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

First up, Veufveuve asks us to believe the hype about Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston:

This book, which had lain unpublished since it was completed by Hurston in the early 1930s, has attracted much excitement and expectation since it was announced earlier this year. It deserves every ounce of hype and praise it has received. Based on oral history interviews conducted by Hurston, it tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, or Kossula, one of the last survivors of one of the last slavers, the Clotilda, to reach the US. It is a remarkable testament; everything one knows about slavery in an abstract sense is painfully, vividly embodied here in Kossula, still utterly bereft of Africa nearly 70 years after he was snatched away from it. Nothing could bring the psychological or emotional damage of that dislocation closer. The narrative, largely in Kossula’s own words (rendered in dialect but extremely easy to understand), is handled beautifully by Hurston. Sympathetically put together with a foreword, introduction, afterword, glossary, notes etc, this book needs to read as widely as possible.

Rose Tremain’s Restoration has impressed PlumedCrest100:

It is a wonderfully humorous book, but it is desperately sad in parts. Tremain captures the colourfulness and the spirit of the restoration era well, her descriptions of food, clothes and entertainment at court are spectacularly detailed. What I was most impressed with was the dialogue: it is not overly stiff and antiquated, but it still has the distinctive cadence of the speech and writing of the era.

Talking of food, Tom Mooney has been enjoying Garlic, Mint and Sweet Basil by “the great” Jean-Claude Izzo:

This is a delightful collection of essays by the godfather of Mediterranean noir. Izzo, one of my favourite writers, muses here on his beloved home city of Marseilles, his lust for good food and his thoughts on noir and other writing. It is very romantic and nostalgic but also contains some timely thoughts on what it is to be French, European and a citizen of the world.

Meanwhile, MsCarey has been enjoying Berlin Noir and Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novel, The One from the Other:

Once I’d suspended belief (no big ask), had a load of fun with it. Clever, entertaining and even a little thought-provoking. I’m hoping the rest of the later ones measure up, and that they’ll be a reliable source of future entertainment. Sad to think he was only 62 when he died.

Staying in Europe, Ongley has been reading Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights as translated by Jennifer Croft:

Tokarczuk has a fine narrative voice, very nicely rendered by Jennifer Croft, which somehow gets diluted in the myriad of micro-fictions that compose this constellation of a novel. There are strong characters that pop up in different locations, from Moscow to the Netherlands, among plentiful musings and asides on travel and taxidermy. The geography sometimes left me disoriented (Someone was insisting that with such great weather they ought to be able to see in the distance the Turkish coast of Mount Ararat), but it all makes for a far-reaching read...

annegeraldine is a few chapters into Robbie Robertson’s Testimony:

There are a lot of special guest star appearances already. Carl Perkins is there. Leiber and Stoller in the Brill building … Jerry Lee at the piano … Howlin’ Wolf blowing young Robbie’s mind. And my God, Levon Helm is there, young smiling and alive.

What a precious gift.

Interesting links about books and reading

• Chuck Palahniuk’s statement about his loss of money and the alleged embezzlement at his literary agency.
• Bill Clinton loves Marcus Aurelius – and he hasn’t finished Don Quixote either.
• “Not for the first time in her life, Sontag became cross.” Geoff Dyer on typically delightful form, discussing memory.
• Zadie Smith on Philip Roth: “He was writing taken neat, and everything he did was at the service of writing.”
  

If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, or film your own book review, please do. Click the brown button on this page to share your video or image. I’ll include some of your posts in next week’s blog.

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