Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

First of all, welcome to all the new readers we’ve been noticing in the threads in the last few weeks! We hope you’re finding this enjoyable – suggestions and thoughts always welcome. We’ve been asking the crowds at the Edinburgh book festival to contribute to TLS in their own way. Here are some of their reads:

And we thought it would be quite nice to put voices to their faces:

goodyorkshirelass, who happens to also be at the festival, has been musing on the “Triumvirate of Margarets”:

That is Atwood, Drabble and Forster. Differing styles, but each in their own way literary, challenging, thought provoking, and above all, for me, “a good read”.

Am just a few chapters into Dame M D’s The Pure Gold Baby, and what a triumph and a joy it is. Though her characters’ lives in the early 70s follow a more challenging and intellectual path than my own conventional one in the same period, nevertheless the sheer elegance of the prose, and peerless evocation of the period have me sighing in entranced, and amused recognition.

proust shared:

Loving Javier Marías’s All Souls, having been bowled over by The Infatuations. Such an observant and perceptive novel of British academic life (or at least Oxbridge life). Fascinating insights into wider English attitudes and secretive behaviour. Laugh-out-loud funny in parts. More than just a campus novel. I am delighted to have “discovered” Marías this year, and am anticipating enjoying his other novels. Unsurprising he is a serious Nobel contender. (...) Praise for the translator, who renders perfectly the tone and tenor of Marías’s prose style.

EitanG has done something many here would find impossible:

By the way, have any of you tried getting rid of your old books? I have thousands, and today I was inspired to give many of them away. A hundred are so are currently boxed up and waiting to go to a second hand store or library. All the books that I know I wouldn’t read again, or if I would, I could just take them from the library, just collecting forming piles and piles and collecting dust on dust ...

tsAnOutrage2 too:

I recently cleared out about half of my library, taking, as it turned out, nearly 700 books to Oxfam, taking them in carrier bags on the bus, over several weeks. I have missed a few actually. Some because I’ve recommended them to friends or acquaintances and was no longer able to give them away, and a couple I’ve just missed. I started re-reading some on the bus, and decided to keep them. You have to be utterly ruthless but you will be glad you did it. Reclaim the oxygen. Fly, my pretties!

Has anyone else donated a big chunk of their ever-piling library? What are your thoughts a while after doing it? Have you missed any of the books?

safarikent felt the need to camouflage their current read:

Don DeLillo was praised by many. Here’s Bonbonbonbons:

Just finished Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Absolutely loved it even though it could’ve cut a few of its 800+ pages. It’s wraps you so completely in post-war America that I think I might now even ‘get’ baseball.

lawrenceK said:

Reading the all-time great, politically incorrect Flashman series, by George MacDonald Fraser, gave me a taste for historically accurate, adventure-filled fiction. Then I discovered the African world of Wilbur Smith. Spanning many generations with the sweep of a James Michener, the action never stops. The scenes of nature, the history of Southern Africa, it opened a new world for me, one that I didn’t think would interest me. Several novels later, i haven’t found one that isn’t a masterpiece.

CharlieBing shared:

I just finished Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, very positively reviewed in the Guardian back in April, and recently longlisted for the Man Booker. What a treat! Not an easy read by any means (it’s written in an approximation of English in 1066), the book examines the guerrilla tactics against William I after the Norman Conquest. If you enjoyed Riddley Walker then you’ll like this, but regardless, read it anyway, it’s an amazing piece: it makes you work and then leaves you wanting more.

Up the Rifles!

And DavidBuda said:

On a Guardian recommendation I’m reading Anneliese Mackintosh’s Any Other Mouth, a series of short stories of which she says “68% happened, 32% did not happen”. I’ve read the first 5 out of 30, and am thoroughly enjoying the idiosyncratic writing style and “on the edge” situations she describes. The fact that some of it is true and some of it isn’t adds a kind of interesting level of speculation to the reading process.

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.