Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including essential reads about race in America and non-challenging books for those times when real life is challenging enough.

meleastham is reading “an absolute classic” - Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth:

By ’eck it’s good.

Given the technology-saturated times we live in, it still manages to take you right there. The 1960s, where cool, good looking assassins used multiple identities to travel the world with a slinky little gun stashed in a secret compartment of an attaché case.

I’m about half way through and to be honest I thought I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I am. It’s brilliant. So well written, gripping and a real page turner!

Over on GuardianWitness, PaulWoolston has been catching up with the latest Booker-winner - though he doesn’t say what he makes of it.

sbmfc reread The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano:

The first and third section are great but the middle section is truly special. There are around 40 narrators who tell of their experiences with and impressions of the two poets at the novel’s centre but also tell their own stories which are wonderful in themselves. It’s a novel which appears to do everything and i look forward to reading it again.

Following last month’s recommendation from jmschrei , LeoToadstool is reading The Folly by Vladislavić

To say I’m enjoying this elegant, absurdist allegory would be an understatement: if Borges wrote a Monty Python sketch on cross-cultural encounters, you’d have The Folly.

jmschrei , meanwhile, has moved on to Dry Season by Gabriela Babnik.

This was a demanding read, it took a while for me to decide if I even liked it. This love story between a 62-year-old Slovenian woman and a 27-year-old black man in Burkina Faso is a blend of meta fiction (the characters acknowledge that they are in a novel) and African magic realism. The author wrote her MA on Nigerian lit and lives part-time in Burkina Faso so she knows the literary style and the political history of the country. It was odd to encounter a Balkan novel that does not involve, in some context, the Balkan Wars. Halfway through I started to get a feel for the work and by the end when a revelation is made that I did not see coming I was definitely impressed.

Definitely a unique read.

Now brain feels a bit like mashed potatoes.

WebberExpat ‘utterly fell transported’ into Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson.

What a book. It’s hard to really pin down, not a typical thriller/psychological examination/character type of book. It’s all of those really, but more than anything it’s not formulaic. I kept finding myself blindsided, I love it when an author abandons the crutch of foreshadowing and just delivers the punches from left and right. More than anything, I suppose it’s an examination of the type of persons you find living at the edge, or over it, of wilderness. The solitary types. I have had two close friends go down the survivalist, separatist path and I can say while the character of Jeremiah Pearl might be drawn to extremes, it is not at all inaccurate. Pick it up, it’s a great page-turner of a book.

Ieuan is reading Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov:

Not nearly as well known as Lolita, though I wonder why. It’s just as good (maybe better, it’s been a long time since I read Lolita).

Always described as Kafkaesque - a description the author hated as he maintained that he’d never read any Kafka. The trouble is that it is the only way to describe it.

I’m finding it a difficult read (each page has enough on it for much thought and meditation), but it’s terrific. The sort of book that one has to completely suspend any sense of disbelief and just keep reading. Perhaps a parable about life, existence and non-existence - perhaps not.

I’m not sure I’d recommend it, but would definitely suggest that people read it.

Addicks123 is partway through the third volume of Peter Ackroyd’s history of Britain The Civil War

This deals with the accession to the throne of King James I and takes the story up and beyond the Civil War into the era of Cromwell. As ever Ackroyd’s books are an enjoyable mix of anecdote with more serious history and although I’d rather he examined the causes and effects he provides a readable analysis.

Vogelmonade continues to read A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey.

Harvey’s book is up to now a great eye opener. Neoliberalism is not a purely economic theory, it is a seriously warped moral philosophy of freedom that is not in touch with any societal reality. This obscure philosophy found some very rich sponsors who found it fit their interests and was made popular through their media outlets and think tanks. The book answers a very important question I had been thinking about: What happened in the last 35-40 years that the idea of the welfare state, in my opinion the greatest civilizing agent in history, became so unpopular. In Harvey’s book the answer is easy: The Rich lost money and status, the world became more equal, and not necessarily in a planned and coordinaterd way the rich acted and massively promoted the idea that states are bad and markets are the only right (moral) way to organize an economy and society.

Interesting links about books and reading:

• 101 books with Corpse in the title: for those readers who are already missing Halloween.
• What Robert Caro Got Wrong: Fred Kaplan’s critique of Caro’s retelling of the Cuban Missile Crisis in his book The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power.
• Two war poems: The Scream by Robert Lowell, and a video of Keith Douglas’s How to Kill

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.

If you’re on Instagram and a book lover, chances are you’re already sharing beautiful pictures of books you are reading, “shelfies” or all kinds of still lifes with books as protagonists. Now, you can share your reads with us on the mobile photography platform – simply tag your pictures there with #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection here.

And, as always, if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see us covering beyond TLS, do let us know.