Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

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Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, on subjects ranging from how authors’ personalities influence our reading experiences to the pleasures of browsing, via many lists of the books our readers have enjoyed most this year – plus our favourite literary links.

MsCarey shared her enthusiasm for In The Light Of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman:

I loved it. It’s a properly big book which thinks seriously about all sorts of things and is unashamed to do so. What makes it exceptional though is that the writer is as adept at the central story as he is with the intellectual whys and wherefores. There are all sorts of fascinating digressions but it’s still a page-turner because you are so desperate to find out what has happened to the central character, who is beautifully drawn. The narrative moves from Oxford to London to New York to Islamabad to Kabul to Bangladesh in order to illuminate some of the big events of the twenty-first century. Supremely entertaining and clever light years beyond my puny abilities. This is a debut novel and I can’t wait to see what Zia Haider Rahman will write next.

Good if you like a bit of subtle social commentary about the differences between cultures, in this instance, the French and the English. It is a reflection of Mitford’s own life, an Englishwoman who lived in Paris for a number of years. I’m quite obsessed with the lives of the Mitford sisters (check out Mary S Lovell’s biography, it is wonderful), so I thought I better get round to reading one of Nancy’s novels. I was very pleased to find that it was as amusing and engaging as I hoped it would be, as I imagine she was.

I have been wavering on my TBR list of fiction and non fiction, and the best I could do was browse 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, a collection of largish volumes of related books, (paintings , classical recordings, movies, news stories) with resumes of a wide range of books. I say browse, there are many ways of reading, but browsing suggests this hot lazy summerlike perusing of books, poems , newspapers, magazines etc, interspersed with youtube and other internet delights, to amuse a leisured soul.

At the moment I am trying to transform from a night owl to a morning lark, but it is hard going changing the habits of a lifetime, is it best to read in the quiet of the night after a tiring day, or in the early morning after a refreshing sleep? – by Stantom.

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