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

After the sad news about Ursula K Le Guin, I’m sure many of us must feel like Maggie B:

After learning of the death of Ursula K Le Guin I felt almost as though I had lost a friend. I’m re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness - and it’s great.

Meanwhile, PortlandRace commemorated Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time Of Gifts:

What a wonderful book – and writer (I quite possibly said the same last week). I can only imagine what fun, if exhausting, company he must have been.

Here is another lovely reminder that life goes on, from boguscoleman, who has been reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral - and Harry Potter:

Last week I started on a re-read of American Pastoral. The first time around I was about 19 and had never read anything like it. I was blinded by the anger and rage expressed through Roth’s incredibly long, forensically-detailed sentences. On this read, I’m more aware of the structure behind it all – where it seems to be rambling, it has an intense focus on stripping away all the crap that goes into the American dream – all of the cliches are there - the quarterback, the beauty queen, the idyllic country home, the successful doctor - and they are all ripped apart with relish. It’s brilliant but exhausting. Happily, to counter all of this I have made a promise to my nine year old daughter to read the Harry Potter books so when Swede Levov’s crumbling world becomes too much for me, I can escape to Hogwart’s for a while – which is lovely. But the real joy comes later when my daughter sits next to me and asks me what I think about a book – even if it is The Prisoner of Azkaban.

Elsewhere, JamesLibTech recommends Mean by Myriam Gurba:

It’s a memoir that chronicles Gurba’s childhood, adolescence, and college years and deals a lot with her feelings of being an outsider as a Mexican-American amongst a fairly well-to-do neighbourhood of (mostly) white children, her coming to terms with her sexuality (and queerness), and her sexual assault as the hands of a serial rapist.

I’m doing it absolutely no justice, but it’s beautifully written and surprisingly funny at times.

And Glozboy has been reading Naomi Wood’s Mrs Hemingway:

It follows the story of Hemingway’s four wives, picking up each time at the moment when the marriage gets into trouble.

I read The Paris Wife by Paula McLain a year ago and this picks up the action more or less straight after the end of that book, with his first wife Hadley having to share him with Pauline Pfeiffer in an uneasy triangle.

It’s a good read, putting you into the action very quickly. Wood clearly did a lot of research for this and it shows, going into little details of each period that add a pleasing authenticity.

Finally, not exactly a recommendation, but still an intriguing post from Swelter:

Last night I dreamed I was reading a Swiss novel, In Transit (author undetermined, but from the cover apparently published by NYRB Classics). The setting was limited to a specific geographic area, with the characters a changing group of displaced persons and refugees that pass through the area.

I was trying to describe the novel to an acquaintance, but didn’t seem to be communicating. She then handed me her phone to show me a list of books she’d recently ordered. There were about a dozen titles and, as I scrolled through them, I didn’t recognize any except for one, Calpurnia Courage and the 19th Women’s Congress. I knew this was a current bestseller, the sequel to an earlier book featuring Calpurnia Courage who the author intended to use as a series character; my impression is that the books were alternate history / steampunk.

If Jung was correct that ‘Canis panem somniat, piscator pisces’ (The dog dreams of food, the fisherman of fish) I’m sure many readers here must dream about books. Do others dream of books that don’t exist?

In my dreams featuring books, the words are mainly just disappearing from the page as I try to read them or the pages keep turning too fast for me to keep up... Alas. How about you?

Interesting links about books and reading

• Harvard has put some of Virginia Woolf’s photo albums online.
• A fascinating article about Chinese epic sci-fi author Cixin Liu.
• A new series of articles about the secrets of book critics (who even knew we had secrets?!)
• What we talk about when we talk about What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Author Brian Evenson answers questions about Raymond Carver.

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 lives 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!