Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Alex42 describes his contribution this week as a “slightly strange rant.” But it’s well worth reading:
Just finished Moby Dick for the second time. Very enjoyable, but could do with some editing. The plot’s great and the non-fiction whaling parts are fascinating, but there are a few too many chapters where I had only the vaguest idea what the characters or the narrator were talking about. Those bits were easy to skim through though, so not a huge complaint.
The action scenes are superb, and left me wishing that someone would have another go at filming it. But alas I doubt it will ever happen, as it would be all too easy to accuse the film of glorifying whaling. It’s a shame that in films we only get to see depictions of the past in which the protagonists’ viewpoints only echo our modern sensibilities. While we may (rightly) disagree with their views now, it’s sad and worrying that we’re never exposed to them without a modern critique being overlaid. It leads to an airbrushed version of history, where people of the past are expected to share the same standards as us...
Anyway, slightly strange rant over. Moby Dick = Highly recommended.
If only Herman Melville were still around to work on a redraft…
Meanwhile, here’s a book where a word isn’t out of place. Boocat01 found a brand new copy of Gobbolino The Witch’s Cat by Ursula Moray Williams:
It was 99p in my local British Heart Foundation store. It was a book I loved as a child. Over the last few days I have been reading it to my nearly six year old and now she like me is enthralled and left in wonder at the adventures of the little cat with three black paws and one pure white one.
William Faulkner’s The Hamlet has impressed paulburns:
The first of the Snopes Family trilogy. teeming with Faulkner’s inventive prose and wild imagination, The Hamlet has characters like the calculating Flem Snopes, the earth-child, Eula; an idiot boy who falls in love with a cow; various ruses and stratagems and cons, and a whole collection of mostly beaten down world weary poor Southerners, victims several generations of of the Civil War and Reconstruction. A stunning inventive read.
French Exit by Patrick deWitt has also worked for LLCoolJ:
It is fabulous. I’m calling it his best yet. All the adjectives usually applied to deWitt are appropriate here: funny, dark, droll, transgressive, arch, blithe, funny. In a word, deWittian. I just loved it.
According to molly2bloom, the “best indication of what happens after Brexit” is Julian Barnes’s England, England:
It’s sad and melancholic, environmentally promising, a tad sobering, but also hilarious laugh-out-loud. A story for all to read and ponder. Britain never sounded so real in any other novel I’ve read.
Talking of rightwing nightmares, Thegreatergood has been reading The Wages Of Destruction by Adam Tooze:
It’s essentially the economic history of the Third Reich and so far the best book I have read on Nazi economics. Its incredible how they moved from one crisis, eg coal, food supply, raw materials to another. The game was up in the autumn of 1941 when Barbarossa began to get derailed due to Soviet resistance and appalling logistics at a time Britain and the USA were developing the most awesome military might. One thing that stands out. Speer was a lucky lucky man not to have been hung at Nuremberg. He was as complicit in Nazi war crimes as anyone. But clearly Germany could never win WW2, economically and militarily they were simply not strong enough... Thankfully. If you’re into economic history read this.
On a happier note, Robert Rudolph has had a special reading experience:
I inadvertently got back into Raymond Chandler. I picked up The Big Sleep last night, and the next thing I knew, I was up to page 128.
Some books can do that to you. Especially when they contain lines like this one: “Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.” Raymond Chandler could certainly write them…
Interesting links about books and reading
BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time just did a splendid programme on the Iliad.
Next week is Banned Book Week in the UK.
Penelope Lively interviewed on the art of fiction in the Paris Review.
Martin Amis on how to write a great sentence.
Dashiell Hammett’s strange career.
Bob Woodward likes John le Carré novels! And has serious things to say about reading: “It is too easy to get into the habit of spending an hour with a book and believing you have read it. This cheats both reader and author.”
If you’re on Instagram, now you can share your reads with us on : simply tag your posts with the hashtag #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection in this blog. Happy reading!
