Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Hail and farewell to Geoffrey Wellum, the spitfire pilot who wrote the wonderful book First Light – as vermontlogger explains:
First Light is the most brilliant description I have read of what it was like to fly a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain, the extremities of fear and exultation. [Wellum] wrote long notes of the experience each time he came back from a sortie, as a way of releasing the tension. He was 18. It was only many years later that he turned them into a book. It came out in 2002.
Talking of heroes, fuzzywuzz has been reading Your Lifein My Hands by Rachel Clarke:
This is the story of a junior doctor working in the NHS. She describes her experiences working long hours (with many hours of unpaid overtime), often with inadequate staffing. Her reflections on her training and her evolution from a wet-behind-the-ears new doctor to the confident doctor as well as the doctors’ strikes and the [hospital scandal] at Mid Staffs were interesting, if not downright frightening.
For something less unsettling, try Tom Mooney’s recommendation of Savages by Don Winslow:
[This is not] as epic in scope or brilliant in execution as his last couple of novels but it’s still a hell of a good ride. Two beach bums-turned-weed growers go head-to-head with the Baja cartel in this fast paced, funny romp. It has all the classics of Winslow’s books – graffitti prose, tons of set pieces, hideously amoral characters. Great fun.
The Last Llanelli Train, a “slice of Bristol noir” by Robert Lewis has entertained safereturndoubtful:
The highlight being its anithero, Robert Llewellyn, an ageing, alcoholic private eye with an office over a mini-mart in an unfashionable part of the city.
Although it is compared to Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy, this book is very much its own sort of thing. It’s a story of the 1980s with seedy, smoky pubs, hungover mornings and no concerns about driving drunk. There will be few protagonists as repellent as Llewellyn, [and this] is a depressing and bitter tale, but as with the best noir flashes of black humour make it perversely enjoyable.
Zimbabwean novelist Ian Holding’s whose What Happened to Us has impressed LindyCrossworth:
It does not pull its punches in telling the story of a white suburban family living in what I presume is Harare. [One night, they] are savagely terrorised by armed intruders. The attack might be arbitrary, unwittingly antagonised by the son of the family or part of a business/political relationship gone wrong – part of the book’s appeal is the ambiguity that pervades it. That sounds bleak, and it is, but this devastating novel – told from the perspective of the boy in the family – becomes one long elegy on the nature of guilt, the role of brotherhood, an awakening sexuality that is stunted by such an assault and post-traumatic stress. It is also a deft and nuanced portrait of the colonial legacy. I think it has a masterly handling of character, theme and written, with quite brilliant control of subject matter. Certainly it is one of the most powerful novels I have read in many months, and the kind of book that stays with you long after you have finished it.
Finally, regular poster and extraordinary reader conedison is going away for the summer:
Pith helmet at the ready, I’m off to the steaming jungles of tropical Iowa – Mrs Con following in two week – she says if she ever stays on my brother’s farm for more than a month she’ll turn into a soybean. The only book I’m taking with me is James Salter’s All That Is, and I’ll finish it on the plane. I plan on raiding my brother’s literary larder, which includes two novels I haven’t read since my high school: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. As most of my reading days are spent under a hickory tree by the Mississippi River, I can’t think of two better books to read. Happy summer reading, fellow forest dwellers! See you mid-September.
Reading Mark Twain by the Mississippi River sounds like a good summer to me. (We’ll be maintaining regular service here, so I’m hoping enough of you stick around to tell us about all the other books you’re reading, too.)
Interesting links about books and reading
- Find out which book terrifies Neil Gaiman and others …
- Reading Trollope in the age of Trump. Look out for the last few lines – they’re corkers.
- The Millions on Kingsley Amis’ James Bond fixation: “Other ageing males in this situation would solve their midlife crisis by buying a fancy sports car, but Amis didn’t know how to drive. So instead he turned to James Bond.”
- Cooking with Leonora Carrington.
If you’re on Instagram, now you can share your reads with us on : simply tag your posts with the hashtag #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection in this blog. Happy reading!
