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

Are you on Instagram? Then you can be featured here by tagging your books-related posts with #GuardianBooksScroll down for our favourite literary linksRead more Tips, links and suggestions blogs

Welcome to this week’s blog – it’s great to be back. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including a moving comment from a reader in Paris about the power of literature, an account of falling head-over-heels for Julio Cortázar, and an introduction to Switzerland’s Kerouac.

MarioCavaradossi is Embarking on The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann:

It’s been on my to-read list for years. Thus far I’m barely out of base camp (150 pages in), but I’ll update more fully when I reach the summit. So far there are some interesting musings on the nature of time and a couple of very finely drawn characters. The narrative events seem to be unfolding in real-time so far, which lends an especially vivid quality to the narrator’s musings on the passage of time.

... an account of his journey east by car through the Balkans, Turkey and Iran to the Hindu Kush in the Fifties with a friend. (We’ve just reached Iran.) It’s a lovely book; he’s clever, compassionate and observant, and seems interested in everything – so, the ideal travel writer! You can’t really avoid the comparison with Patrick Leigh Fermor, but Bouvier is less dreamy and his prose, while still lovely, less lyrical. He’s interested in now, whereas Fermor is always chasing after then. Two different approaches, but equally enjoyable to read.

After reading the first five stories and the beginning of Hopscotch, I announced that I had found a new favourite writer, and I stand by that. Unfortunately, some of the stories towards the end were not as good – they are less surreal, and the prose is lifeless. But there are still the brilliant ones, such as Axolotl, House Taken Over, Letter to a young lady in paris, and Bestiary. Fortunately, I’m now turning to Hopscotch, and the writing is brilliant. His sentences are always unexpected, such as “sparkling clean like a great big beautiful cockroach”. They make me smirk.

Voices from Chernobyl reads less like fact and more like a work of post-apocalyptic fiction

[It] is a collection of reportage on the famous nuclear catastrophe and its aftermath, published about a decade after the event. It is presented as a sequence of monologues by people who were caught in the chaos and/or its aftermath: those who lived in Chernobyl and the surrounds, those who returned, scientists, politicians, soldiers deployed to “liquidate” the poisoned countryside, etc.

There is next to no authorial intervention, subjects speak for themselves, and what transpires is a harrowing oral history that reads less like fact and more like a work of post-apocalyptic fiction. In fact, in its portrait of a society that changes for the worst in the blink of an eye, leaving the most basic of human behaviours and interactions a matter of life and death, Alexievich’s book most resembles the novel Blindness, by Alexievich’s fellow Nobel Laureate José Saramago. Among some of the more nightmarish episodes are of a man’s body disintegrating before his wife’s eyes, the culling of household pets for fear that they would spread radiation, and the actual burying of radioactive villages (and the topsoil to boot!). Of course, the shadow of the callous Soviet bureaucracy looms over all of this, and things didn’t seem to improve much with the system’s collapse a few short years later.

I needed to go to my bookshop nearby this morning ... I just wanted to be among books and among people wanting to read. I picked up L'Urgence et la patience because I like Jean-Philippe Toussaint and because I liked the cover. It's about the experience of writing. Then I picked up Jean-Pierre Vernant's La Traversée des frontières. He was that absolutely wonderful specialist in Ancient Greek literature but was also a high figure of La Résistance during WWII. This book is about memory, about heroism, in a constant and beautiful movement between Ancient Greece and Occupied France. That strong face on the cover helped me through the day. I've read both books today . I needed to. Feeling lucky I was able to ...

Sent via GuardianWitness

By Bluebird63

14 November 2015, 20:36

Related: Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter

Continue reading...