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, including great books for periods of reading apathy, haunting short stories, books that you just have to read in one sitting, and mysteries that could be lovechildren of John LeCarré and Paul Auster.

Alice Munro's stories seem to progress with pauses and sudden shifts and the opening of new vistas of feeling

Much to haunt the mind – many layers in these stories – which keep peeling back to reveal more. They seem to progress with pauses and sudden shifts and the opening of new vistas of feeling, and in the final group darkness truly descends.

It was exactly what I was looking for in my period of reading apathy – something fun and strange. As a novel, I feel it probably should have been a bit shorter, and I would have preferred it without the scenes set in Biblical times, but I’d still recommend it. I read the introduction last, and I find the contextual information really fascinating, such as the fact that Bulgakov himself would have “disappeared” if authorities had known he was writing the novel.

... and it has left me more than a little perplexed. I really don’t know whether I enjoyed it or not and this is a feeling completely alien to me. Several times during the reading I was on the point of giving it up as the plot was dragging but there was something that kept me going (I don’t like leaving books unread if I can help it). The last 100 pages or so were more interesting than the previous 400 or so, but looking back I’m not sure it was worth it! This is particularly disappointing as I loved both The Crimson Petal and the White and Under The Skin. Anyone else feel underwhelmed by this book or was it just me?

My attention doesn’t hold for longer than ten minutes in the evening, and the lazy weekend mornings seemed to have disappeared from my timetable recently. So I was glad to be stuck on a bus seat between London and Paris for nine hours yesterday, as it allowed me to read The Salinger Contract by Adam Langer, which is an entirely gripping, funny “mystery” (not so much a thriller, and not really a mystery novel either) that does not resemble anything I’ve ever read, although it could well be the lovechild of John LeCarré and Paul Auster.

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