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, which range from disappointing endings to unmissable classics and the Indonesian author everyone should read – plus our favourite literary links.

The discussion of disappointing book endings was prompted by Oranje14:

Has anyone else ever loved a book so much initially, only to be profoundly disappointed by the time they reached the end?

The one that immediately springs to mind is The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters. I was so excited during the first half of the book that Waters was doing something different with the twentieth-century woman’s domestic novel but it fell apart in the second half. —MsCarey

Good question. Unfortunately I can never discount the possibility that I misunderstood something in the text which has caused me to miss the point come the conclusion, I read a lot of fiction in translation whilst being about as cultured as a rusty wheelbarrow with a deflated tyre. I remember reaching the end of The Master and Margarita and feeling that there was something missing, given the power of the characters ... Ah crap, now I want to reread it and figure out where I went wrong. —Wordnumb

The most difficult experience I’ve had of loving a book and then being profoundly disappointed by its ending was with Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. In it he imagines an alternative American history, in which Lindbergh defeats FDR by a landslide in the 1940 election and comes to an understanding with Hitler. Though Roth has often used his Newark childhood in his work, I thought he never wrote about it so movingly and lovingly. There are scenes in it which are unforgettable, such as all of Newark staying up to hear Lindbergh’s speech to the 1940 Republican convention which wins him the nomination, people emptying onto the streets afterwards in their pyjamas, as if an earthquake had erupted. —Albertine67

I just read August by Gerard Woodward. It was a gem of a find, a superbly-written, character-driven novel about the development of a family over a decade or so. What I really loved about it was its use of a simple, basic narrative form (as opposed to post-modernist preoccupations with deconstructed narratives) that was a timely reminder that a book doesn’t have to be outlandishly different or outrageously creative to be brilliant.

Oh I just finished in one sit the book Child of all Nations - by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (one of the Buru Quartet book series). How splendid, how thrilling, how sad, how I cried, how I even slept with the book in my hands. Anyone that never read Mr. Toer’s book is losing an opportunity to educate (including myself) in a very profound way on history, economics, othering (the act of making a person into an non entity). It is the best book I have read in a long while. Compared (if one can say that word), only to the likes of the Russians grand masters of literature.

I’m enjoying it tremendously. Given that Crusoe describes himself as an undutiful good-for-nothing before the shipwreck, he is incredibly ingenious in coping with his situation on the island. He’s just seen the footprint in the sand, and I was interested to note that this occurs exactly half-way through the novel, in terms of page count (in my copy, anyway). Would Defoe have planned this? Is anything known about his writing process as an early novelist? How much rewriting and editing would he have carried out?

Preparing for the hilarious and wonderful Mindy’s new book coming out later this year!

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