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

To start, two short, but nonetheless persuasive reviews. The first from taipingtianguo is about Stephen King’s On Writing:

Part biography, part manual for writers, always fascinating. Dad walks out on King when he’s two, never comes back, so mom brings him up solo. But Stephen later discovers his old man had literary aspirations and submitted stories to mags.

And poorprints on Graham Norton’s debut novel Holding:

A gentle, comforting, modest gem. Perfect against all the current madness.

More expansively, JeremyMarchant recommends China Miéville’s The City & The City:

As it was a local book club ask, I made no attempt to find out anything about it and, for the first few dozen pages, I was disappointed that it appeared to be some sort of ‘novelised’ Nordic noir tv story.

However, Miéville then starts to fill in the context which I was previously unable to see and, as he does so, the story becomes far richer, multi-dimensional and about far more than just the clichéd murdered young woman. Indeed, that story rapidly gets left behind as the novel introduces more layers to the point that it becomes about something else completely.

Miéville is a master at knowing just how much to tell you and how much to leave you temporarily puzzled by (apparently, according to his interview on R4 Bookclub, he actually plots the rate of revelation). Indeed, the cross-hatching between what is familiar to the reader and what isn’t is handled masterfully.

And, because I found it so rewarding to read the book without any preconceived ideas of its real plot, I haven’t written here anything that would breach what you learn in the first dozen pages.

Recommended. And I don’t say that often.

My fellow Mark Kermode fans will also be intrigued by this tip from Kemster:

I’m almost done with The Friedkin Connection, a memoir by film director William Friedkin. It’s as good a Hollywood memoir as you’d ever hope to read with some great detail about the making of some of the best cinema of its time. It also goes into gruelling detail about the disasters too - the section on “Cruising” is an abject eye opener. What I’ve found particularly refreshing is the author’s candid view of his own talent as a film maker and puts a lot of failures down to the possibility that he just wasn’t that good and got very lucky a couple of times. I’ve never read, or heard of, another film maker that is so brutally honest about his own short comings.

Here’s a nice topical recommendation from playitagainstu:

Just finished a book by a famous Nobel Prize for Literature winner. (No, not that one.)

It’s my first excursion into the work of Thomas Mann and I really enjoyed ‘Lotte in Weimar’, Mann’s portrayal of the genius of Goethe. Lotte, the real life heroine of Goethe’s novel ‘The Sorrows of Werther’, makes a pilgrimage to Weimar in 1816 in her later years to see the great man, and it’s through her and the people she meets that the the life of Goethe gradually emerges. A totally absorbing and wonderfully evocative novel.

And this isn’t so much of a recommendation as a book-to-avoid from, WebberExpat - but any mention of Philip K Dick remains interesting:

I read Philip K. Dick’s final novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. It was crap, more or less. Equal parts christian mysticism and world-weary sarcasm, it was a sad final offering of a mind trying to reconcile his own psychotic history. Long gone were Dick’s out-there ideas that made you question the depth of the reality we perceived. I didn’t bother finishing it, despite it being a scant 200 pages. If I wanted to listen to a troubled soul reconcile their atheism with a rediscovered religiosity, I’d call one of my aunts up on the phone.

In the thread that followedWeberExpat went on to praise Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, Martian Time-Slip, Ubik. And other PKD suggestions will also be gratefully received.

Finally, a post full of heartbreak and beauty from conedison:

Four years ago I saw an excellent one-hander at Trafalgar Studios about the life of Zelda Fitzgerald. I think that play is what has drawn me to the book, West of Sunset by Stewart O’Nan, about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years. Here’s a taste of Zelda’s writing when she was in one of her hospitals - all her letters to Scott were in longhand.

`Oh Goofo, every day I think of the warm skin of the sea and how I ruined our eyes for each other. You were angry and shut me in when I wanted the sun. Maybe I was never meant to be a salamander, just this thing they wrap in sheets and feed when the bell rings. I’m sorry I cost you all those cities all those perfect boulevards with their lights burning down around us in the night.’

Interesting links about books and reading

• Enjoy this footage of David Hockney launching his very big new book at Frankfurt.
• A goodly portion of the world’s new books are currently stuck on boats and going nowhere.
• Still thinking about Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature? This list of ten books he ‘digs’ is a treat.
• Less happy reading is this report on author earnings, commissioned by our friends in Europe.

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!