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: fabulous reads by female authors, new takes on classics, novels that should have been short stories and books-inspired food choices.

laidbackviews made a welcome return to the thread:

Gosh I’ve been neglecting you all of late. Here’s what’s been spending time on the bedside table:

Firstly a run of four female writers. Ayelet Gundar-Goshen creates some wonderful characters in her unusual tale One Night, Markovitch. Very readable. Still not sure of Rebecca Solnit, though The Faraway Nearby had some moments. Lesley Riddoch is a gem and her Wee White Blossom a fine update on the original Blossom. Visions; Hope. Finally on the girlie front we had Gertrude Bell, with her Tales from the Queen of the Desert, and as fresh today as when they were penned a century or so ago. Delightful, even having read the Persian stuff before.

I last read this in 1982. Back then the consensus seemed to be this was about history. 1948, and Soviet Russia. We’d been allowed to read Orwell and our future would be different. Wonder what new things I’ll find this time?

How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position. Tabish Khair.

The File on H. Ismail Kadare.

My perfect kind of book. Claudia is dying and thinks back over episodes in her life. Simple as that and oh so beautiful. I was worried that it was going to be depressing but the emphasis is very much on life and on how impossible it is to ever really know the whole of someone. Claudia is self-obsessed and arrogant but quite irresistible. I borrowed this from the library but have already ordered a copy as I want to re-read it at some point. It’s up at the top of my favourite of the Booker winners.

I’m reading The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuczinsky ... My partner thinks I diss the Russians too much for not knowing more about them, so this looked like a great way to get some USSR-era Russia insight. And Rysz K is always great. What a guy, like the personification of the word “intrepid”. I’m attempting it in Spanish translation though, so probably not getting the most out of it. Chapter 1, on the Red Army invasion of his home town when Ryszard was seven years old, was still harrowing.

After having seen the romantic “dramedy” One Day at the cinema, I thought it obvious to steer clear of David Nicholls’s works, and snobbishly dismissed him as the paragon of mushy lit that was not worthy of my TBR (the literary meanness can go far!). Then his latest novel Us was longlisted for the Booker, raising a few eyebrows in passing, and then a colleague of mine recommended it to me. So here I am, following Douglas and Connie whose marriage is on its last legs, and Albie, their 17-year-old son and aspiring photographer, on a Grand Tour of Europe and its numerous museums. And I have to admit it’s rather pleasing and funny in parts, although the writing is plain. The incredible weather here may soften my opinions, but after having spent the weekend with the last hundred pages of Knausgaard’s first volume of My Struggle in a bleak version of “How Clean Is Your House?”, this is the kind of novel I entirely welcome.

What I am appreciating so far is that, while Saunders’s short stories are about a particular moment or event, the worlds he creates for each are complete enough for the moment/event to become interesting and memorable (in the way that some of our own life-defining moments are). In the hands of a lesser writer, perhaps, some of these moments/events could seem rather banal and boring. It’s such an amazing and enviable skill that some of the best short story writers have: how to select just the right kind and level of detail to create and present the worlds of their stories.

“Since I’m always reading older books, I continuously come across references such as the author describes, though, not being a member of the group stereotyped, I’m sure it wouldn’t have struck me as it did her that the meanest goat in Heidi is named ‘the Great Turk’.”

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