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, with fantastic letter collections (a recurring theme lately), magic thrillers and very easily readable – one reader assures us – two-thousand-page trilogies.

NatashaFatale earned all our admiration by finishing Anatoly Rybakov’s Stalin trilogy, “which is basically a single 1800-page novel. That sounds daunting but it isn’t at all”:

Yevtushenko said of one the books that it reads like a detective story, and that’s exactly right. Not in that it’s a mystery – how could it be? – but in that it moves like a very good one. It fairly races along. So if you could see yourself reading six good mysteries in a row ...

I stayed lucky with Peter Brown’s The Ransom of the Soul. It simply never occurred to me before how much early Christianity had in common with the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Could have used an editor in a couple of places; the defects are minor but the writing would be near-perfect if they’d been caught, so I grumble.

I have always steered clear of Steinbeck, however, for my book club, I am reading ‘East of Eden’. Just love it. Only half way through, but what a book! The writing about the human condition speaks to me in many ways. My favourite characters so far are Samuel and Lee. Philosophers and boy, do they think! PS. Never seen the film and I don’t want to.

Don’t ask me why. I just felt like I needed some of that kind of no-nonnsense advice to start 2016. He writes in epigrams mostly, which can get tiring. And, when he starts railing against the luxury of bathroom fixtures, it does get a bit much. But, for the most part, a lot of what he says is good advice for any age. You take what applies to you. I did enjoy, very much, what he had to say about friendship – a very different concept to how we approach it these days. And, I wondered how he would have responded to social media friendships – they would have faced a rant worse than bathroom fixtures, I think.

Her protagonist, Zinzi December, is one of the “animalled” who live in the eponymous slum – this means that she did something bad enough in her past to be mysteriously tethered with a psychic connection to an animal for the rest of her life (in her case, a sloth). This is a thriller with magic, and great fun to read. While the narrative itself is sometimes choppy and left me slightly stranded at times, trying to figure out what exactly was going on and how we suddenly got here, the characters and settings and scenarios are fantastically drawn.

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