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

To start, here’s a perplexing one from MsCarey:

Reading a review of a new Beryl Bainbridge biography today, it struck me that none of us mentioned her when talking about women writers for the Reading Group. Bainbridge always falls off the bottom of my list and I don’t know why.

I’ll be delighted to hear it if anyone has ideas about why this wonderful writer might continue to be overlooked - and why she so often lost at out at the Booker Prize too (the wonderful Master Georgie lost out to Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. Amsterdam!) Also, if anyone thinks we should cover a Beryl Bainbridge book on the Reading Group, please let me know. I’ll be very pleased to move her to the top of the list. Seems only fair...

Also on the theme of unfairly neglected authors, LeoToadstool has written a fascinating review of the Chantic Bird by David Ireland:

Halfway through The Chantic Bird by David Ireland, republished last year in Text Publishing’s Classics range. A first-person narrative of a sociopathic teenager and the trail of havoc he wreaks around Sydney’s outer suburbs. The introduction to the Text Classics edition subtitles it “Australian Psycho,” and there is something of Patrick Bateman in the nameless narrator, though his pursuits are rendered sightly less graphically (but graphic enough for the book’s original late-60s readers, I’m sure), in a tough Aussie working class vernacular, tempered with some surprisingly lyrical passages

I first heard of Ireland in late 2011 when Text Publishing announced its plan to unearth forgotten gems of Australian literature under a new imprint. Intrigued by the description of David Ireland and his novel The Glass Canoe, I bought it on a whim and was stunned. How this book - a winner of the Miles Franklin Award (basically the Aussie Booker, for those not in the know), and as brutal, tender and stylish a work of late-20th century literature you might hope to read - could have ever have been allowed to fall out of print was criminal.

Still continuing on overlooked talent, interwar has been reading Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor - but is perhaps ambivalent about its qualities:

Rather a strange work. The first sentence informs the reader that the heroine of sorts, Cassandra, has done a lot of “novel-reading” and therefore “could be sure of experiencing the proper emotions”. So when she takes up a position as governess in a Palladian mansion (the owner’s name is Marion Vanbrugh - her surname is Dashwood) she believes she will inevitably fall novelistically in love with Marion - and so she does.

There are echoes of the gothic here: the Palladian facade hides medieval rooms and priest-holes, just as the members of the Vanbrugh family have been raised to hide their emotions. The house is also haunted by the spirit of the beautiful Violet, who could read Homer in Greek at the age of eight, who married Marion, was loved by his cousin Tom (a drunkard who keeps a skeleton in his room), and died giving birth to her daughter Sophy...

More certain was laidbackviews in this review of Sooyong Park’s The Great Soul Of Siberia:

An eagle perched on top of a tree. The feathers on its back fluttered in the wind. In the fall, the fish swim against the current, but the birds turn their back to the wind. A badger crossed a log bridge over the brook to dig through the leaves for food, and an Asian black bear climbed nut pines to gather pine nuts.”

All this, and so much more in The Great Soul of Siberia. Sooyong Park takes us to the two metre earthen bunkers where he spends six winter months in isolation watching everything around him. The Amur Tiger is his speciality, and he introduces us to three generations of the family, from hot breath to heartache. It’s a beautiful gently-paced read.

Another glowing recommendation came from paulburns:

Just finished Kei Miller’s Augustown. a breathtakingly beautiful 240 page novel of love, class, horror, brutality, Rastafarianism, violence and magic realism of a present and remembered Jamaica. Its not the poetically restful read it promises to be in its opening pages - there’s too much horror and cruelty for that, but it is an absolutely wonderful work.

Finally, Kemster provides a nice endorsement of the benefits of Tips, Links and Suggestions itself - and of the fun of following good recommendations:

Someone here recommended The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster a while back. All I can say is thank you very much. It’s wonderful.

Interesting links about books and reading

• An interesting attempt to reclassify Mills and Boon books as feminist literature.
• Bad news from Barnes & Noble.
• More bad news, this time from no less than Mario Vargas Llosa. Culture is dead!
• Sorry - yet more bad news (albeit with an amusing headline): Austrian chancellor alleges that Amazon pays less tax than a local sausage stall.

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. Happy reading!