Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from the last week.
To start, a popular choice from RickLondon, who has enjoyed Candice Carty-Williams’ debut, Queenie:
The story of the life and misadventures of a young black woman in London. It’s very funny but with some genuine pathos. I could read more and more books about the eponymous Queenie; hoping this isn’t the last we have seen of her.
The Long Home by William Gay hits the right notes for mrfloydthursby:
A backwoods community of hard-drinking working men and their womenfolk is lorded over by the irredeemable figure of Dallas Hardin, whose appearance in the prologue is presaged by a whiff of cordite. Hardin is another in that long line of satanic characters trailing brimstone in their wake as they stalk through the pages of American literature (from Mark Twain’s mysterious stranger and Stephen Vincent Benét’s Mr. Scratch to Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden and Stephen King’s Randall Flagg) … The narrative unfolds through a series of sometimes comic, but mostly violent events, in a prose style that at times is more effect than affecting. Still, there’s a grim poetry to many of the descriptions of the changing light on the landscape, and the dialogue has a raspy bourbon-flavour to it. Best read to the sound of duelling banjos.
Bernard Ollivier’s Walking to Samarkand, translated by Dan Golembeski, has delighted laidbackviews:
Back in the late 1990s, Bernard Ollivier, then in his early 60s, set out to walk the Silk Road alone. Walking to Samarkand, finally translated, takes us across Iran and Turkmenistan, and into Uzbekistan. It’s a journey that’s all about the people he meets along the way, who feed him and put him up, or demand his passport, and more. He’s a joy to travel with, admiration growing as the miles mount.
Larts has been fascinated by The Narrow Land by Christine Dwyer Hickey:
I was drawn in immediately by the nameless, German speaking boy who is dumped (if that’s the right word) on a train. Then the nameless couple, artist and wife, who barely speak to each other. Then the peculiar actions and conversations that ensue. It’s fascinating, carefully constructed and peculiar so far.
“The highlight of my reading week has been Ray by Barry Hannah,” says safereturndoubtful:
It’s a wonderful short novel that defies any preconception you may have about the very idea of a ‘novel’ and reminds me more of a protest song. It will mean different things to different people, but for me, it is the scenario of an intelligent professional dealing with mental stress after war; a doctor, family man, alcoholic; trying to balance children, lovers, patients and neighbours in the sweat of the Alabama heat at the end of Carter’s years of presidency, and, this is the key, remain sane. Blended into this are Ray’s hallucinatory fantasies of shooting down planes in Vietnam or killing Yankees in the Civil War. I’d read the odd review of this previously and doubted that it could possibly work and be readable, especially in little over 100 pages, but the writing is such that it will infuse itself into you, and infection will soon follow … in a good way.
The Priory by Dorothy Whipple has given storm46 mixed feelings:
I was engrossed in this book with its Downton Abbey vibe, and the classic plot without the clichés. Well-written, psychologically astute and convincing, this is a little gem. And yet… The admiration I feel for the novel is tempered with the disgust I feel for that class’s privileged, entitled descendants and my rage that this entitlement means they think running the country is still their due and right, despite, like The Major, no obvious qualifications for doing so except for the accident of their birth.
Finally, proust is reading Elizabeth Taylor’s Collected Stories:
Wonderful, brilliantly observed, succinct. Almost up there with William Trevor and John Updike, to the extent that such comparisons are legitimate.
I think that’s a legitimate comparison. I’d even think about cutting the “almost”. Or would that be pushing it too far?
Interesting links about books and reading
This celebrity author song is worth it for the Stephen King cameo.
“I recently made the mistake of logging onto my favourite least-favourite website, Goodreads”: DR Baker on why authors don’t owe you books.
Here’s the trailer for the second season of His Dark Materials.
Authors were also writing about defunding the police in the 1970s.
“Casual sadism is not incompatible with bureaucratic efficiency”: Mary Beard revisits Fergus Millar’s The Emperor in the Roman World.
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!
