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 – it’s all about short books and short stories this week, perfect to squeeze in before longer holiday reads.

TimHannigan is in the middle of a run of Very Short Books as recommended by fellow TLSers:

The latest was The Singing Bowl by Alistair Carr, as recommended by @laidbackviews. It’s a short travel book about time spent (mostly) in Mongolia. It’s very cleanly written, with a strong sense of the grubbiness and thin thread of drunken violence that runs through Ulan Bator (never been myself, but I have two close family members who live and work there). I also think there’s a lot to be said for the travelogue condensed into novella length. There was, however, something oddly amateurish about the book as a piece of travel literature. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was, though being written in the present tense was part of the problem. Travelogues written in the present tense always sound like either magazine articles, or the naïve and solipsistic “what I did on my holidays” pieces that people sometimes read at open mic “writers’ events”.

A thought-provoking, evocative novel that deserves more than one reading, demonstrating the ease with which Toni Morrison and her narrative skill are able to skate into the 21st century, to pick up and explore the nuances of another of society’s dysfunctional aspects, that the things you do and say to children in their early years really matter and will impact their adult perceptions, actions and relationships. However, there are moments, that if grasped, can and do lead one out of that.

Johnson is one of the rare writers who fully inhabits a character of the opposite sex. His characters are heart-breaking

I’ve mentioned before that I rarely read short stories, mostly because I don’t have time to form attachments to characters in a short space. Well, Adam Johnson got to me in his short story.

Interesting Facts, which is also contained in his recent National Book Award-winning collection Fortune Smiles, is a remarkable “meta” story. It is narrated by a character who is the wife of a recent Pulitzer-prize winning author who has written a book about North Korea. Which would seem to be Johnson himself, having won the Pulitzer for The Orphanmaster’s Son, a phenomenal piece of work that I recommend. The narrator has breast cancer, and she narrates the story through the scrim of chemotherapy, which I have heard from friends who have undergone it, gets into your brain in ways that are difficult to describe if you haven’t experienced it. I guess it’s sort of the way your brain can feel sometimes during pregnancy, when you are flooded with hormones that feel as if they are blocking you from reaching parts of your brain that you know are there. This is what it’s like for the wife, who knows she’s dying, and is failing to make herself understood.

I don’t want to give too much away, but Johnson is one of the rare writers who fully inhabits a character of the opposite sex. His characters are heart-breaking, and while mentioning that the wife is dying might explain the fact that the story made me weep, it’s not that actually. That would be too facile. What made me weep were small moments that Johnson’s language conveyed in ways that went right for the gut. Makes me tempted to pony up and buy the collected stories in hardback.

I have been a fan of Greene for as long as I can remember and relish the chance to re-read anything I can find. I am always leaving them on train seats or in boxes as I leave one country to live in another. I didn’t actually intend my life to live out like a Graham Greene novel but it often seems than way.

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