Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
katcalls gave a fine reminder of just how hard a good book can hit you:
I’m well into an older Patchett, The Magician’s Assistant. It is a fine book about a magician’s assistant based in Los Angeles who learns about the secret past of her magician friend/husband after he dies.
I’m enjoying everything about it and when a twist hit about 40% into the book it took my breath away. I had to put the book down for a day or two just to absorb the blow. I take the book with me everywhere and snatch moments with it - waiting for the doctor or when I’m meeting a friend for coffee. Maybe a few minutes in the morning while I’m waiting for my tea to steep.
That’s Patchett (as in, Ann), not Pratchett. Although, of course, Sir Terry also comes highly recommended - not least from bluefairy:
Last night I finished The Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. Absolutely loved the series, the combination of Pratchett and Baxter was perfect. The concept is quite simple: what if you could ‘step sideways’ into another earth and could keep going through millions of ‘copies’ of earth. I was gripped and managed (before Christmas) to read three quarters of one of the books on a 3 hour flight. My favourite book by far was the last, The Long Cosmos where a signal was received from deep space simply saying ‘Join Us’. I loved the trolls and their songs and I’m quite sad there aren’t going to be any more of these books.
On the subject of similar names, interwar has a good tip about one of the last century’s numerous talented women called Shirley:
Back when, I used to come across the name of Shirley Hazzard in literary reviews, but I think I probably confused her amid the other Shirleys writing then - Shirley Jackson, Shirley Ann Grau ... In any event, I’ve only just got round to reading one of her books: People in Glass Houses, first published in 1955. It’s a novel of loosely connected stories based on the 10 years she spent doing clerical work at the United Nations in New York, called here The Organization. Basically she has accomplished what many people dream of - to write a novel of revenge against a former employer. Her UN is a mire of mediocrity, hypocrisy, inefficiency, and - above all - bureaucracy. The chapter on a speech given to the staff by the Director General (obviously Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold) is a classic in itself. Full of zinger one-liners and seething irony.
On the theme of sticking the boot in, how to resist this tip from elliese?
I finished Richard Hughes’s A High Wind In Jamaica this weekend - it’s brilliantly evil. Centred around a mostly-accidental kidnapping of a group of English children on their way ‘home’ from Jamaica by pirates, the book is beautifully written, with a kind of elegant, sly nastiness that’s irresistible, and very funny too. It reminds me of Barrie, with its theme of children being “gay and innocent and heartless”; where innocent, here, means not understanding that one’s actions have consequences. I love the atmosphere Hughes conjures up: the sticky, stifling, filthy heat, the contrast between the violent incidents - and the threat of violence around one of the female characters’ messy, developing sense of self and sexuality - and the basic good-naturedness of the pirates towards the children. It’s a lingering, disturbing, vicious little book, the nastiness enhanced by the omniscient narrator’s apparent cheerfulness. Fantastic.
Elsewhere, the perennial subject of book storage arose again. Jessica Lucy Beckitt has an unusual approach:
I might be one of the few people on here who doesn’t actually keep books.
I mean, I get through five or six books a month, but then I give them away usually as soon as I’ve finished them. I started a book swap shelf at work, and all my read books go straight on there. I love the idea of my experience being a moment in the life of a book, and I also love giving books to others and then seeing the joy they get from it and knowing that in some very, very small way I have done something to enrich that person’s intellectual life.
It’s said quite often amongst readers that to walk into a person’s house and not see shelves groaning with books is a sign that you should turn around and run back out. Well, please do stay for a glass of wine because some of us just like the idea of plucking texts out of circulation and then launching them back in again!
The practicality of this approach was highlighted by JulianTurnbull:
Over many years we accumulated thousands of books. Most of them ended up in the loft, gathering dust. On hearing this, a structural engineer relative investigated, then calculated the weight bearing down on the rafters. He advised us to get rid of them immediately before the ceilings came crashing down.
We did so, sorrowfully. Parting with whole collections of Ladybird books was especially difficult, but the children had long flown the nest. Local charity shops were ecstatic.
Now friends and family have combined resources and have a huge collection of e-books, which we can pass freely amongst each other via email, anywhere in the world. None of us are ensnared in the Kindle racket - we use £30 tablets instead.
Even though there are few physical books in the house, we have more reading material than ever before, contained on a small external hard-drive. The e-library circulates quite rapidly. So please don’t walk out, and do sit down to a hefty glug or two of Vino Collapso - all is not what it seems!
I’ll drink to that too.
Interesting links about books and reading
- A fascinating review about eating humans for fun (among other things.)
- Six of the best books about the increasingly recognized Frederick Douglass.
- An enlightening interview with Donal Ryan about the difficulty of earning a living as a writer - even a best-selling writer.
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!
