Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week – and we’d love to hear what you’re planning to read over the holidays. We’ll be back in the new year (and comments will stay open until then). Have the merriest of times, everyone!
VelmaNebraska has had the “pleasure” of reading Patti Smith’s first memoir, Just Kids:
I love the clarity and simplicity of her writing. She captures at once what it feels like to be an “ordinary” young woman as well as one who was clearly quite extraordinary, becoming adult in an extraordinary time and place, engaging with extraordinary people. The relationship she describes with Robert Mapplethorpe is deep and shining and touching. It is a relationship to envy: the product of loyalty, commitment, openness and the cultivation of very thick skin. This is a book that can’t help mythologising but I’m alright with that.
charlotteh4 highly recommended The Paris Wife by Paula McLain:
My mother lent me this book, which was bought at a train station by one of my elder sisters. It is a wonderful story about the wife of Ernest Hemingway told through her eyes. Although the book is mainly set in Paris and focuses on Hemingway’s road to success as a writer, it is really about a shy and insecure 28-year-old falling in love with an energetic 21-year-old genius. It is beautifully written and signposts the sense of impending doom for the relationship, whilst focusing on the joy of a young American couple in love in Paris in the 1920s.
FunkBrother69 is rereading Gore Vidal’s collection of essays United States, and recommends it “to anyone who has an interest in American history or literary criticism”:
What strikes me after a gap of maybe 15 years since I last read this is the simple yet oddly expressive prose Vidal uses. For once the comment on the jacket is actually accurate: “He can express in a phrase what a more solemn essayist would be hard pressed to put in a paragraph.” His wit and sarcasm are to the fore in most of the essays, but they never become carping – rather, they show up the lunacy that has been at the heart of American political life for the past century in an entertaining and amusing way. [...] The political essays are as good a chronicle of American history, post-independence, as you are likely to find in any more academic work. Finally, as an essayist I would say he ranks just behind Orwell in the pantheon of those I have read. This is a big book (1200 pages) in all respects, but is so readable the pages fly past.
Interesting links about books and reading
- The best facts I learned from books in 2015: Those wrinkles you get in your fingers and toes after a long bath are basically rain treads, and other facts from books, via The New Yorker.
- The Best Children’s Books of 2015: a beautiful illustrated list of the “most intelligent and imaginative books published ‘for children’ but immeasurably rewarding for all readers,” from Brain Pickings.
- 30 Must-Read Poetry Debuts from 2015: a mouthwatering list from Literary Hub.
- If Taylor Swift Won’t Write Her Memoir, Her Fans Will Do It For Her: Simon & Schuster is crowdsourcing the pop star’s memoir. On why, how and for whose benefit – in Buzzfeed.
- At the Corner of the Real and the Imagined: an essay in The Toast on the obsession with literary geography.
- Women of 2015: Elena Ferrante, writer: a fascinating (and rare, of course) interview with the mysterious Elena Ferrante, in the Financial Times.
- Hanya Yanagihara’s “Sex and the City”: if you’ve read A Little Life, or – like Swelter – are closely following the reactions to it, you’ll probably enjoy this New Yorker piece by Elif Batuman.
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.
