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

For many of us, last week was hard. Leonard Cohen died. Donald Trump became president. “Hate has had its victory,” said bdfeil, who decided to seek comfort in the novels of Anthony Trollope. Many other contributors claimed to be too distracted for books in this week when words failed. But interesting recommendations came in regardless, not to mention ways to help contextualise recent events. JamesLibTech, for instance, has been reading TS Eliot:

It seemed appropriate for the state of things and the direction everything seemed to be going. This is the way the world ends and all that madness.

This week?

Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Others opted for escapism. Although even that evoked unfortunate parallels. Hard not see some of our current woes in this from paulburns:

Sat up late finishing C. J. Sansom’s Dominion. A wonderful alternative history thriller, based on the premise Churchill did not succeed Chamberlain and Britain surrendered after Dunkirk to become a Nazi satellite etc etc. An exciting read. Good for blowing fluff out of the brain.

At least, sometimes, the coincidences were amusing. judgeDAmNationAgain wrote:

Have just finished reading Goldfinger, Ian Fleming’s novel about a ginger-haired billionaire super-villain who doesn’t smoke, enjoys golf, is a bit pervy and secretly works for a criminal Russian organisation. Was quite good, but written in the 1950s so not as relevant in this day and age...

There was also a kind of consolation from laidbackviews:

What is to come, I pondered; well the end of the year draws nigh, there has been a harvesting, hand-stacked sheaves of course, and a threshing, for animal feed. The field is alive to the sound of the chaffies and kestrels hunt on the wing, hovering as the wee beasties escape the binder. And leverets suckle.

The Running Hare goes straight on to my reads-of-the-year list, as I approach the final chapters. Lewis-Stempel brings the farmland to life, with some precious phrases. I didn’t read his earlier work, Meadowland, but on to the xmas list it goes.

Anything been happening out in the real world these days? I glance out the window, to the farmland that surrounds me, the snow now melted, washed away, sun bathed. These are different fields to those that John Lewis-Stempel knows, a different type of farming altogether. The cattle are indoors now, locked up for months. But the buzzard flies yet, and squeals, mobbed by crows. And the wireless stays off.

Take hope too, from PatLux’s reminder of the beauty of words and that we can still share common ground with poets who wrote over 2000 years ago. Their civilisation has fallen. But their love of life remains:

My favourite books are those in which a sentence or a short passage resonates so strongly with me that I have to stop and transcribe the words by hand in my special notebook. The words then become mine as well as the writer’s.

I am only 75 pages into my latest charity shop find, Richard Flanagan’s Man Booker 2014 winner The Narrow Road To The Deep North and I have had to stop twice this afternoon to enjoy writing these words in my own handwriting.

“A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. ”

And the following which will be read at my funeral and which Flanagan himself copied from Catullus.

Let us live and love
And not care tuppence for old men
Who sermonise and disapprove.
Suns when they sink can rise again,
But we, when our brief light has shone,
Must sleep the long night on and on.

“Vivamus et amemus” could be words to help us to get us through the next few years.

Finally, following Bob Dylan’s Nobel triumph I think we can accept this as a literary recommendation from playitagainstu:

Just listening to one of my favourite Tom Waits albums (The Black Rider) and thought these lines might be of some consolation:

There’s a lot of things in this world
You’re gonna have no use for
And when you get blue
And you’ve lost all your dreams
There’s nothing like a campfire
And a can of beans.

Interesting links about books and reading

• One in four Americans voted for Donald Trump. Coincidentally, one in four also didn’t read a book last year.
• Alternatively, an attempt to put the Trump victory in its literary context.
• On a brighter note, we still have JK Rowling and she’s still got a wonderful Twitter feed.

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.

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