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.

conedison asked an excellent question:

If you could erase from your memory just one, favourite book from any time in your life, then be handed it fresh and new, which book would you choose to read again for the first time? (My wife chose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but said shed require a time machine so she could go back and read it again for the first time ... as a child.)

Im reading Dan Simmons Endymion. I read Hyperion last year, and just finished Fall of Hyperion, so am going to finish the series off before starting something else. Very interesting and enjoyable books. They are long, the sci in sci-fi is sometimes a bit hard and there is so, so much going on but I would recommend them.

by Patrick McCabe. picked up from a charity book stall at the GP surgery. Almost got a Grisham but am now so glad I didn't

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By gordonfrank

17 October 2014, 4:12

Continuing my exploitation of my continued employment in a bookshop, I have now moved on to Roy Keanes new book. He is a character that any novelist would be delighted to come up with so I bet Roddy Doyle was delighted to get the gig ghost writing this one. Keane is a walking contradiction and Doyle seems to get that. His writing style is a little too chatty at times though, resulting in unflatteringly (to Mr. Keane) clunky sentences such as one that contained two supposes within about ten words. Nevertheless, I should imagine the enjoyment one gets from reading it will be exactly as predicted before picking it up, which for me is rather a lot.

I just finished reading the latest novel of a writer whose previous works I devoured and loved, and this one felt like a break-up. Not in a please dont leave me way, more in a what happened to us? way. I fell out of love and I thought we could make it work but it just no longer does it for me and Im utterly disappointed. As with all break-ups, Im going to go bury myself in my bed, eat an indecent amount of chocolate and probably end up in a karaoke bar. Ah, literature.

Im currently reading Javier Marias The Infatuations well, I dont know whether reading is the right word. Some books, although brilliant, are hard to come back to, you know you are going to have to work hard to enjoy them properly yes, Im looking at you, Book Four of À la recherche, you may smirk but Ill be back. Ill crack Prousts monster no matter how long it takes! while others glide down like a twenty year malt. I find Javier Marias writing in this latter category.

I can understand that he is an acquired taste. Long, long sentences wander off to discuss whether the word just used was exactly the right one to describe what the sentence was trying to describe. Not much happens and what does happen which can be highly dramatic is sucked inexorably into the hypnotic web of text.

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