Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including reads on vegetarianism, friendship, love, America’s economic collapse and Germany’s war guilt.

fingerlakeswanderer was moved by The Vegetarian by Han Kang:

It’s a disturbing novel about an ordinary woman’s decision to be a vegetarian and how it has an effect on her family. We only get rare glimpses of what’s going on inside her head. The whole story is told from the three perspectives of those in her family who watched the consequences of her actions. It was profoundly sad. For me, it was another reminder of how women’s decisions over their own bodies are frequently treated as an affront to others. It seems that everyone had an opinion over her decision to stop eating meat, and yet, Han Kang never lets us inside the head of the woman who sets in motion a chain of events that ultimately destroy a family.

CharlieBing praised Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life:

It’s quite extraordinary, it’s divided in three parts that seem to interweave throughout the book (though you don’t find that out until the end). Ballooning, Sarah Bernhardt, and then... aside from the astonishing sadness, where do such ideas come from?

paulburns has been reading Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles. A Family, 2029-2047:

What can I say? This is my first Shriver. If the rest of her work is like this, I’m a fan for life. America is in the midst of economic collapse as the dollar goes into meltdown and the “uber-rich” plunge into poverty, struggling to survive in an era of soaring inflation where money is worthless, hoarding of the slightest quantity of gold illegal, etc, etc.

Shriver paints this dystopian world with a deftness almost amounting to magic as she traces the misfortunes of the Mandible family, at one time on of the richest families in Washington DC. Each family member is lovingly characterised, from Grand Old Man and his second wife Lulu, suffering dementia, his two elderly children and their children and children’s children so that you really care what happens to them.

I don’t want to go overboard, but I think this might be the best current novel I’ve read since Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings.

Finally, Sara Richards found The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert in a second hand bookshop, took it home and read it almost in one sitting:

... which means I will have to read it again to make sure I haven’t missed anything. This is a novel in three sections which tells the story of the Second World War through the eyes of three non combatants, three innocents. [...] What made this little book so special was the quality of the writing. The language was simple, the writing controlled, and the three sections complemented each other so well. The emotional tension increases through the stories until [the character of] Michael is faced with coming to terms with the truth about his heritage – and then moving past that as his Turkish partner has a baby and the new life has to be celebrated, the past somehow assimilated and then left behind. A fine but devastating piece of writing.

Interesting links about books and reading

• 5 Somali-British Poets You Need To Know About: and you can listen to their poems and find out about their inspirations in this fantastic Buzzfeed piece.
  
• Middle Eastern Writers Find Refuge in the Dystopian Novel: five rising literary stars to watch from the region, in the New York Times. Plus this interactive feature.
• New fiction by Langston Hughes (Seven People Dancing) and Zadie Smith (Two Men Arrive in a Village) in the New Yorker.
• Garth Williams, Illustrator of American Childhood: “Williams took an entirely different approach—one that familiarizes, not distances, the pioneer life that it portrays” ... A piece on the illustrator of Stuart Little, also in the New Yorker.
  
• The Beats, Revisited: The Shifting Legacy of a Literary Generation: Have the Beats aged well? In Signature Reads.
• From Scripture to Screen: Kate Tempest’s Electrifying Spoken-Word Meditation on Our Fraught Fillers of Existential Emptiness: “You’re handed the mould and told — fit in to this.” In Brain Pickings.
  

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.

Happy reading!