Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
“It’s Mark Twain these days,” says voicefrombelgrade, “I’m rereading his short story collection”:
Every time I read The Experience Of The McWilliamses With Membranous Croup, Extracts from Adam’s Diary, Eve’s Diary, The Stolen White Elephant... I just love them. Also, I pilfered Tom Sawyer from my late father’s library (all right, I’ll take it back, my mom won’t even know that I took it...) – it’s a masterful Serbian translation from the 1949 (the author is Stanislav Vinaver). It’s relatively rare to find a translation that’s as good as the original, but this one really is, and I just have to revisit it every so often.
BaddHamster is “finishing up” The House Of Sleep by Jonathan Coe:
Warm, funny, breezily paced (as always with him) and a few interesting thoughts on the nature of sleep. Basically, if you like Coe, you’ll probably enjoy it. I do and I am.
And CharlieBing “just finished” Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands:
As a cartographer by training and a sometime graphic artist by trade, I just loved almost every bit of this beautifully designed book ... a minor quibble with the occasional use of yellow text on white pages, but the typography is exquisite, the whole conceit just wonderful.
“I’ve good words to say about Kill [redacted] by Anthony Good,” says safereturndoubtful:
Michael, a retired headmaster grieving for his wife, the victim of a terrorist attack, asks himself the question of who is really responsible for what happened, not the bombers themselves, not the bomb makers, but the ‘bomb-triggerers’ – the politician enriching himself from his time in office. There’s much more to this story than vengeance though; the narration soon reveals darker aspects of Michael’s character as he recalls his career. Good’s skill is in the narrator considering himself as a realist struggling with difficult pupils, but coming over to the reader as anything but that, and a cruel authoritarian.
As an ex-teacher of 31 years, this is an admirably accurate portrayal of some headteacher’s traits I have seen all too frequently.
Reading Isabel Allende’s Daughter Of Fortune has been “an exquisite pleasure” for PatLux:
Such a rich historical novel in which I, like one of the main protagonists Tao Chi’en, learned lots. I loved the lyrical evocative prose which stimulated all my senses. One of those books that makes you feel you are on a delightful journey with the characters and evokes laughter and sadness. And it stays with you in the intervals between when you put it down and pick it up again. I will definitely be reading more Allende.
MachenBach recommends Augustus Carp, Esq., By Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man:
A satirical mock-autobiography, published anonymously by Sir Henry Howarth Bashford in 1924. Anthony Burgess singled it out as one of the 20th century’s funniest books, but I would say that it’s consistently amusing, rather than LOL funny. Still, that’s rare enough to be noteworthy. Carp is possessed of a Pooterishly inflated sense of his own (and his father’s) importance, and almost total blindness to his own limitations and motivations. He’s a hilariously sanctimonious self-professed Christian (or “Xtian”), who frequently goes out into the streets to lecture smokers, drinkers and music hall artistes on the evils of their ways, but who seems hypocritically blind to his own acts of bullying, blackmail, and greed. Like a monstrous cross between Pooter and Ignatius J Reilly, his voice is impressively realised, and the irony well sustained. I’m not sure how much real satirical bite it had at the time – it seems rather more 1890s than 1920s in many ways, and the joke does wear a little thin long before he gets his comeuppance, but it’s very well-written (in a pretentiously archaic register) and generally good fun.
Finally, Dennis89 suggests we give “serious thought” to reading An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman:
A 200-page account detailing the writer’s reflections, thoughts and wanderings during his visit to Armenia at the twilight of his life. Justification for the journey is provided by the task of editing a Russian translation of a local Armenian novel though the trip allows Grossman to explore and delve far more deeply into this marginalised and often overlooked country.
Faith, patriotism, oppression, comradeship and other such topics are beautifully mused upon in this life-affirming gem of a book.
Sounds fantastic. (That’s also an excellent excuse to link to Linda Grant’s fine article on reading Grossman: “It took me three weeks to read it and three weeks to recover from the experience.”)
Interesting links about books and reading
“This is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact.” Not all early reviewers of Moby Dick were impressed.
Was John Steinbeck a spy?
Olga Tokarczuk speaks out on nationalism.
An interview with Ann Goldstein on translating Primo Levi’s work. (Hat tip to Carmen212.)
Maurice Sendak at the opera.
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!
