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

Hello, and welcome to this weeks rather belated blog. pabloelbrujo inspired an interesting discussion when he mused that an Oxford World Classics edition of Alexandre Dumas Twenty Years After had more more explanatory notes than he felt were needed. How important do you think it is to have explanatory notes and how detailed should they be, also do you think that you might be missing out if you dont read them? he asked.

frustratedartist replied:

I think increasingly people are reading classics without any explanatory notes, and looking things up on the Internet where necessary. All those public domain classics that are free on sites like Project Gutenberg, all those collections of classics for Kindle (All of Balzac in one volume for 2 pounds, that kind of thing) - none of them have any explanatory notes. Latin quotations, obscure historical references, unusual words- its almost as easy to google them as to flip to the back of the book.

Unlike printed dictionaries it doesnt just tell us what a word means now, but it can tell us how a word was used when the author was writing. When Zola uses the word chauffeur, he means a man shovelling coal on a steam engine, When Proust uses it he means a personal driver.

All right, just one more : I took this one along so that, together with the brine, the paling grey cells might receive a boostPlus, dont forget the myriad classics available free onlineYou take all of them along with your computer.

Sent via GuardianWitness

By ElQuixote

31 August 2014, 17:54

Got Wonder Boys (Michael Chabon) the other day for a train journey read (mostly because I really enjoyed The Yiddish Policemens Union). Nearly finished it now, but I wish I wasnt. I havent so thoroughly enjoyed a novel in a long, long, time. Funny, beautifully written, sad... pretty close to a perfect read. Kudos, Mr Chabon.

Ive not long finished The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks. A family business who sell the highly successful board and PC game Empire! fight off a takeover bid from an American company.

Being Iain Banks this is just a side plot to much more twisted realities. Having said that, I did have to wait a bit too long for the real madness to kick off.

Finished Summertime by Coetzee - a weird and wonderful novel/memoir/biography which ought not to be so compelling but somehow is due to the matchless elegance of the style and the multi-layered view of the self - the written self, the real self etc. Now on Him With His Foot in His Mouth by Saul Bellow - amazing outpouring of thought and language - like Dickens on Speed!

Ive been doing some lazy one-thingleads-to-another reading. Susan Hill to Virginia Woolf and Helene Hanff 84 Charing Cross Road (which Ive read before) and Qs Legacy (which I havent). I skipped The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street and was amused to find the author herself had been appalled when she read it back to herself. I dont remember it being that bad - but I dont think itll bear rereading.

The same could be said for the Susan Hill. There is a point in Howards End is on the Landing where the writer wonders whether Iris Murdoch will stand the test of time. A dangerous question to pose, because of course the reader immediately asks the question of Susan Hills books, and as far as the ones Ive read are concerned, the answer is a resounding no.

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