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 weeks blog. Heres a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

First of all, welcome to all the new readers weve been noticing in the threads in the last few weeks! We hope youre finding this enjoyable suggestions and thoughts always welcome. Weve been asking the crowds at the Edinburgh book festival to contribute to TLS in their own way. Here are some of their reads:

That is Atwood, Drabble and Forster. Differing styles, but each in their own way literary, challenging, thought provoking, and above all, for me, a good read.

Am just a few chapters into Dame M Ds The Pure Gold Baby, and what a triumph and a joy it is. Though her characters lives in the early 70s follow a more challenging and intellectual path than my own conventional one in the same period, nevertheless the sheer elegance of the prose, and peerless evocation of the period have me sighing in entranced, and amused recognition.

Loving Javier Maríass All Souls, having been bowled over by The Infatuations. Such an observant and perceptive novel of British academic life (or at least Oxbridge life). Fascinating insights into wider English attitudes and secretive behaviour. Laugh-out-loud funny in parts. More than just a campus novel. I am delighted to have discovered Marías this year, and am anticipating enjoying his other novels. Unsurprising he is a serious Nobel contender. (...) Praise for the translator, who renders perfectly the tone and tenor of Maríass prose style.

By the way, have any of you tried getting rid of your old books? I have thousands, and today I was inspired to give many of them away. A hundred are so are currently boxed up and waiting to go to a second hand store or library. All the books that I know I wouldnt read again, or if I would, I could just take them from the library, just collecting forming piles and piles and collecting dust on dust ...

I recently cleared out about half of my library, taking, as it turned out, nearly 700 books to Oxfam, taking them in carrier bags on the bus, over several weeks. I have missed a few actually. Some because Ive recommended them to friends or acquaintances and was no longer able to give them away, and a couple Ive just missed. I started re-reading some on the bus, and decided to keep them. You have to be utterly ruthless but you will be glad you did it. Reclaim the oxygen. Fly, my pretties!

Ah, I'm not being serious. I was concerned about the white cover of Truth by John D. Caputo (Penguin), so I papered over it. Also, I was worried about getting funny looks if I was seen reading a book subtitled Philosophy in Transit.

Sent via GuardianWitness

By safarikent

11 August 2014, 18:05

Just finished Don DeLillos Underworld. Absolutely loved it even though it couldve cut a few of its 800+ pages. Its wraps you so completely in post-war America that I think I might now even get baseball.

Reading the all-time great, politically incorrect Flashman series, by George MacDonald Fraser, gave me a taste for historically accurate, adventure-filled fiction. Then I discovered the African world of Wilbur Smith. Spanning many generations with the sweep of a James Michener, the action never stops. The scenes of nature, the history of Southern Africa, it opened a new world for me, one that I didnt think would interest me. Several novels later, i havent found one that isnt a masterpiece.

I just finished Paul Kingsnorths The Wake, very positively reviewed in the Guardian back in April, and recently longlisted for the Man Booker. What a treat! Not an easy read by any means (its written in an approximation of English in 1066), the book examines the guerrilla tactics against William I after the Norman Conquest. If you enjoyed Riddley Walker then youll like this, but regardless, read it anyway, its an amazing piece: it makes you work and then leaves you wanting more.

Up the Rifles!

On a Guardian recommendation Im reading Anneliese Mackintoshs Any Other Mouth, a series of short stories of which she says 68% happened, 32% did not happen. Ive read the first 5 out of 30, and am thoroughly enjoying the idiosyncratic writing style and on the edge situations she describes. The fact that some of it is true and some of it isnt adds a kind of interesting level of speculation to the reading process.

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