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.

EnidColeslaw_ shared this reflection on how difficult it is for many of us to get rid of material posessions – and linked it to her recent read:

For a few years now I have been trying to let go of my material possessions. I give away clothes and every paper book I’ve read goes to a neighbourhood association that collects books. My tiny bedroom is still stuffed to the gills with books, vinyls, comics, clothes, but at the end of the day, I wonder how I would react if all of this disappeared, for example if my apartment burned down. Would I be hysterically crying? I hope not, yet I don’t think I am ready to, one day, leave all of that behind me. I care a little bit too much, for the time being. Heidi Julavits does a whole lot. She has an attachment to certain objects that often verges on obsession. It’s one of the main themes of her recent memoir The Folded Clock, in which every entry begins like a diary: “Today, I”. She lives in Maine part of the year and a previous tenant of her house left a tap handle inside the wall. Out of superstition she carries it in her handbag every day, and draws it every day before beginning to work. It’s hers now, but she feels it never really belongs to her.

I’m an English Literature student and I enjoy my course reading, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nice when term is over and I can finally read what I want. I need to finish this wonderful feminist examination of the concept of virginity, and our obsession with it, in the next three days while I still have access to my uni library! Alongside this, I’m reading some Angela Carter and finishing off Austerity by Kerry-Anne Mendoza. My summer reading list keeps growing and growing, but luckily my reading speed is at a good pace after my first year at university.

It is quite unusual and remarkable in that the first half of the book addresses the author’s struggle with how a novel about a massacre should be written. [...] I found this part in equal parts compelling and frustrating. How wonderful to get into the mind of the author on something so profound, but the way that the writing obscured the actual plot made it a little confusing. However, when she starts writing the story itself, from the different perspectives of the villagers, from opposing sides, in the format of letters and speeches and catalogues of dismembered bodies, the experiment starts to pay off. I guess it’s true, when your novel is about an atrocity, half of the struggle is how you will write about it, so I understand its significance here. However, as an overall piece of work, it resonated less with me for that precise reason. Sometimes we don’t need to know about the author’s mechanics.

I’m about two thirds through and had the strange experience of going from being completely confused to utterly captivated without realising when the change happened.

I find myself rereading back up the pages as the non linear impressionist narrative means I’m not always appreciating the incredible sentences for their phrasing. I’ve never read Joyce but I don’t think i’ve ever read a better prose stylist in English than William Faulkner.

As part of a reading challenge that I set myself, I read Time Reborn by Lee Smolin. I think I will need to re-read it several times to really get it, but I liked it. Smolin writes well, makes very interesting arguments, and explains several concepts in a new way. He also seems to have some ideas and doubts that I have had, so I am quite sympathetic to his view.

However, as much as I liked his arguments I did not find them entirely convincing, mostly because he appears to dismiss the idea of an observer-dependent reality which seems a shame. He also doesn’t make much case for how the viewpoint he proposes makes a blind bit of difference to anyone who is not a cosmologist. This also seems a shame because I think that what people believe about time has some very subtle but pervasive effects on their lives, from their anxiety levels to how they justify their behaviour toward others.

Very fine and economical use of language and evoked the central character’s turmoil superbly – his hesitant steps towards understanding the African predicament during the colonial period, his sense of family and his place within that unit versus his growing need for love and new experiences beyond his very enclosed world. There are odd moments when the authorial presence is almost too imposing and overwhelms the characters – but the expression is so thoughtful and insightful that my connection with them remains right up to the sombre conclusion.

Life is short, “The Recognitions” is long. (And difficult, I’m told.) I’ve read “Moby-Dick.” I’ve read Carlyle’s “The French Revolution.” I might even read that again, at some point. But I’ll be dead one day, and you can bounce copies of “Infinite Jest” off my sinking coffin. Nobody reads everything.

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