Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
EnidColeslaw was reading Here and Now, the book that compiles the correspondence between Paul Auster and JM Coetzee over the course of three years:
Enjoyed a few days off in London to re-visit my favourite bookshops (wait, isn’t that what tourism is all about?) and bought a few books I had been meaning to read, especially Here and Now, and A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes. I’m well aware that this is ludicrous, but despite French being my native language, I’ve only read Barthes in English so far, thanks (or because of?) a well-stocked bookshop in the Bloomsbury area which has more Barthes on its shelves than any of the bookshops in my neighbourhood, ahem.
The Auster and Coetzee correspondence is interesting and sometimes amusing, but not an endless string of thought-provoking discussions. There was a certain stiffness in their exchanges, probably due to the fact that they somehow knew that the letters would end up being published. Lots of baseball talk too, which I assume is... normal for Auster, being American? Maybe less so for Coetzee, although he is much more scrupulous in his analyses of matches and scores, and more generally focused in each of his letters, where Auster tends to drift from a subject to the other without much of a transition.
LucyRM is going back to this nostalgic Finnish read:
judgeDAmNation asked a fascinating question:
Reading Animal Farm at such a young age, I hold it responsible for a) instilling a lifelong love of all things Orwell, and b) securing the complete transfer of my love of reading from children’s/young adult books to more “grown up” literature. This has reminded me of the question I was going to post this week, which is this: for those of us who have been avid readers since childhood, what was the key book or books that helped make the transition from younger to adult fiction?
It’s such a great question that we might take it up and make an open thread out of it. For now, the answers here ranged from The Old Man and the Sea and Lord of the Flies to The Hunt for Red October.
SharonE6 is reading the Man Booker-prize winner and compares it with The Goldfinch:
I’m reading Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. What a pleasant contrast to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch which I’ve just finished. Flanagan’s writing is spare and lyrical. Quite beautiful. I feel that I should be reading it slowly and savouring every word. Tartt throws everything in and had me yelling for an editor. Endless pages of long dialogue that I couldn’t actually hear anyone saying. Flanagan’s dialogue is brief and leaves me unsure about what I’m reading. But I feel I can relax and just wait to find out what he wants to tell me.
Asmita Das shared:
And a warm welcome to all of our new readers, such as fuzzywuzz, who left this lovely comment:
Ooh, I do love this! A place I can discuss books outside of my immediate family (fiancee and 12 year old daughter). I confess I am a bit all over the place when it comes to finishing books and often read two or three books simultaneously. [You’ll find you’re not alone in this blog, then!] So I gave myself a pat on the back after finishing two this week.
The first was Chuck Palahniuk’s Damned, a delightful read full of humour (of the dark kind!) and demons. The story follows a recently deceased teen and her narrative of her experience of landing in hell. Although hell is well, hellish, I came away from this story with the notion that hell isn’t quite the polar opposite of heaven. I will of course seek out part two of this story, Doomed as soon as I can.
The second book was The Picture of Dorian Gray, a classic if there ever was one. I have sympathies with Dorian, whose innocence/naivete was unspoiled until Lord Wotton planted the notion of Dorian’s unparalleled beauty. The portrait, a perfect work of art, would be the mirror of Dorian, but also a reflection of the soul of the artist, Basil Hallward. Beauty is only skin deep, as the saying goes and the decline of Dorian’s morals/conscience is in tandem with the increasing ugliness of the picture. Ego is, indeed very delicate.
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.
