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 from last week. As you might have gathered, Marta is away at the moment, and I have been so busy without her that the upset caused by some aggressive commenters over the last fortnight passed me by.

I can only apologise to anyone who has been offended, emphasise how highly we value this thread and (almost) everyone who contributes to it, and second TimHannigan’s words:

I’ve said a whole bunch of times in the past that this is just about the single nicest little corner of the internet I’ve ever come across. It does seem like it’s come under assault a few times of late, but it’s probably something that can be resisted quite easily if we put our minds to it. Trolls tend to get bored very quickly. @conedison points out he’s been contributing here for four years; you’re average troll doesn’t last more than a few weeks.

I’ve been reading A Brief History of Seven Killings, it’s tough going to be entirely honest, pages and pages of patois, a myriad of characters that fleet in and out of the cacophony of noise that seems to be happening everywhere in the book.

I’ve not finished it yet, but I’m bearing my way through it.

I have just read this book too. What can I say - I am a white English/Irish person who has no affiliation with Jamaica; her politics or history. I have never visited Jamaica but have always had a soft spot for Bob Marley. Didn’t even remember there was an an attempted killing on him - that’s how much history passed me by when I was young.I liked this book because it seemed to tell a sort of truth about colonialism...yes another ..ism. I liked all the ‘bad’ characters in the book-even Josie Wales was a victim of the ‘shitstem’. There are so many wasted deaths in this book - but I will always remember Bam-Bam...and his Dad’s Clarke’s shoes. This book tells you something about the CIA and its reach - don’t know if this is true or not but it makes you think.

As expected, a wonderful book. There are very few historians who can make dry administrative history fascinating, but Beard achieves this and many other things. A fascinating political, social, cultural, literary history of ancient Rome from its beginnings to Caracalla (more or less.)

Anyone like a laugh? Just finished Another Great Day At Sea by the inimitable Geoff Dyer - so deft, so amusing and less than 200 pages long. Geoff is Writer In Residence for two weeks on the aircraft carrier USS George HW Bush, patrolling the Arabian Gulf. He’s well over 6ft tall and suffers from claustrophobia so how’s that gonna go? This is a total delight like eating a slice of lemon meringue pie, frothy, tangy and crisp. Loved it.

I’ve finished Herzog, the best Bellow novel, in my opinion, that I’ve read to date. It backs up my theory that I prefer Bellow’s third-person prose, as I also enjoyed Seize the Daymore than Augie March. I think one of the reasons that I like these texts more is that there aren’t as many of Bellow’s famous ‘idioms’, which he sometimes piles on. My feeling is that they look suspiciously like cliches.

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