Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

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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.

So I have been reading the third novel in the series, Some Hope. It’s quite awful to be back there, actually; Melrose’s world is populated almost entirely by selfish, spiteful, sad upper-class people and dwells –maliciously and sarcastically – on all of the horrible, pointless, trivial things they do to each other, and say to each other, and think about each other.

This is a world I do not come from and so I find there’s an element of “social voyeurism” in reading St Aubyn, it’s just that it’s in a really rubbish way — like being a voyeur but without any of the disturbing pleasure that’s supposed to go with it.

Roger Angell is now in his 90s, and this book's title essay (the best American essay of 2015) is a rumination on his life as he lives it now. A fiction editor at the New Yorker, he writes about everything from V.S. Pritchett to the 4th of July in rural Maine. He may be the best baseball writer we've ever had (he's the only writer in both the Baseball Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters). Here is the first sentence of his remembrance of Earl Weaver, the long-time manager of the Baltimore Orioles: "Earl Weaver, the banty, umpire-contentious, Hall of Fame manager of the Orioles, was the best naked talker I ever heard." (And he did mean "naked.")

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By Blifil48

2 April 2016, 15:01

At first I thought it was just an exercise in decadence, but it turned out to be a cracker of a book. It’s a historical novel set in Carthage during the Mercenary War, a generation before Hannibal terrorised the Romans. Essentially, it follows the siege of Carthage by an army of soldiers who weren’t paid for their previous defence of the city. I don’t think the style is as good as in Madame Bovary, but it is a much more interesting plot. I’m likely to read more of Flaubert’s texts in the near future.

... and I have to say it is a very strange book. I’m not entirely certain what to think of it. I thought the first section was wonderful in its a evocation of time and space - solid but also dreamlike - it had an immediacy, yet also the melancholy of looking back to a lost time. But the remaining two parts I found very weird and surreal. I’m a bit baffled by the narrator too, François Seurel, who was oddly passive, and difficult to read. I felt very ambivalent about him in the end. He seems to end up with nothing, while everyone else had some kind of resolution, although they seemingly have the ability to extract nourishment and a living from fresh air ... still, I enjoyed it. Just very odd. It put me in mind of films like The Royal Tenenbaums.

This morning I finished Sunset Park which is superb: a wonderfully detailed look at a group of people drawn together almost at random and the effects of both that and years that they have lived separately before. It might be the first Auster novel I have read, somewhere I have his The New York Trilogy which I think I may have read but too long ago to remember anything now.