Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Here’s an intriguing question from UndercoverOps, who has been re-reading “my favourite book from childhood”, The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O’Shea:
It’s not a book I’ve heard much about since, did it never make it on to the classics list? I have been very much enjoying its humour and magic again as an adult decades later. It seems to have all the key elements of a children’s adventure - magic, peril, a quest, no parents. It even starts in a secondhand bookshop!
A more grown-up form of innocence for Malinkibear, who has been reading Edith Wharton:
Finished The Age of Innocence yesterday. I picked it up on a whim, as a book I’d heard of but knew nothing about, and it fit into my “read more books not written by straight cis white men” resolution. (Somewhat) surprisingly enjoyed it, I felt it was a nuanced critique on high society and the inequality in permissiveness between the sexes - an inequality that remains today.
Kevin Barry’s Booker longlisted Night Boat To Tangier has impressed allworthy:
Hell, he can he write. Wonderful descriptions of place and he can capture a character in a few breathtaking brushstrokes. I’m still not sure about its form which he seems to wrestle with at times. That could be me but well worth reading.
Alexia_R has finished Paula Chiziane’s The First Wife, translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw:
Apparently the first book by a Mozambican woman to be translated into English. Parts of this are bitingly funny, other parts terribly sad. The story meanders around a bit and is pretty long but it reads so smoothly, I didn’t mind, and I learnt something about the north/south divide in Mozambique and some regional cultural/sexual practices that were completely new to me … I’m going to be thinking about it for a while to come, I think.
WebberExpat says that Zola’s Germinal is rightly “reputed as a masterpiece”:
It’s a book that feels urgent, like Urban Sinclair’s The Jungle and Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath, Germinal seems to be a book that is screaming at us today. It has a lot to say about what happens when the many have the fewest resources and when revolution fails to bring the promised cornucopiae, the people will swing blindly and viciously. If you have no hope of every climbing out of the coal heap and warming your hands and filling your stomach, losing your life seems paltry and preordained. It also has a lot to say about how easy it is for the well-meaning idiot to cobble together a philosophy to harness that rage (and let’s not get onto the fucking nefarious idiots that we’re staring down today).
The Makioka Sisters by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki has kept LeoToadstool busy:
Considered one of the greatest Japanese novels of the 20th century, it’s a family epic centred on the lives of four sisters of an upper-middle class family in late-1930s Osaka. It has a bit of a Russian feel to it, reminiscent not of Anna Karenina (slyly referenced in the text) but of Chekhov, in its chronicling of the experiences and little dramas of family life: illnesses, excursions to shrines, visits to Tokyo, marriage proposals, migrations, etc. Not the most action-packed book ever written, but still worth persisting with. Edward Seidensticker’s translation, dating from 1957, reads decently, if a little flat, and is often hilarious in its datedness (he devotes a footnote to explaining what “sushi” is, for instance).
FatFreddyCat has also been reading about Japan, in Another Kyoto by Alex Kerr:
Kerr has spent several decades in this remarkable city and the book originated in aimless wanderings around Kyoto with a friend during which they would discursively and at length talk around various things that caught their eye as they went. It suffers slightly from the pretentious over-solemnity that Americans in particular can bring to living in Japan, but that small criticism aside, it’s a fascinating book.
Finally, The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton has provided a wealth of useful material for Elias_Artifex:
Ostensibly a study into the causes and treatment of melancholy (corresponding very roughly to what we would call depression) it is a actually a pretty free-ranging review of theoretical understand (cosmological, physiological and psychological) as it stood when the book was written (1621). Dr Johnson said that it was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise. I keep a copy of The Anatomy by my bed and often read a few pages to calm the mind - something about the writing has this effect. One bit that never fails to lift my spirits is the section on laxatives (very comprehensive), the application of which arises from the Galenic/Hippocratic notion that melancholy (an excess of black bile) can be relieved by purging. The idea that depression can be lifted simply by a good clear-out is very appealing somehow.
Not even somehow.
Interesting links about books and reading
Téa Obreht’s second novel is out after eight years. What took so long?
Why Beatrix Potter initially self-published Peter Rabbit.
Book riot recommend 10 books in translation by female authors.
Insects apparently have literary buzz.
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!
