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, including modern ghost story recommendations, interesting reading practices, and huge and fascinating debates on gender and sexism in the writing and publishing worlds – ignited by Marlon James’s comments in this Guardian event and by Claire Vaye Watkins’s now infamous recent essay. Do take a look at last week’s thread.

But first, what’s the best book you’ve read this year? We would love to get the thoughts of the TLS community on the one book each of you has enjoyed the most in 2015. It’s been great to see some of you already looking back on the year’s reads, and no doubt many of you will do so on this thread. But if you feel inclined to also share this with us for an additional piece, please send a review of your chosen book (150 words minimum) by emailing marta.bausells@theguardian.com with the subject line “The best book I’ve read this year”. The deadline is Tuesday 15 December.

Starting on September, I had planned to read 52 books in 52 weeks, so starting Infinite Jest may compromise those plans

It goes a bit David Mitchellish at the end which necessitates too much clunky exposition in the dialogue but it does seem a bit churlish of me to accuse David Mitchell of being David Mitchell and I do recommend it. It’s just that it’s not perfect unlike my favourite modern ghost story which I recommend unreservedly to anyone looking for a shiversome read in December: Dark Matter by Michelle Paver is about a British expedition to the Norwegian Arctic in the 1930s and is just brilliant. Also short.

This week, I have dived head-first into David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan opus, Infinite Jest. While some peers have dissuaded me from the book based on its massive size and difficulty, I have been thoroughly enjoying it thus far. I was able to utilize some great online tools such as the page-by-page annotations and scene guide provided by the Infinite Jest wiki page. Starting on September 1st of this year, I have planned to read 52 books in 52 weeks, so starting Infinite Jest may compromise those plans since I am currently anticipating completing the book sometime around Christmas.

Were you ever so engrossed in, enchanted by, delighted with a novel that you just didn’t want it to end and so you rationed the last 100 or so pages, reading 10, maybe, 20 pages at a time then putting the book aside? First time for me was last week with The Night Circus [by Erin Morgenstern]. I finished the final 23 pages last Saturday. Took me, literally, all day to reach the book’s perfect, I mean perfect, conclusion. I’ve been proselytizing friends and family all week. And I urge you, yes you, to read The Night Circus ASAP. Whew! How I do go on.

Every Christmas, I find the doorstop of a novel, the literary touchstone, the gaping hole in my reading, and I read it

I find the doorstop of a novel, the literary touchstone, the gaping hole in my reading, and I read it. Or two. Last year, it was Great Expectations, the year before that Moby Dick, the year before that Anna Karenina. This year, it’s Middlemarch. It’s been sitting up on my to-be-read shelf for far too much time, occupying far to much space. So it will be tackled. I’ve gotten about 16 pages into it and I can already tell by the twists and turns and convolutions of the phrases that I’m going to be in for the long haul on this one. It might take me the entirety of December. But it seems ephemeral and magnetic.

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