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.

conedison discussed the pleasures and pitfals of poetic prose:

Leonard Cohen was already an award-winning poet before becoming a songwriter, but he also wrote two novels. I remember reading his Beautiful Losers many years ago and being transported by certain passages. Also in David Guterson’s Snow Falling On Cedars (which I was not crazy about), I remember thinking that some of his paragraphs were so serenely poetic that perhaps he’d chosen the wrong genre in which to express himself. Now for only the third time I’ve read truly poetic prose in Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat. The writing is rice-paper delicate as if every word was written with an ostrich feather. Cat lover or no, it’s a sweet read.

The writing in The Guest Cat is rice-paper delicate as if every word was written with an ostrich feather

Interesting question, actually. For me there are two kinds of fiction: fiction that entertains me passively much as watching a baseball game or a movie does, and fiction that rewards closer attention and therefore demands, if not work, at least a certain kind of concentration that I don’t always feel like investing. What I find interesting is the way most people who sometimes enjoy passive entertainment seem to find authors they like and other authors who leave them cold (or worse) without thinking about it, almost as if their taste in light fiction is a part of their nature.

Three chapters in and bells are ringing. Seems I read part of Americana in short story form in the Guardian Review Book of Short Stories last year. Living up to expectations so far.

Sent via GuardianWitness

By goodyorkshirelass

8 February 2015, 12:34

Absolutely wonderful writing style. I keep being surprised by the unusual turn of phrase. Delightful!

I think you’re fortunate when that happens – a sort of love affair. I’ve come closest in the last couple of years with Angela Carter. I love the way that she pulls the floor from under me. I want to understand how her head works. But I’m reading her very slowly, she’s such strong meat. I also loved the cool clarity of Alice Munro’s writing which I read for the first time last year. I will be going back to her.

“What makes a good story?” I asked my friend. She then recommended this book to me. I found it at my local library and just love its weathered cover. There are some great stories in here, and just what I needed to read to feel inspired.

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