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

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

AggieH started a fascinating conversation about Martin Amis, and about the artist and their personality versus the art, with this comment:

Things Martin Amis made me think about while I read House of Meetings:

-How little thought we give to the war rapist’s post-coital tristesse.

I’ve just finished The Martian by Andy Weir. Well, to be accurate I should say re-finished. It’s such a page turner that when I got to the end I simply had to go back and read the thing again. If you even have just a passing interest in science fiction then this is well worth looking into. Next up is Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War. The prose seems a tad overworked in the first pages but once you get used to it it’s actually rather poetic and well crafted. Will report back ...

I enjoy the occasional celebrity memoir (Amy Poehler, Tina Fey), I spend a lot of time reading online magazines and newspapers, although it’s part of my job, and of course, as many of us here, I like to read about books (on TLS, Goodreads, blogs, and other corners of the Internet). I spend what could be deemed an indecent amount of time watching TV shows. And I love sleeping. None of that time I consider “wasted” or “lost”. Yes, if I hadn’t watched The Sopranos last week, I could have finished Gilead by now, but I’m sure Marilynne Robinson would acclaim the quiet fury of Tony Soprano in the face of adversity.

However. When a 768-page book, having received mainly positive reviews, bores me almost all the way through to its end, I consider my time, yes, slightly wasted. Mind you, my time is not precious. I didn’t lose anything, materially or spiritually, by being stuck all weekend in my bedroom reading We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas. But it could be a very solid, satisfying 350-page novel following an American family of Irish descent from the 1950s to the end of the 1990s. It probably doesn’t need to be the sprawling epic the publisher wants it to be. Where are good editors when we need them? (And when will I stop ranting about books on TLS?)

Been rather slow going this past week, but have just finished A Most Wanted Man. I love John le Carre as he embodies everything I love about spy fiction as well as everything I love about literary fiction, and his characterisation is second to none. Seemed somewhat lighter in tone than the Karla trilogy, but the ending was as bleak as that in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. A great read, and now I can watch the DVD...

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