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.

Two of you were delighted by a week of catch-up reading:

Recently read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time and its brilliance is overshadowing everything else. Other fiction seems obvious, trite and bland, it's a bit like watching Midsomer Murders after Wallander. So now I'm reading Vincent Van Gogh's letters and crying a lot, also Stephen King's On Writing.

Finally getting round to Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways. Evocative, atmospheric, beautifully written, extraordinarily well informed with range of references.

Hypnotic writing, surely something of a contemporary classic.

out of these three, Jung, Bryson and Mr King...I have chosen to read Mr Mercedes because this is the one I cannot save and must read now.

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By Madeleineann

10 June 2014, 10:10

I used to abandon two or three books a year. This year, Ive abandoned two or three a week. Either Im getting worse at picking them or Im getting pickier.

I'm still reading - as slowly as I possibly can Taddeusz Rózewitcz's painfully well-written book Mother departs. It's not a family memoir, nor a collection of poems, nor a suitcase filled with photos and small objects that all contain past lives & loves & regrets and it is more or less all of that. I have no way of describing this book really but it is one of the most impressive books I've read in quite a long time. TR (and his family) lived through most of the horrors last century dealt out in Europe and he wears the scars but his writing however harsh he is on himself and however disillusioned he gets about mankind's ability to learn from experience has a lightness of touch that is at times almost unearthly.

I'm glad I didn't notice the small letters on the bottom of the ebook cover, calling it "fantasy and historical" because I'm not a fan of fantasy, but I don't think it's fantasy so much as mysticism involving Arabian (especially Syrian) immigrants and Polish Orthodox Jews about a jinni and a golem, respectively. It's almost as if Wecker picked up a spirit from Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Isaac B. Singer, Polish Jewish writer, was living in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at the time of his death, and there's a street, W.86 St. off Broadway, with the name "Isaac B. Singer Way" on the street sign above the Street number; the street where he lived. I will always delight in remembering a radio news reader, announcing his death, "Isaac Bashevis, the singer died...")

A quartet of books, by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, published by New Directions.

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By Dylanwolf

10 June 2014, 11:23

As a male Irish adoptee and father of two boys, this is a killer to read but strangely comforting. After holding in the pain of parts one and two, I stopped in fear of part three. I know how my adult life went off the rails. I dreaded it, but in true adoptee style, I grabbed some Scotch and had a good cry, then forged ahead. Part three was just as difficult to read as the first half, but for very different reasons. Structurally, I love the interjections by the author at the end of each part reminds one that it is a biography, and it really did happen. I think I'm ready to face reading the final act!

Got a handful of little recipe books that cover the Civil War. They have little anecdotes on how the people "made-do" with whatever was at hand, letters from soldiers to their families, ingredient substitutions for well-loved dishes in times of the war.

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By rolypolyladybug

14 June 2014, 0:48

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