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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 begin at The Beginning Of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald, as recommended by Dennis89:

Quiet, subtle and gloriously offbeat this tale of Moscow life at the turn of the 20th Century is a delight. Aided by a lush yet beautifully economic writing style Fitzgerald just seems to know how much to give the reader at each and every point ... at 170 odd pages this book felt like a masterclass in the compression and distortion of time … More Fitzgerald novels beckon. Onwards.

“I have just finished Fraud by Anita Brookner,” says lonelybloomer:

Very, very impressed. She described internal lives of a few characters, balancing between different perspectives to show her character, Anna, in her own eyes and the eyes of others. People are shown as being judgemental of a spinster with nothing to do, yet she has an inner life richer than most of them. I have to honestly say that Brookner makes spinsterhood (for lack of a better word) seem a career worth pursuing...

“I wanted something a little lighter,” says captainlego. “So I turned to Nina Stibbe and Man at the Helm”:

A lovely, light, funny and entertaining novel about two sisters, 10 and 12 or thereabouts, trying to hook their whiskey-guzzling, bad play-writing mother up with a suitable man. It’s great fun.

Focus by Arthur Miller has given Glozboy food for thought:

Living in an antisemitic part of 1940s New York, Laurence Newman starts wearing glasses because of his poor eyesight. The glasses make him look jewish, turning the spotlight of prejudice fully upon him.

This was an awesome read, the subtlety with which things slowly turn against Newman providing a palpable sense of dread throughout. I don’t usually like it when people say things like ‘food for thought in our current times’, but it’s definitely something worth considering.

GELBuck has enjoyed imbibing Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

I understand that this was written to discourage drinking and debauchery and encourage good and Godly behaviour. I’m not sure it would work in that way today. The heroine is a priggish and saintly character who would be hard to live with while the hero is so wet you could grow cress on him. My sympathies were more with the villainous husband who would have been great company at a party even if you wouldn’t want him to drive your wife home afterwards. Having said that, I enjoyed the ‘will they, won’t they’ melodrama of the story and there were some delicious scenes. I particularly liked the four-year-old boy being taught to drink wine, gin and brandy and swear at his mother (don’t judge!) as well as one female character proposing to disgrace her family by earning her own living!

“I’m dipping into some Soviet-Russian sci-fi with Roadside Picnic by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky,” says nilpferd, “who adapted their book into a screenplay for Tarkovsky’s Stalker”:

There’s apparently a thematic link back to Lem’s Solaris and further back to Arthur C Clarke’s Sentinel, the basis respectively for further films by Tarkovsky and Kubrick (2001). Having just rewatched Stalker, I was once again spellbound by this magnificent film, whose dialogue incidentally has many provocative points to make about literature and poetry. It is also a film which seems more contemporary each time I watch it, with its themes of decay and desire, our dwindling resources of faith and humanity, and the sense of blindly trapping ourselves into a toxic pressure cooker of pollution and waste.

Finally, ChronicExpat recommends another book which was turned into a classic film, In A Lonely Place by Dorothy B Hughes:

Stunning: beautifully written, superbly plotted, psychologically sophisticated … and terrifying in its gimlet-eyed examination of violent misogyny. I’ve never seen the (more famous) 1950 film adaptation with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham so I came to the novel cold, which was probably a good thing as I have now learned that the film’s plot differs significantly from its source material. If you have even a fleeting interest in the hardboiled/noir genre and have not yet read this book, you really, just, must. No questions, just go and read it, right now.

Sounds like we better go to it!

Interesting links about books and reading

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!