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

Like many of us, KaiserinElisabeth, complained of waking up “grumpy and out of sorts.” But it wasn’t just Trump and Brexit causing the upset, this time; KaiserinElisabeth took an extra dose of mard from “finishing Masha Gessen’s biography of Putin — The Man Without a Face — at 1:00 am.” This late night read, unsurprisingly, “didn’t result in pleasant dreams... The book is well-written and sobering, one that I felt I needed to read but took no pleasure in.”

Happier was Jessica Lucy Beckitt who has just encountered one of the all time greats - and was suitably impressed:

I finally finished the Dubliners. Well ‘The Dead’ just knocked me off my feet. I couldn’t see that ending coming at all and reading it gave me goose bumps up the back of my neck and I choked up. Wow. Just, wow.

More obscure, but almost as glowing, was a recommendation by LeoToadstool:

Two-thirds of the way through Márcio Souza’s Emperor of the Amazon (translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Colchie). A spoofy late-20th century version of a turn-of-the-century adventurer’s tale about an opportunistic Spanish diplomat who finds himself the figurehead of a Brazilian scheme to reclaim from Bolivia the rubber-rich region of Acre. It’s a fun read, written in a self-reflexive, digressive, genre-bending, bitty style reminiscent of 19th century Brazilian master Machado de Assis – who I’m sure Souza used as his model. In fact, the story is almost Machado meets Conrad, if you can imagine that.

The edition LeoToadstool was reading also has an interesting story:

This was among the stack of old Avon/Bard paperbacks I picked up earlier this year. A remarkable American imprint, which was among the first to introduce the Latin American Boom authors to the English-speaking world. It is saddening that, when the series ceased publication, much of their catalogue disappeared from print altogether, with tatty paperbacks of the more obscure titles fetching ridiculous prices online. Dalkey Archive, NYRB classics and the like need to get their act together and scour the old Avon Bard library for the gems deserving of a new audience – Emperor of the Amazon among them.

Elsewhere, the reviews last week were as interesting as ever - but several were also ambivalent and hesitating about the quality of the books. MildGloster, for instance, wasn’t entirely bowled over by Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things:

Which I found engaging and ambitious and yet somehow incomplete; the idea wasn’t a wholly complex one, or perhaps not as complex as the novel seemed to think it was, and the story played out rather plainly. Faber never really went as out-there as I’d hoped he would, although that may be a fault of my own perception — my perception of how the book should be. It was incredibly easy to read, though: smooth and slippery, but with that slipperiness of never being able to fully grasp; there was too much surface, too much shiny, simple story. In conclusion: The Book of Strange New Things, as a whole work, has nothing on The Crimson Petal and the White.

Also struggling was roadwaterlady who had taken on Gaslight by Steven Price:

It’s very long - over 700 pages and I have reached 611 but oh what a struggle. The language flows beautifully as one would expect from a poet but there’s just too many descriptive words... don’t think I can bear to read more for a while even though I am near the end. Need some light relief.

Don’t we all! Another lukewarm notice came from simplicitydrifter, writing about Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl:

A retelling of The Taming of the Shrew, in a series of retellings by equally stellar writers, it inevitably differs quite a lot from her other novels, and has quite a lightness (and shortness) that maybe comes from being a little unexpected coda to her main works.

I’m not sure what to make of it. I like her approach of no story being as straightforward as it first appears, and maybe no person being as straightforward as they first appear. I appreciate the insistence that people can and do change. And the silences and misapprehensions that can arise, perpetuate and sometimes cause major but unintentional harm in families is a revisit to a theme of hers that I can certainly relate to. But it’s such a challenging story to try and make the best of that playing it for comedy with a serious undertone is probably the only way she could realistically do it, and this felt a bit jarring. I tried to enter into it as an interesting exercise rather than a new Anne Tyler novel and that’s pretty much how I experienced it, but I had secretly hoped to be a bit more wowed.

Finally, let’s end with an unhesitating recommendation. Vieuxtemps has been enjoying America by the wonderful Alistair Cooke:

This was a delightful read by a wonderful writer, and it is always interested reading my history from an outside point of view. The photos and paintings were numerous and very good. I remember watching his “America” series (on film) in school, (yes, film!) and have always respected this man. On a whim, I picked this book up for cheap at a used bookstore, and now I want to read more of his work.

All other Cooke recommendations will be gratefully received.

Interesting links about books and reading

• A treasure trove of Alistair Cooke programmes, articles, scripts and more.
• Don’t worry about judging a book by its cover any more. Computers can do it for you.
• Dali’s vision of Dante’s hell.
• Someone’s building a Parthenon of banned books.

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