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

Are you on Instagram? Then you can be featured here by tagging your books-related posts with #GuardianBooksScroll down for our favourite literary linksRead more Tips, links and suggestions blogs

Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including Mary Beard on everyday life in ancient Rome, laughing at Thomas Pynchon on a train in Asia and brainstorming great novels set during world war two.

elfwyn has finished Mary Beard’s SPQR:

...in the paperback edition, which is a lot easier for reading in bed. For someone who has never managed to muster much interest in Ancient Rome, apart from Lindsey Davis’s Falco novels, this has been a revelation. It’s full of fascinating detail not only about Roman myth, customs and history, and what Romans thought of themselves and their place in the world, but about the lives of ordinary people. One moment you think, “Oh, they’re just like us,” and then you’re brought up short by some amazing and completely unexpected fact that proves emphatically that no, actually, they weren’t like us at all. Highly recommended (and her current TV series, though not based on the book, features many of the same events and locations).

Lord, even when he’s trying to appear as though he’s not really trying very hard at all, Pynchon’s a fantastic writer. Loved the intricate, yarn-like complexity of the plot, which was deeply satisfyingly wound-up and honked multiply throughout, including on a crowded train to a lake in the middle of nowhere in Central Asia, to the bemusement of local people. Goodness gracious, he’s a funny man.

It doesn’t have the “magic realism” of One Hundred Years of Solitude, aside from a couple of surreal exceptions (the protagonist’s cat comes with an instruction manual), and the prose is lighter, without the page-long paragraphs. It’s rare to come across a text which is sinister and charming at the same time, and I’ve enjoyed it enough that I’m going to have to read his whole catalogue.

What do people think are the great novels set in WW2? I have Vitaly Grossman’s Life and Fate, Anatoli Rybakov’s Dust and Ashes, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (for an Australian perspective.) Would be interested to hear people’s thoughts, suggestions.

Continue reading...