Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week:
lulamae has been catching up with CJ Sansom:
Highly unlikely to get near a Booker Prize but I’m reading Lamentation, the sixth of CJ Sansom’s Shardlake mysteries. He’s a historian so it’s all well researched and has a hunchbacked (an important fact) and principled lawyer at its main character. The stories began with the dissolution of the monasteries (Dissolution) with Shardlake working for Cromwell and has moved on to Henry 8 near death. Lighter than Wolf Hall but equally enjoyable and with much the same cast. Very hard to put down...
Andrew Adam joined the Patrick Gale fan club on TLS with this economical encomium for the Cornwall-based writer’s latest novel of gay love and pioneer farming in Canada, which has been described as Brokeback Mountain meets Little House on the Prairie:
“A Place Called Winter” by Patrick Gale: Brilliant novel, brilliant writer.
Over on GuardianWitness, blogger ihath demonstrated a different sort of critical economy with this persuasive piece of paper architecture:
Dylanwolf had a productive week: His recommendations are worth reading in full, but they included “Yoko Tawada, a Japanese writer, now living in Germany (according to wiki). I was bowled over by her novel The Naked Eye.”
But the week also held a couple of disappointments:
Cries of outrage will no doubt follow my next sentence. I’ve tried to read two of John Lanchester’s novels, and gave up on both. There. Said it. I know he has a devoted following.
On holiday a couple of years ago I got a third of the way through Capital and threw in the towel. First few chapters thought I’d settled down to a good read. But then, but then. Enjoyable though it was initially it began to feel formulaic and stereotypical. Gave it to a friend. Big fan. She loved it.
Same nagging feeling today just a few chapters into Fragrant Harbour. Really couldn’t be arsed. Sorry John. Don’t suppose you’ll miss me. By all accounts you’re a smashing chap. Loved your Observer restaurant reviews. But still.
MsCarey had similar feelings towards the work of Ursula K Le Guin:
I’ve just abandoned The Left Hand of Darkness. I was delighted when ENMWombat recommended this last week as I’d been thinking of trying something by Ursula Le Guin but didn’t know where to start. I picked it up at the library this afternoon and was pleased to see that reassuring Virago green spine. But oh dear oh dear. I didn’t even get to the end of the first chapter. It just felt like being in an especially portentous episode of Star Trek. My apologies to ENMWombat. It just wasn’t for me.
BlikSnyman suggested she try again:
I didn’t really like The Left Hand of Darkness but loved The Dispossessed.
ID1541580 has been reading in Spanish:
Finally, a couple of questions. Swelter asked:
I have a question for anyone who has read some of both Patricia Highsmith’s non-Ripley novels and George Simenon’s romans dur. Are they similar in tone and / or subject matter? Do you think that Highsmith was mining a vein that Simenon pioneered?
I am not a fan of series detectives and have pretty much ignored Simenon, not realizing until recently that he had written a number of books that were not part of his Maigret series. Reading a description of these romans dur, as they seem to be called, they sounded similar to some of the Highsmith novels I’ve been enjoying recently, examining how a violent act intrudes upon and changes the lives of otherwise ordinary people, and sometimes reveals that, after all, they were not so ordinary to begin with.
Audrey Schoeman started a very useful discussion with a plea for an ebook store that would accept Paypal. Thanks to MsCarey, hiccup1 and BlikSnyman for their advice. You can follow the conversation in full here.
Thanks also to Swelter for yet another useful link, this time to a New Yorker piece about fiction allowing us to enter the consciousness of animals:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/can-fiction-show-us-how-animals-think
And that’s it for this week. 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.
