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 pictures from last week, including a discussion of post-Soviet literature, the lowdown on this year’s Man Booker international finalists and a whole heap of comfort reads (which suddenly seem more necessary in the light of the weekend’s terrible events in Paris).

RedBirdFlies has embarked on ambitious project to read the writers longlisted for this year’s International Booker

So after a book of non fiction essays Tales From the Heart and a fictional biography of her grandmother Victoire, My Mother’s Mother, I then went on to read Maryse Condé’s novel Segu, something of a minor classic of historical fiction set in the early 1800’s within the family of a nobleman, which follows the four sons as they leave Segu and encounter all manners of places, people, perceptions, faiths and practices outside those they are familiar with.

I also read Marlene Van Niekerk’s Agaat, which floored me and took a while to be about to gather my thoughts and write something about. A talented writer and thinker and a challenging read.

Having visited Spinalonga on holiday in Crete reading Victoria Hislop's novel based on its history as a leper colony is a chance to try to keep up my French. It's great that my local library has collections in 'Community Languages' including a good few shelves of French books.

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By tiojo

11 November 2015, 12:34

I have just ordered Ludmilla Ulitskaya’s The Big Green Tent. I’m quite excited about getting this book, as Ulitskaya will be the first of the post-Soviet novelists I’ve read.

But back to Soviet days - has anybody read work by Vassily AKsyonov? Recently I got intoGenerations of Winter and The Winter Hero? It’s a huge epic about a medical family surviving life in Stalinist Russia and quite compelling.

I first read ‘Arctic Summer’, his latest book about E.M. Forster’s ‘secret history’ and loved it. Such lyrical and truthful writing. Have since read two of his republished novels: ’Small Circle of Beings’ - basically about family in a very real hell on earth. A ‘difficult book - quite short, very condensed, but worth it. Also, have just finished Galgut’s ‘The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs’ - another ‘short book’- 142 pages, first published in 1991- shortly after the first free general elections were held in South West Africa.

As someone that has spent a great deal of time living on Sicily, this remains a fascinating account of the lives of fishermen in the early '50s at Scopello, north west Sicily. Still a beautiful place and on the edge of the fabulous Riserva dello Zingaro. Alongside this book, need to read 'Sicilian Lives' by the man known as the Gandhi of Sicily, Danilo Dolci, which covers similar subject material, but based on the other side of Golfo di Castellammare at Trappeto

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By Tacitus49

11 November 2015, 14:44

Completely absorbed I was happy to concur with the critics who described it as “Simply Magnificent”. Until, until.

Swept away initially by her exploration of the emotions of Lewis, a thirteen year old boy spending the summer in Paris who falls under the spell of a glamourous Russian novelist, I was convinced by her usual sure touch. All was as it should be, but then, but then. In the final section events took a different turn and I was unable, as one reviewer said, to be “beguiled by Rose Tremain into suspending disbelief”.

After an unusual October in reading terms, I decided to go back to my books a week ago or so. This time my choice dates from many years ago, particularly from the Archaic Greece.

This book contains around 470 fables which include a moral lesson. They show the goodness and the evil by which the human being is usually characterized. We can see that the current human behaviour is the same as before. We haven't evolved in this sense.

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By ID1541580

10 November 2015, 13:42

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