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

Let’s start with sunshine and a self-proclaimed “gush” from BaddHamster:

I know I’m decades late to the party, but I just don’t want Tales of the City to end! I’m at a loss as to how Maupin’s writing can be so gentle and acerbic at the same time. And the character work is flawless... Not a cipher in the bunch, really.

I’d say it’s never too late to recommend Armistead Maupin. Continuing the fulsome recommendations, ID1100766 has been enjoying Golden Hill by Francis Spufford:

Set just before the American Revolution, it tells of a young man (‘Mr Smith’) newly arrived in New York with an order for £1,000. But who is he? And what’s his plan? This novel plays with the conventions of the 18th-century novel and zips along at a rollicking pace. I really feel that I’m seeing a different New York through his wide-eyed wonder though every now and then we are reminded it is a novel we are reading. Superb so far.

And Magrat123 has fallen for A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles:

Obviously it’s too early to rank it in 2017’s reading, but I know it’s going to be one of my lifetime most memorable books. A virtuoso performance, not unlike An Instance of the Fingerpost but better.

It is that rare beast, a literary novel that also has an engaging plot, with an ingenious ending which has been falling into place, piece by unsignalled piece, from the very beginning, hidden in plain sight.

Talking of endorsements, meanwhile, it would be irresponsible of me to encourage Chris135’s behaviour here, even if I enjoyed the idea:

My boss is off today so I’ve spent the afternoon at work sneakily reading Graham Greene’s The Power And The Glory. Still got a few pages to go, but really enjoyed it so far, probably more than any other Greene I have read (well... maybe except for Brighton Rock). Its a great story about a “whisky priest” trying to dodge the authorities in the middle of an anti-clerical campaign in Mexico. I’ve found with Greene that whilst they are always worth reading they can be a bit patchy - I love his prose, narrative and description but always find the dialogue a bit disappointing and wooden.

Graham Greene has also been entertaining Rex Bowan:

I finished a couple of books which were topical: American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers by Perry Anderson and The Quiet American by Graham Greene. The first is a survey of the last hundred years of American foreign policy, and then brief capsules of some major contemporary thinkers who represent different trends (broadly Wilsonian, liberal internationalism and realism, with the other trends being isolationism /republicanism and policy based on economic interests). I love the grip that Anderson has on his material, and the at once lofty and plain style. I also LOL-ed when he described one book as classic New Yorker schlock. It prompts some interesting thoughts about Trump and American protectionism.

The Greene neatly illustrates Anderson’s thesis. I also thought it was the best Greene novel I’d read by a distance.

Elsewhere, Alex42 poses a fascinating question:

Still plodding through Shirley by Charlotte Bronte. 30% of the way through and the author has finally remembered to introduce the title character, who wasn’t even mentioned up until that point. Does this book hold the record for the longest time it takes an eponymous character to appear?

And here’s a challenge inspired by Leslie Snider’s quotation of the beginning of Anita Brookner’s A Start In Life (“Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature”). Why don’t you tell us your favourite openings?

Interesting links about books and reading

• Maximum Paris: a walk around the Left Bank, discussing Shakespeare & Company with Sylvia Whitman, Lauren Elkin and Krista Halverson.
• In Indonesia, a sex education book has proved hugely controversial.
• A quite old but rather good list of video games inspired by books.
• And a new game entirely about books, burning them and eating them. Seems topical, somehow...
  

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