Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Let’s start with a recommendation that hit the spot. Larry McMurtry’s “truly fantastic” Lonesome Dove has pleased nicandrach88:
It is physically big (being 800 pages) but is so well written that I just raced through. The story tells of a cattle drive from Texas all the way to Montana in the 1880’s. And what a story it is - anything and everything can happen on this dangerous journey, and it does but it is the characters that really made it for me. McMurtry has an exceptional talent at forming and shaping his characters, not only the main players but all of those that feature in this epic book - the men, the women, the rangers, the cowboys, the whores, the sheriffs, the children, the saloon keepers, the cooks, the pioneers, the Indians, the buffalo hunters, even the horses become big characters.
So a real big thank you to ‘lljones’ and ‘conedison’ along with many others here that have recommended this fantastic book.
Talking of doing things on a grand scale, Rex Bowan has been reading Don Mosey’s Boycott, a 1985 biography of the inimitable England and Yorkshire batsman:
It is the single most sustained piece of character assassination I have ever read. It is so vituperative and one-sided in its criticism of Boycott that it attains the purity of art. Though I’m sure it’s fair, it also creates a certain sympathy for Boycott, whose sociopathy increasingly seems like an affliction and a painful one, while, by virtue of his own intrusion into the narrative and outright antipathy to the protagonist, Mosey himself becomes a character. It ends with Boycott and his fans essentially having taken over Yorkshire. They made a television play about that in the late 80’s and no wonder, if Boycott was a novel, it would be one of the best written in England since the War.
Tom Mooney has been equally bowled over by Street Of Thieves by Mathias Enard:
It follows the coming of age and struggle for identity of a young Moroccan at the height of the Arab spring. Young Lakhdar longs to escape the streets of Tangier for Barcelona and Europe but finds, as the world explodes around him, his life falling apart. He falls in with fundamentalists and crooks, sailers and smugglers. His only consolation is in his French detective novels... A masterful novel, wonderfully translated and so prescient. There is a shade of Bolano’s Savage Detectives, both in the themes of identity and burning youth and in its urgent, gritty prose. Awesome stuff.
DH Lawrence’s Twilight In Italy has also had a strong effect on julian6:
His philosophy may sometimes be hard to fathom but his descriptions have a crystalline beauty. His encounters with Italians or Swiss or English are imbued with dramatic significance. Each moment of meeting, like a little play, has dialogue carefully chosen and recollections bringing time and its passing to further enrich the mosaic of emotions. The whole leaves you spellbound, breathless with anticipation for the next paragraph.
Finally, jmschrei has been enjoying the “wonderfully camp” political satire My Tender Matador by the late Chilean author, Pedro Lemebel:
It is the story of a love affair between an aging drag-queen and a young Marxist reactionary. Woven against their story is a hilarious portrayal of Pinochet as a paranoid, hen-pecked old man. Lemebel was a gay man who called himself a “queen” and his transvestite main character is simply fantastic. In my experience, literature with strong, sympathetic (and realistic) trans characters is rare—I loved this book.
Sounds fabulous!
Interesting links about books and reading
- This came out a few weeks ago, but it’s a treat: Longform podcast interview with John Grisham. His tips for writing are superb. And he’s one heck of a good talker.
- Tiny Owl publishing have produced a blog about the shameful decision by the UK Home Office to refuse a visa to Iranian author Ehsan Abdollahi.
- And if that got you stressed, treat yourself to a few minutes on How to Train Your Dragon author Cressida Cowell’s website.
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!
