Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week:
Halloween approaches and tiojo has been doing some appropriate reading:
I’ve just put down Andrew Michael Hurley’s second novel based in the countryside of the Bowland Fells and the Fylde, Devil’s Day. It follows on well from his first, The Loney. The countryside, which I know well enough, inspires him. But he sees things in it not many of us would. What to us are rolling moors, green valleys, sparkling streams, picturesque farmsteads, signify something else to Mr Hurley. He sees another world. Spiritual, demonic, folkloric, who knows. An unsettling mixture of real and imagined geography gives us the horror version of Le Grande Meaulnes. His novels are psychogeography in action. The moors will look different next time I walk across them.
On the same theme, Veufveuve has enjoyed Mary Shelley’s Transformation:
A slim collection of short stories (comprising the title story, The Mortal Immortal, and The Evil Eye). All three stories are in some way supernatural or uncanny and the writing, though obviously touched by the gothic and thus sometimes a little overblown, is often very good – she knew what she was doing. All three stories, like Frankenstein, explore what it means to be human and how we might live. For me, by the far the most effective was The Mortal Immortal (I probably don’t need to explain the subject matter), bringing home its great existential crisis very powerfully.
A different kind of monster has entertained Kevin Dawson in Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret:
That rare thing, a genuinely unputdownable/laugh out loud book. Difficult to tell who was the less appealing, Princess Margaret herself or the people who (as Brown notes) happily accepted invites to events at which she would be present, knowing how awful it (and she) would be. They attended seemingly only so they could then skip off home to describe how awful the event was. Increased my respect for George Harrison, though (who, on being told he couldn’t eat before she left a “do” simply went up to her and asked her to leave).
This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson has impressed 17Luftballons:
It’s about the captain of the Beagle and Darwin. Echoes of Patrick O’Brian’s naval novels but it’s the detail and description that really bring it to life, so vivid and well-described I almost feel like I’m watching a film, or that I’ve visited all these places I’ve never seen. The characters are fascinatingly nuanced and human. And their debates over theology versus their scientific discoveries are really bringing home to me the significance and impact of evolutionary theory at the time. Nice and long, too - I don’t want it to end any time soon!
Caroline Alexander’s The War That Killed Achilles has fascinated GeorgeMeany:
A forensic and very readable analysis of The Iliad and the different strands that informed its creation. Utterly fascinating and totally recommended for armchair Homer fans and general readers alike.
Here’s a teaser from casaleiro:
About 10 days ago the Guardian carried an interview with a Spanish writer who recommended A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. Never heard of it! So down the town I went and found a copy in a charity shop. It was a fabulous discovery, and I am currently following it by re-reading William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. What the two have in common is their view of childhood as a wild and potentially violent state of being. I guess most readers are familiar with Golding. Concerning the older novel by Hughes (1929), I will say nothing, I simply urge people to read it, preferably without knowing anything about it beforehand.
I’m intrigued. Talking of suspense, franhunny has been reading Agatha Christie’s Mrs McGinty’s Dead:
While I usually loathe Poirot because of his smugness, it was not as bad as in other Poirot novels so I could live with it as a quirk.
Which made the book quite enjoyable. Oh, I knew the murderer after the second murder, but I did not know why yet and how the two murders were connected.A classic whodunnit, with the classic “all suspects into the same room” finale where Mr Poirot explains his thoughts.
A few hours well spent.
(I’m glad it felt like a good investment of time, because we’re going to be looking at Agatha Christie on the reading group next month.)
Finally, Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller has done the trick for judgeDAmNationIII:
I’m about halfway through rereading and my God is it the tonic I need at the moment. I remember being relatively unimpressed with it the first time around (at least compared to the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy and Black Spring, which I read first), and although there are parts that go on a bit, the rest of it just feels like it’s screaming directly into my soul.
That sounds pretty good to me.
Interesting links about books and reading
How does it feel to burn a book? “Excruciating,” according to New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean.
Patrick Parrinder marks the 100th anniversary of HG Wells’s decision to write the history of the world.
So much to admire in this sixth former’s quest to overturn a backpack ban by finding increasingly strange ways to carry his books to school.
Enjoy disagreeing with Lithub’s list of the 10 books that defined the 1990s.
If you’re on Instagram, now you can share your reads with us: simply tag your posts with the hashtag #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection in this blog. Happy reading!
