Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
granitadicaffe has just “entered the gates of Purgatory” with Dante:
In Il Purgatorio it takes 9 cantos before you reach Purgatory itself. On the way they meet and chat to various historical personages. The gates are a little hard to find and when you get there there are 3 large steps of marble outside: the first is white, smooth and polished, the second dark rough and cracked, and the third red like blood spurting from a vein. On these stands a big angel with a sword, who only opened the door after Virgil explained their mission. He used 2 keys, a silver and a gold one. If the latter, which is difficult to turn, won’t open then you can’t get in. It is hard to enter Purgatory but once you are inside you mustn’t look back!
“I’m not a slow reader,” says kinson1964, but “I’ve been reading the same book since last year.” That book is Jerusalem by Alan Moore:
A huge book (page numbers reach four figures) and it’s an amazing read. It deals with Northampton rather like Joyce deals with Dublin or Gray does with Glasgow - all human life (and death) is there together with a wealth of historical facts, trivia and metaphysical speculation. I now wish that I knew the town well for the extra psycho-geographical resonance.
A Delicate Truth, “another le Carré novel leaving barbs deep in the body politic of the high and mighty of Britain”, has captivated notatalllover:
Unputdownable, Toby Bell, the hero, showing the meaning of bouncebackability, having grabbed hold of the hand of someone under the cosh of the secret state faces brutal consequences in his desire to find the truth behind the lies and cover up hidden under the pacific blanket wielded by the Foreign Office. Again le Carré lets his readers know Britain is a police state in all but name. A rewarding read.
A quick tip from Dennis89:
Just finished Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. A short novella and the ideal read for one sitting.... Beautiful prose and quite atmospheric for such a short book.
And a fine idea from nkenny:
I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. It’s extremely funny and perfect for dipping in and out of during spare moments.
Van Gogh’s letters have impressed marosc:
They’re really good. The main element of his personality that’s coming out is commitment to authenticity - he’s determined to be himself even in the face of severe family pressure to conform and to be true to his artistic vision even when it means only selling a handful of pieces because he refuses to compromise to make his art more saleable. And his brother Theo must be the greatest art benefactor in history - pretty much single handedly supporting Vincent so he can dedicate himself to art - and what a legacy we’ve got because of that. The way Vincent writes about his art and comparing it with other artists (it’s not true that he was a loner - he was friends with Toulouse-Lautrec & Seurat and, of course, began a failed attempt at an artists’ community with Gauguin) is totally engaging - you can really feel his excitement about what he’s doing.
Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey is, according to FrogC, “excellent”:
It was not at all what I expected. The voyaging adventures are mostly told in flashback and take up a smaller part of the book than Odysseus’s return home and revenge upon the suitors who’ve been pestering his wife and eating him out of house and home. (I kept thinking, impertinently, that that was not how I would have written it.) And it’s a surprisingly cruel book - I ended up not liking Odysseus very much.
Finally, Tom Mooney recommends A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley:
In 1957, a young black farmer shoots his livestock, salts his fields and burns down his house. He then walks away from his fictional southern state. Every other black citizen follows his lead.
From this brilliant set-up, Kelley tells the story of young Tucker Caliban, his ancestors and their masters, owners and bosses, entirely through the eyes of the white people left behind in town.
There are a lot of moving parts in this novel but they tie together beautifully come the end. It’s at times hopeful and cynical, moral and immoral, simple and complex. Almost 60 years after it was first published it feels incredibly fresh and would sit happily alongside the works of Ellison, Baldwin and other great writers on civil rights in the US.
That sounds essential.
Interesting links about books and reading
“If somebody is looking for something to read, isn’t it your job to put it in their hands?” Why US independent bookstores are embracing genre fiction.
“Hexes and jinxes, maledictions, imprecations, anathema, damnation, fukú.” Julian Lukas’ writes about curses in the New York Times.
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!
