Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including your thoughts on the shortlist for the Best Translated Book Award, the wonderful Marilynne Robinson, and learning life lessons from Haruki Murakami.
MsCarey has finished A Mixture of Frailties, the fabulous third volume of Robertson Davies’s Salterton Trilogy:
...and the world is therefore a little greyer all of a sudden. There’s no-one like Davies for sheer entertainment value whilst all the while probing deep questions about the divisions between the intellect and the spirit, the arts and the everyday, the individual and the herd.
jmschrei talked about great translated works off the back of the the Best Translated Book award shortlist announced last week.
As usual I am one part thrilled, one part bemused and one part disappointed. I am currently reading Mercè Rodoreda’s War, So Much War, one of the titles that did make the cut. She was a Catalan writer I have long wanted to read so this was the push needed. I have a friend who practically worships her.
One title that did not make the cut is a slim volume called Berlin by Slovenian poet/writer Aleš Šteger. Illustrated by the author’s own photos, this is a collection of 31 very short (2-3 page) single-paragraph stories that read almost like prose poems. He takes on the role of the flâneur, closely modeled on the work of Walter Benjamin and the pieces are excellent. He writes about a bookshop, visiting the zoo, imagining a museum of museum guards, an infestation of ladybugs and more. One of my favourite pieces is called “Flea Markets”. [Read the full comment here.]
conedison talked about Marilynne Robinson’s Home:
It’s like a Biblical storm – for the longest time all you can see are distant flashes of lightning, but you know in your bones that the time will come when the world will crack open and hell will be revealed and it’ll look exactly like your own back yard.
And when you’ve finished all you’re left with is a question: what good does it do to forgive someone you love if they will not forgive themselves? Of Robinson’s Gilead Trilogy, Home is the hardest to handle – sort of like wearing sackcloth and ashes for 339 pages. But if you’re in the mood to be disturbed by an absolute master of her craft, read the book.
koochacoo’s reading has had a Japanese theme as of late, with mixed results:
I was on holiday in Japan for the last fortnight, so my reading has had a Japanese theme. First, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of the Hills. Having read three of his novels now, I think there is something about his style of storytelling that, whilst easy to read, does not move me. With this novel, alongside An Artist of the Floating World and Never Let Me Go, though the themes are interesting, I have been underwhelmed by their delivery and execution. I have a couple more of his books, but I don’t think I will be in any hurry to read them.
I also read Haruki Murakami’s Kafka On The Shore, without any previous Murakami experience. 100-200 pages before the end, I really started to struggle with the novel, not understanding the point of the story and not being able to see where it would end. However, by the time I finished it, I really developed a strong appreciation for the story and Murakami’s writing. I don’t think I grasped what he is trying to say in the novel, but I certainly took from it, in terms of not allowing your past to dictate your future, for example. I’m unsure as to whether I will read more of his work.
We also loved this conversation on the best novels about music. Which are yours?
Interesting links about books and reading
- Remembering Prince: A continuously updated collection of New Yorker writers’ memories of the inimitable icon. And here, it publishes a beautiful gallery of New Yorkers “going crazy” for him upon the news of his death.
- His Brief Candle Burns On: 25 Authors on Shakespeare’s 400th, compiled by Signature.
- Get to Know the Brilliant Somali-British Poet Featured on Beyoncé’s Lemonade: none other than Warsan Shire, featured here in Good, and about whom the New Yorker published this piece a year ago.
- Timbuktu’s ‘Badass Librarians’: Checking Out Books Under Al-Qaida’s Nose. In NPR.
- Read Between the Racism: The Serious Lack of Diversity in Book Publishing: Ilana Masad writes for Broadly about, despite much talk about it, the diversity problem is not anywhere near getting fixed.
- Moving Beyond “Crazy Rich Asians” In The Stories We Tell About China: “In a time of rising Yellow Peril, it’s never been more urgent for us to move away from stereotypes about China and its people in our literature.” In Buzzfeed.
- Check Out the Cover of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Plus His Thoughts on Writing a Novel, in Vulture.
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.
