Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
“Life changed in moments, of guns pushed into bellies and the squealing of tyres through city streets.” News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez has got dylan37 revved up:
The psychopathic drug lord Escobar effectively holding the establishment hostage, and national trauma kept in a locked room. There’s a real sense of time and place; a rising panic within the captive and the captors – usually young boys, paid poorly, and trapped and bound in the same underworld. A defining era for Colombia. High reportage from the mind of a novelist, and a tragedy told in heat and colour.
Violent crime has also been fascinating safereturndoubtful, this time in Homicide: A Year On The Streets by David Simon:
Simon spent a year with the Baltimore homicide division, one of the most violent cities in the country. The incidents encountered during the year are covered and of great interest, but the real strength and focus of the book is the study of the police detectives themselves, of the mechanisms they have of coping with what must be one of the most harrowing of jobs. It’s a long read, and won’t be for everyone, but those with a real interest in the TV series, and who might want to know more, it’s essential.
Dodgers by Bill Beverly has impressed mgbellingham:
A really interesting character study which put me in mind of Steinbeck throughout in Beverly’s descriptions of rural America. The cast list is relatively slight but they’re all so richly drawn and I was invested in all of them. Fat Walter provided a great comic foil to the brothers Ty and East who are rather tragic characters. East’s obsessive vigilance coupled with Ty’s psychopathic violent tendencies illicit a great deal of sympathy in the reader as you wonder at the lives these characters have lead which have made them as they are. The ending was slightly drawn out and anti-climactic but I did not resent spending a few more pages in East’s company. A coming of age tale with a grim realism at its heart, I loved it.
“I’m a late-comer to Tara Westover’s Educated,” says kevinincanada “and found myself variously riveted, fuming and exasperated”:
A memoir about a girl starting a formal education only at 16, but also getting an education in ‘life’. The core of the book is Westover’s descriptions of her very sheltered and abusive upbringing at the hands a dangerously religious father and complicit family. He’s blinkered, racist and brazenly hypocritical, as zealots often are, but Westover is nevertheless more forgiving of her father and than I would have been in her place. I had to keep reminding myself that this is now, not 70 years ago. In a similar vein to Hillbilly Elegy, it is difficult in places, but rewards the effort.
Reedist has “just read” The Fountain Overflows trilogy by Rebecca West:
Conventional in some ways, but very quickly un-put-downable for me... the frank descriptions of real poverty in this family that has ‘come down in the world’ through equally frankly-described fecklessness... the humour and resourcefulness of the family and their friends... and the very real characters, unexpected alliances etc.... also the serious attention given to art and the processes that go in to it. Somehow untypical of British writing, in a good way.
According to LeoToadstool, The Longest Memory, by British-Guyanese writer Fred D’Aguiar, is “a modern classic of slavery literature”:
Centred on the deadly flogging of a runaway slave and the aftermath, this is a poet’s novel in every sense of the word: an exquisitely-crafted, polyphonic cross-section of plantation life in early 19th century Virginia, accomplished in less than 150 pages. Reading it, I was put in mind of another slim, poetic slavery narrative, South African Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, which is also highly recommended.
Finally, Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices has left MarGar65 in awe:
How did she do this? How on earth could she accomplish in 200 pages the complexity that others go for and fail to achieve in much longer and convoluted narratives? She doesn’t waste a word, does she?
She does not.
Interesting links about books and reading
The mighty Melville House are planning to publish the Mueller Report … Just as soon as it’s released.
Richard Powers on his reading habits and “the erotics of knowledge”.
TS Eliot on cultural cooperation.
Van Gogh was quite a reader.
“Blockchain is here to stay, so the publishing industry might as well see what it can do.” A handy guide to a possible future by Bill Rosenblatt in Publishers Weekly.
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!
