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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

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Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

AggieH has just read Marriage Material by Sathnam Sanghera:

It’s so good that I can’t prove it. I couldn’t, wouldn’t tear myself away from reading to make notes. So without the aid of substantiating quotes, I’ll just boldly claim that it’s terrific. I didn’t think we needed another intergenerational story of an immigrant family, but it turns out we did. The story moves naturally between the telling personal details and the general experience of being an immigrant and being the child of immigrants.

Apparently Sathnam Sanghera’s written a memoir before, but this is his first work of fiction. It’s gone straight on to my short list of mature, fully-formed debuts. Also on that: Michelle de Kretser, Yiyun Li, Eimear McBride, Chimamanda Adichie, Zia Haider Rahman, Kjersti Annesdottir Skomsvold. Read the rest of the comment here.

The subtitle is so ironic and so sad because Diski, a long time smoker, is now diagnosed with terminal lung cancer about which she writes with honesty in the London Review of Books.

This isn’t a thick volume but it took me a long time to read because I needed time to absorb the different layers that this part travel book part autobiography and memoir presented. Diski undertook two different journeys in America in pursuit of being alone in a crowd and spent much of her time in the smoking cars, some quite seedy others plush, meeting people (“miscreants”) with whom she connected, although that had not been her intention, and about whom she writes so descriptively that I felt I was sitting with her dreading the opening of another conversation, the making of yet more unsought connections. Two quotations will give a flavour of her writing:

I hate neat endings. I have an antipathy to finishing in general. The last page, the final strains of a chord, the curtain falling on the echo of a closing speech, living happily ever after; all that grates on me. The finality is false because there you still are, the reader, the observer, the listener with a gaping chasm in front of you left out of the resolution of the story that seduced you into thinking yourself inside it. Then it’s done and gone, abandoning you ...

Journeys come to an end before they end, just as they begin before they begin – with the arrival of anticipation.

Diski might be one of those writers about whom readers differ but I have enjoyed her work and I respect the honesty with which she writes about her very difficult young life and why she travels but doesn’t write “travel books.”

This book and Plath’s astute, social and self-observations help me to maintain my sanity in the midst and heights of the mundane.

It’s so good that I can’t prove it. I couldn’t, wouldn’t tear myself away from reading to make notes.

@TimHannigan told me that he found it “troubling”, and I can see his point. Naipaul appears to be prejudiced to basically everyone except white males. On the question of ethics, I’m defiantly tolerant of unethical novels, provided that they are of a higher order aesthetically. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, I feel, is a great novel, so I don’t care too much that some people find it an unethical text. A Bend in the River is good, but it isn’t remarkable. I feel that the scenery didn’t lend itself to the prose in the way that A House for Mr Biswas did, though there were occasional good passages.

I always used to make sure a finish a book even if it was like pulling teeth, but I realised, life’s too short and there are far too many books out there to persevere with something that you think is awful. –Perry22

There is no reason to soldier on. There are so many wonderful books out there that you will never even hear of. Search for them and don’t waste another second on this one. As others have said: life is short. –ItsAnOutrage2

Learning to abandon books liberated my reading. I’ve been known to abandon short stories. Other times, I get quite far in before losing the will. –AggieH

Zadie Smith is a fine writer, but she is also, and probably first of all, a reader with a keen mind. In her collection of essays Changing My Mind, she notably dissects the “gifts of David Foster Wallace” in his fiction, questions her situation as a writer and a reader between Nabokov’s idea of an authorial supremacy and Barthes’ dismissal of the author, and discusses how E.M. Forster has been terribly underrated for the past couple of decades. She also talks, more casually, but without losing her insight, of her own environment, of growing up in a biracial family and interrogates why she sees herself first and foremost as a black person. There is a lovely chapter about her father and his love of self-deprecating comedy intertwined with his pessimism outlook on life, which she sees as intrinsically British:

No good can come of this. This had been Harvey’s reaction to all news, no matter how objectively good that news might be, from the historic entrance of a Smith child into an actual university to the birthing of babies and the winning of prizes. When he became ill, he took a perversely British satisfaction in the diagnosis of cancer: absolutely nothing good could come of this, and the certainty of it seemed almost to calm him.

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I'm a grown-up, but I still love colouring books

I always loved colouring in as a child, but gave up the habit as an adult. Now I’ve returned to it – and judging from sales figures, it seems I’m far from alone

Colouring books for adults top Amazon bestseller list

What’s your favourite colour? It’s a question children ask each other so often we could be forgiven for dismissing it as meaningless. But for me, colour provides a direct link to our emotions, and our feelings about colour can reflect how we feel about ourselves.

When I was a child, colouring in was one of my favourite activities, and when I spent my gap year working as an au pair in France I was thrilled to discover that one of my young charges was also a fan. But when I went to university, I had no children to legitimise my hobby and allowed myself to be embarrassed into giving it up – until a few years later, when my oldest nephew was born and I no longer had to hide my obsession.

Related: Colouring books for adults top Amazon bestseller list

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Salman Rushdie's star ratings of fellow novelists revealed

The author’s dim view of some generally acknowledged classics has emerged by mistake through his GoodReads account. It’s an error we should welcome

We’re always hearing about the books authors love, but much less is said about the ones they hate. So thank goodness for Salman Rushdie, who the Independent on Sunday revealed has been handing out one-star ratings on GoodReads to the likes of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and giving To Kill a Mockingbird a begrudging three out of five.

Rushdie’s summary judgments of esteemed predecessors included low scores for The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen and Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm. He delivered emphatic thumbs-ups to F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, The Golden Bowl by Henry James, and A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh – all of which racked up maximum points.

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Jan Morris's Venice: 'less of a city than an experience'

In this book, and throughout literature, the place seems to exist in a half-real world of the imagination

Part of the thrill of first arriving in Venice is one of recognition. It isn’t the strangeness that registers – it’s the familiarity. When Robert Benchley famously telegrammed “streets filled with water please advise”, the joke relied on his lack of surprise. Of course he already knew what he would find – and knew that everyone else would too.

When I first visited myself, 15 years ago, it felt like stepping onto the set of a film I’d seen countless times. Chugging down the Grand Canal on Vaporetto No 1 was as much about spotting sights I’d already seen as finding fresh splendours. The beauty of this, the “holiday-place of all holiday-places”, was entirely expected. Henry James was worrying over the same idea back in 1882 when he wrote of the difficulty of writing anything “new” about the city:

Venice. It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it. Venice has been painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities of the world is the easiest to visit without going there.

In this crowning unreality, where all the streets were paved with water, and where the deathlike stillness of the days and nights was broken by no sound but the softened ringing of church-bells, the rippling of the current, and the cry of the gondoliers turning the corners of the flowing streets, Little Dorrit … sat down to muse.

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How the subconscious mind shapes creative writing

Authors who improvise, like John Boyne, and those who meticulously pre-plan like Michelle Paver, all seem to benefit from thoughts they don’t know they’re having

Do you remember those plastic slide puzzles you used to get in party bags? They were made up of a three by three grid with eight tiles and a blank square – the missing tile allowing you to move the others around.

This nine-grid puzzle was the central image behind the story of Mark Haddon’s The Red House – although, bizarrely, he didn’t know it when he wrote the book.

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Are the Hugo nominees really the best sci-fi books of the year?

This year’s awards have been beset by controversy, but there’s reason to believe the genre is more diverse and democratic than ever

The sci-fi calendar revolves around prizes. From April to September, the best or simply the kookiest sci-fi books of the year are celebrated in a packed schedule of awards. On 4 April alone, the Tiptree award was scooped up by dual winners Jo Walton and Monica Byrne, while the British Science Fiction Association awards were announced at Eastercon.

Locus magazine’s annual publicly voted awards are a useful guide to the best recent science-fiction writing, with William Gibson’s The Peripheral, Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Causal Angel and Kameron Hurley’s The Mirror Empire among the titles that reveal the rough outline of science fiction and fantasy in 2015. It has been a wonderful year for quality imaginative storytelling, but very little of that quality was reflected in arguably the field’s best-known awards, the Hugos.

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Poem of the Week: The Lover’s Maze, attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh

The circling, breathless account of infatuation provides an elegant set of puzzles for the reader

The Lover’s Maze

Her Face, her Tonge, her Wytte,
So fayre, so sweete, so sharpe,
First bent, then drew, then hytte,
Myne Eye, mine Eare, my Hartt:

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Jane Austen invented #RealisticYA fiction

The Twitter trend for very ordinary retellings of fantastic stories revives a style that dates back to Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen would have been very proud of young adult fiction readers this week. Using the #RealisticYA and #VeryRealisticYA hashtags, many have been lining up to puncture the genre’s often fantastical plots with fragments of narrative in a rather more ordinary key. For instance, @corpsehands wrote “a teen finds out there are werewolves at the school. they’d investigate, but they have a LOT of homework to do.”

Such miniature parodies of dystopian sagas and supernatural romances, filling Twitter with ordinary girls and boys forswearing epic quests and magical initiations to get on with revision or household chores, continue a tradition that dates back to Northanger Abbey – and beyond.

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Poster poems: Pathways

As the spring begins to beckon us outside, this month we’re on the trail of your metrical feet

The writer Robert MacFarlane has carved a trail in the minds of the book-reading public in recent years, with his books The Old Ways and Holloway. Among other things, MacFarlane talks a good deal about writers who have shared his fascination with old walkways. Certainly, pathways, both real and metaphorical, have played a significant part in the outputs of many poets, past and present.

One of MacFarlane’s great literary heroes is the poet Edward Thomas. A Londoner by birth but a countryman by inclination, Thomas was an inveterate walker and lanes and footpaths were his way into a happier world. Living and writing on the brink of the modern world, the world of cities and global war, Thomas immersed himself in the rural England he must have known was dying. His poem The Lane captures this knowledge and his reaction to it tersely.

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Thrillers are politically conservative? That's not right

Val McDermid says that while crime fiction is naturally of the left, thrillers are on the side of the status quo. Jonathan Freedland votes against this reading

Quickfire quiz. Identify the following as left or right. Big business? On the right, obviously. Trade unions? Left, of course. The one per cent? That’d be the right. Nicola Sturgeon? Clearly, on the left. If those are too easy, try this literary variant. Crime novels: right or left? And what about thrillers: where on the political spectrum do those belong?

Val McDermid, undisputed maestro of crime, reckons she knows the answer. Writing earlier this week, she argued that her own genre was rooted firmly on the left: “It’s critical of the status quo, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly. It often gives a voice to characters who are not comfortably established in the world – immigrants, sex workers, the poor, the old. The dispossessed and the people who don’t vote.”. Thrillers, by contrast, are inherently conservative, “probably because the threat implicit in the thriller is the world turned upside down, the idea of being stripped of what matters to you.”

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