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.

TimHannigan has been enjoying the Costa Book of the Year-winning H is for Hawk:

It deserves all the prizes and acclaim it’s been getting. I’d put off reading it because I’d got a bit grumpy about how bandwagonish “nature writing” had become, but it’s something quite different – and some very, very fine writing.

A few chapters still to go, so I’ll say more anon, but here’s a wee taster of her writing, from the moment when she picks up her hawk in a car park at a ferry port. There were two birds, and she was meant to have the second one:

So we opened the other box, which was meant to hold the larger, older bird. And dear God, it did. Everything about this second hawk was different. She came out like a Victorian melodrama: a sort of madwoman in the attack. She was smokier and darker and much, much bigger, and instead of twittering, she wailed; great, awful gouts of sound like a thing in pain.

For some reason, this is turning out to be a year when I read more short story collections. Not something planned, but, very enjoyable. This week, I am loving Saadat Hasan Manto’s Bombay Stories. This is the translation by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad. Most of the stories are quickly-told and some are definitely of their time. But, in all of them, what shines through is Manto’s love for the Bombay that he eventually had to leave behind. It is a Bombay that only exists in fleeting glimpses in the Mumbai of today ... You have to look hard to find it even if you’re from the place. But, when you read stories like these, you know how and where to start looking. And, that’s something, isn’t it?

A big fan of Nick Hornby and I've been looking forward to reading this one.

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By TaymazValley

2 March 2015, 16:14

When most of us go out to a movie or play, whether we like what we’re seeing or not, we stay until the end. Both endeavours are experienced in public forums. But reading a book is a private enterprise. If disenchanted, we’re free to close that book and walk away at any time. My question is, in the privacy of your abode, how bad does a book have to be before you say: Enough? Or do you treat the reading of a book similarly to John Humphries asking a question ... I’ve started so I’ll finish? :-)

Are there are any books that people have enjoyed reading but still not finished for whatever reason? I remember enjoying On The Road at the age of about 15/16 (presumably the best time to read it), but for some reason I put it to one side and never came back to it. Likewise I never completed Wild Swans by Jung Chang, although the reason then was because my mother lent the copy I was reading to someone she worked with, who then flew back to China with it; she bought me a replacement copy, but by the time I got it I no longer felt the urge to pick it up ...

The teenage nobel peace prize winner's book is essential reading for both women & girls everywhere, AND anyone who wants to understand the complexities of the conflict in Pakistan.

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By EveMaria

7 March 2015, 23:41

I finished The Sound and the Fury and it was quite excellent. Almost, almost, catharsis. There was a hint of it when Jason was talking to the police and was powerless after being built up as evil. Not actual catharsis, really, because that wouldn’t suit the fiction – but just the hint that sometimes, life is not what the undeserving want it to be. A wonderful book.

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