Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

An intriguing and unexpected thread was started by frustratedartist:

We often read about ‘lost’ books from the ancient world. Lost in the sense that every copy of them was destroyed and the text no longer exists. Or the sole manuscript was destroyed by its author, for example. Has this ever happened to a printed book? That is, are there any books published after say 1500, every single copy, including the manuscript, of which has been lost? Here I’m thinking of printed and bound books, as opposed to ephemeral publications like leaflets pamphlets magazines etc.

Yosserian supplied an answer whose opening could almost have been the premise of a Borges short story:

Perhaps there are lost books, but they are unknown because they are lost... I know when I’m rummaging in dusty corners of second hand bookshops, I occasionally unearth books which are so idiosyncratic or personal, I wonder if anyone at all knows of their existence. They are often by elderly gentlemen reminiscing about their time at Eton, or in the army or something, and must have had small print runs... I’ve often had this notion of creating a museum of forgotten people and lives from stuff I find (books, letters, photographs) - must be a sentimental resistance/denial in my being to our essential ephemerality on this earth.

One book I did buy was a strange stream of consciousness novel by Erica Cotterill called Form of Diary - it just seemed so wacky and odd, that I wondered if it was a one off, despite having a quote from GB Shaw on the cover. And while there are maybe a dozen for sale online ranging from 15 quid to 150, there is almost nothing in the way of discussion or reviews... so it might as well be lost. I suspect in this sense there are bound to be decent books that if not lost in the sense that they no longer physically exist, are nevertheless thoroughly forgotten, which perhaps amounts to the same thing.

We also got something close to a definitive (not to mention beautifully evocative) answer from interwar:

When I was working in an antiquarian bookshop in Cecil Court years ago, a man brought in a box of books he’d been lugging up and down Charing Cross Road. I said I’d need time to look at them, but he was so fed up he said he’d take £5 right there and then. I gave it to him mostly because I felt sorry for him (one reason I was never the most successful bookseller). Anyway, when I finally did get round to inspecting what was in the box, most of it was worthless, but there was one eighteenth-century novel by a woman writer unknown to me, in original boards, virtually in mint condition. I looked it up but found nothing. The British Library did not have a copy, so I sold it to them. Strangely, I remember what they paid (£120) but not the name of the work or its author. The price has stuck in my mind because I felt guilty about only giving the seller £5.

Elsewhere, daveportivo has been appreciating Grayson Perry’s The Descent Of Man:

I have to say I think it’s fabulous. Look he’s not a cutting edge expert on gender studies or much of scientist (obviously), but I found this book very profound in addressing the pressures and psychological stresses of the male gender role. Now that sounds very theoretical, but what I loved about the book is how personable and how human it is. It really struck me when he described behaviours that have either blighted my life in the past or that I continue to struggle with.

Fannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood also got the thumbs up from SydneyH:

I’ve finished Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, which was just adorable. The prose is perfect, and the action is consistently amusing. I wasn’t as sure about the introduction by V.S. Pritchett, which claimed that “there is not a trace of satire in her”, instead reading O’Connor as a realist, a “fabulist and moralist”. I felt that she was definitely satirising a number of start-up religions, of which there are many. I’m now interested in finding out if her short stories are similar. To me she didn’t seem stylistically so much like Faulkner and McCarthy as like Nathanael West, and I really enjoyed it.

Following on from WebberExpat’s demolition job on VALIS in a previous TLS, BMacLean came to the author’s defence, saying his later novels have plenty to recommend them:

In fact, I’d rate VALIS in particular as one of the very best novels ever written by an American. Dick was indeed striving to come to terms with experiences that he himself feared might have been borderline psychotic episodes, and reinterpreted them obsessively in these last works. I found that struggle, as reflected through PKD’s very real literary talent, intensely fascinating.

He dealt with it in books like The Divine Invasion and Radio Free Albemuth as “standard” (PKD-standard, that is) science fiction novels, in Transmigration as what might perhaps be described as “straight” (again by PKD standards) fiction, and most compellingly in VALIS as experimental, fictionalised autobiography. Not to mention his personal notes and journals, some of which have now been published, though I haven’t yet read any of this material.

Maybe this is such a personal reaction that it can’t be conveyed to other people, but I would urge potential readers not to take WebberExpat’s views as the final word on VALIS (as I’m sure WebberExpat him or herself would be the first to agree). I don’t deny that it’s a very strange piece of work, and as such, will not be to everyone’s taste. But for those to whom it speaks, it is an extremely powerful reading experience.

Happily, WebberExpat was indeed “the first to agree”, writing:

I couldn’t agree more, despite having absolutely hated VALIS. Anything by Dick merits a close read. I just found both Archer and VALIS terribly sarcastic and tired of life and dismissive. Unpleasant, you get the idea that the Dick who wrote these books was exceptionally unpleasant. Completely different than the tone of anything else Dick wrote, such as The Divine Invasion or Scanner Darkly, which dealt with similar themes. But, that was just my gut reaction, dissenting interpretations are always welcome.

Finally, another fine thread started by Kemster, who asked:

Have you ever been bowled over a by a single sentence? This one, from One Hundred Years of Solitude, knocked me out - “They went ahead like sleepwalkers in a universe of grief.”

First to reply was kmir with:

Whatever remains green is more deeply, richly green than it was before. - John Betjeman.

Things took a slightly different course when judgeDAmNationAgain suggested:

I remember years ago reading The Jester by James Patterson, and a couple of baddies are ransacking a church or something, and one of them says: “Let’s go search the fucking crypt.”

That kind of knocked me sideways, but probably for different reasons than what you’re thinking of...

Then roadwaterlady gave us this from The Broken Shore by Peter Temple:

‘I suppose I can find a gassed tomato, some rat-trap cheese and a couple of slices of tissue-paper white’.

She added: “Just about sums up how I think of a cheese sandwich. Ugh.”

Poor roadwaterlady. I weep for anyone who hasn’t known the joy of a decent cheese sandwich. Put some quality cheddar, crisps and chutney in your next one.

Interesting links about books and reading

• Uh oh! If Donald Trump doesn’t succeed in destroying the free world, he may still have a future in publishing say Esquire.
• A beautifully gory gallery of Edgar Allen Poe illustrations for Halloween.
• Someone is building a 3D-model of Borges’ library of Babel.
• An oldie, but oh-so-goodie, Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules for writing.

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!