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.

judgeDAmNation was finishing an Orwell-themed reading list:

Finished reading A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell, thus finally completing all his books (apart from maybe a few of the essays) – I also read Homage to Catalonia and Burmese Days earlier this year, though HTC didn’t grab me as much as I had hoped it would [...]. A Clergyman’s Daughter was brilliant though, comically written with its wide cast of respectable/odious village institutions such as the Rector and the village gossip, as opposed to the much more likeable rogue Mr. Warburton and habitual criminal Nobby ...

TimHannigan started a great conversation about British travel writing:

At the weekend I got a sudden and powerful craving for some high-calibre British travel writing. I wanted erudition, fine style and learnedness all delivered with a light touch and a sense of humour. [...]

Travels with a Tangerine is pitch-perfect English travel writing – packed with the obscure and the arcane, filled with writing on architecture coloured with the inheritance of Robert Byron, endlessly digressive, speckled with occasional moments of melancholia but rather more frequent moments of rich, warm humour, and suffused with a glorious sense of the absurd. Oh goodness me it’s so good! It’s a thick rich stew and it has put a great big smile on my face.

Harking back to a previous conversation here about posh travel writers, Mackintosh-Smith is definitely posh (there are allusions to boarding school aplenty), but he’s a proper charmer and a genuine eccentric.

Sara Richards has a recipe for those “bored of the Booker or betrayed by the Baileys”:

There is help at hand. A quick read of Edward St Aubyn’s Lost for Words will make you feel better immediately. This short novel is guaranteed to make you laugh. Or cry for that matter. The Elysian prize committee has just been formed and some of the manuscripts are not even ready. One of them is not even eligible but that’s no matter in this postmodern world. The committee are headed by a fairly corrupt politician and he starts to build alliances very quickly. It’s not all plain sailing though.

If you want a quick read with lots of plot and much merriment here’s your book. Read with tongue firmly in cheek as you watch the wrong manuscript rise and rise.

Kate Berrisford is enjoying Iris Murdoch and Donna Tartt:

PatLux felt compelled to recommend some short stories:

While sitting in the sun this afternoon savouring Jhumpha Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies I was reflecting on how these stories are so engaging that I would love to recommend them to others. It is wonderful to have this forum so to do. I tend to avoid short stories as I often find the endings unsatisfactory so I was delighted that the ending of the first story, A Temporary Matter, made me gasp out loud. Lahiri’s characterisations are so well executed and in each story I feel I am having an intimate insight into the protagonists’ lives.

Mexican2 is loving Will Self’s Shark:

That’s two in a row. If the third matches the first two I think he may be argued to be England’s greatest living novelist. Much as that’s going to infuriate a lot of people. [...] He wanted to be cool, he stayed up all night reading the dictionary, for years, he wrote novel after novel, for years, he was annoying and arrogant, and he just kept going. I thought he was rubbish early on in his career. I eat my words.

Finally, AvidViewer reflected on how authors get inside other people’s heads:

Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy is one of the most detailed and accurate narratives of other people’s thoughts that I have read (the only comparable I know of is [Norman] Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead). Astonishing that one human being can understand so many others so intimately.

Oranje14 replied:

It’s been mentioned loads on here previously, but if this is the kind of thing you like then you really must read The Infatuations by Javier Marías. He manages to express thoughts and feelings you didn’t even know you had yourself.

Are there other writers who you think capture human emotions in a similarly intimate and insightful way? We would love to hear more from you.

If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, or film your own book review, please do. Click the blue button on this page to share your video or image. I’ll include some of your posts in next week’s blog.

And, as always, if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see us covering beyond TLS, do let us know.

Contributors

Guardian readers and Marta Bausells

The GuardianTramp

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