Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week:
An early Christmas present of Neville Shute’s On The Beach has surprised lace675468:
I received Neville Shute’s On the Beach as a book club Christmas gift. We had to make a choice from a pile of wrapped books with just a brief synopsis from the giver’s perspective, and the description of this as an apocalyptic vision piqued my interest. It’s amazing, depressing and disturbing in equal measures and I can’t believe I haven’t discovered this before.
Maggie Atwood’s Oryx and Crake has also surprised captaindiy:
Entirely bonkers and unexpectedly hilarious in parts; my mental image of her has forever changed following the passage describing the Crakers’ courtship ritual.
I’m intrigued. What do the Crakers get up to?
Meanwhile, LeoToadstool has been reading JL Carr’s wonderful novella A Month In The Country and it’s gone over just as well as you might expect:
A first world war veteran arrives in a Yorkshire village to restore a medieval church painting and discovers a kind of happiness in work and friendship, a contentment that is offset by a spot of unrequited love. Wistful and elegiac, if there was ever a prose fiction equivalent of a Housman poem, this is it.
Tom Drury’s Pacific has also had the desired effect on RedmonT:
It’s as good as you’d expect. It has repeatedly made me laugh out loud in public and I find it so difficult to explain why. Drury has created a world of characters that I really feel I know; that helps me imagine how they say things which I guess makes it funnier. Take this:
When Lyris and Albert arrived, Tiny was drinking vodka and Hi-C and watching the Ironman Triathlon on television. An athlete had completed the running part and was staggering around like a new-born colt. People tried to corral him, with little success.
“What you need in that situation is a wheelbarrow,” said Tiny.
Lyris and Albert stood on either side of his chair, looking at the screen.
So funny. There’s another part with Dan and Louise where she asks him if he would like to go to the moon and he says “Yeah, if they fixed it up a little bit.” Just brilliant. I’ll be sad when it ends.
James Ellroy’s Blood River has moved BaddHamster to metaphor:
It’s a little like spending a day listening to Wagner at full volume while watching two TV screens, one showing non-stop images of genocide and the other showing something like Casablanca ... but in a good way, if that makes any sense. One is left punch drunk but strangely satisfied.
Fantastic! And uh-oh. Here’s a dose of reality from mrsdoom, who found Henry Porter’s The Dying Light “impossible to put down”:
It is a conspiracy thriller about a corrupt UK government which develops a clandestine system of big data collection. Written in 2009 it seems prescient. In the afterword the author puts the question, “Does our stoicism, our determination to “keep on, keeping on,” and not get too worked up about things amount to a fatal complacency?” I think we know the answer now.
I think we do too. But let’s not end on a downer. DishwasherCrab has a pleasure to share:
Lies Sleeping by Ben Aaronovitch, the most recent in his Rivers of London series. What a perfect end of year treat!
And that brings 2018 to a close here on Tips, Links And Suggestions. We’ll be keeping comments open for the next fortnight so you can log all your holiday reading. We’ll be back in the usual place on 7 January 2019. Until then, thank you for your wisdom, good cheer and companionship, not to mention all the superb reviews and recommendations. Thanks also for consistently proving that there are good things in the world. Here’s to 2019!
Interesting links about books and reading
An extract from Dave Eggers’s 2018 PEN HG Wells lecture on human rights: “What we often forget in the daily drumbeat of abuses by the dominant tech companies is our complicity in these abuses…”
Emily Brontë had a huge bull mastiff called Keeper.
Maya Angelou on The Art Of Fiction.
The best facts that Kathryn Schulz learned from books in 2018. (Including, surprisingly, that Iris Murdoch believed in the Loch Ness monster.
The much-imitated Charles Dickens at Christmas.
If you’re on Instagram, now you can share your reads with us: simply tag your posts with the hashtag #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection in this blog. Happy reading!
