Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from the last week.
To begin, an autumnal reward for einekleinenachtmusik who has been lulled by Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter:
Today is leaf-raking day. Fantastic autumn colours of cherry and birch but the darn leaves are in free-fall. Very bothersome to a tidy mind. Luckily, mine is only intermittently so, but you have to think of the neighbours who are lovely but also very tidy. A nice log fire for reward and a bit of an old chinwag with the genial Frank Bascombe, all-time good egg and hero of The Sportswriter.
Ford’s prose is immaculate, so smooth, so lulling, that it would be easy to miss the brilliant aperçus of life as lived in suburban New Jersey in, I think, the mid-80s. He quotes EM Forster’s Aspects of the Novel: “Fictional characters should possess the incalculability of life.” And Frank Bascombe is his perfect vehicle – not a BMW, mind you, more a muddy Volvo with a mostly quiet, but often hilarious, sense of humour.
It’s hard to think of Frank as fictional - he feels more like a pal.
Tambok enjoyed The Perfect World Of Miwako Sumida by Clarissa Goenawan:
Ms Goenawan is an Indonesian-born Singaporean author but the story is set in Japan. The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is the story of an enigmatic, to the point of being strange, young woman and her small circle of friends. When Miwako commits suicide her friends try to solve the riddle of her life, who she really was and where she came from, after she briefly flitted through their lives … In life it’s hard to understand why the small group are drawn to Miwako – she’s difficult, lacks social skills and is not particularly likable – but as the story unfolds the reasons for her spiky personality and reluctance to reveal her past become clear. I wasn’t sure what to make of this book at the start but very soon got into it. It’s quirky, insightful and has a touch of the supernatural – something I’m not usually keen on, but it works very well.
Something a bit different that I really enjoyed.
“For anyone currently looking for books to give young children with gay parents or young kids with open-minded straight parents,” LeatherCol recommends Pearl Power and the Girl With Two Dads by Mel Elliott:
Lovely illustrations, and Pearl herself seems wonderfully in touch and easy for young kids to relate to, I imagine. As an adult gay man, I don’t actually agree with the message of the book that the two gay dads are just the same as Pearl’s straight mum and dad, because queer is not straight and, for me, the straight world is not mine … but, looking at the world of the child, it does seem far more important to bring out similarities and lovingness in parenting for children of both gay and straight parents, than it does to make queer political arguments as a counter to heteronormality which would be very misplaced in children’s literature. … and, I’m sure, just terribly difficult to illustrate.
Devil By the Sea by Nina Bawden has pleasantly surprised safereturndoubtful:
A south coast seaside town at the end of the season is the setting of this unsettling story, seen through the eyes of nine-year-old Hilary … Bawden, better known for her children’s books, excels in her depiction of children. Though Hilary is terrified by the man, she is also fascinated by him, and wants to meet him again. The confusing, frightening world of things not fully understood as children is a dark place, and one into which Bawden delves compellingly. This was originally published in 1957, and shouldn’t be confused with the easier to find version of 1976, which is a children’s version that Bawden was subsequently asked to rewrite.
Had I the chance to influence her writing, I would have asked her to do the reverse, rewrite some of her children’s books as dark chillers. She had the knack to terrify, that’s for sure.
“I didn’t expect to enjoy Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul so much,” says annegeraldine:
It is in no small part due to the character of Charley Fortnum, the Consul himself. It is set in Argentina. There’s plenty of angst about fathers and the nature of belief and there’s an espionage plot involving a botched kidnapping.The writing is great. It made me laugh [the British ambassador! ] and feel a bit sad because overall it’s about how we are diminished by the lack of love.
A Song for Dark Times by Ian Rankin is a “typical Rebus” says CCCubbon:
There are two parallel investigations afoot, one in Edinburgh and one in the north of Scotland near Tongue with rather tenuous links between the two. I thought the more northern one with Rebus worked better but both tended to get a little bogged down, the Rebus ending a tad rushed and shall be interested to read what others think in due course.
Theothebook has just finished Ernst Jünger: Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern) translated by Michael Hofmann:
A firsthand account of his fighting and being wounded many times during the first world war. Surprisingly there are moments of humour as well as time spent reading, drinking wine, sunbathing and the companionship of that time as well as the horror … After all that he lived a long life, 1895-1998, dying on the eve of his 103rd birthday. When I read a book like this I feel as though I want to give it to every young person so as they see the futility and damage of war and to everyone who causes and sends the young off to fight.
Finally, GELBuck conjures a beautiful dream with The Discovery of France by Graham Robb:
A fascinating sort of social history of France touching on geography, culture, work, farming practices, tourism and more. I found the first half of the book about the decline of the non-French languages and dialects particularly interesting. This is the perfect read for when – Covid permitting – you are stuck in traffic on a French autoroute next summer.
Let’s hope we can all join that traffic jam soon.
Interesting links about books and reading
David Byrne likes reading aloud to his friends.
Dan Brown writes at 4am and when asked what he would change about his books, declines to say “everything”.
John Steinbeck didn’t like other people.
“Lawrence became famous writing novels about sex. But his best stories – and his most profound achievements – reside elsewhere,” argues Frances Wilson, mere decades after Geoff Dyer said something very similar.
“They were careless people …” Why a quote from The Great Gatsby has taken on new resonance.
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!
