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

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

sheen_shine let us in on the way they divide up their reading by age. It sounds like a nice way to balance classics and new releases. Does anyone else do anything similar to this?

I'm 25 and mostly read a mix of classics and new releases. Last night I finished The Godfather, an old battered copy I borrowed from my Dad who bought it way back in 1971. Today I started the new Bridget Jones which my sister bought for me from a charity shop for £3. I also read a lot of classics on my Kindle because they're free and then I hunt around charity shops to find a real copy so I still have it on my bookshelf.

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By sheen_shine

7 April 2014, 14:23

I just finished Stoner and now feel I have to read something upbeat and amusing. I found the prose in Stoner too flowery for my taste and overall a downer of a book. I suppose you have to take into consideration that it was written several years ago in a different style than today's.

Interesting to hear a dissenting voice on Stoner. I picked it up not exactly because of the hype, but because the publishers, in their efforts to generate a buzz, gave out truckloads of free copies, including mine. I could see why people liked it, the prose style was very fine, and I really wanted to be amazed by it, but just wasn't. I found it a little conventional for my tastes. Perhaps if I had been in a different frame of mind I might have enjoyed it more. Halfway through, I kept finding myself picking up other books in preference, and months later accepted that I just didn't have any real desire to go back to it.

Just finished Stoner - which felt substantial during the reading, but isn't really staying with me.

Touching, tragic, funny,terrible, wonderfully0-constructed account of life in an Albanian town during the Second World War. on the Man Booker INternational in 2005 and richly deserved.

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By Joaker

8 April 2014, 1:27

Sometimes I like big, so it was fun to see that The Hindus was as fat & tall as The Essential Ellison

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By Jantar

7 April 2014, 20:26

Neither of those two was a match for The Absolute Sandman (which itself was trounced by The Annotated Sandman that arrived here two weeks ago.)

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By Jantar

7 April 2014, 20:32

I have a confession to make. I have never read Sherlock Holmes. Second confession, i liked the tv series but felt some of the stories were too far fetched. Notably the one with the blade inserted into the guardsman's belt. How do the two compare?

@GuardianBooks about to finish @GlaisterLesley Little Egypt. Such a sense of place, am eking it out!

@GuardianBooks Loving Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed, giving away my hardcover copy to a Twitter follower when I'm done....

@GuardianBooks I'm Reding 'Taunting the dead' by @writermels brilliant book. Highly recommended.

@GuardianBooks Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury. To be honest, I'm starting to wonder why I'm bothering. #Hardwork.

Oh, I Capture the Caste. A very, very important book for me. I may even have been the person going on about how great it was here. I loved it so, so much (and the last line is just ... wow).

It was the book I was reading when I met my girlfriend, and the first gift I gave her was a copy of it. And I have a very, very old, special copy from my mum (so special it is literally in bubblewrap in my flat). It's associated now with a lot that I love most.

I completely relate to feeling that special emotional connection with a book. Mine is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.

An excellent book on a fascinating country.

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By stevenpj

9 April 2014, 4:14

One day soon I will be able to read a book about something other than Indonesia without feeling guilty...

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By TimHannigan

8 April 2014, 22:02

Looks through a highly personal lens at the lives of public musical icons that have changed the face of music in the 21st century. Spans from the early country rock of the 1950's and 60's to the rise in the Seattle grunge movement through to the dawn of inner city rap in the 90's. Insights so rare and subjects so varied they range from Elvis to Cobain to Dr. Dre.

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By kathbutty

9 April 2014, 10:21

It's been on my bookshelf for months. Wish I'd picked it up sooner. Astonishing (fictionalised) portrait of Marilyn Monroe. And I'm only half way through.

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By Nicolereal

13 April 2014, 12:53

A £1 charity shop find.

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By davpra

9 April 2014, 19:05

Mountolive - thanks btw to those people who encouraged me to persist with the Quartet despite the sudden change to third person narrative - (and the jump back in time). Interestingly it's written like a conventional novel but I'm now wondering whether this new viewpoint is any less blinkered than the others, or is still one particular individual's perspective. It's seeped very much in the feelings and observations of one individual, even the things a person wouldn't remember or necessarily consciously notice but might well feel in the moment being repulsively hot in a uniform, or inexplicably happy, or distaste for a particular colleague.

I'm also now reading The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier, which does a similar thing regarding perspective but much more overtly, moving between the different children's understanding of their childhood and their parents as they try to work out what really happened one summer years ago - all aware that they've only got part of the story.

I have read other books which use a similar device, namely, taking a narrative and turning it round so that the story is seen or told by someone from a different viewpoint. I can't remember what they were. Does anyone here know of any?

A very dear friend has given me a copy of The Luminaries with these words: "once you reach page 600 it gets very good". Is this the most underwhelming recommendation ever?

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