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
Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including essential reads about race in America and non-challenging books for those times when real life is challenging enough.
meleastham is reading “an absolute classic” - Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth:
By ’eck it’s good.
Given the technology-saturated times we live in, it still manages to take you right there. The 1960s, where cool, good looking assassins used multiple identities to travel the world with a slinky little gun stashed in a secret compartment of an attaché case.
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By PaulWoolston
31 October 2015, 6:24
The first and third section are great but the middle section is truly special. There are around 40 narrators who tell of their experiences with and impressions of the two poets at the novel’s centre but also tell their own stories which are wonderful in themselves. It’s a novel which appears to do everything and i look forward to reading it again.
To say I’m enjoying this elegant, absurdist allegory would be an understatement: if Borges wrote a Monty Python sketch on cross-cultural encounters, you’d have The Folly.
Struggling with the ghosts of our fathers....
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By tompip
28 October 2015, 16:30
This was a demanding read, it took a while for me to decide if I even liked it. This love story between a 62-year-old Slovenian woman and a 27-year-old black man in Burkina Faso is a blend of meta fiction (the characters acknowledge that they are in a novel) and African magic realism. The author wrote her MA on Nigerian lit and lives part-time in Burkina Faso so she knows the literary style and the political history of the country. It was odd to encounter a Balkan novel that does not involve, in some context, the Balkan Wars. Halfway through I started to get a feel for the work and by the end when a revelation is made that I did not see coming I was definitely impressed.
Definitely a unique read.
What a book. It’s hard to really pin down, not a typical thriller/psychological examination/character type of book. It’s all of those really, but more than anything it’s not formulaic. I kept finding myself blindsided, I love it when an author abandons the crutch of foreshadowing and just delivers the punches from left and right. More than anything, I suppose it’s an examination of the type of persons you find living at the edge, or over it, of wilderness. The solitary types. I have had two close friends go down the survivalist, separatist path and I can say while the character of Jeremiah Pearl might be drawn to extremes, it is not at all inaccurate. Pick it up, it’s a great page-turner of a book.
Not nearly as well known as Lolita, though I wonder why. It’s just as good (maybe better, it’s been a long time since I read Lolita).
Always described as Kafkaesque - a description the author hated as he maintained that he’d never read any Kafka. The trouble is that it is the only way to describe it.
Read this on the metro, in Central Park, while sitting on the fire escape of my building and drinking champagne. Contains some lovely and poignant poems.
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15 October 2015, 18:21
This deals with the accession to the throne of King James I and takes the story up and beyond the Civil War into the era of Cromwell. As ever Ackroyd’s books are an enjoyable mix of anecdote with more serious history and although I’d rather he examined the causes and effects he provides a readable analysis.
Harvey’s book is up to now a great eye opener. Neoliberalism is not a purely economic theory, it is a seriously warped moral philosophy of freedom that is not in touch with any societal reality. This obscure philosophy found some very rich sponsors who found it fit their interests and was made popular through their media outlets and think tanks. The book answers a very important question I had been thinking about: What happened in the last 35-40 years that the idea of the welfare state, in my opinion the greatest civilizing agent in history, became so unpopular. In Harvey’s book the answer is easy: The Rich lost money and status, the world became more equal, and not necessarily in a planned and coordinaterd way the rich acted and massively promoted the idea that states are bad and markets are the only right (moral) way to organize an economy and society.
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