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

First, three pleasingly positive reviews. George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo has left conedison “reeling”:

This is why I read fiction - in the forever hope that I will become so involved subjectively that writing about it turns into a mish-mosh. I’m smiling now. When someone’s novel transubstantiates into art... So rare.

Twenty minutes after finishing Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine linzena77 checked in to tell us:

Eleanor Oliphant is, of course, completely not fine. It is funny, heartbreaking, and both sad and hopeful; it has had me both laughing out loud and close to tears on my daily commute. I’m really not sure what to follow it with: I feel it’s a story I need to let settle before starting another, so possibly a bit of non-fiction for the remainder of the week.

And proust believes that Edith Warton’s Summer “deserves a wider audience”:

I have read most of her classics, but had not read this excellent late novel until recently. Taut, assured and precise writing, demonstrating her preoccupation with the themes of liberty, repression, and small town prejudice in puritan New England. Character and plot typically plausible. Excellent use of imagery. For such a wealthy ‘upper class’ American woman of that generation, she reveals great empathy with the less fortunate. Hermione Lee’s biog - critique is well worth the attention of Warton devotees. Something of a page turner too.

Not everyone has had such good experiences. Tom Mooney did not enjoy Savages by Sabri Louatah:

Good lord, that is an astonishingly bad book. Written in prose so wooden I could hardly believe it. I would expect better from a GCSE coursework paper. I accept that the translation may be partly at fault but even so the story is just so disjointed and so full of plot holes. A really, genuinely terrible book.

Elsewhere, Gretsch83 at least found some good in Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson:

It’s an imaginative retelling of The Merchant of Venice, set in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, with a modern-day art dealer as the protagonist and a timeless Shylock as his companion. It brings so much of The Finkler Question with it that Shakespeare’s own play sometimes sits in its shadow, taking a great many pages to say what Billy Bard managed to say in ‘do we not bleed’. Still, it’s very readable, often insightful.

A different kind of insight came to nina1414 thanks to Joanna Blythman’s 2005 book, Bad Food Britain:

It is what I would call “car crash reading’” or what UK western writer JT Edson used to called “the fascination of the horrible”. Just like your eyes are drawing to a car crash and you gaze with horror upon it, so do you read the words and facts set out in this book. 25% of British households no longer has a dining table. 1/3 of British people say they do not eat vegetables because they require too much effort to prepare. 35p is the average amount in pence spend on ingredients for a primary school meal in 2003. 57% - the percentage of British men who have little interest in food. (A lot of people merely see food as ‘fuel’.) Only 4 our of 10 Britons enjoy eating meals with their children. And... 51% the percentage of all the crisps and savoury snacks eaten in Europe by the British alone.

Oh dear. Let’s end on a far more nourishing suggestion from misskappus:

I visit a dear elderly Swiss neighbour, and we spend every Monday morning reading and discussing a Rilke poem. We are currently working our way through his Pilgrimage poems from the book of Hours. Bowls me over every time, and so thrilling to work with the German (and she has such insights). The poems work away all week with me like mycelium. Next project is Akhmatova with a Russian friend. Then Baudelaire and others with a French friend. And with my Swiss friend we plan after Rilke among other things, Hesse. So my tip and suggestion is to meet up with others to discuss a poem, and if with someone who speaks the original language or particular expertise, so much the better. To exercise the soul, and deepen friendships. Highly recommended!

That sounds lovely.

Interesting links about books and reading

• Returning to Lawrence Ferlinghetti as he nears his hundredth birthday.
• What it means to be American, according to Edith Wharton.
• More cheering news about Amazon laying waste to all that is good. Or at least, people.
• Literary feuds in ranking order.

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!