Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Dad’s Maybe Book by Tim O’Brien has been a successful gift for Tom Mooney:
My wife hates buying me books for Christmas. She sees it as something she can’t win at. But she took the risk this year and I’m so glad. It’s the first book someone had bought me in ages and I started reading it right away. It is a series of diary entries and letters to his sons after he became a father for the first time at 58. Its bloody delightful and full of love, doubt, truth and fatherly wisdom. I love O’Brien’s fiction – The Things They Carried is one of the greatest American books – but this is something totally different and really lovely. If anyone’s looking for a pressie for a new parent, this would be perfect.
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters has pleased vermontlogger:
A strong story about the varieties of love, how it ends and how it begins. Very well told, nine main characters brought vividly to life in a darkly atmospheric London of the Blitz and after, all done with deceptive ease in rather traditional, comfortable prose. Even the receding time-line came to seem natural. I really enjoyed it.
There’s been a lot of illness around this Christmas, but at least Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square took interwar’s “mind off coughs and sneezes”:
From the start we are made aware of the central problem of the book: George Bone is obsessed with Netta Langdon, a young actress – beautiful but utterly lacking in talent, generosity and empathy. He adores her and he believes he must murder her. No one captures the London of lost and unsettled souls better than Hamilton, here especially the Earl’s Court area at the end of the thirties with its sleazy hotels and bedsits, cold rooms, dark damp streets and smoke-filled pubs, with a side-trip to another favourite Hamilton setting, Brighton… A real masterpiece of 20th-century fiction.
CCCubbon devoured A Necessary Evil by Abir Mukherjee “in a couple of days”:
The tales are set in Calcutta shortly after the first world war, around 1920. They evoke the atmosphere of the land towards the end of the Raj, the attitudes of the British towards the “natives”, their sickening sense of superiority. Mukherjee does his research well and I have learned about various guns, including a Colt Paterson revolver which had a folding trigger that only emerged when the gun was cocked, and that Dumdum was a real place where those named bullets were made. It is still a named place near the Kolkata International Airport.
Jeremy Clarkson’s I Know You Got Soul has pleasantly surprised nina1414:
Each chapter is about some piece of engineered vehicle (plus the Hoover Dam) that he considers has “soul”. And I have to say, they are fascinating. Even for someone like me with no interest in vehicles (or dams)!
Fact follows amazing and astounding facts, all woven together in a way that is never boring or dry. The articles will make you look and think about zeppelins, the Hoover Dam, the Spitfire, battleships and aircraft carriers etc. in a different light. And, yes, sometimes you might - along with Clarkson - even mourn the fact that some of them have now “died” and been scrapped.
“I finally got round to reading Greta Thunberg’s very short No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference this week,” says rgilyead:
Sobering to think that we are so oblivious to the effect we are having on the planet and each other. Shaming that it takes a young student to speak truth to power. Inspiring too.
Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown has been a successful first graphic novel for orie1227:
I was inspired by the Guardian’s best graphic novels of 2019 article last week to give one a try, so I’ve picked up Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown, and at the halfway stage I’m really enjoying it. It’s my first ever graphic novel, I’ve been surprised how much thought and feeling can be squeezed into a page, often with a minimal use of words. I’d always assumed they wouldn’t really be for me, but this kind of graphic novel I can fully get on board with.
LeatherCol recommends getting a ghostly chill from Susan Hill:
In the small hours last night, home after the traditional delights and customs and dynamics of a Danish family Christmas (in London), I read Susan Hill’s brilliantly constructed and atmospheric ghost story The Mist in the Mirror. If you’re in the mood for the genre, I recommend it. I’m still unsettled.
Finally, Paul Expat does not quite know what to make of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow:
What the ever-loving crap was that? is my condensed review of The Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I’m mystified by the whole blessed thing. Please, don’t interpret it as overt dislike. It’s more like icky, wanting a shower after shaking an unshorn hand … I have no friggin’ idea what to make of it. It’s ringing in my head, like that time I walked into a telephone pole and broke my glasses.
Gravity’s Rainbow is. What it is, I have not a clue. But, I’m pretty sure that it is.
I’m taking that as a recommendation.
Interesting links about books and reading
“Brushing my teeth this morning, I catch a glimpse of my New Year self and am depressed to see how depleted I’m looking.” Alan Bennett’s 2019 diary is typically wonderful.
“Read more women,” says Elif Shafak.
11 trends that changed the way we read in the 2010s.
Ralph Ellison’s letters show his “brilliance and audacity, love and loyalty” says 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!
