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:

lulamae has been catching up with CJ Sansom:

Highly unlikely to get near a Booker Prize but I’m reading Lamentation, the sixth of CJ Sansom’s Shardlake mysteries. He’s a historian so it’s all well researched and has a hunchbacked (an important fact) and principled lawyer at its main character. The stories began with the dissolution of the monasteries (Dissolution) with Shardlake working for Cromwell and has moved on to Henry 8 near death. Lighter than Wolf Hall but equally enjoyable and with much the same cast. Very hard to put down...

“A Place Called Winter” by Patrick Gale: Brilliant novel, brilliant writer.

Words explode into the air, leaving behind velocity rings worthy of your favorite Pikachu.

A fuller review here: http://ihath.com/?p=2353

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By ihath

21 April 2015, 17:08

Cries of outrage will no doubt follow my next sentence. I’ve tried to read two of John Lanchester’s novels, and gave up on both. There. Said it. I know he has a devoted following.

On holiday a couple of years ago I got a third of the way through Capital and threw in the towel. First few chapters thought I’d settled down to a good read. But then, but then. Enjoyable though it was iniitially it began to feel formulaic and stereotypical. Gave it to a friend. Big fan. She loved it.

I’ve just abandoned The Left Hand of Darkness. I was delighted when ENMWombat recommended this last week as I’d been thinking of trying something by Ursula Le Guin but didn’t know where to start. I picked it up at the library this afternoon and was pleased to see that reassuring Virago green spine. But oh dear oh dear. I didn’t even get to the end of the first chapter. It just felt like being in an especially portentous episode of Star Trek. My apologies to ENMWombat. It just wasn’t for me.

I didn’t really like The Left Hand of Darkness but loved The Dispossessed.

The second book I've started reading this month, "Relatos del mar" ("Tales of the sea") is a compilation of real and fictional stories that explore how influential the sea has been in real history as well as in literature. The tales are set chronologically so as to the reader can notice how the stories which are told about this place have evolved with the passing of time.

We can find very different stories: from those related to slavery and plundering to others that show a bit of reflection on the sea and dangerous voyages due to the weather conditions. It's being interesting so far.

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By ID1541580

24 April 2015, 10:54

I have a question for anyone who has read some of both Patricia Highsmith’s non-Ripley novels and George Simenon’s romans dur. Are they similar in tone and / or subject matter? Do you think that Highsmith was mining a vein that Simenon pioneered?

I am not a fan of series detectives and have pretty much ignored Simenon, not realizing until recently that he had written a number of books that were not part of his Maigret series. Reading a description of these romans dur, as they seem to be called, they sounded similar to some of the Highsmith novels I’ve been enjoying recently, examining how a violent act intrudes upon and changes the lives of otherwise ordinary people, and sometimes reveals that, after all, they were not so ordinary to begin with.

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