50 Book Challenge 2015 Part 3

Hello, hope it's ok to join! I've had lots of tips from these 50 books threads, they're great.

It's unlikely I'll make it to 50 this year as I'm expecting twins in a few weeks but I've done a lot of reading up until now - loads of waiting around for appointments and a bit of pregnancy insomnia have helped!

So here's my list so far:

1. The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan. Really enjoyed this one, lovely prose even though harrowing at times.

1. The Children Act - Ian McEwan. Haven't read a McEwan in ages and this one was typically slow burning and fascinating.

1. Stone Mattress: Nine Tales - Margaret Atwood. I love Margaret Atwood and these short stories were really enjoyable. Quirky as ever but some of them were linked which I liked.

1. We are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler. I really enjoyed her other famous book, The Jane Austen Book Club, but I didn't like this book at all! The narrator wasn't a likeable character and the "twist" sent the book in a bizarre and silly direction.

1. The Complete Call The Midwife by Jennifer Worth. Love the TV programme so I thought I'd read some of the stories behind the programme. The book is much grittier than the programme and gives a great insight into 1950s Poplar.

1. The Little House - Philippa Gregory. I've read all her historical novels but this one is a contemporary tale. I saw it recommended on another fiction thread and it was brilliant! Brings the whole "loony MIL" idea to a whole other level. Interesting insight into PND too.

1. The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins. There's loads said about this one already! I raced through it and thoroughly enjoyed.

1. Some Luck - Jane Smiley. Great insight into a family living through the American Depression. Really engaging and it's the first in a series so I'll be buying No. 2 when it comes out later this month.

1. Daughter - Jane Shemilt. A mother searches for her missing daughter. Interesting book but full of working mother cliches and the ending was a bit of a let down. Worth a look though.

10. The Miniaturist - Jessie Burton. Loved this tale of Amsterdam and it's guilds. Again I felt the ending was weak but it was an enjoyable book.

11. Elizabeth is Missing - Emma Healey. Again, lots of talk already about this one. I liked this one, narrated by a lady suffering from dementia. I felt the storyline from the past wasn't fleshed out enough at the end.

12. Us - David Nicholls. Just like One Day, Nicholls creates unlikeable characters and dissects their lives. Readable but didn't enjoy it. The end was ridiculous (IMO).

13. Me Before You - JoJo Moyes. Hmm. Cliched and quite depressing!

14. The Rosie Project - Graeme Simsion. Loved this one. A story about an unusual love affair! Funny and romantic.

15. The Rosie Effect - Graeme Simsion (sequel to 14!). More adventures with Don Tillman. Not as good as number 1 but I liked it.

16. The Last Anniversary - Liane Moriarty. Pure light entertainment but page turning. A recently single woman gets embroiled in a family mystery.

17. A Spool of Blue Thread - Anne Tyler. Following the Whitshank family through the generations. It's well written but very little actually happens and I just didn't empathise with any of the characters.

I think 18 is going to be What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty. I might also get to read Transatlantic by Colum McCann before my Kindle will be idle for a while!

Book 21: A Place called Winter by Patrick Gale. The book moves back and forth in time - doing a slow reveal of the story of Harry Cane. Its first person narrative tells of Harry's years as a young man, his beloved brother Jack, his marriage to Winnie, his subsequent outing, his emigration to Canada to homestead, finally to his treatment in two very varied mental facilities. Initially Harry is a bit of a cipher. He seems like a charicature but - in reality - he just didn't know who or what he was. He started life as simply a gentleman, with nothing else to distinguish him. He has an idea that he would like to farm and increasingly feels his own lack of purpose when his brother trains to become a vet but, until his outing, knows not what to do about it. Homesteading in Canada is hard and physical, but he builds a new life for himself until some unknown (till the end) event means he ends up incarcerated in an asylum. There is a happy-ish ending, in that he is reconciled with the love be belived lost to the war, tempered with understanding that the illegality of homosexuality still shadows his chosen life.

Sorry for the length of the review - I wrote it for my blog and CBA to cut it down!

I enjoyed this - it ranked a very close second to my favourite of his books 'Notes from an Exhibition'.

Not sure what to choose next ...

16. Fingerprints - Francis Galton I read this for my degree. It was interesting to see where ideas about fingerprint identification started, however it was very outdated. But it is more than a hundred years old, I think it must have been revolutionary in its time. Definitely worth a read to anyone studying the subject, but probably not recommended to anyone else.

15. An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro

Another lovely book by Ishiguro, though having read a couple of his in a row now, with Remains of the Day still relatively fresh in my mind too, I am starting to notice how quite a lot of the devices he uses repeat themselves, and it makes them seem a bit forced/artificial at times.

I was very interested to learn about Japan in the wake of the second world war, I'd like to read another novel about everyday Japan during/just after the war - does anyone have any recommendations?

The worst thing about reading this book was that I looked at some reviews online after I had finished it, and they were all mentioning this big dramatic reveal in the book that didn't sound familiar to me at all. Then I flicked back through my copy and realised two of the crucial pages were stuck together. Oops.

Clever and pointless might describe rather a lot of literature, hackmum...

Glad it's not just me who was mystified by the use of the astrological signs in The Luminaries. All the critics raved about how clever it was but it seemed pointless to me. (Perhaps it was clever and pointless.)

24. A Wanted Man - Lee Child

Almost exactly the same as every other Jack Reacher novel. Short sentences, uncomplicated thoughts. Very nicely scratched my 'beach read' itch.

28. Witch Hunt by Ian Rankin

The sinking of two privately hired boats, one on either side of the English Channel, in the middle of the night comes to the attention of the security services. They realise that a woman they have dubbed Witch has arrived in the UK and the hunt is on. Witch is a terrorist and assassin for hire, one of the best, and with an international conference involving heads of state from across the globe about to take place in London she needs to be stopped.

Not up to the standard of the Rebus novels, I felt, but a good read. There's the recently retired old intelligence hand who has personal reasons for getting involved with the hunt for Witch, two Special Branch officers (who are both a little cliched in their own ways), and the two young intelligence officers (one British man, one French woman) who set off on their own hunt for information across Europe. Witch herself is a blank canvas with very little being given away about who she is and her motivations until the very end.

35. Ecstasy - Three Tales of Chemical Romance by Irvine Welsh

An easy read, decent enough but not really gripping, these three novellas are entertaining but lack the depth of some of his other books. It's pretty typical Irvine Welsh fare and I did enjoy it but it's certainky not his best.

Have been on a bit of a junk-food-esque gorge of easy reads at the moment, and thoroughly enjoyable it's been to.

I'm going to give 'revival' by Stephen king another bash next, I think, and then try and get back onto something a bit more challenging.

I reckon it's a serious case of the Emperor's New Clothes. Now, I personally am up for a gawk at the Emperor's manly torso, don't get me wrong, but admire it as a fashion statement? I Will Not.

"deeply silly - really, using astrological signs? How embarrassing"

Not knowing anything about astrology, I gave it the benefit of the doubt. Who knows, maybe there was something profound there that I just didn't get. Still waiting for someone to tell me what that is, though.

40. The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton. Liked the setting, the main characters, the Victorian pastiche. The narrative tricksiness was deeply silly - really, using astrological signs? How embarrassing - and it added nothing to the book.

41. A Million Years in a Day, Greg Jenner. Non-fiction; uses the structure of an ordinary day to delve into the history of bathing, food etc. Rather enjoyed it, but a lot feels fairly familiar from other popular histories.

42. Thin Air, Ann Cleeves. Set in Shetland. Loved the setting and the mystery, but the denouement was a bit disappointing.

43. An Everywhere: A little book about reading, Heather Reyes. Non-fiction. Author decides she might as well make the most of her chemotherapy to catch up on her reading. I thoroughly approve of her determination, but didn't feel there was a huge overlap in the books we read. She has a penchant for weighty French tomes - I felt rather inadequate by comparison.

44. The Ghost Fields, Elly Griffiths. I love her heroine and am intrigued by the various intertwined personal lives of the characters. I thought this outing wasn't quite as memorable as the last, but worth the read anyway.

I said I wasn't going to count re-reads, so will just mention I re-visited The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (had forgotten the frustration of "Let's go to another European city so I can tell another bit of a story that somebody wrote down for me years ago". Kind of takes the tension out of it. And there's something about "It was the sinister librarian!" that makes me laugh. But I was visiting one of the places mentioned, which was fun) and The Secret History by Donna Tartt (it struck me that it's sort of an anti-Dead Poet's Society, which is fun).

No 34.
more than just coincidence by Julie wassamer

This is an autobiographical true story of a young girl who had her baby daughter adopted at ten days & then by chance met her again when she was 18
It's a good read , easy to read style

Loads to catch up on! Was travelling over Easter so had a lot of reading time.

35. One Two, Buckle My Shoe, Agatha Christie. Just over two weeks since I read it, and I have great difficulty remembering what happened. It's Agatha Christie - ingenious and unlikely.

36. The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins. I enjoyed this and I'm glad it's doing. I though the main narrator's struggles with alcohol were convincingly described, and I thought the murderer was pretty convincing as these things go. There's also a bit of a sub-theme about what it does to you to have a baby, or to not be able to have a baby, which gave it a bit of a depth. A page-turner with a bit of heft.

37. Arsenic for Tea, Robin Stevens. A pastiche of Golden Age crime done for the schoolgirl market. Might appeal more to nostalgics like me rather than to its official target audience.

38. Running like a Girl, Alexandra Heminsley. Non-fiction about running. I found it quite inspirational, although only because I've recently started running (more of a slow jog, but apparently we're allowed to call it running these days, no matter what the actual speed). She made me feel like I could run a marathon.

39. Drunk in charge of a foreign language: The Diary of a Spanish Misadventure, Matt Rothwell. Truly dreadful, but somehow utterly compelling. Englishman goes camping in Spain, initially with wife, but she declares partway through that she's leaving him. Non-fiction. Really, really bad as a guide to Spain - he constantly misses all the sights because he can't find parking, and on the odd occasion he does, he has no idea what he's looking at. It's mainly descriptions of dull afternoons on campsites, playing "Triv" and being kept awake by the neighbour's music. But all too often that's what real life is like. I can't recommend this book at all and yet - there's a regrettable sort of truthfulness about it.

21. The Humans - Matt Haig. A very sweet, gentle read, I enjoyed it.

22. The Martian - Andy Weir. If you understand the basics of science and like reading about space travel and exploration, this book is for you. I could not put it down, and rated it 11 out of 10. This will be one of the very few books I ever re-read.

23. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Fowler. Once the twist comes a quarter of the way into the book, there isn't really much of a story left. Readable though.

24. Kristin Lavransdatter - Sigrid Undset. A very long novel (1100pgs) set in fourteenth century Norway. A story about one woman's life, and how she has to learn to live with the decisions she makes. A Nobel prize winning book, and I loved it.

Working on book 25 - The First 15 Lives of Harry August.

Whippet - am 70% in now, and still really enjoying it. :)

Dragontrainer I like the sound of Cecilia from your review. I am slightly put off by its length though (wuss).

14. Basil - Wilkie Collins. I love Wilkie Collins and although I enjoyed this, I can see why this is not one of his better known books. This tells the story of Basil, a young man from a good family with a very proud father who is very dismissive of anyone who is "new money" and cannot trace their family back hundreds of years. Rather improbably Basil sees a young girl whilst travelling on an omnibus and falls in love with her at first sight. She is the daughter of a linen draper and obviously far below his family in terms of status and class. Even though he knows his father will probably disown him, he marries the girl (with some conditions imposed by the girls father). The book starts with Basil telling us that he has been disgraced and cast out by his father, so we know right from the start that the marriage does not end well. There are the usual array of " baddies" and we slowly discover what has happened. Being a very practical and overly sensible person myself I found it so hard to feel sympathy for Basil, I mean what kind of person marries someone they hardly know and expects to live happily ever after??!!

15. Guards Guards! - Terry Pratchett's. This was a book group choice as I would never have chosen a Pratchett book to read as fantasy is really not my cup of tea. However I actually rather liked it. It is number 8 in the Disc world series but I hadn't read the first 7 and still enjoyed it. It tells the story if Captain Vimes and his motley crew of men who make up the night watch. Someone uses magic to summon up a dragon to seize power and the book tells the story of the night watch and their attempts to stop them. I was surprised by how funny this was, especially the scenes with the Elucidated Brethren which reminded me of a Monty Python sketch. I am really glad that I read this and even though I'm not in a hurry to read anymore I would still consider reading others in the future.

Have just started number 16 - Merivel: A man of our time by Rose Tremain. I have high hopes for this as I loved Restoration, so I hope it doesn't disappoint.

21. The Far Pavilions by MM Kaye

Epic novel set against the backdrop of the Raj. I remembered it from the TV series in the 1980s, which I loved, and felt it was a good time to read it being a little bereft after my latest re-reading of The Thorn Birds. Found the book hard going at first, mainly because I just couldn't get my head around the protagonist's character and motivations. Ended up rather enjoying it - certainly the last third of the book was really interesting and the story swept me away. A good read but not a read again I think like my other blockbuster faves.

22. Aloft by William Langewische

Third outing of this book for me and I think it may be my favourite non-fiction book. It's a series of essays by pilot and journalist Langewische on flight. Felt it needed a reread after recent events and enjoyed it as much as ever. It's beautifully written and highlights really how safe flight really is, despite the news (and my own personal fears).

23. All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

Enjoyed this novel about two sisters, depression, suicide and the nature of love. It's sad but still uplifting in some ways and has a lot about how much you should try to save someone when they just don't want to live. It's a quick read. Recommended.

14. Stephanie Laurens - Tangled Reins

A Regency romance. A nice easy read but all very predictable. Our hero and heroine overcome awkward plot devices to be blissfully united and ready to live happily ever after by the end of the book.

15. Stephen Lloyd Jones - The String Diaries

A very good read and thoroughly absorbing. Hannah and her family are on the run from a long lived shapeshifter, Jakab, who's been obsessed with her family for generations.

16. Sheila Hancock - Miss Carter's War

If you're interested in British social history after the second world war, then this is a good one. Marguerite Carter starts working as a teacher after the second world war, and the book follows her life up until the beginning of the 21st century. Just about every major social change in that time period is touched on. It's also pushing a pro-Labour message very strongly, so ardent Conservatives might not like it as much.

17. Yelena Black - Dance of Shadows

Dancer Vanessa starts studying at an exclusive ballet academy to search for clues to her sister's disappearance. It all gets a bit silly with dance rituals to summon demons and so on. There's a sequel but I'm not going to bother with that.

Book 18 : Kingdom of Shadows -Barbara Erskine

This is one of those time slip books that pp were complaining about
A modern woman inherits a castle in Scotland and starts going into trances about one of her ancestors who lives there during the time of Robert Bruce. In the modern era as well as these visions of her ancestor, the main character has to deal with several people wanting to buy the castle off her including her husband who has lost a lot of money in the city and needs the cash from the sale to avoid bankruptcy.

Right I did enjoy this book in the sense that it was easy to read and a page turner but my main issue with it is the sections at in the past are interesting with great characters and real historical detail that makes a great story. The bits set in the now just got on my nerves! The main character is a drip who needs a man to be able to cope with anything and just spends the whole book running away from her annoying husband and never once just tells him to get lost ! There are a lot of male characters in the present time and all of them are ignorant and pig headed that they too just annoyed me! Ultimately I think the bits set on the past were so good the author should have stuck with that and not bothered with the present setting.

#18. Cecilia by Fanny Burney. Very much of its time (18th century), with what at times is a totally alien mindset to today. Cecilia is rich, beautiful and pure - though her wealth is subject to the proviso that she will forego it should she marry and her husband not take her maiden name. Obviously, she falls in love with a man whose family prohibit him to change his name, triggering many trials of her virtue. I really enjoyed this, as I have had a penchant for earnestly moral heroines ever since my Gran introduced me to Georgette Heyer many moons ago! It is a real doorstop of a novel at just under 1,000 pages, but the sheer escapism of a society so different to ours really worked for me - and left me very grateful for the freedoms of life in the Western world in the 21st century!

Remus thank you for the summary of East Lynne. It sounds fun actually so I am looking forward to reading it now (despite the fact my copy has very small print and it looks long).

Thanks also to Bssh for the recommendation. I haven't read that one yet and it looks good as long as it doesn't jump around

I am glad I am not the only one who finds books that jump around annoying tumble and highlandcoo give me a nice linear story any day...

tessiegirl
I'm re watching game of thrones at the moment before series 5 starts and was considering reading the books so please let me know what it's like :-)

No 33
The Gospel according to Drew Barrymore By Pippa Wright

^Esther and Laura have been best friends since they were seven, when Esther was chubby and Laura was already perfect. So much has changed since then - school, boyfriends, drink, experimental hair-dye, university, jobs, London, babies - and their friendship has changed just as much, but they are still close, still inextricably linked to one another.

So when Esther is told that Laura has gone missing, she leaves everything behind - including her husband and small child - to fly to San Francisco and trace her friend's last movements. All she has is an email from Laura: 'I'm channelling Drew Barrymore, as ever. The Gospel, right?'

In trying to understand why Laura has disappeared, and what on earth Drew Barrymore has to do with it, Esther needs to look back. Back at the secrets woven into their friendship and the truths she's avoided facing for so long^

thought it might be too chick lit for me but it was a really warming quick read