Kicking off a weekly digest of the best readers' book reviews, englightening looks at authors from Dickens to Barnes
Charles Dickens ... best compressed. Photograph: Bettman/Corbis
Hello and welcome to our – new! – weekly roundup of our favourite readers' reviews.
Since we launched the readers' reviews section of the site last April, we've had many fine offerings – but we're aware that they get a little lost, down at the bottom of the front page. So we figured that what we'd do would be to highlight our favourites in a blog every Monday – and to make things more interesting, how's about this: if you see one of your reviews mentioned, email me with your address (sarah.crown@guardian.co.uk) and we'll send you a choice volume from our cupboards.
We've had so many reviews over the last nine months that it's an impossible task to sift back and find the best of the best, but these are three (OK, four) of the standouts that have stayed with us to date. Hope you like them - and if you review anything this coming week, do clock in next Monday to see whether you've won a book.
First up, pinkroom's elegant and enlightening review of Charles Dickens's Hard Times (which is also my favourite of his novels, so apologies for bias). FR Leavis, says pinkroom,
And finally, my personal favourite DebbieN's peerless deconstruction of Hilary Mantel's use of the third-person pronoun in Wolf Hall, which I'm not going to quote from, as to do so would be to ruin the rhythm – just read it, it's wonderful
Those of you mentioned here - mail me! And everyone else - check back in next week.
Since we launched the readers' reviews section of the site last April, we've had many fine offerings – but we're aware that they get a little lost, down at the bottom of the front page. So we figured that what we'd do would be to highlight our favourites in a blog every Monday – and to make things more interesting, how's about this: if you see one of your reviews mentioned, email me with your address (sarah.crown@guardian.co.uk) and we'll send you a choice volume from our cupboards.
We've had so many reviews over the last nine months that it's an impossible task to sift back and find the best of the best, but these are three (OK, four) of the standouts that have stayed with us to date. Hope you like them - and if you review anything this coming week, do clock in next Monday to see whether you've won a book.
First up, pinkroom's elegant and enlightening review of Charles Dickens's Hard Times (which is also my favourite of his novels, so apologies for bias). FR Leavis, says pinkroom,
famously praised its "compression", and he was certainly on to something. Even the otherwise magnificent Great Expectations sags in the second half as the Compeyson mystery unfolds at the expense of the Pip story. Hard Times, however, is as toughly constructed as a Coketown girder. Three books. Three storylines. One well-told tale put together in gripping three-chapter installmentsSecond, a pair of reviews on last year's Booker winner, Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, which, taken together, flag up another benefit of reader reviews: their ability to interrogate the critical consensus (or in this case, to widen the cracks that were already there). Here, samspokony sides vigorously with the Booker judges ("Barnes' novel … is crafted with enough finesse to remind us that, all political issues or social topics aside, sometimes great prose can succeed on its own terms") while rconleysmith took the Geoff Dyer line. "Pretentious, passion-free, tedious and cold," s/he said. "This is a book for the London literati snobs, NOT a book for people from all walks of life to enjoy."
And finally, my personal favourite DebbieN's peerless deconstruction of Hilary Mantel's use of the third-person pronoun in Wolf Hall, which I'm not going to quote from, as to do so would be to ruin the rhythm – just read it, it's wonderful
Those of you mentioned here - mail me! And everyone else - check back in next week.
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