Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from over the Christmas holiday period.
I’m loath to start the year with a complaint. It’s not as if I didn’t do enough moaning in 2016. Even so. 1,200 comments over the last two weeks? How can I hope to do those justice? Especially when so many were clever, intriguing, enlightening and/ or funny. Oh well. What follows is just a small selection of the many, many excellent tips and recommendations you provided. Oh and one post which we may regard as a warning from lonelybloomer:
My notes on reading Moby-Dick this year:
11-Aug-16: Started Moby-Dick. Excited!!
17-Aug-16: No whale in sight yet. Weird.
30-Aug-16: Asked a friend who has read the book when does the whale arrive. Her responce: “lol wait till 15 pages before the end”. Frustrated and confused.
01-09-16: Maybe taking a break from Moby-Dick.
30-09-16: Attended the seminar on American literature. Had to lie that I have read Moby-Dick. During the confidential chat on a break, learned that nobody in the group has actually finished it (we’re in American Studies program).
05-Oct-16: Rory Gilmore has finished MB, and I have not. Ashamed. Starting again.
25-Oct-16: Taking a break from Moby-Dick to read I Love Dick.
15-Dec-16: Maybe I could finish it before the end of the year and thus make 2016 meaningful at least in some sense.
22-Dec-16: F** it. Life is too short. Booker winners time!
Perhaps even better was the following response from interwar:
I’ve heard that life can be rich and meaningful even for those who’ve never finished Moby-Dick.
Touché!
Here’s a more straightforward, but equally interesting suggestion from Fourpaws:
I finished The Invention of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon in the wee small hours and couldn’t put it down even knowing that there would be no happy ending. It’s an interesting book that delves into the world of not only Carter’s writing but also how she created herself and then did so again during her abbreviated life ... I don’t think you need to have read Angela Carter’s novels to enjoy this. It’s a good book if you like reading about the activity of writing and how an author develops their ideas and brings those to fruition. I still found a couple of things in the early part of the book a little uncomfortable, but after that Gordon seemed to delve more into Carter’s writing rather than the nitty gritty of her own personal life. Perhaps as she became more famous, she was more cautious about the information she imparted to friends. What shines through is how great a talent and intellect Carter was yet she failed to get the recognition during her lifetime that she deserved. It is such a shame that she didn’t win the Booker before she died.
Shame indeed. We’ll have to try to look at Carter soon on the Reading Group.
Also intriguing was Yosserian’s review of Michael Crummey’s Sweetland:
Sweetland is a beautifully told, but uncomfortable lament for a disappearing Newfoundland; or even a bitter accusation. Full of history, of lost livelihoods; of ghosts… When I was in Channel-Port aux Basques, and Corner Brook - I had a number of melancholic conversations about Newfoundlanders feeling lost, and unlamented; this novel takes me right back then; and oddly/disturbingly feels more visceral than those conversations; makes me feel somewhat chastened, inadequate, in my own responses to real people’s lives. Maybe this is a function of novels – to reveal more about ourselves than we otherwise would know – but... well... as beautiful as that may be, its not always a comforting thought. So, a thoughtful, compelling novel....
Elsewhere, Vieuxtemps has been carrying out a task many of us dread:
A terrible, brutal, cruel, merciless purge of my personal library removed 340 books from about 1,400. A little less than my goal of 400, but it will do.
Besides slaying (some of) the paper hoarding dragon, I did manage to read Maugham’s “Christmas Holiday”, which is not really about Christmas, but about a young, sweet, bourgeois English chap that visits Paris for a Christmas weekend museum holiday, and hooks up with a depressed, hardened Russian prostitute. Not *quite* what I was expecting for my Christmas read, but, from Maugham, maybe I should haven’t expected bubbly times. It was still good; not great like Maugham’s best (which is probably “Of Human Bondage”) but still very well written. Recommended for Maugham fans.
There were also lots of summaries of 2016 reading over the holiday period. VelmaNebraska, for instance, has been good and busy:
Oh 2016! Since the summer, I have been mainly reading crime thrillers for diversion while travelling or winding down before sleep: Greg Iles’ The Quiet Game, James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdown and Alafair Burke’s The Ex. I preferred the latter two (Iles’ hero was a bit too indestructible) and only just now realized that their authors have the same surname. It can’t be a coincidence that one of the characters in The Tin Roof Blowdown is called Alafair (have just googled, so you don’t have to - they are father and daughter - which I think is rather lovely). All three books are part of series, which I may return to, for comfort and ease of choice.
But the book I’ve adored over the past few months, and find myself thinking about long after finishing, is Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. How deceptive and sly, and smart and funny, it is.
So too has MildGloster, who provided a list of hits from the year:
Favourite fiction: Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys, which I thought was an absolute revelation; its themes of female isolation and sadness I clearly found pertinent.
Favourite non-fiction: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. It is the sort of read that changes you, that you know you should be reading, and I would encourage everybody to read it for that reason; it’s important.
Favourite autobiography: Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. by Viv Albertine. Raw. Straightforward. Cool.
And special mentions for some other books I thought were brilliant: A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor; Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke; SPQR by Mary Beard; Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth by Leo Tolstoy; and Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
All those impressive lists were also elevating for Applecake:
Having read all these lists and totals, I need to start a reading diary in the New Year so I can join in next time around. I’ve read shed loads of books this year but probably couldn’t name half of them. I don’t know why I haven’t thought of keeping a reading log before. There is always some inspiration on here from something.
Has anyone else got any reading resolutions for 2017?
Interesting links about books and reading
- JK Rowling’s new website.
- At last! Someone’s made a series of Lego dioramas of Knausgaard’s My Struggle.
- Click here if you want to listen to William Burroughs reading random extracts from Naked Lunch.
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!
