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.

MsCarey has just finished Master and Commander and is submerged in a Patrick O’Brian binge – which is not stopping her from pursuing other reading urges:

It was a strange sensation to be entertained so thoroughly and educated so charmingly by a book where I understood only three words in every four. Intelligent and satisfying storytelling. I will definitely be back for more. The lexicon, A Sea of Words, arrived just after I’d finished but I’m dipping in happily already in anticipation of Post Captain.

And now I’ve had one of those powerful urges for a particular read which sweeps aside all the books one has planned on reading. In this case it was an overwhelming desire to read something about India so I’ve just been out and bought William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns. Hoping this will do the trick.

Beautifully paced writing with a finely balanced structure. This book is a critique of class, liberal idealistic hubris, contemporary colonialism and the complicity of the “locals”, greed, and the financial services that both make and unmake us. It’s also an exercise in epistemology and emotion, an unusual combination that works because of the nature of the book’s principal characters, their interaction and the writer’s capacity to merge ideas, events and people. Above all, it is a story of a friendship that is deep and flawed and ultimately a betrayal, the friendship being a mirror to the international events that are both centre-stage and a backdrop. Am buying copies for my friends.

It takes a while to get into the story but then it hooks you with great pictures and situations that are not lost even in the German translation.

Inspired by the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish “vanitas” and “memento mori” paintings, personal symbols representing attempts to cope with, forestall and deny one’s personal, increasingly imminent, annihilation ... I particularly like the Warhol postcard (in place of the traditional skull) echoing the relative fifteen-minutes of fame quotation. Other personal possessions (such as my camera, running top and watch, perched on the edge of the abyss) denote me; the blingy candle needs little explanation: time is short ...

I just stepped away from my IFFP shadow jury marathon to slip in Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (tr. Lisa Dillman). Two words: Read it! In nine short chapters you encounter all the magic of Alice in Wonderland, the darkness of Dante’s Inferno, the dystopia of McCarthy’s The Road. This infectious, gritty novel traces the passage of a streetwise young Mexican woman named Makina across the waters to the US to find her brother and deliver a message from their mother. Along the way she must make deals with shady characters, risk detection and interpret the strange land and peoples she encounters. The language is wonderful, at times completely original, to capture the feel of the original as the translator explains in her afterword.

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