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Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments
What we’re reading: China Miéville, Sebastian Barry, Derek Owusu and Guardian readers on the books they enjoyed in September Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month.
Join the conversation in the comments. A brilliant, strange book that challenged me in the most exhilarating way, with its fractured language and dream-cinema visions, the sense it bestowed of walking through a corridor full of echoes. Echoes of a less elliptical but no-less political kind haunt Jordy Rosenberg’s astounding. I guess you could call it a family novel?
But it’s at least as much about fascism as it is about the family – as well as about unsettling linkages between the two. And for horrors and rage in a nonfiction register, Jonas Marvin’sis an indispensable – and beautifully written – essay on decades of structural, economic and psychic violence.
The feeling it provoked in me brought to mind John Berger’s phrase “undefeated despair”.by Elizabeth O’Connor, a beautifully written story describing a short time in the life of a young woman and her fishing community on an island off the coast of Wales in the 1930s. The simplicity of this tale is underpinned with intriguing moral issues when two anthropologists visit the island to study the lives and history of the islanders.
The book is the most poetic I’ve read in a while.. Incredibly late to the party because I was resistant to reading her again having had such a hard time with Sula. But Beloved, in my opinion, is the perfect novel. The second isby Juan Rulfo, one of the founding texts of the Latin American tradition of magical realism.
It was hard work but so enjoyable, a reminder that challenging can be fun and that it’s possible to tell a story in a variety of ways. Last, I want to mentionby Thornton Wilder. I’ve only just finished it, so coherent feelings are still working themselves out, but in the mix I know there is admiration, pleasure, something life affirming and something ineffable sparked by the religious elements of the novel.
I’m almost certain it’s going to join the others as one of my favourites. I’m having a great run. The Recovery House by Derek Owusu is published by Merky Books . To support the Guardian, order your copy atby Gerald Martin, a giant ship of a book which, at nearly a thousand pages, will probably steer me through the remains of 2026.
In the night, when I cannot sleep, I do as I always do around the date of my birthday: a re-read of all of Jean Rhys. With her, I am on the moonlit deck of the ship and we watch the darkness of a deep sea rush by. For sanity,by Eileen Myles, concerning the loss of part of their archive and the struggle to hold on to a rent controlled apartment of 40 years.
Andby Anthony Trollope is the cat’s pyjamas. I was nodding my head recently when Marlon James was saying somewhere that he rated Trollope above Dickens. Not that D is any slouch. I am rereading a book I read for work, and now again just because it’s so excellently done,, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Emerson said it was a masterpiece by a writer not known for writing masterpieces The Penguin Classics reissue in the late 1990s also has his correspondence with Emily Dickinson and an account of his one meeting with her, revelatory on many levels. She spoke as she wrote. I was also very admiring of a little book of poems by Kayleigh Jayshree called
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