambitions

It's clear straight away what sort of fish Cynan Jones is frying in The Dig, his bleak novel of west Wales rural despair. On page one Jones's unnamed "big man" parks up overlooking the shallow valley on a "flat night" which gives his van "a strange alien colour", and when he gets out it lifts and relaxes "like a child relieved of the momentary fear of being hit". Before the reader gets much further his spare, abrupt prose has dropped a dead badger on to the road, spat on the dirty tarmac beside the body and "kicked … [it] round a little to unstiffen it".

But right there on the page alongside the despoiled corpse is another signal, a promise to the reader that there's some point to all this brutality. Or rather, it's not so much that there's something added, it's that something has been missed out. The dogs have pulled off the badger's nose, leaving it hanging "loose and bloodied … like a separate animal" – making it obvious the animal wasn't killed in a traffic accident, but was illegally ripped apart by dogs for entertainment – and the big man has second thoughts which Jones punctuates like this:

Ag, he thought. The crows will sort that.

Now these are only thoughts, of course, but pretty much all of the dialogue is laid out this way as well, speech marks blown away by the gritty blast of Jones's realism. Here's a young policeman, for example, who has come round to the big man's house to ask him a few questions:

We've had a report of fly-tipping. He waited. I just wanted to ask whether you would know anything about that.

What did they tip? asked the man.

The policeman didn't respond. He was looking at the junk and the big man saw and said, Does it look like I throw things away?

Just wondered if you could help, sir, said the policeman.

Jones says the novel was traditionally speech marked until Granta wanted to run a chunk as part of their "celebration" of Britain's "past and present, its people, its land". John Freeman, who was editing the magazine back in 2012, took the speech marks out, Jones explains, hoping to make it "more immediate, more with it". And it was this impact, this directness which had the novelist crossing out inverted commas left, right and centre as he pulled the rest of the book together.

Like many of the symbols habitually used to mount text on to the page, inverted commas have a long and complicated history. According to Keith Houston, the "germ" of the quotation mark is to be found in the "diple (>)" placed by first-century scribes in the margin to indicate a line which contained "some noteworthy text". Christian scholars used the diple to reveal the presence of that most noteworthy of texts, the Bible, but as their theological disputes became more and more involved they started using it to distinguish their own words from those of their opponents. With the invention of the printing press, compositors began reaching for a pair of commas (",,") to indicate quotations, hanging doubled commas in the margin of passages containing quoted text. But in the 18th century, Houston explains, the impetus to standardise the use of quotation marks came from the "drive for realism" shown by authors such as Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson as they experimented with the newest form of literature, the novel.

Eschewing paraphrased, reported speech filtered through a narrator, these new novelists presented readers with their characters' unvarnished words, and with this new directness came a need to separate speech from narration.

The 1748 edition of Clarissa separated speakers with "dashes or new lines", but sometimes placed an opening quotation mark "at the exact point at which a quotation began, with a new 'mark of silence', or closing quotation mark ("), accompanying it where the quotation ended". The 1765 edition of Moll Flanders showed changes in speaker with paragraph breaks, "though marginal inverted commas were retained for the occasional sententious quotation". But by the end of the 18th century, Houston continues, "the growing pains of the double comma were largely past". Largely past, that is, until editors like Freeman want to make things a little more direct, a little more real.

By stripping away a couple of centuries of typographical convention, Jones doesn't just jab his characters' speech right in the reader's eye, he also aligns himself with the kind of author who's been ignoring typographical convention all along. Writers like James Joyce, who lays out his dialogue as for the theatre or in the continental manner – with a new line and a horizontal dash to show when someone starts to speak – or Samuel Beckett who sometimes makes do with a simple paragraph break. There isn't much talking in Jones's dark portrait of country life, but the way he's laid out the dialogue speaks volumes for his ambition.

FictionJames JoyceSamuel BeckettRichard Lea
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