Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Today we’re TLSing from the Edinburgh international book festival. You can follow all of our coverage here. And we’ve been asking the crowds here what they’re reading – what a density of books per person! We’ll bring you a round-up on the next blog. Right, on to this week’s reads.
VelmaNebraska said:
I’m about half way through Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, which is reminding me (in the best possible ways) of the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men (I haven’t read McCarthy’s original novel) and Sam Shepard’s True West. I had started it a few months ago but guess I wasn’t in the right place to appreciate it then. There’s a kind of melancholy and fragility about the book despite its subject matter (the brutality of Manifest Destiny and free market individualism perhaps). What I’m enjoying most are the surprising delicately drawn relationships and the beautiful turns of phrase of the eponymous contract killers.
Oranje14 is trying something new:
In the spirit of trying to read more short stories, more books by women, and more books by Scots- I have just bought myself AL Kennedy’s Now That You’re Back. What could go wrong?
Betty Bee is going to start The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair:
Glozboy has been reading Under the Wire by William Ash:
It’s his account of his time in the war as an American flying for the RAF, then being imprisoned in Stalag Luft III (the one where the “great escape” happened) and another POW camp in Poland. He was partly the inspiration for Steve McQueen’s character in The Great Escape.
It’s a fascinating story, and a good companion piece to Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape, as you find out what happened to several of the prisoners who were transferred between the camps.
AlleinAllein felt let down by a Kazuo Ishiguro classic:
The Remains of the Day was really disappointing. Looking for what to read next, I saw on my Goodreads that almost everybody on my friends list had read it with all of them giving it four or five stars, not to mention it seems to have won all kinds of awards but it just seemed very plain. The voice of Stevens is perfect but what he actually has to say, even viewed from the jazzy “it’s what isn’t on the page” style, isn’t particularly compelling. Perhaps his upper lip is too stiff for my taste.
caminoamigo made a wonderful discovery:
DVerdaguer is on a quite eclectic duo of reads:
The TBR list game continued, and we happily saw (as is becoming usual) a great discussion of Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing – special mention to TimHannigan’s parody comment (fragment to follow) and to AggieH’s review.
For you. You’ll soon. You’ll read her book. In the constant genius chatter. Have you? Read you? Best thing ever written. Compelled you, even though sceptical. She made a bookeen. A little slender thing it. Ten years in a bottom drawer. But now they hoopla in the sickly slickly prizegiving noisemaking and. You. Will. Read. This. Fecking. Book.
And they comparing. Comparing uncle James. Uncle James she gets comparisons like she want before. Being Irish and using funny sentences. Uncle that uncle with his consciousness streams.
If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, or film your own book review, please do. Click the blue button on this page to share your video or image. I’ll include some of your posts in next week’s blog.
And, as always, if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see us covering beyond TLS, do let us know.
