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.

The Easter break has led several on great book binges. For instance, Catherine Raynor has had a fruitful holiday, with a reading rate of almost a book a day:

Day six of the holiday: book four of six underway; there may be a shopping trip required before day 16!

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By Catherine Raynor

24 April 2014, 5:34

And disagreed over the correct use of the semi-colon. There's only one book to settle the argument!

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By Chris James

23 April 2014, 7:08

About halfway through Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh. What a jewel of a novel this is: it seethes with the heat, anger and violence of a peculiar Indian summer, but there is a crystalline quality in the prose that makes for very agreeable reading.

If the second half of the book is as good as the first, this may receive a coveted place on my favourites list.

Shipwreck book Rescue of the Bounty by Tougias: As a sailor, I love all books about being on the sea, even those that end badly! I feel we all can learn from others' mistakes, and this author (Tougias) has a good track record for telling such stories. In Rescue of the Bounty, he crosses from individual captains' mistakes to the phenomena of group think, in which the whole crew of this big wooden ship (from Brando's Mutiny on the Bounty and Pirates of the Caribbean movies) doesn't question the decision to attempt sailing around a massive hurricane that they all knew about. It ends in disaster, but with a thrilling birds-eye view from the rescue copters.

John, you are a bit wimpish in your approach to the 'borrowed' Keats. I have in mind a service provided by cat-burglars who, for a small fee, will break into houses and retrieve mis-borrowed books. For an additional fee they could also spot rare and interesting books on the borrowers' shelves that you might like to have.

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By Joaker

24 April 2014, 3:23

In answer to 'what book gets stolen or borrowed forever?', I could probably list three or four LPs that I've had to replace a few times over the years. But only one book stands out and that is O'Brian's Master and Commander.

I always keep a copy ready to lend. For some reason, although most people have said that they loved it, I rarely get it back, and always replace it with a £1 copy from the market for the next time someone wants to read it.

Re-reading my all time top 4 books. All as good as I remember them.

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By EveMaria

23 April 2014, 23:01

I'm flying through as in I started it yesterday and will finish it today Bad News, the second part in Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose series. I enjoyed the first in the series very much, but would still say this second part is a substantial improvement.

I finished Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which I thought was very, very good indeed. Perhaps a spot uneven, but still very moving, and funny and in particular very thoughtful, emotionally. You can really see how he influenced William Saroyan My Name is Aram, one of my favourite books ever, in particular bears huge similarities. I do prefer it to Anderson, however.

There are probably no compliments left to be paid to Bring up the Bodies, which I've just finished. I'm still walking in Cromwell's world, if still alive - what a bloodbath! But there's little to beat this novel for un-put-down-ability despite its requirement for close and slow reading. But wonderful humour too. It's a chunky novel but I'm also a big short story fan and look at this site, based in Canada, most days: http://commuterlit.com/2013/04/thursday-longing/

A stunning portrayal of a once well off family in the throes of madness brought on by the pervasive threat of poverty in 1940's Barcelona, narrated by Andrea, a niece who comes to spend a year with her relatives, expecting anything but that which unfolds. Intense, beautiful, extraordinary, spellbinding.

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By RedBirdFlies

27 April 2014, 13:09

About fifty pages into The Grapes of Wrath. Very good so far.

Only 50 pages in? I'm jealous. I had to read it in high school (a mere half-century ago) and was enormously uplifted by Steinbeck's paean to the resilience of the human spirit. Immediately following, I had to read Lord of The Flies and was stunned by Golding's warning of the human savagery simmering just beneath that oh so fragile hymen of civility. After absorbing these two magnificent novels I remember thinking, Boy, are we ever a mixed-up bunch of coconuts.

Just one book this week.

"Sahib" by Richard Holmes. For all those fans of Kipling, John Masters and Frank Richards. The British soldier in India prior to World War One in all his foul-mouthed glory. Neville Chamberlain (not the PM) is frequently quoted as of course are Kipling and Richards.
I'm left with a question. Did anyone write a history of the "John Company's Regiments?"

I just finished You Should Have Known. It was wonderful. The author has captured a slice of Manhattanites, some of whom I had observed years ago as a young mother. The geography is wonderful. It is a mystery of sorts: missing person.

I've just finished Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question. I began by laughing - sometimes out loud. But by the time I got to the end, I simply felt ground down, as if I had been hit over the head repeatedly by a large hard foam mallet with the word 'Jewish' emblazoned on it. To be fair, this pretty much approximates the way I imagine its characters feeling. Ultimately I think that, while offering absolutely no answers to its never quite articulated 'question' (how could it do either?), this novel was paradoxically too didactic for me. I preferred Kalooki Nights.

@GuardianBooks: a request, if I may? Please make it policy to always name the translator in a review.

There are over 3000 written languages. Most of us only understand one or two of them. Without translators, all the books in all the other languages would not exist for us. We need translators. We need to give them credit. They go unmentioned too often.

@GuardianBooks No1. Ladies Detective series as part of my 52 books in 52 weeks challenge!

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