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.

We saw an interesting comment about sports literature by Oranje14:

I was reminded of a novel I read a little while back called In the Crowd by Laurent Mauvignier. Its a really unusual book, a stream of consciousness telling of the events of the Heysel tragedy. It made me wonder what sports fiction anyone would recommend.

Im currently reading a George Vesceys history of baseball, and this seems to be a sport which lends itself to fiction, Im thinking of sections of Delillos Underworld and The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.

Set in Japan (and translated from the Japanese), its about an entomologist who sets out to study insects that live in the sand but is tricked by the villagers who live in the dunes. He thinks he has a bed for the night, but finds himself tasked with shoveling back the sand from the bottom of a 60-feet hole where hes held hostage with the woman who lives there. If they dont keep shoveling the sand dunes will engulf them and the village. Its tense and its Sisyphean right up my street! And my do I know a lot about the properties of sand now!

A 1991 paperback picked off my parents' bookshelves - see my post from yesterday. A fantastic and tense read..!

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By KIChildrensAuthor

7 October 2014, 12:15

Do people here bother to read the introductions to classic books when reading said book for the first time? The trouble with these introductions is that theyre written by academics who assume that youve read the books already about fifty times (as they have) and so have no qualms in giving stuff away. [...] Now I generally either skip the introductions altogether, or read them after Ive finished the book itself (although normally I cant be bothered with all that guff once Ive read the actual story) ...

As I get close to the final few chapters of Cyrus Massoudis first book I find myself hoping that he may have more in the pipeline. He set off, a westerner with Iranian roots, to spend three years in the country and in the tales and legends he heard from the family that left in 1979. He returned an Iranian who happens to live in the west.

Land of the Turquoise Mountains. Journeys Across Iran is his account of those times. He gets just the right mix of history and of characters and sights to see. It really is one to savour as he takes us inside festivities and rituals that other western writers havent been able to access. We celebrate New Year, engage with Sufis, and head off to borderlands and ancient cities.

We writers are told to always avoid clichés but Im close to the end and it seems that hes written nothing but; a smorgasbord of grisly murders, an equal number of suspects, a flawed police inspector hopelessly in love with his sergeant (female in case youre wondering) who is hopelessly in love with someone else. He does however give us a very un-clichéd sex scene which is as graphic as it is off-putting and enough to tempt me to take a vow of celibacy. Should have been a real turn off (the book not the sex scene) but in fact in its own quiet way its brilliant. Effortless to read, and horribly compelling. I only have thirty or so pages left and cant wait to get back to it later to see if my suspicions about who done it are correct.

It only goes to show that there really are no rules. If youve got the gift, and Ben Elton clearly has, you can get away with anything.

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