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 week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

EnidColeslaw was reading Here and Now, the book that compiles the correspondence between Paul Auster and JM Coetzee over the course of three years:

Enjoyed a few days off in London to re-visit my favourite bookshops (wait, isn’t that what tourism is all about?) and bought a few books I had been meaning to read, especially Here and Now, and A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes. I’m well aware that this is ludicrous, but despite French being my native language, I’ve only read Barthes in English so far, thanks (or because of?) a well-stocked bookshop in the Bloomsbury area which has more Barthes on its shelves than any of the bookshops in my neighbourhood, ahem.

The Auster and Coetzee correspondence is interesting and sometimes amusing, but not an endless string of thought-provoking discussions. There was a certain stiffness in their exchanges, probably due to the fact that they somehow knew that the letters would end up being published. Lots of baseball talk too, which I assume is... normal for Auster, being American? Maybe less so for Coetzee, although he is much more scrupulous in his analyses of matches and scores, and more generally focused in each of his letters, where Auster tends to drift from a subject to the other without much of a transition.

I always feel quite melancholy and nostalgic in November so when re-reading Tove Jansson's haunting, lyrical tale i empathise with Moominpappa's feelings of something missing.

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By LucyRM

11 November 2014, 18:11

Reading Animal Farm at such a young age, I hold it responsible for a) instilling a lifelong love of all things Orwell, and b) securing the complete transfer of my love of reading from children’s/young adult books to more “grown up” literature. This has reminded me of the question I was going to post this week, which is this: for those of us who have been avid readers since childhood, what was the key book or books that helped make the transition from younger to adult fiction?

I’m reading Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. What a pleasant contrast to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch which I’ve just finished. Flanagan’s writing is spare and lyrical. Quite beautiful. I feel that I should be reading it slowly and savouring every word. Tartt throws everything in and had me yelling for an editor. Endless pages of long dialogue that I couldn’t actually hear anyone saying. Flanagan’s dialogue is brief and leaves me unsure about what I’m reading. But I feel I can relax and just wait to find out what he wants to tell me.

Whether it is the violence in Gaza, or two neighboring countries always at war with each other as is the case between India and Pakistan, or the perpetuation of violence by a state on its citizens, especially the students as in seen in Mexico and India, modern man is constantly fighting with seen / unseen and known / unknown enemy. What better time to pick up this book and try to understand what it means to be oneself, an individual with a myriad of identities forged by lineage, history and geopolitics of a region.

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By Asmita Das

10 November 2014, 9:01

Ooh, I do love this! A place I can discuss books outside of my immediate family (fiancee and 12 year old daughter). I confess I am a bit all over the place when it comes to finishing books and often read two or three books simultaneously. [You’ll find you’re not alone in this blog, then!] So I gave myself a pat on the back after finishing two this week.

The first was Chuck Palahniuk’s Damned, a delightful read full of humour (of the dark kind!) and demons. The story follows a recently deceased teen and her narrative of her experience of landing in hell. Although hell is well, hellish, I came away from this story with the notion that hell isn’t quite the polar opposite of heaven. I will of course seek out part two of this story, Doomed as soon as I can.

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