Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from the last week.
Let’s start with a “good read for the times”. MissBurgundy recommends Xavier de Maistre’s 1794 “delight” Journey Around My Room (Voyage Autour De Ma Chambre):
He’s in lock-down in his room for six weeks under house arrest and makes the most of it by describing its contents, his conversations with his servant Joannetti and his dog Rosine. Amongst other things.
I don’t know what I said last time but it’s a good read for these times - not long, like nothing else before or since and full of nice people (well his love interest Madame de Hautcastel could be a bit more affectionate) and a lovely dog.
Paul Auster’s City Of Glass feels resonant to PatLux:
I know he did not write the book with me in mind but it feels as if he did. His main character loves walking in New York City and on pages 106 to 108 of the Faber and Faber 1987 edition he takes a walk from the Upper Westside down to Bowling Green and then back up to the UN building.. On the walk he passes a whole host of places and streets which have huge personal significance for me who lived and worked in the city for nine years. The memories came flooding back, some happy some sad. All crystal clear.
David Foster Wallace’s 1989 book of essays, Girl With The Curious Hair, has been similarly evocative for WildIrish:
What if you could summon the dearly departed back to Earth? Reading David’s essays always feels as if a big brother has stopped over to tell me a beautiful wise story. A story with real purpose. A somewhat mostly true story. One that is guaranteed to make me laugh and smile and yes, even cry. And I think of David as I read his words and I whisper, “you are so right, so incredibly right,” in my mind I have had so many long lingering conversations and dinner dates with David Foster Wallace. Maybe we all meet up; a bunch of fellow writers at a secluded location say, the French Countryside home of another writer, or maybe just a benevolent host. Long drawn out conversations mixed with gusto, passion and humor. Together we solve all the world’s problems over some really great wine, gin and tonic, I’ll take my Amaretto Sour Neat, please … Yes. I think I would like very much to return to 1989 and do every single thing all over again. Just to see what might happen....
Missing David Foster Wallace in these times and identifying with his writing like no other.
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami has elicited greenmill’s sympathy:
My second by him and the latest in a bit of a Japanese rampage (fiction and non) having visited that country for the first time last year. A conjunction of messy student sex and genuinely poignant lost love with some quasi-philosophical meaning of life stuff mixed in. An enjoyable read which elicited my sympathy for the main characters. The word Wood (American slang) in the title gives advance notice that there is a colossal amount of masturbation in this book, solo and otherwise.
Iris Murdoch’s The Bell is pleasing interwar:
Iris Murdoch continues to delight with her picture of a shudder-making pious community, notably the portrait of the blandly bullying and passive-aggressively smug Mrs Mark. Sinister overtones emerge.
Tana French’s In The Woods has made booklooker rush to the end:
Ever peeked at the ending of a detective novel? I have not done so before, but Tana French’s In the Woods in combination with the virus situation seems to have upped the suspense and my stress levels so much that I did ... It did not spoil my pleasure of reading the book, though.
Some useful tips for coping with low concentration levels from MalaclypseTheYounger:
Like others here, I’ve been struggling to concentrate on reading for very long, or to get emotionally invested in fictional characters or plot, or to follow a sustained argument to its conclusion. Can’t think why...
But this week I’ve been able to enjoy reading some poetry (Anne Carson, Stephen Dunn), and also reading some books about how poetry works (Rhian Williams, Mary Oliver).
I’ve also started reading some lyric essays, which is a hybrid genre or category that draws on aspect of essays and lyric poetry. Last night I was reading Eula Biss’s lyric essay, “The Pain Scale”, and it made me laugh aloud - something I wasn’t expecting to happen any time soon, let alone while reading about pain!
Finally, BlogWriter has just finished The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway:
It has been several decades since I first read it, and it felt as fresh as new. The fighting race of the old man with the great fish, and its bloody aftermath, is handled with writing skill combined with the author’s first-hand experience: when Santiago hits a shark with his tiller we hit with him, when his hands bleed ours bleed, too. And when the boy Manolin cries by his bedside, we cry with him. A masterpiece worthy of the Nobel prize.
I think so too. And thank you for all the wonderful comments and ideas in another very big week here on TLS. I’m glad we’re here to keep each other going.
Interesting links about books and reading
An epic (and wonderful) podcast series on the history of literature to help you get through the current botheration.
The Internet Archive’s archive of copied books hurts authors.
Contributors to the Times Literary Supplement find cultural things to occupy them in isolation.
Angela Carter on Colette.
Paul Auster’s improbably true parable for the pandemic age.
Gerald Howard is right about Don DeLillo.
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!
