50 Book Challenge 2015 Part 3

I read some reviews on Amazon that say the mystery is never explained?

Hi Wiltingfast and Cote here is the Book Depository review of Bird Box

Josh Malerman's debut novel BIRD BOX is a terrifying psychological thriller that will haunt you long after reading. Most people dismissed the reports on the news. But they became too frequent; they became too real. And soon it was happening to people we knew. Then the Internet died. The televisions and radios went silent. The phones stopped ringing And we couldn't look outside anymore.

It is very gripping and somewhat terrifying but only because the people cannot see (they have to be blind folded). I will give a review when I finish it :) I don't like horror (used to read all the "classic" horrors in my youth but am too much of a scardy cat to read them now, but this book is fantastic! Like The Girl With All The Gifts it is tense but very very readable :)

Ah newborn baby brain, I seem to recall I watched an AWFUL lot of Come Dine With Me

Lammy, I checked out that book and it sounds terrifying! Don't think I could cope with it!

27. Biocentrism by Robert Lanza; not sure what to make of this, read more like philosophy than science with plenty of quantum physics thrown in to keep you occupied. From time to time I try to read stuff about Q P and generally I really struggle. This was a bit easier to digest than most, he broke up the hard science with some tales from his life which was a relief. But if he wasn't a famous scientist I would have dismissed the central tenets of the book as total new agey nonsense. Essentially, your mind creates reality. And not as I initially thought he meant in that your perception of reality is a manifestation of your senses, but literally, your mind and consciousness creates the reality around it. He's quite convincing it's just such a counter intuitive notion. I was aware Q P had some oddness going on but I never heard of someone extrapolating from the results to this degree. Whatever you think of his arguments, it was an v interesting (albeit strictly middle of the day) read.

Now onto US by David Nicholls.

Thanks Lammy, I'll check it out

31 Is a debut novel called Bird Box by Josh Mallerman
Set in USA and something awful has happened world wide. Anyone who sees these weird "creatures" goes on a killing rampage and then violently kills themselves. It swings from the beginning of the madness to four years later. The main character is pregnant on twins at the beginning and now has them trained not to look at the sky (windows in house blocked up etc). Her and the kids set off (blind folded) to find safety after being couped up in a house for four years.

I cannot put this down since I started it yesterday!

Not sure if it would be one you would like Cote?????

I can't get into anything after the surreal, Ballardian stories of 19th Century book The King In Yellow Inspiration, please?

Atticus I am excited for you! Enjoy the bit of time off before baby 2 arrives, and glad you loved The Shadow Year :)

I keep thinking of Joyless and hope her results were okay.

I finished Ben Elton's Two Brothers and loved it. A remarkable story about WW2.

21. Mistress of the House - Rosemary Baird. This is non-fiction, and a look at how (generally) wealthy aristocratic women took on the responsibilities for the maintenance of stately homes after marriage. This really made me think about how women used their (then, limited) influence to shape their homes and surroundings, often when their budgets were not within their control. Obviously life was very different for the home owners than it was for their employees, but this was a very interesting read.

I have just spent 75 quid at amazon for my holiday reading based entirely on this thread! The challenge will be not to touch any before I go away.

I got The Buried Giant, L shaped room, Red Rising, Ocean at the end of the lane, preordered the new SK, 50 lives of Harry August, daddy long legs, various pets alive and dead, a liane moriarty, we have always lived at the castle, and the new shardlake. Hope to get the new Kate Atkinson out the library too and pick up a few at the airport.

I must have read about forty ish books so far this year but despite promising myself I would recorded them I haven't! So I'm starting from now.

1. Penny Vicenzi - A Perfect Heritage. Fun and frothy, I like her best when she's writing about family empires and this was great. Her dialogue is just utterly dreadful though, but it makes me love her more.

2. Beauty by Louise Mensch. Pretty much EXACTLY the same as the PV, but better dialogue.

3. The Childrens Act, Ian McEwen. Lovely considered prose. Nice read.

4. Jacobs Folly by Rebecca Miller. An 18th century Jew is reincarnated as a fly in 2013 America and can influence the thoughts and actions of two people, a middle aged family man and a young Orthodox Jewish girl. Loved this, it was weird, evocative, funny, the historical bits were great, good writing.

5. The Happy Puppy Handbook. Thinking of getting a puppy. Exciting!

6. Jamrachs menagerie by Carol Birch. A boy in Victorian London gets a job with an animal importer and then goes to sea to look for a Komodo dragon to import. Nice book but felt in two halves really. I would have just liked a book about his experiences working with the animals OR the sea voyage, it was disjointed.

No 48

I really enjoyed the Heather Gudenkauf I read so I picked up another of hers from the library These things hidden & I actually thought it was better than the other one

It's about two sisters Allison , who had twin babies as a teenager one of which she drowned , & her sister Brynn who helped her give birth to them .
Allison goes to prison & the novel starts five years later when she is released
The book is written from the point of view of the sisters & the mother who adopted the surviving twin

I couldn't read either when breast feeding - I read a lot of magazines & mumsnet

32. The King In Yellow - Robert W Chambers

Wow, this was a rare find! This is a book of short stories published in 1895. If you have watched the series True Detective, this is where the unexplained references to Sarcosa and Yellow King were taken from.

The first story is called The Repairer Of Reputations and it is arguably one of the best and weirdest stories I've ever read, with a fantastically unreliable narrator. Like the next three stories, it talks about a play called The King In Yellow that drives its readers insane. In the narrator's words: "I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang ni the heavens, where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns wink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with his beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth - a world which now trembles before The King In Yellow."

He lives in a near-future, (prophetically) a war with Germany has taken place and Russia has taken over most of Europe. Suicide is now facilitated in the US, with Government Lethal Chambers in every town. Or is it? It is only slowly that we realise that all may not be as the narrator tells it.

The next couple of stories are also in this universe and talk peripherally about this play, The King In Yellow. They are good stories, a cross between J G Ballard's insanity stories and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, with descriptions of impossible landscapes in a chillingly calm tone: "Far away, over leagues of tossing cloud-waves, I saw the moon dripping with spray: and beyond, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the moon."

Apparently, Lovecraft was a fan of this author. I might have to read some Lovecraft soon, too...

Highlandcoo - Don't live in Edinburgh sadly (can't really transfer work wise - have looked into it), though visit most years. Most envious of your travel plan!

15. The Crooked House by Christobel Kent I wasn't sure about this to begin with, and to end with, but loved the rest of it. Teenager Esme has slipped home unexpectedly and is in her attic room whilst her family are massacred downstairs. Her Father is thought to have murdered the others before shooting himself. Esme leaves, creating a new identity, until ten years later she returns with a new boyfriend for a wedding. Struck me as unlikely, but the writing is so atmospheric, and the characters unsettling, that the plot recedes, and the menacing, stark landscape, of marshes and mud and taciturn, ethnocentric characters became quite enthralling. Kent writes atmosphere very well - I read Time of Mourning by her previously, which is a murder mystery set in Florence, and thought she captured the white, dusty heat of the city in summer very well. Esme is rather annoying - she pushes her glasses up her nose every chapter - but the boyfriend is wonderful in gentle and considered dominance. The isolation and sense that it's best to leave things alone in lonely remote communities really resonated with me. By the end there is a surfeit of characters, and the assured pace slips, and becomes rather silly, with everyone suddenly remembering details from a decade before, but I really enjoyed this, and would recommend highly.

I found books and a wriggly ten pound plus newborn too much, and resorted to watching boxsets (not really a television watcher). Worked my way through all of Grey's Anatomy in the early months, and am still going with ER eleven months later! DH did lend me his kindle (upgraded himself to a paperwhite) so read the Silkworm, which definitely wouldn't have managed one handed, and read lots of Hamish MacBeth - lightweight in every sense. Also listened to so much Radio 4 that the newsreaders sounded like old friends. Read somewhere about babies named after radio 4 readers, and totally get it now.

3am breastfeeding for me was either ER box set or one of these: Jilly Cooper, Ian Rankin Rebus books or Tom Clancy (Rainbow Six is a classic )

Book 20 The Quickening by Julie Myerson.

I'm a huge fan of Myerson. I think her brand of literary fiction with a whiff of the paranormal is excellent. I particularly loved her dystopian novel Then.

This novel is trickier. Although the concept is great ( couple go to Caribbean where a murder and other creepy stuff happens ) and the writing a sparkling tour de force, the main characters are beyond annoying.

Not complex or multilayered. Just awful.

Consequently it's difficult to give a shit!

Book 66 - 'The Painted Garden' by Noel Streatfeild
I absolutely adore, 'Ballet Shoes' which I first read aged 6 or 7 and have re-read almost every year ever since, so I was thrilled to find this, which I'd heard about on here but never seen, for a pound in a charity shop.

I enjoyed it, but it's not as good as BS, and I was so disappointed that Petrova, my favourite Fossil, doesn't appear in, although Pauline and Posy do. A lovely way to pass a lazy Sunday morning, but I doubt I'll be re-reading it.

Atticus - 'The Crucible' when done well can be absolutely stunning on stage. Ironically, the best performance I've ever seen of it was a school play. The young man playing John P was incredible.

I couldn't read anything when I was breastfeeding my newborn- no concentration whatsoever. With DS2 I discovered Pinterest, staring into space, napping and also a world of sport as it was the year of the London Olympics - good times!

20. H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald
    Beautiful evocative writing. Fascinating to read about hawking, a very niche area that can only appeal to a very committed few. I thought the way she blended telling the story of her new relationship with her hawk whilst trying to deal with the grief of her father and telling us about T.H White was impressive.

21. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
    Audiobook. 2002 Booker Prize Winner. Pi Patel is ship-wrecked and loses his family, is left afloat in the Pacific Ocean for over 200 days with only a Bengal tiger for company. It is the story of this journey and a small intro of his life before. I've been meaning to read this for years. I really enjoyed the narrator and story. Thought-provoking, very good.

Onto Of Mice and Men next..

I read my way through the whole of Jilly Coopers Rutshire books when I was in labour and breastfeeding. Both times.

Yay Atticus, how exciting! I read all of A Suitable Boy when breastfeeding. I hope everything goes well. I have read a lot of Sylvia Plath poetry this year and am awaiting for Amazon to deliver her short stories. I am also going to make sure I read a play this year.

42. Erewhon, or Over the Range - Samuel Butler. Sort of a hybrid between Utopia and Gullivers Travels but not as good as either. Basically an intrepid young man discovers an unknown civilisation beyond a mountain range then discourses at length about the laws and customs. However, there's an interesting philosophical discussion about the destruction of machines and their intelligence which is well ahead of its time considering this was written in 1872.

I read The Girl Who Played With Fire (#2 in the Millennium series after The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) while at the hospital before & after DS's birth by ElCS. I was breastfeeding him while reading the book and getting dagger eyes from my mum. I devoured #3 in the series The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest at home, in the week that followed.

p.s. if anyone has any recommendations for books particularly suitable to read at 3am whilst feeding a newborn, I would love to hear them in preparation for No. 2's imminent arrival!

I haven't posted for an absolute AGE so have far too much to catch up on - I won't leave it so long next time.

Pleased to report that I'm finally on maternity leave and am awaiting the baby's arrival. I've had a few twinges and have been wondering if something is about to happen but no consistent signs of labour just yet...

Hope all of you waiting for test results or who have been ill are feeling better - Lammy, Joyless, Cote, Duchess - hope I haven't missed anyone.

Anyway, here are my books 31-40:

31. Sane New World by Ruby Wax. Recommended by a previous poster. Sensible, interesting and entertaining. I found elements of the style a bit painful but I couldn't help admiring the honesty and practicality of Wax's writing.

32. The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks. Yes yes yes, excellent read, highly, highly recommend. Particularly resonated due to my pregnancy but even without this I would have loved the writing, the often raw but highly touching storyline and the vivid characters. Racism and rampant sexism both highly uncomfortable, but evocative of an era, and the sexism at least is central to the storyline.

33. The Crucible by Arthur Miller. The first play on my list and worth the switch in genre. Captures the madness of misguided group thought and mass delusion through a depiction of the Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism. Clever, shocking and, quite frankly, frightening. Would love to see this on the stage.

34. The Shadow Year by Hannah Richell. Another recommendation from a previous poster - thank you, I loved this. I'm a huge 'Secret History' fan and this fell into the same literary basket in many ways.

35. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. This was groundbreaking at the time of publication for its depiction of a young woman's spiral into depression and attempted suicide (a journey Plath herself took). A tough, raw read, particularly the second half, but I knew the subject matter and was prepared to push through it; the book has been on my 'intend to read' list forever so I'm glad that I eventually took the plunge and was brave enough to give it a go. Not a holiday read but for anyone trying to tick off a few modern classics it's worth the effort.

36. The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Excellent book, so very very clever but also accessible. I loved Cunningham's pastiche of Woolf's stream of consciousness, particularly at the beginning, and thought his intertwining of three story lines worked incredibly well. A highly successful modern take on Bloomsbury values. Which led me on to...

37. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I had read bits of this before but never cover to cover. As you may have guessed from my book choices I am interested in feminist literature and Mrs. Dalloway's trip out to buy the flowers herself has always resonated with me as a symbol of independent womanhood. The narrative's constant slippage between different mental strands captures so beautifully the vagaries of thought, and in a strange way made me think of how the characters could benefit from some of Ruby Wax's Mindfulness practices (cf book 31).

38. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan. Quick, fun read. Too many coincidences but it's Just That Kind of Book and it's such a good yarn that I willingly suspended my disbelief and allowed myself to be carried away. Would recommend.

39. The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide. Not for me. Japanese couple become obsessed with their neighbour's cat. I'm a dog person.

40. The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield. Loved Delafield's dry, witty take on life. Many of her observations still ring true and raise a laugh even 83 years after its first publication. Light, fun and a blessed relief after that damn cat (cf book 39).

Clash - Told you so! I'm also still reeling from having forked out £8.49 for a Kindle book. Brilliant series, though. He has recently completed the 3rd book, apparently, so hopefully we won't have to wait for long to read the end of the saga.

Meanwhile: The one God I worship, Neal Stephenson, has published a new book called Seveneves. The Kindle version is £12.92 and I just can't bring myself to buy it. Maybe in another month or so, when its price comes down to single digits.

Has anyone else read Funny Girl by Nick Hornby? Not sure what to think about it so far. Finding it a bit dull. Loads of 60s culture references not doing anything for me.