Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

Let’s start with a trip down memory lane from Magrat123 who has been revisiting Richmal Crompton’s Just William books:

Even at the age of eight or nine, I could tell that they were better than Enid Blyton, who I fairly soon got bored with.

Following the discussion elsewhere about audio books I expended an Audible credit on Just William 1, a very large collection of roughly 20 minute stories, wonderfully narrated by Martin Jarvis. I had not expected the sly satirical nods directed to adult readers, nor her mastery of the short story form that invites favourable comparison with Saki or O Henry.

High praise. Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake has won similar acclaim from manunkind:

Just wow ... I just finished this book first thing this morning. Now I feel that I cannot wake up from the world it left me with. Gorgeous prose: “This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.”

The story is very strange, but not in Kafkaesque way, more like Delicatessen by Jeunet and Caro ... which is a film, and that’s what it feels like- more like watching, not reading. Looking forward to the sequel.

On the subject of old school scifi, FrogC recommends RC Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript, an apocalyptic novel first published in 1939:

Must apocalypse novels are set after the apocalypse, depicting the way the survivors coped with the situation. In this case, the apocalypse takes place halfway through, and the characters know it’s coming. It’s an idea that sounds whimsical at first - the moon has been jolted out of its orbit and is gong to crash into the earth. The book starts as comedy: the narrator, Edgar Hopkins, is a Pooterish figure, smug, reclusive, lacking any self-knowledge and obsessed with keeping chickens. His narrative voice can be very funny:

“Aunt Rose had grown stout in recent years, but she possessed the finest collection in England of old coloured prints of stage coaches that had overturned in snowdrifts.”

But as the moon approaches, now huge and terrible, even Edgar starts to become sensitive, and we see, movingly, that he’s capable of disinterested love. The drama and pathos of the last week before the disaster is very powerful. He survives, of course, to tell his story, and the novel is now in the cosy catastrophe phase familiar from the work of John Wyndham. The Hopkins Manuscript is at least in that class, and arguably better. I’m enjoying it immensely.

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police has given captainlego pause for thought:

It reads like a fable, and is beautifully written in spare, lucid prose. It’s a quite a meditative book; I found it slowed me down as I wanted to savour her poetic style. It’s quite a sad book, but in a gentle, resigned way … The novel acts more as a gentle examination of memory, love, friendship and most significantly, loss.

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy has unsettled alegnayelkcub:

Although it’s short I had to take my time over it and I kept rereading sections. I liked the repetition in the book and the way the heat and languor of the place were conveyed. Found it quite an unsettling read.

Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods is impressing writeronthestorm:

So far, so great. Ahead of it’s time in terms of structure, as it pretty much reads like a Netflix true crime original with a superb structure of what I assume to be flashbacks and news reports, interviews, police case notes, quotes, etc. that start to build up a deeply unnerving view of what may have happened to the wife of a prominent, recently defeated politician as they take a sojourn in the eponymous Lake of the Woods. It really is excellent, as it peels back the layers of their relationship and the husband’s past.

Persevering with Zadie Smith’s NW has paid off for mycittavritti:

It took me quite a while to get through, but it certainly turned out to be worth the read. I posted a couple of weeks back that I was struggling with it, and someone helpfully pointed out that Smith seems to do characters better than she does plot/structure. That seems to be the case with NW. I had initially read it because it’s been on my shelf for over five years and I was hoping to take it to the used bookstore to clear up some space, but after I read the last page I actually kind of wanted to go back and read it again. I suspect I’d get a lot more out of it if I did.

Finally, CCCubbon has something good cooking:

There’s a book I go back to time and time again, an old cookery book called Cakes and Cake Decorating by Rosemary Wadey. It’s a soft-covered book, which over the years has become sticky and stained. You can tell which cakes and pastries I make most often by the amount of debris, scratchy notes and missing bits on a page. My edition dates from 1983 and there was a later reprint in 1985. It is out of print but secondhand ones appear. It’s my cake making bible ... it’s an easy fruit cake today that’s cooling now.

That sounds delicious.

Interesting links about books and reading

• Bookninja has stealthily returned to the fray.

• An LGBTQ friendly book has been removed from a library for fear of turning children gay.

• The Oxford Dictionary word of the year is climate emergency. (I know that’s two words. I don’t make the rules.)

• The BBC on the best first lines in fiction.

• “We’re told the Queen has carpeted Andrew…” So wrote Clive James in 1983.

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!