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

daylightsimulator shared:

It’s taken me three weeks to get to page 174 of Elizabeth Bowen’s second world war novel In the Heat of the Day. Its endless ambiguity makes it the most putdownable book I’ve ever read. It’s impossible to read more than twenty pages without a kind of mental peasouper descending (the fog of war?). The phrase “or rather” seems to follow every observation or thought. There are more commas on one page than in Cormac McCarthy’s entire oeuvre. This doesn’t mean I’m not enjoying it. On the contrary, it’s a treat to see how a writer can evoke and sustain a feeling of limitless opacity. I think this book was popular at the time it was published, but can imagine it would get little public interest today.

ID7499975 shared a picture [see left] of their latest read, which portrays “the good, the bad and the ugly of second-world-war Berlin”.

kushti read Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, a book that our readers repeatedly praise:

It deserves all the plaudits it has received. It’s one of those occasions when a wildly experimental form just works. It’s written in short separated paragraphs; tiny vignettes, asides and quotes from other writers, depicting a relationship in crisis. It’s extraordinarily funny in places, and moving in others. Although it is so fragmentary, each seemingly random observation builds on the last, and it really does feel like you’ve read something wholly original.

We’re delighted to see lots of new readers venturing into Tips, Links and Suggestions. Welcome to mesnilman, who is reading Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig:

I watched The Grand Budapest Hotel just before Christmas, and Zweig went back on my reading list as a result. This is my first attempt at Zweig (and my first post on this blog!), and I’m really enjoying it. A faux pas by an Austrian cavalry officer leads to him becoming entangled with the local nobility.

I’m interspersing this with The Global Minotaur (by the Greek finance minister Y Varouflakis) as well as the 80p Penguin little black classic of Circles of Hell (extract of Dante’s Inferno). I’d highly recommend The Global Minotaur. A book to make one think (whether or not you agree with Varouflakis!).

Audrey Schoeman, who we’re also welcoming to TLS, is an impressive three weeks and two thirds of the way through Infinite Jest:

I first picked the book up about three years ago, but gave up fairly quickly. This time I began it on the beach, which meant more time to persevere and I am so glad I did. Somewhere around page 200 the strands began to come together and it became one helluva good read. Yes, it’s a little wordy, but they’re really good words. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes long reads and doesn’t mind working a little bit for their entertainment!

ID8459116 shared:

And Lantana made a discovery while taking their kids to “the local mobile library bus that drives through our village every Saturday”:

There, amongst the shiny children’s books and DIY manuals, was an unexpected gem – Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, still a virgin with no stamps inside the cover. Joy. Just finished it and couldn’t do anything else but read it … Kids had defrosted and heated food, dishes remained unwashed, cats and dogs lost weight, husband turned into a reluctant au pair … Nothing came between me and sheets of Colorless. There is very little on this planet to compare to reading Murakami for the first time. [...] Burrowing into the mind of a Japanese 31 year old shy man and reading his thoughts, his paranoia and his hurt made me very happy. What strange creatures we are.

And over on Twitter ...

Interesting links about books and reading

• Enough About Me: in the era of constant self-exposure on social media, autobiographical writers are increasingly invested in defining and defending the value of their work. On The Atlantic.
• Famous Writers’ Insults: a piece that rounds up some of the best insults from writers to writers. For instance, Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
• A Loss for Words: a New Yorker piece on dying languages, and how to save them (if it’s indeed possible).

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.