Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including great books for periods of reading apathy, haunting short stories, books that you just have to read in one sitting, and mysteries that could be lovechildren of John LeCarré and Paul Auster.

julian6 has finished Alice Munro’s “beautifully conceived” collection of stories Dear Life:

Much to haunt the mind – many layers in these stories – which keep peeling back to reveal more. They seem to progress with pauses and sudden shifts and the opening of new vistas of feeling, and in the final group darkness truly descends.

SydneyH has read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita:

It was exactly what I was looking for in my period of reading apathy – something fun and strange. As a novel, I feel it probably should have been a bit shorter, and I would have preferred it without the scenes set in Biblical times, but I’d still recommend it. I read the introduction last, and I find the contextual information really fascinating, such as the fact that Bulgakov himself would have “disappeared” if authorities had known he was writing the novel.

FunkBrother69 has just completed The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber:

... and it has left me more than a little perplexed. I really don’t know whether I enjoyed it or not and this is a feeling completely alien to me. Several times during the reading I was on the point of giving it up as the plot was dragging but there was something that kept me going (I don’t like leaving books unread if I can help it). The last 100 pages or so were more interesting than the previous 400 or so, but looking back I’m not sure it was worth it! This is particularly disappointing as I loved both The Crimson Petal and the White and Under The Skin. Anyone else feel underwhelmed by this book or was it just me?

Reading a book in one sitting is a rare experience for EnidColeslaw, who shared:

My attention doesn’t hold for longer than ten minutes in the evening, and the lazy weekend mornings seemed to have disappeared from my timetable recently. So I was glad to be stuck on a bus seat between London and Paris for nine hours yesterday, as it allowed me to read The Salinger Contract by Adam Langer, which is an entirely gripping, funny “mystery” (not so much a thriller, and not really a mystery novel either) that does not resemble anything I’ve ever read, although it could well be the lovechild of John LeCarré and Paul Auster.

“Modern technology in a high rise without a dog for dinner,” shared thuante, who is reading JG Ballard’s High-Rise in a perfect setting, on Instagram:

Interesting links about books and reading

• These Two Book Publishers Got Into The Cutest Little Twitter Spat: We loved every minute of this “spat” between Melville House and Penguin Random House – compiled here by Buzzfeed.
  
• Why London defies attempts to write the definitive novel: “There is no London any more but multiple cities separated from one another by money or its lack, by language or religion or life experience.” On why the time of the great synoptic London novel is over, in the Financial Times.
• Marlon James: five Jamaican novels you should read. Expect your TBR pile to grow instantly. In Literary Hub.
  
• What It’s Like to Write the Most Hyped Book of the Year: an interview with Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire, on Buzzfeed. On the same subject, check out this Guardian piece on why we’re still obsessed with 1970s New York.
• Writing On Screen: Why Do Writing Students Love Such Terrible Mentors? “Hollywood loves making movies about writers – apparently there is nothing more cinematic than watching an unwashed nerd sit in front of a computer and think really hard.” In Electric Literature.
  
• Library builder’s monument of books: on Room to Read, a non-profit organisation created 15 years ago after a high-flying Microsoft executive quit his job to help children in Nepal. In the BBC.
• No Normal: a fantastic extract from Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir, by Carrie Brownstein, she of Sleater-Kinney and Portlandia fame. In the New Yorker.
  

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.

If you’re on Instagram and a book lover, chances are you’re already sharing beautiful pictures of books you are reading, “shelfies” or all kinds of still lifes with books as protagonists. Now, you can share your reads with us on the mobile photography platform – simply tag your pictures there with #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection here.

And, as always, if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see us covering beyond TLS, do let us know.