Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from the last week.
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison has been mrfloydthursby’s Juneteenth reading:
A timely and a timeless text… Ellison lends his narrator a strong voice, which remains clear and robust throughout. Although there are few extraneous descriptions of locales, the novel has a keen sense of place, and it’s the lack of all that surface detail which gives the book its timeless quality…
This is the third time I’ve read Invisible Man, and I’m sure it will not be the last. I finished it last Friday, and it was only after I had read the final questioning line and returned the book to the shelf that I remembered what day it was: June 19th.
Here’s another book that sounds like it really matters. PaultheExile recommends Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara, “a little kick in the teeth aimed at the little despots subjugating the masses”:
It seems such an important work, such a thumb in the eye of going narrative, so inconvenient. It shows just how much help, how much popularity those few initial fascists had. The idea of the Italian partigiano, Fontamara shows just how it was pushed to form, but even moreso, how rare the rebel was and how frequent and complacent were the collaborators.
It’s very clearly a piece of propaganda, but perhaps one of the most effective pieces of propaganda I’ve ever read. There are no heroes. No cunning plans. No Audie Murphys rallying the troops. Just tick-laden sadsacks who’ve no idea of what a good break could possibly ever be, who find a limit and organise.
“Some Dostoevsky for light reading?” suggests booklooker, who has been reading Another Man’s Wife and a Husband Under the Bed, an 1848 short story:
Dostoevsky’s shorter works were one of the first recommendations I received here, and, as promised, they are fun. They also demonstrate techniques that render later works so brilliant, in this case, highly absurd, credible dialogue in even more absurd situations – two men who are strangers to each other hiding in the dust under another stranger’s bed. While I do not think “cuckoldry” as funny as Dostoevsky’s contemporaries (or Shakespeare’s, for that matter), I enjoyed the story. It is almost completely rendered in dialogue, which takes some work from the reader in order to understand who is talking when. But the work is worth it.
Stendhal’s Mina de Vanghel has pleased vermontlogger:
Stendhal broke off in the middle of Le Rouge et le Noir to write this 50-page novella about a love-seeking young heiress from Koenigsberg (he passed through in 1812 en route to Moscow). She’s got her ideas of love from reading Auguste Lafontaine, said in the notes to be an indefatigable novelist of high moral rectitude and dripping sentimentality. Casting aside both rectitude and sentimentality she picks out a man to be her lover and traps him by a gross deception. When he finds out what she has done he does not like it, and the consequence is fatal. The chief pleasure is Stendhal’s peerless style. The plot is more than a bit daft. Yet the pulse is so strong, Stendhal almost makes you believe in the train of her emotion.
“Just finished Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams,” says getebi:
I really enjoyed it. The main character is really relatable; even though she has different experiences of life as a young black women from mine as a not-so-young white women, the awkward smear tests and sexualisation by random men had me nodding and cheering Queenie on. A great read.
Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz (translated by Trevor Le Gassick) has delighted Veufveuve:
Mahfouz never fails to delight me, and this is no exception - in fact it is now my favourite after the Cairo trilogy. It is an ensemble piece that follows the tangled lives of the residents of a scrappy, scruffy alley in old Cairo during WWII. The cast is a marvellous array of characters, most of them deeply flawed in some way but also deeply human. Things do happen, and events unfold, but this is much more about people and place than plot.
Mena Gallie’s You’re Welcome To Ulster is “yet another great read” for AbsoluteBeginner76:
Gallie sweeps the reader into a story where a middle aged lady with breast cancer heads to Ireland for some fun, to feel like a woman and let her hair down. There is an old flame nearby, she stays with her pregnant friend Caroline in a beautiful house on the County Down coast, worries about a couple of mean looking IRA lads and finds Ulster in the middle of the 1969 civil rights marches.
Finally, we’re going to need an update on this one - MsCarey has been reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
I haven’t looked at this since I was 12 and it was the first Shakespeare we had to do at school. I loathed it then. Julius Caesar at 13 the following year went down a treat, though. I wonder if there is any one “best” Shakespeare to introduce to a kid. Ultimately, I ended up loving being taught Shakespeare at school and it’s something I’ve been thankful for all my life since, but the Dream remains a nightmare in my memory. Interested to see where this read takes me.
When I read it, I concluded that it was rather good. I wish similar joy to MsCarey this time around…
Interesting links about books and reading
“Ah, to be cleverly ridiculed in the pages of one’s own magazine.” On editing David Foster Wallace.
David Sedaris is “destroying” his Fitbit friends.
Good news: books are safe from Covid-19 after a standard three days of quarantine.
Roddy Doyle scored 8 out of 10 on a quiz about Roddy Doyle.
Are you reading wrong? (Before you rage click, don’t worry, the answer’s no.)
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!
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