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, including a sprawling historical novel, wonderful Wodehouse and a tip for how to strategically leave a book in a public place for others to enjoy.

paulburns had a good reading experience, thanks to a recommendation on TLS:

Yesterday I finished Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. In a word, magnificent, and, as I suspected, just that little edge better than Crytptomonicon. Its a novel in three parts. The first part tells the story of the early years of the Royal Society... Part two takes us to Vienna under siege by the Turks, mercantile Amsterdam and the Court of Louis XIV. Part three considers the protagonists’ adventures up to 1688 or so concurrently, bringing them all together and tearing them apart, with tales of science, espionage and derring-do.

Finished re-reading Leave It to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse - the usual amiable nincompoops, plucky heroines, stern aunts, false identities, jewellery theft and pigs are all present, correct and accounted for, but it was a forceful reminder that no one can turn those ingredients into an art form quite the way Wodehouse does.

To me, a good Wodehouse has always been somewhere between comfort food and a sublimely performed ballet (to thoroughly mix my metaphors) - you may know what you’re getting and what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t make it any less wonderful.

Some previous guest had left behind a David Lodge book: A Man of Parts. A gripping read about the life of H.G. Wells. I never realised he was such a bed-hopper. An eye-opener. I shall now look up more about his life and works.

There’s a website devoted to leaving books for others to find -www.bookcrossing.com... You do have to consider what book to leave where, though. And definitely none where they would be binned by the cleaners.

Holiday reading will consist of the last two-hundred odd pages of The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson, Sherston’s Progress by Siegfried Sassoon (a lot shorter than I was expecting it to be), and probably We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

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