Welcome to this week's blog.
We begin with the unexpected. DotGumbi sent us this cheeky shot of her reading a fan fiction mash-up of Jurassic Park and Pulp Fiction.
What next? Rocky Horror Picture of Dorian Grey? My Reservoir Dog Skip?
If you can think of any mash-ups you'd like (or shudder) to see, then let us know!
Dylanwolf has found the first seven pages of his new read similarly packed with incongruous elements.
I've begun Kanzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry which has already offered up a lost eye, a dawn meditation on the floor of septic tank under construction, details on how to deal with the corpse of a suicide, an evocation of Sarudahiko, hints of abuse and maltreatment at The Smile Training Centre and a mention of Henry Miller ...
Onward I think, to Page 8!
I rather think I'm going to enjoy this immensely.
Do keep us updated Dylanwolf, the unlikely melange has got us intrigued.
Some of our readers are bringing books together themselves, having multiple reads on the go at once.
I'm reading more books simultaneously this time than I can recall ever having done before ...
'Reading Lolita in Tehran' by Azar Nafisi -- which I missed when it first came out. An earnest bibliomemoir, but quite eye-opening, even after all these years.
Elizabeth McCracken's 'Thunderstruck and Other Stories', which is due out shortly. Beautiful, sad stories.
'Poems That Make Grown Men Cry' - just because I'm curious. Rather predictable selection of poems thus far, but, it is getting better as we move closer to present-day (the selections are arranged chronologically).
And, still reading Orhan Pamuk's 'The Museum of Innocence', though, at times, it does rather go on.
There's nothing wrong with having a number of books on the go. Books match moods and sometimes you need a break if they are particularly long or an arduous read. Certainly reading fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoir at the same time can work really well.
Jenny Bhatt has a hypothesis for the cause of this readerly restlessness: the modern attention span.
I think the internet has changed my reading habits so that I need to switch books after every 50 pages or so.
Les Amis de Socrate recommends giving singular attention to Nerval's short stories, favourites of Marcel Proust, in order to derive the full enjoyment they offer.
Sometimes a heavy, and homogenous, reading-list is unavoidable. Rosie Hewitson's photo carries the weight of a looming deadline:
For the students and academics among you, how does writing an essay affect your enjoyment of a book? Is your immersion in the narrative hindered by the spectre of an essay plan? Once you've got used to dissecting literature, is reading ever the same again?
Other readers are most definitely reading for pleasure.
There's no need to resist, Kalyiel! And there is a lot more crime fiction to enjoy.
But history has been the genre dominating the week's conversation.
Muhammed1 sent this photo of Baqer Moin's biography of Ruhollah Khomeini, the Ayatollah who led the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and turned modern Iran into an Islamic state.
This week I have read two fine pieces of popular history. The first was On Secret Service East of Constantinople by the mighty Peter Hopkirk, the only one of his books I'd not previously read.
Hopkirk is one of the true masters of this genre, brilliantly able to craft a ripping yarn from convoluted source material and to drive a thundering narrative through the thicket of facts. There might be just a few too many "wily sultans" and "dastardly kaisers", but the book was published 20 years ago, and in any case, it's so much fun I'd forgive more or less anything. The subject is the German attempt to ignite a "jihad" against British interests in Asia during World War I, a little known facet of that conflict, and one with obvious later parallels.
The second book was more recent: Des Eakin's The Stolen Village. This is about a raid by North African pirates on the Irish village of Baltimore in the 17th century, a topic similar to that covered by another pop history master, Giles Milton, in White Gold.
The Stolen Village is an interesting book, but if Peter Hopkirk is a consummate professional in the genre, then Des Eakin, whose previous books are apparently novels, is clearly an amateur. He also makes a few unfortunate choices that an editor ought to have picked up: a jarringly anachronistic use of the term "Islamist", a confusion over the meaning of "Islamic", a totally unjustified reference to North African slave raids in Britain and Ireland as a "jihad", and some very ill-considered "imagined dialogues". But still, he's clearly done a good job as despite having no sources for a central narrative beyond the point at which the Baltimore slaves are taken away from their village, he's manage to keep the pages turning easily throughout.
edinflo has been reading about the creation of a literary masterpiece, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. She found the book's scope to be expansive, going beyond Scott and Zelda to provide a viewpoint on 1920s America.
I recently finished Sarah Churchwell's Careless People, which I found immensely enjoyable and also made me realise how poor my knowledge of (even modern) American history is. The futility of prohibition and the flourishing of bootlegging under it was especially fascinating.
Despite all the parties and scandals, it is a tragic story too. I was struck by the youth of Scott and Zelda at the height of their fame and their separate ends are heartbreaking.
I was really taken with Churchwell's focus on the year 1922 as a way to tell the story of Fitzgerald's writing of The Great Gatsby. It made me want to try Bill Bryson's One Summer: America, 1927, which does something similar, albeit not connected to a novel.
Have you read a book recently, either fact or fiction, that gave you new insight into a historical period?
