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. Marta's away, so here's my roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

With the weather on the up, you seemed to be ready for a challenge and prone to nostalgia. There were lots of second - and third - tries at previously abandoned books.

I've picked up John Fowles' The Magus after having put it down about ten years ago. It wasn't to do with the book itself that I didn't finish it before - in fact I recall I was quite intrigued by the plot - just that I had so little reading time that I was making very slow progress and must have drifted away from it. It's quite a long book and I can see that I made it to page 240 (about a third of the way through) because my bookmark - a US Dollar bill for some reason - was still in there. So I'm reading it from the beginning now, with the same bookmark. 115 pages in after two days, so doing a lot better than last time.

It took James Ramsay one decade & two attempts to reach the lighthouse. It took me two decades & three attempts. I didnt even want to go there this time. Fortunately, @GetOver99 and @Mexican2 coaxed me back into the boat. My minds eye clearly needed glasses when I abandoned To The Lighthouse in 1998 and around 2005...

...I was unforgivably blind to the mesmerising shifts in perspective. Profound, dramatic, existential thoughts are thought and [in parenthesis the person measures a sock, requests more soup, checks a train time]...

I am being totally blown away by Dubliners. I am surprised at how accessible it has been. Having found this I did a bit of digging and I think Joyce becomes harder to read as time goes on. These short stories paint a beautiful picture of a moment in time. A lot of them I found painfully sad but so enjoyable. I am so taken with them that I now have to attempt Ulysses. Gulp.

It's writing is a little unstructured, but it is an honest account of the tortured genius.

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By Minky13

11 May 2014, 14:38

Just finished Richard Matheson's Hell House: even though I've read it several times, it still gives me the creeps.
A dying millionaire hires four investigators to provide him with proof of survival after death by visiting the Mount Everest of haunted houses. Several earlier investigations have failed, resulting in death for most of the participants.
Matheson's explanation for the ghostly goings on is as ingenious as the one he created for vampirism in I am Legend.
A hell of book.

I also zipped through The Seven Dials Mystery, which I only mention to say that it's a book that is less enjoyable with each re-read. I first read Seven Dials when I was a teenager, and whether its been ruined for me by subsequent books, or its been ruined because I know whodunnit, I'm not sure. Also the humour that amused me at the time now seems a trifle off-key. I feel it's meant to be satirising Wodehouse and Chesterton, but you cant satirise something thats not meant to be serious.

Really not sure about discussing this book at our village book club , with my mother in law. I heard the recommendation on Radio 2's Simon Mayo program, it sounded quite good so recommended it for our local book club. I knew there were some risqué bits but was not prepared for the extent nor the delicate nature of the lesbian and ménage a trios scenes that will potential be discussed. It was a slow burn read that I have found difficult to get into but as the book goes on and the stronger Blanche get the more I want to find our if she changes her life and succeeds. I have read about three quarters of it so far.

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By Mikem0

12 May 2014, 13:22

Just finished the Laurie Lee trilogy Cider with Rosie, As I walked out One Midsummer Morning, and A moment of War published together as Red Sky at Sunrise. I hadn't realised when I read this that it is Lee's centenary and that there is a programme of events to celebrate his life around Stroud which is an area that I only recently discovered and which is exquisite. I enjoyed all these books having read the first one years ago. A Moment of War describes Lee's attempt to fight in the Spanish Civil War, culminating in what amounts to a breakdown having killed someone and realising that this was not his war. The boredom, the random cruelty and the hunger and bestiality of the war are the images that remain. Cider with Rosie remains the best of the books, it's language and the story it tells of a disappeared way of life infused with love and poetry are unforgettable.

I got a bit further through Peter Ackroyds London: the Biography, which I first dipped into last year, it having sat unopened on my shelf since publication. I have been returning to it in-between books. Its an amazing achievement, too rich and overwhelming in detail to digest in one go, but reading a few chapters at a time is wonderful. Still got about a third to go!

Then I read The White Hotel by DM Thomas. A bizarre book. The story of a woman, an opera singer, with sexual hysteria, who is undergoing psychoanalysis with Freud himself. It includes two versions of her dreamlike, explicit phantasy, then Freuds case study of the psychoanalysis, then an account of her more or less contented life in Kiev between the wars. Then comes a horrific fictionalised account of the massacre of Kievs Jews by the Nazis, followed by a strange coda. It was shortlisted for the Booker, and has some admiring reviews on the internet. I really didnt know what to make of it at all.

I'm on page 125 of The Luminaries and bored silly. Should I keep going? (It was a gift from a friend and she wants to know what I think of it but I'm finding the ties of friendship diminishing by the minute).

I enjoyed the style, even though I agree she doesn't pull off the bigger picture. There is enough there to make me think that, especially as she's so young, Catton could produce something really interesting in future. Did it deserve the Booker, though? Definitely not.

I liked Elizabeth McCracken's, The Giant's House. You're well-rewarded for what matters most here, character delineation, honesty and talent. McCracken had no feel for the 1950's American setting and an at least relatively happy ending seemed shoe-horned in (author? editor?), but McCracken pulls no punches. She's in your face with the truth all the time. Honesty and talent in the same bottle is the magic potion. Elizabeth McCracken has it.

Currently reading Nicola Griffith's excellent The Blue Place, a hardboiled detective set in Atlanta, Georgia, starring a British-Norwegian-Amercian "rangy six-footer with eyes the colour of cement and a tendency to hurt people who get in her way" as the backcover flap has it. One of those books that grabs you and doesn't let go until you've finished it.

As for what to read next, I'd recommend Singh's collected short stories, The Portrait of a Lady. Personally I find the ones from the middle of his career best, but there are good pieces from both the early days and the end too.

Delhi is wonderfully well written, decidedly saucy, but also disturbing and dark too. But it's rather flawed as a novel (it was an attempt to tell the history of Delhi in fictionalised form).

[...] a good, rollicking history of the battle which suffers slightly from trying to keep the pace up. There are quite a few points early on where they pass swiftly over points which really deserve a bit more explanation (for example there are lots of mentions early on of the importance of capturing enemy ships as prizes and captains getting rich, but how the prize money system worked is only explained as an aside later on). Also, whilst it's very good on the context of Trafalgar itself, a reader who didn't know better might get the impression from the book that it marked pretty much the beginnings of hostilities in Europe. As an account of the battle using contemporary accounts and letters brilliantly, it is a pleasure, though.

In light of her comments re lack of female authors discussed on this forum @sand1ascuptorNYC might be interested in a book I've found on my shelves. The Minerva Anthology of 20th Century Women's Fiction is something I should take a look at again.

Published in the UK in 1991 it's interesting to note the names, both well recognised and those who are perhaps forgotten. Elizabeth Bowen, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, Margaret Drabble, Olivia Manning and Fay Weldon are amongst the 34 extracts, of which there are less than half a dozen which don't ring a bell with me.

Some I have read and enjoyed, others remind me how limited are my reading horizons. A nudge to explore further.

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