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 – and thanks for sharing your best reads of the year. Please continue to do so in the thread or by email to marta.bausells@theguardian.com for inclusion in an upcoming piece.

LiteraryWanderings recommended the memoir Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey:

I couldn’t help but feel empathy for Anna who informs the reader of what her life is like when living with debilitating light sensitivity. I’ll be honest at first I found I was sitting outside of the book too much, but as the book progressed I was drawn in, this could be partly because I felt that the writing seems to strengthen but maybe because I was finding the subject matter so interesting. If you’re looking for something different to read this could well be it. Anna is one inspiring lady.

I’ve finished Suttree, the fantastic novel by Cormac McCarthy. It’s two hundred pages longer than Blood Meridian, and is funnier and more contemplative than other McCarthy books I’ve read. I’d previously read Harold Bloom dismissing it by saying it was just like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! So I was annoyed to find that it wasn’t at all like Faulkner’s text. In fact, I’d argue that it’s a more independent text than Blood Meridian, which has clear affiliations with Moby Dick and William Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico. If I had to compare it to anything, I’d say it’s like a strong Patrick White novel, somewhere between Tree of Man and The Vivisector. As to criticisms, I feel that it trails off awkwardly at the end, not for the first time with McCarthy, and I’ve managed to catch him repeating himself at times. I’ve often had a sense of de ja vu reading McCarthy, so this time I was prepared :)

If you’ve read post-apocalypse novels published in the last ten years and liked what you read, please give me a pointer. I’ve read The Road (The Dog Stars is better in my opinion) and after seeing Shaun of the Dead in 2004, I can’t read of or watch zombies without laughing. So, have you anything for me?

The book is by Kevin Barry, a writer previously unknown to me, and one whom I would have missed if not for the Guardian. Beatlebone dropped in America about two weeks ago, and I have not heard much about it. If there hadn’t been such a fuss about it over here, I wouldn’t have known to pick it up. And am I glad I did.

The premise is that it’s 1978. John Lennon is 37, going on 38. He is tired. Years before, he bought a tiny island off the Irish shore, and now, battered by fame and haunted by memories, he wants nothing more than to go out to his island, the one he hasn’t visited since he bought it, and put into practice what he has learned in Primal Scream therapy. He wants to go somewhere that no one can hear him and scream and scream and scream his pain away. Or so the theory goes. [Read the rest of the comment here.]

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