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.

One of the treats of Tips, Links and Suggestions is when it sparks a critical debate between readers who respect each other enough to respectfully disagree - as it did this week over Nathan Filer's Costa first novel award-winner, The Shock of the Fall. MsCarey kicked it off:

I'm reading and not enjoying The Shock of the Fall. There are good things here but the main conceit (as I understand it) that the 19 year old narrator has sat down and written the book I'm reading doesn't convince me at all. It's far too fluent and deliberately crafted. I want to engage with the narrator and instead I feel manipulated by the text.

I was expecting a fairly lightweight book. It was darker and more caustic than I expected. I wonder if "expect" is the key word for me there? When I approach a book with high expectations, especially if its been hyped in the press, minor flaws seem major. When I approach a book blindly or with neutral expectations, I focus on the happy surprises within.

Like your good self, I dislike being manipulated by the text. I didnt feel that with The Shock of The Fall. Filer convinced me from page one. I think Im generally an unsentimental reader, but there were definitely motions of liquid in my eye at times. (Especially when grannies or aunts were involved.)

Nearly through Auster's Leviathan a reread more powerful than ever. A very tall story but told with unerring conviction and an almost relentless narrative drive he does seem to have a genuine uninhibited talent which makes the mediocre seem even more mediocre than it usually does.

My 2nd hand copy was printed in 1974. I believe a new edition has recently been released. Published by Puffin, my book would have cost 40p back in the day. Bought as our latest Reading Group choice I think it cost me a couple of quid.

Sent via GuardianWitness

By pipkinface

23 June 2014, 20:34

It's a dense book a meandering, oppressive book that really suits a blindingly hot summer day to get a sense of the sheer thirst and desperation that pervades it. The prose wanders at times aimlessly, and as absurd as this may sound in so doing communicates how broken the Consul is. He is a pathetic drunk deluding himself that he is not, and the book lays plain his faulty logic by which he does delude himself. A common subject when talking about books is how you can "relate to" the characters - Under the Volcano absolutely defies this. Your way of "relating to" the Consul is seeing how he lies to himself, how he is trapped in a self-destructive addiction.

I have been re-cataloguing my library on LibraryThing and can report that I have read around 52% of the 1,500 odd books that I own. I wanted to get a hold on this statistic to help me regulate my book-buying habit, which so easily outstrips the rate at which I could possible read. How do others control the habit? And if you maintain a library what is a reasonable percentage of books read to books owned?

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