Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
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Version 0 of 1. Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, from appreciations of Milan Kundera to male/female author ratios to shocking book abandonment confessions. Vesca shared: I’ve been reading The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf. It’s one of those books that seem to be about nothing very significant, as focussed on inner thoughts as well as external events, but those thoughts are interesting. Layered in a way the thoughts of characters in books are not usually layered – and it’s made me think about how shallowly people are usually portrayed in fiction, with just the top surface of their minds, the one that drives what the person is going to say or do next. To which jmschrei added: This description has me really intrigued. I think that my own reading has evolved greatly since my first aborted efforts to read Virginia Woolf. The internal life is often sacrificed to action and advancing a narrative arc. Thank you. PatLux said: My husband just asked me what I think is the ratio of female to male authors I have read in my life so far. Having not kept a tally of my lifetime’s reading (I am a female in my early 60s) I stated categorically that it would be more female than male. However having studied literature at school and university I recall that most authors we read were male and most of the literary critics would also have been male. Last year was the first time that I kept a list of the books that I read and I have just counted and found that I read 40 by female authors and 33 by male authors. So far in 2015 the male authors are in the lead by 5 to 1. It was interesting to read about male/female ratios from other readers too. Does anyone else keep a list of the books they read each year? Sierranorth is immersed in several kinds of journeys at once: Journeys I am reading three books just now, each a different kind of journey for me. Rene Dovovan's novel is a seamless and evocative journey back and forth in time from the late 90s to Concord, Massachusetts in 1842 and Emerson, Thoreau among others; Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark is taking me on a walking journey with him while the late Welsh poet Lynette Roberts is taking me back to life on the home front during WWII. Sent via Guardian Witness By Sierranorth 22 January 2015, 13:26 jmschrei shared: I have read four South African writers this year (the latest, The Alphabet of Birds by SJ Naudé, is already a contender for my top books of the year, a collection of short stories of simmering beauty and melancholy) and two German stalwarts (Sebald and Bernhard) so I thought I would go elsewhere for a bit. The Son is a slight book by Montenegrin writer Andrej Nikolaidis (translated by Will Firth for Istros Books). I quite enjoyed his book The Coming which I read last year and this volume, which I think is the second part of a loose trilogy, shows his unabashed love of Thomas Bernhard – transferred to Montenegro with a distinct set of injustices and indignities to rail against. The biting humour of Nikolaidis’ previous book and that of his literary hero comes through all the same. tamewhale tackled The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera after years of it sitting on his bookshelf: I feel like an idiot now for ignoring it. It is difficult for me to overstate how much I enjoyed it. I admit that in the last year I have trudged through some well-known classics without getting much from them but this restored my faith that there are books that I find entirely absorbing. Swelter shared this resolution: The death of novelist Thomas Berger last summer prompted me to re-visit this writer. I had been a fan in the 70s, but by the late 80s I felt his books had lost the narrative power and stylistic refinement that had first attracted me. I decided to read or re-read all of his novels over the coming year or so. To test my earlier feeling that his writing suffered a falling off, I am reading the novels in pairs, an earlier work together with a later one. Let’s end with a hilarious confession by AggieH: Late enough in this long thread’s lifetime to dare sneak in a confession. I have graduated from being the kind of unforgiving reader who abandons a book to being the kind of evil human being who abandons a short story. Just to heighten my sense of having kicked a kitten, I abandoned not one but two stories, both in the eminently well-intentioned The Book of Gaza. Yes, I am ashamed of myself. No, I am not so important that I could not sacrifice the ten minutes of my life it would have taken to finish them both. Read on ... Interesting links about books and reading 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. |