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Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
conedison asked an excellent question:
If you could erase from your memory just one, favourite book from any time in your life, then be handed it fresh and new, which book would you choose to read again “for the first time”? (My wife chose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but said she’d require a time machine so she could go back and read it again “for the first time” ... as a child.)
stevenronaldson said:
I’m reading Dan Simmons – Endymion. I read Hyperion last year, and just finished ‘Fall of Hyperion’, so am going to finish the series off before starting something else. Very interesting and enjoyable books. They are long, the “sci” in “sci-fi” is sometimes a bit “hard” and there is so, so much going on but I would recommend them.
gordonfrank was glad to pick up a Patrick McCabe book:
The Dead School
by Patrick McCabe. picked up from a charity book stall at the GP surgery. Almost got a Grisham but am now so glad I didn't
Bonbonbonbons was reading Roy Keane’s autobiography:
Continuing my exploitation of my continued employment in a bookshop, I have now moved on to Roy Keane’s new book. He is a character that any novelist would be delighted to come up with so I bet Roddy Doyle was delighted to get the gig ghost writing this one. Keane is a walking contradiction and Doyle seems to get that. His writing style is a little too “chatty” at times though, resulting in unflatteringly (to Mr. Keane) clunky sentences such as one that contained two “supposes” within about ten words. Nevertheless, I should imagine the enjoyment one gets from reading it will be exactly as predicted before picking it up, which for me is rather a lot.
EnidColeslaw_ shared:
I just finished reading the latest novel of a writer whose previous works I devoured and loved, and this one felt like a break-up. Not in a “please don’t leave me” way, more in a “what happened to us?” way. I fell out of love and I thought we could make it work but it just no longer does it for me and I’m utterly disappointed. As with all break-ups, I’m going to go bury myself in my bed, eat an indecent amount of chocolate and probably end up in a karaoke bar. Ah, literature.
And we saw a new The Infatuations debate. Dylanwolf said:
I’m currently reading Javier Marias’ The Infatuations – well, I don’t know whether reading is the right word. Some books, although brilliant, are hard to come back to, you know you are going to have to work hard to enjoy them properly – yes, I’m looking at you, Book Four of À la recherche, you may smirk but I’ll be back. I’ll crack Proust’s monster no matter how long it takes! – while others glide down like a twenty year malt. I find Javier Marias’ writing in this latter category.
I can understand that he is an acquired taste. Long, long sentences wander off to discuss whether the word just used was exactly the right one to describe what the sentence was trying to describe. Not much happens and what does happen which can be highly dramatic is sucked inexorably into the hypnotic web of text.
I read a review that compared Marias unfavourably to Henry James and I can see what they were driving at. But I disagree, in that I think the two authors are very different – even aside the obvious classic-modern dichotomy. James’s monster sentences are florid externally blooming constructions whilst Marias’s devolve internally into a tighter and tighter spiral like a Mandelbrot set. James is effusion, Marias infusion.
If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, or film your own book review, please do. Click the blue button on this page to share your video or image. I’ll include some of your posts in next week’s blog.
And, as always, if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see us covering beyond TLS, do let us know.
