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, with writers competing for a reader’s mental space and loads on War and Peace, including bets and online resources for those of you who are attempting to read it.
VelmaNebraska has just finished reading Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44:
[It] struck me as tremendously well-written and evocative but finally just too deliberately positioned as a blockbuster. The opening chapters, moving from starvation to Stalinism, were like brutal fairytale fragments – difficult to chew through – before settling down into a relatively straightforward “on the trail of a serial killer” vibe. I won’t give away the ending, except to say that it was altogether too psychologically pat for my tastes, which was rather a shame.
Connected, in a way, was Forced Entertainment’s precise staged reading of Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook, which I saw last night. For over two hours, with only two chairs and scripts in hand, Richard Lowdon and Robin Arthur, often speaking in dispassionate unison, embody young twins who survive the second world war by creating their own moral code and shared language. It’s been touring for a couple years now and is really quite astounding.
Oh, my!
Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett are competing for my heart these days, mano a mano. One topples the other off the pinnacle with every latest book. Patchett will get her chance again, later this year, but for now it’s Strout! Strout! Strout! From a Guardian I tried it twice before and failed when I got to seemingly endless battle chapters. This time, I am following the troops on google earth.
The only drawback: I have to wait watching the TV version until next year. –kakaokuchen
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