Last week's thread included excited talk about Bring Up the Bodies, a call for more comic books to be covered on the site and the books you are currently reading and what you think of them.
I'm zipping through my re-read of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and loving it just as much second time round. I'd forgotten how funny it is in places - "Half the world is called Thomas" made me laugh out loud.
Just a suggestion, more comedy books. So bored of people sighting Catch 22, that was out when Jesus was a boy. New, dark, challenging stuff. Never gets a mention... Bring on the funny.
This week I 'ave mostly been reading Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy and Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts. [Returns to shed.]
I'm a quarter of the way through The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. The suicidal virgins are the five Lisbon sisters;... Nostalgic and whimsical, he deals with suicide with alarming and delicious irreverence. It feels like an episode of "The Wonder Years"; the one where Winnie nose-dived out of her bedroom window impaling herself on a spike!
I'm switching timeframes and locations now, and re-reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon; I read it first as a student of Japanese history, and now I'm reading it without the need to have my academic brain engaged, I'm struck by the translation by Ivan Morris: it's truly masterful; I've read parts of a transliteration as well (for academic purposes) and Morris has done something really special here.
Glided through the final parts of Brick Lane on Bank Holiday Monday and felt thoroughly satisfied - it was everything I hoped it would be! Currently gliding through John Lanchester's Capital and enjoying it hugely, such great characters.
DanHolloway also used the thread to review Kate Tempest's book Everything Speaks in its Own Way. Dan posted his review here because although we have thousands of books available on the site for you to review, we don't have all titles published by very small presses. If you have read something you'd like to review but we don't have a book page for, do feel free to post in the TLS thread untill we have a better solution.
Here is the start of Dan's review, or you can read it in full:
It has been one of my tiresome refrains for years that the media should stop talking about self-published authors' sales figures and start talking about the quality of books. It's just been a case of waiting for the right book. Now a serious candidate to be that book has arrived let's hope the culture media puts its column inches where its mouth is and stops pretending it's just an extension of the business pages. And rebuffing the idea that self-publishing means 99 cent ebooks, Kate Tempest's Everything Speaks in its Own Way is the natural correlate of that downward push – an exquisitely artisan-produced volme.
Thanks to everyone who gets involved in TLS, I do read every comment and put your suggestions to the books desk. Before I move onto this week's review list, I'd like to point people to the Flash Fiction blog and how to write guide we have gathering contributions and comments. We will publish a seletion of our favourite readers' flash fiction later in the week.
Here's this week's review list, subject to last minute changes.
Non-fiction
• On The Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin by Marie Colvin
• Taking the Waters: A Swim Around Hampstead Heath by Caitlin Davies and Ruth Corney
• The London Square:Garden's in the Midst of Town by Todd Longstaffe-Gawen
• Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel, Victim: A 900 year old Strory Retold by John Guy
• The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer
• The Plantagenets: The Kings who Made England by Dan Jones
• The Expo Files: Articles by the Crusading Journalist by Stieg Larsson
• The Buddhas of Bamiyan by Llewelyn Morgan
• How England Made the English: From Hedgerow to Heathrow by Harry Mount
• Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan by Judith Walkowitz
Fiction
• HHhH by Laurent Binet
• The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
• Life! Death! Prizes! by Stephen May
• Once You Break a Knuckle D.W. Wilson
• Frankenstein app
