Welcome to Tips, links and suggestions. Last week's blog was full of emotion as the following, very small selection of comments, illustrates:
Having taken a quick diversion by way of Paul Auster's 'The New York Trilogy', I am once again making my way through the Ripliad, with 'The Boy Who Followed Ripley.' I can't remember the last book (or series of books) that gave me such unadulterated enjoyment, not since I first discovered serious reading at the age of about 15/16 - so much that I'm going to be genuinely saddened once I finish the next and final volume...
So, I finished I Capture the Caste on a plane yesterday. I have a confession to make: it made me cry. Relatively dignified tears, but unmistakeable. Unfortunately, I've just been through an ending very similar to Cassandra's, and her last words in her last notebook unexpectedly broke through my defenses (I have been studiously trying not to think about it; trying not to identify anything I read or see or watch with her) and brought forward a few things I had successfully held out of mind. Gosh.
Quite apart from making me cry at the end, it's a beautiful, mature, funny, evocative book. I will be recommending it far and wide.
I'm still going through Herodotus. I'm on Book 1 now, Cyrus being dead. Still very good, though some of the extended geographical information does plod a little. I've also picked up The Hearing Trumpet from my sister's shelf to read. I suspect that I'll find nothing in this surrealist tale of a 92-year-old to make me weep, at least for reasons other than laughter.
Thank you to everyone who uploaded photos last week and special thanks to artpunx for the photo at the top of this blog. You can browse the library, here. If you would like to show us what you are reading rather than writing a comment in the thread, please do so by hitting the blue button and uploading a photograph via GuardianWitness. We'll use one of your snaps in next week's blog.
Here's a list of some of the books we'll be writing about this week, but what you are reading, today?
Our review list - subject to last minute changes
Non-fiction:
• Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd
Fiction:
• Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson
• A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee
• The Illusion of Separateness by Simon Van Booy
• Marbles by Ellen Forney
• The Parrots by Filippo Bologna
Children's:
• The Boy With Two Heads by Andy Mulligan
Just finished Jack Vance's Dying Earth series, obtained after recommendation on another CiF thread. Artfully written, with grand ideas that could have been fleshed out to a whole book in themselves thrown away in a sentence, and an old worlde vocabulary used with an economic turn of phrase that sets the mood whilst being accessible. I can now see his influence in M John Harrison and Stephen Donaldson among others.
Next up continue where I left off 3 chapters into Anne Applebaum's factual "Iron Curtain" - so far reading like a history textbook despite purporting to be about people's experiences - or Gillian Flyn's "Gone Girl".