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

To start, a good question from conedison:

Stoner is one of the best novels I’ve ever read and yet I can’t see myself ever reading it a second time - Mother Conedison did not raise a masochist... Is there any book you truly love, but will never go near again?

Suggestions so far include Anna Karenina (“too harrowing”), Proust (too long), The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (“because I can never forget the ending”) and Pale Fire (“because it REALLY twisted my melon.”)

Another question came courtesy of Wordnumb:

Trying to decide whether I want to read Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, published as a 1200 page brick in the last few days. On the one hand I don’t get much out of graphic novels and haven’t been particularly impressed with the stories behind the adaptations of his work I’ve seen (I appreciate he generally dissociates himself from adaptations, but still) - on the other hand I’m forever moaning about the lack of inventive, ambitious writing by British authors being published. Excerpts I’ve spotted online lead me to believe he’s not great at refining his prose, which may explain the length of the novel more than any narrative complexity. Also I’m a little bored of writing that attempts to appropriate from Blake to lend gravitas to otherwise mainstream plotting, which could be the case here, won’t know until I’ve taken the plunge.

Probably too early to ask whether anyone has read it yet, but has anyone here read it yet?

If anyone has read the book, please do let us know. Will it take longer to read than kmir’s sterling work on the Book Of Disquiet:

Well, finally finishing Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet after three years. Hard to know what to make of him or the book-a strange fish indeed!

There are moments of beauty, tenderness, naivete and charm that on the whole redeem the solipsism and so I sigh (partly out of relief) at the thought of bringing it to a close. Pessoa, stuck up there on the cramped fourth floor of the office, with nothing but his accounts and his dreams and the desire to be nothing...

In contrast, tamewhale has been blasting through them:

Last week I read The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, which I ripped through in a few hours. Apart from a section in the middle describing the scenery passing by on a long bus trip, it was very compelling. It reminded of Kerouac in its directness and its concentration on immediate experience, although Kerouac is much more clearly emotional than Hemingway. There is a romance in TSAR, but it remains for the most part buried under the surface, sublimated into other experiences, mostly drinking. I’ve started reading Women In Love by DH Lawrence since then and what strikes me is how modern TSAR reads by comparison. Although it was published only six years later, it feels like it’s from a different century, although there are some thematic parallels. I enjoyed it a lot, and immediately wanted to read everything else he’s written.

I also read No One Belongs Here More Than You, a short story collection by Miranda July. I had read some of this years ago when it first came out, but somehow never got around to them all. It was very funny and full of eccentric or broken people who might be their own worst enemy. Miranda July’s writing feels like a magic trick to me, like an endlessly inventive string of digressions and non sequiturs that always feel somehow complete by the last sentence.

Another fine recommendation came from Jessica Lucy Beckitt:

I’m reading Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya Von Bremzen. It’s delightful, and takes the reader through each decade of the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, focusing on food. It’s essentially a memoir, with aspects of travel writing, popular history, and generously populated with fabulous anecdotes of Russian artists and poets navigating their way through the cultural minefield of the USSR.

My favourite anecdote so far involves an actor playing the part of a sausage in a Stalin-era propagandist theatre piece promoting the new wave of convenience foods engineered by Mikoyan (the food minister). She was instructed to use the Stanislavski system to prepare for the role.

More doubtful - but ultimately enthusiastic - was pearcesleftfoot on Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers:

My girlfriend asked me what it was about and all I could muster was ‘it’s about a crow who helps a family grieve for their mum. Although the crow wasn’t real. I don’t think so. May have been a cipher for their emotions... Who knows really, love? I enjoyed it though. I suppose that’s what matters in the end.

That is what matters. And “the end” also a good place to wrap up for this week.

Interesting links about books and reading

• An exhibition about 13th century Catalan brainiac Ramon Llull and the book in which he laid out the theory for a ‘thinking machine’ - a primitive computer.
• A mighty organisation looks set to take on Amazon and potential tax evasion and we’ll all benefit... oh... damn.
• An author dramatically answers the question of what he would save from the fire if his house burned down.
• An insight into designing spines - the backbones of books.

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!