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.

judgeDAmNation was finishing an Orwell-themed reading list:

Finished reading A Clergymans Daughter by George Orwell, thus finally completing all his books (apart from maybe a few of the essays) I also read Homage to Catalonia and Burmese Days earlier this year, though HTC didnt grab me as much as I had hoped it would [...]. A Clergymans Daughter was brilliant though, comically written with its wide cast of respectable/odious village institutions such as the Rector and the village gossip, as opposed to the much more likeable rogue Mr. Warburton and habitual criminal Nobby ...

At the weekend I got a sudden and powerful craving for some high-calibre British travel writing. I wanted erudition, fine style and learnedness all delivered with a light touch and a sense of humour. [...]

Travels with a Tangerine is pitch-perfect English travel writing packed with the obscure and the arcane, filled with writing on architecture coloured with the inheritance of Robert Byron, endlessly digressive, speckled with occasional moments of melancholia but rather more frequent moments of rich, warm humour, and suffused with a glorious sense of the absurd. Oh goodness me its so good! Its a thick rich stew and it has put a great big smile on my face.

There is help at hand. A quick read of Edward St Aubyns Lost for Words will make you feel better immediately. This short novel is guaranteed to make you laugh. Or cry for that matter. The Elysian prize committee has just been formed and some of the manuscripts are not even ready. One of them is not even eligible but thats no matter in this postmodern world. The committee are headed by a fairly corrupt politician and he starts to build alliances very quickly. Its not all plain sailing though.

If you want a quick read with lots of plot and much merriment heres your book. Read with tongue firmly in cheek as you watch the wrong manuscript rise and rise.

Ever a little behind, I read Murdoch for the first time at the beginning of the month. What an exceptional writer. The Italian Girl's characters are honest, humorous, and recognisable, and the pace of the storytelling is exquisite. The Unicorn, with its slow, dense and creepy build up had me anguished, enchanted and horrified until the end.

I'm enjoying the plot of The Goldfinch. I certainly want to know what happens and I like the characters, but Tart's prose is not nearly as well crafted as Murdoch's. Both my mother and I have surpassed the 80th page and intend to finish it.

Sent via GuardianWitness

By Kate Berrisford

9 September 2014, 18:33

While sitting in the sun this afternoon savouring Jhumpha Lahiris Interpreter of Maladies I was reflecting on how these stories are so engaging that I would love to recommend them to others. It is wonderful to have this forum so to do. I tend to avoid short stories as I often find the endings unsatisfactory so I was delighted that the ending of the first story, A Temporary Matter, made me gasp out loud. Lahiris characterisations are so well executed and in each story I feel I am having an intimate insight into the protagonists lives.

Thats two in a row. If the third matches the first two I think he may be argued to be Englands greatest living novelist. Much as thats going to infuriate a lot of people. [...] He wanted to be cool, he stayed up all night reading the dictionary, for years, he wrote novel after novel, for years, he was annoying and arrogant, and he just kept going. I thought he was rubbish early on in his career. I eat my words.

Rowlings The Casual Vacancy is one of the most detailed and accurate narratives of other peoples thoughts that I have read (the only comparable I know of is [Norman] Mailers The Naked and the Dead). Astonishing that one human being can understand so many others so intimately.

Its been mentioned loads on here previously, but if this is the kind of thing you like then you really must read The Infatuations by Javier Marías. He manages to express thoughts and feelings you didnt even know you had yourself.

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