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
Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week – you’ve all kicked off 2016 in force and with books by your side.
The Seth was a joy – an account of a roundabout trip to Delhi from north-western China via Tibet and Nepal, a journey he undertook as a visiting student in the early 1980s. Seth’s an irresistible storyteller; From Heaven Lake is almost a tenth of the size of his magnum opus A Suitable Boy, but it is full of the same wit and compassion found in that later fictional work.
Pedro Páramo, on the other hand, is a novel I’d read about – Susan Sontag called it one of the 20th century’s most influential novels and Salman Rushdie recently dubbed it a surrealist masterpiece – and thought I’d squeeze in in the last few days of the 2015. A story of a young man who fulfils a promise to his dying mother to visit her hometown and meet his father, the the character of the title. When he arrives, he finds himself in a place where the worlds of the living and the dead intersect, and so unfolds the story of the downfall of a corrupt landowner and the community over which he lorded. Pedro Páramo is very much a work of proto-magical realism, and its influence on García Márquez and other Boom authors is clear in its dense, lyrical prose, shifting viewpoints and non-linear structure. It’s a probably a work that gains from being read twice, so I may revisit it in the future.
... which I found very satisfying – a sort of sci-fi thriller without the low-budget monsters. The science Wells invents to explain invisibility also feels more convincing and appealing than his attempts in The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, the two other novels of his that I’ve read. I think I’d have to say that I like it more than those two. His prose is plainer than what I usually go for, but he had a knack for wild plots.
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