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, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

Here’s a cheering thought-stream from charlie_gibson:

Just finished reading the superb Imperium (Robert Harris) - I found it to be terrifyingly relevant in the current political climate. While the story is told through the eyes and voice of Tiro, Cicero’s constant companion, the focus is on the events that led to the end of the democratic Roman Republic and the rise of the monarchic Roman Empire.

The arc of the second act is defined by the rise of Pompey “the Great”. Pompey - superbly drawn by Harris as willfully ignorant of politics (and rather ignorant generally) seeking only personal glory and power - rails against the elite to further his own position...

Pompey belittled Rome’s democratic institutions, scapegoated foreign influence, undermined the Senate and the courts, challenged the noble families and reduced the Republic’s power to nothing more than a facade. He sought, and almost achieved, near-total power. He laid the foundations for the end of the democratic Republic and the start of the dictatorial Empire under his ally-turned-enemy Julius Caesar.

And the most terrifying aspect of all is that we know the end of the story. The Roman Republic - arguably the pinnacle of human achievement to that point - was never to return. The Roman Empire would grow for more than 400 years in terms of territory and power, but its citizens would no longer be free. And the Empire in the west would eventually collapse, leading to a European dark age that lasted more than a millennia.

Okay, I was joking about things being cheering. But hey, at least we aren’t living in the world of Zola’s Germinal, as eloquently described by nina1414:

I managed to finish Germinal yesterday. I now look around me at my flat and imagine living in that world. Everything was monotone. Hard, grimy. They had little to start with and then a miners’ strike went on for months and they pawned everything and they had nothing, absolutely nothing any more. And people died of starvation and at the end, they were no better off than at the beginning.

What a horrible, horrible life. And I have no doubt that plenty of people around the world still live in such poverty. I am so grateful, so bloody grateful for what I have.

And as Fourpaws points out, things could be worse still, if we are to believe 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire by Rebecca Rideal:

It’s a good read but what a dark and deathly period. It puts our current woes into perspective. How terrible to have lost family and friends in the plague and then to have lost your home, business and worldly goods in the Great Fire of 1666 one year later. But hope springs eternal. People got back on with their lives very quickly and rebuilt their homes. And two things I think shine through: how Charles II and his brother the Duke of York (later James II) rose to the occasion...They kept things together particularly in dealing with the fire and its aftermath. Perhaps there is hope for us all yet. And the other thing is fake news, as we know, is nothing new. Everyone wants to blame someone else and foreigners are always easy prey. The Great Fire was blamed on the Dutch and French (both contemporary enemies of Britain) and almost anyone else that wasn’t obviously English. Horrifically, people were literally cut up in the streets as they were deemed to have had some part in trying to destroy London.

More happily, barbkay recommends two books by “tough women”:

I’m casting back to nature and travel writing I unaccountably missed or absurdly let sit for far too long. Having finished Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain - that astonishing, crystalline evocation of the Cairngorms - I’ve finally cracked open Martha Gellhorn’s Travels with Myself and Another, which had been sitting on a shelf for at least a decade. Moving from mind to mind felt like emerging still wet from a tarn in early spring, the peaks ranged below, to hop into a DC-3 pocked with holes and juddering over the bombed immensities of China during the second Sino-Japanese War. Shepherd subsumed the self in the immense otherness of wild nature; Gellhorn immersed in the visceral strangeness of other cultures. That a lot of the action in these two highly distinct books was happening around the same time - the 1930s and 40s - is fascinating. As is the knowledge that these two tough women were avidly exploring life at different kinds of altitude.

And finally, Elizabeth Bowen once got Juliabrady into trouble:

I loved The Death of the Heart so much I couldn’t stop reading it one weekend in the eighties when my boyfriend visited me. Death of relationship. Still love Elizabeth Bowen , The Heat of the Day is now my favourite.

Anyone else fallen out with someone over a book? (I’ve certainly fallen in with people because of them...)

Interesting links about books and reading

If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, or film your own book review, please do. Click the blue button on this page to share your video or image. I’ll include some of your posts in next week’s blog.

If you’re on Instagram and a book lover, chances are you’re already sharing beautiful pictures of books you are reading, “shelfies” or all kinds of still lifes with books as protagonists. Now, you can share your reads with us on the mobile photography platform – simply tag your pictures there with #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection here. Happy reading!

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