Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from the last week.
First, scarletnoir has discovered Unknown Man No. 89, by Elmore Leonard:
A name I have known for a long time, but oddly never got around to reading. I believe that I may have been prompted by a comment from one of you, and if so - many thanks. This is an excellent and tightly plotted hard-boiled tale, set in Detroit, with our protagonist a process server with a talent for finding people. I won’t say any more to avoid spoilers, except that, rather unexpectedly, the story also contains a convincing description of what early love feels like. Unexpectedly sensitive and intelligent, in what is mainly a fast-paced crime caper. Top stuff.
“Readers, I did it again,” says booklooker, “I peeked at the ending of a detective novel. This time, I have just finished reading Tana French’s Faithful Place”:
Would recommend it for any fans of well-written detective fiction.
French’s observations of human character and family dynamics are apt, concise and occasionally even funny. The conflict of loyalty to family and the possibility of a choice of personal autonomy and bettering oneself according to one’s own preferences really spoke to me.
PatLux has “dived into” Earthly Remains, one of Donna Leon’s crime novels set in Venice:
And here we go again - 28 pages in and I have already come across two connections with the current situation...
“...mask over his nose and mouth, hands under his ankles and shoulders, stretcher, ambulance, siren, the calming up and down motion of the water, slow slide into the dock, bumbling about, transfer to a harder surface, the sound of wheels on marble floors as he was rolled through the hospital.”
“When they arrived at the foot of the Rialto bridge, they looked up horrified. Anthill, termites, wasps... “I can’t stand it anymore” Paola said ... “I want Il Gazzettino to have a headline saying there’s cholera in the city. Plague.”
Echoes of the City by Lars Saabye Christensen feels like the right book for the moment to TomMooney:
It’s been on my shelf for months but I finally made a start this morning. Boy, is this ever the book we need right now. It follows a collection of characters in Oslo as the city slowly wakes back up after the second world war. I am taking a lot of solace from its pages.
A different kind of relief for jaya06, who recommends Underland by Robert Macfarlane:
It is such a beautiful book, and is the first thing in ages that has put me back in touch with nature (even though I’m surrounded by as much concrete as you can imagine). I’m almost sad that it has to end.
Veufveuve has enjoyed Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World:
Humboldt’s was a remarkable life and Wulf tells it very well. She also does an excellent job of conveying his prescience and importance - it is strange that he is (in comparison to some others) so little known. I also appreciated the chapters on those who took inspiration from him. Particularly interesting was George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and Nature, of whom I’d never heard.
Two Ben Rice books have impressed philipphilip99:
Just reread Pobby and Dingan by Ben Rice, a tale of two lost imaginary friends in the opal mining region of Australia, and finally got around to reading the second novella it usually gets bundled with, Specks in the Sky, in which a mysterious group of parachutists land at the remote home of a fatherless family and set about busting gender stereotypes, much to the suspicions of the youngest child.
Both stories are an intriguing mix of realism and fable that seem to be telling you something important but without ever spelling out what that thing is.
Modern Art by Joris-Karl Huysmans, translated by Brendan King, has brought joy to AbsoluteBeginner76:
What a joy this was to read, a superbly translated volume, with excellent footnotes and small inserts of the artwork studied. Am really surprised this hasn’t won any awards and Dedalus is a publisher that always rewards you with these gems of translation.
Finally, Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light is proving to be a useful ingredient in BaddHamster’s lockdown strategy:
Well, it’s just me, beer, the cat and Hilary Mantel ... not necessarily in that order. Am I going a bit mad? Less so than I have been in the past. Is the cat a bit pissed off with all the extra attention? Definitely maybe. Is the new Hilary Mantel all I’d hoped it would be? Absolutely. Haven’t read the previous instalment in almost a decade and after the first sentence, I’m back in that very specific world with that very specific version of Cromwell. Now, I must hasten back to the book, plant the cat on my lap, and read and sup. Keep well and safe everyone. This is history.
Thank goodness we’ve got writers like Mantel to help us though it all.
Interesting links about books and reading
“When regarded as a 20-something prig squatting rent-free on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land, Thoreau sounds like the dude you’d least like to be quarantined with”: Ron Charles on Walden.
Ann Patchett on why we need life-changing books right now.
“From now on, it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us.” Robert Zaretsky on Camus and The Plague.
Eley Williams and Influx Press are holding a flash fiction auction until Wednesday. You bid to send her a title and she’ll write a story based on it.
Fredric Jameson on Joseph Conrad.
A new story by George Saunders in the New Yorker.
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!
