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

We’re getting ever closer to the end of 2016. There are all sorts of reasons why that might be cause for relief and celebration - but let’s focus on the positive: the new projects many TLS readers have planned for 2017. HousmansEngland has a host of ideas:

I’m considering tackling a series or six. Since I enjoyed Ferrante’s first Neapolitan novel, My Brilliant Friend, but didn’t carry on with the series, I’m going to reread this, followed by the others. I may well read her other novels, too. They all sound very good.

A few months ago, I read the first of Simon Raven’s Alms For Oblivion series, The Rich Pay Late. I’m not sure if I’m interested enough to read the entire series, but I might try another one and see how it goes. I’ve had the first two omnibus volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (i.e. the first six novels), for years, and I think I may even have read the first one, but maybe now is the time to tackle the whole series.

And how about this idea from kakaokuchen?

After reading War & Peace in daily instalments from Jan to June this year (it was meant to be a one year challenge but I got carried away), I have - after lengthy contemplation - embarked on my next annual challenge, reading all John le Carré novels in chronological order. I read Call for the Dead on the weekend, it felt very much like Agatha Christie with spies thrown in, but now, halfway through A Murder of Quality, I am beginning to get that peculiar John le Carré drift of taking the piss plus sharp observations.

A year with John le Carré can only be time well-spent. Talking of time, it sounds like Sara Richards is going to run into some positively Borgesian problems:

Someone mentioned a project for 2017. My project will be the project I had in mind for 2016 which was to read the books I have on my shelves, a project which will take several years. I’m afraid I was sidetracked and read library books, kindle books, new authors and so on.

Last week’s discussion also brought up a book to avoid in 2017 (and for the rest of eternity). It started when Greatnothing wrote the following:

Just a few chapters in to Ayn Rand’s Atlas shrugged. I have just recently finished all the Bioshock video games and this books gets mentioned quite a lot by the creators, so I thought I would give it a try? Anyone got any other suggestions?

TLS regular machenbach was the first responder:

My suggestions would encompass the entire history of literature except Atlas Shrugged, but I may be in the minority.

If the rest of the thread is anything to go by, that minority will be a large one. But machenbach wasn’t just being glib, also providing forceful arguments about the dread book:

You might yet enjoy it, but I suspect that most people enjoy it merely because it confirms what they already think they know about things, and I guess that always gives a semblance of gratification... Nevertheless, I personally think that by any other criteria Atlas Shrugged is the foulest turd in the toilet bowl, and I’m the ashen-faced guy who’s telling you that you’re probably better off trying another cubicle. And, in doing so, I’m single-handedly disproving 48.6% of what Rand thinks she knows about human nature.

... It’s quite amazing how often people get recommended the book by someone who prefaces their recommendation with “I don’t normally read books but…”, which somehow seems to work in the advocate’s favour in a way one rarely encounters elsewhere (“I don’t drink alcohol, but this purple meths is interesting” etc). Maybe it’s because the Rand Foundation constantly floods the high school book supply with hundreds of thousands of free copies of her books each year, in a way that some people – mean, cynical, non-objectivist people – might see as a little sinister and redolent of some kind of cult or pyramid scheme?

This glorious invective was nicely topped off by the ever-reliable NatashaFatale:

“...it’s quite amazing...” Or at least eye-opening. It’s such a universal phenomenon that it has to matter a great deal. I think it’s self-evident that almost any exposure to literary subtlety is a vaccine against Rand’s cardboard sophistries. Try to imagine anyone discussing The Brothers Karamazov over dinner and then falling for Atlas Shrugged afterwards. I don’t think it can happen, and I don’t think that has much to do with anyone’s political predispositions.

We didn’t just have a non-recommendation last week. We also had a rather splendid non-recommendation recommendation from WebberExpat:

I suppose my coming here to ring the praises of Mrs. Dalloway would be a bit of a lost cause. A bit like going to a SciFi convention and telling everybody about this move I just saw, “Star Wars, you’re gonna love it!” It was wonderful in a way that I can’t solidly identify. Jumping from soul to soul, all gravitating around Mrs Dalloway or poor Septimus, or both, it was really a lovely little novel.

On a different tack, Vesca provided a fascinating question:

I’m starting to be curious about secondary characters though. What happens to beautiful, brainless (but occasionally shrewd) Rosemary in After the Funeral, eating eclairs and cheerfully amused at her husband’s faithlessness because she knows he’ll always stick to her for her money? Or poor old George Lomax, who Bundle accidentally vamps, and then gets engaged to his secretary?

And Tom Mooney came in with some powerful advocacy for The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

It absolutely lives up to the hype. I was totally dazzled by it. Who knew there was still some originality left to bleed out of the harrowing slave narrative? Whitehead’s reimagining of a physical underground railroad is genius and his tale of escape from slavery is raw and horrible and everything it should be. My book of the year by a distance.

On the subject of books of the year I’ve been enjoying the recommendations here. As always, your contributions are superb.

Interesting links about books and reading

• Here’s a book title we can all get behind.
• A film about Primo Levi’s return to Auschwitz in 1984.
• At last! A cocktail made of old books.

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