Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments from last week. As you might have gathered, Marta is away at the moment, and I have been so busy without her that the upset caused by some aggressive commenters over the last fortnight passed me by.

I can only apologise to anyone who has been offended, emphasise how highly we value this thread and (almost) everyone who contributes to it, and second TimHannigan’s words:

I’ve said a whole bunch of times in the past that this is just about the single nicest little corner of the internet I’ve ever come across. It does seem like it’s come under assault a few times of late, but it’s probably something that can be resisted quite easily if we put our minds to it. Trolls tend to get bored very quickly. @conedison points out he’s been contributing here for four years; you’re average troll doesn’t last more than a few weeks.

As TimHannigan also said: “where the bloody hell is AggieH these days? None of this would have happened if she was around to keep things in order.” So if you’re reading this, AggieH, please come back to us.

Also, conedison , please don’t leave us. Delighted you still feel invested enough in our community to inquire after another contributor absent without leave: “Albertine, if you’re out there send up a flare. We miss you.”

The one positive result of the uproar is that it has tempted a couple of our quieter members out into the open. Hello, magmillar, hello Loveofreading. Delighted to hear from you.

And so on to the discussions proper, which are the best proof of what a great forum this is.

djhworld has been having a hard time with Marlon James’s Man Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings:

I’ve been reading A Brief History of Seven Killings, it’s tough going to be entirely honest, pages and pages of patois, a myriad of characters that fleet in and out of the cacophony of noise that seems to be happening everywhere in the book.

I’ve not finished it yet, but I’m bearing my way through it.

I’m not sure what to make of of it really, what did the Man Booker judges actually like about it?

7sisters took a different view:

I have just read this book too. What can I say - I am a white English/Irish person who has no affiliation with Jamaica; her politics or history. I have never visited Jamaica but have always had a soft spot for Bob Marley. Didn’t even remember there was an an attempted killing on him - that’s how much history passed me by when I was young.I liked this book because it seemed to tell a sort of truth about colonialism...yes another ..ism. I liked all the ‘bad’ characters in the book-even Josie Wales was a victim of the ‘shitstem’. There are so many wasted deaths in this book - but I will always remember Bam-Bam...and his Dad’s Clarke’s shoes. This book tells you something about the CIA and its reach - don’t know if this is true or not but it makes you think.

paulburns has just finished Mary Beard’s SPQR.

As expected, a wonderful book. There are very few historians who can make dry administrative history fascinating, but Beard achieves this and many other things. A fascinating political, social, cultural, literary history of ancient Rome from its beginnings to Caracalla (more or less.)

sursumcorda offers some light relief:

Anyone like a laugh? Just finished Another Great Day At Sea by the inimitable Geoff Dyer - so deft, so amusing and less than 200 pages long. Geoff is Writer In Residence for two weeks on the aircraft carrier USS George HW Bush, patrolling the Arabian Gulf. He’s well over 6ft tall and suffers from claustrophobia so how’s that gonna go? This is a total delight like eating a slice of lemon meringue pie, frothy, tangy and crisp. Loved it.

SydneyH kicked off a thought-provoking discussion of of Saul Bellow with the following observation:

I’ve finished Herzog, the best Bellow novel, in my opinion, that I’ve read to date. It backs up my theory that I prefer Bellow’s third-person prose, as I also enjoyed Seize the Daymore than Augie March. I think one of the reasons that I like these texts more is that there aren’t as many of Bellow’s famous ‘idioms’, which he sometimes piles on. My feeling is that they look suspiciously like cliches.

You can follow the whole discussion here

Finally, thanks to laidbackviews for inspiring a Desert Island Books thread. The challenge, originally posed by Books are My Bag, is to list your eight favourites. I’m going to come over all Kirsty Young and say I’m not sure we can allow The Complete Works of Shakespeare, paulburns. What does everyone else think?

Useful links

Swelter recommends a New Republic article on a TLS favorite, William’s Stoner, contrasting its world with the current experience of college instruction.

EnidColeslaw_points out Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “long, rambling review” of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission in the NYT Book Review, “which is, for the ones who’ve read him, just pure classic Knausgaard.”

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.