50 Book Challenge 2016 Part Five

Brilliant, thanks SEdweller - I was trying to find that thread on Advanced Search and couldn't remember enough of the title :)

Yes Minister is a great idea, my DF has the scripts, and they're funny to read to. Not sure about Androids - I think I might love Blade Runner too much, and I possibly overdosed on Dick in my 20s (now there's a sentence not to take out of context . . . )

54. Enigma - Robert Harris. Bletchley Park has been one of my reading themes this year and this is a gripping dramatisation of the code breaking story, lots of twists, a disappearing girl, a Cambridge Mathematician, on the verge of a breakdown, Atlantic convoys, spies etc. Nowhere near as 'brain-hurty' (copyright Cote) as Cryptonomicon .

55 and 56 Books 3 and 4 in the James Herriot vet series. A breath of fresh
Yorkshire air. Lovely.
.

to

Sadik I don't know how serious you like your politics to be, but if the answer is not very, I can recommend the entire recording of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister - all the radio and TV episodes - available on audible for 1 credit. Still funny, and relevant, and even the TV shows work on a purely audio level. I did listen to the whole lot, in order, when I first got it, but now I do go back and listen to individual episodes.

For sci-fi, see my review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? above (listed on audible as Blade Runner). It's narrated by Scott Brick, whose voice I personally like, but may not be too everyone's taste.

Daphne, I'm sure you'll enjoy the Three Body Problem. I didn't enjoy the second book quite as much as the first (though it was still excellent), but I think others actually liked it better.

I've just started a thread asking for suggestions for my next audible book, and not really had anything, so if anyone here who uses audible has some good ideas, they'd be really welcome. I was going to go for Jonathan Strange, but I think I need something a bit more different just for a change.

81 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, listened to as an audiobook read by Simon Vance

A classic early steampunk novel (1990? Certainly I don't remember being aware of steampunk as a genre when it was published). Set in an alternate 1850s London in which Charles Babbage successfully built his analytical engine around 25 years earlier, and steam powered computerisation has become a central part of life, along with a very different direction to political history.

For those who haven't read it, this is definitely not a perfect novel - looking at amazon, it has roughly equal numbers of reviews from 1 up to 5 stars - the plot is pretty perfunctory and dependent such as it is on a macguffin that is very much 'so what' when it is revealed.

However . . . the writing is gorgeous, there's masses of fun in spotting real life characters in their new incarnations (Ada Byron - never marrying Lovelace - as Queen of Engines and daughter of Prime Minister Byron, Disraeli as a romance novelist and ghost writer, just for example), and the descriptions of London are wonderful. The reader for the audiobook was exceptional, and it worked perfectly for me in this form, much better than as a regular book.

wilting, I defend Pym over Brookner. I can picture Pym writing a similar plot, but it would have been funnier and taken more relish in absurd details. I appreciate your insight about the dissonance - I found it quite hard to place in time.

Hope you enjoy it, Daphne - I've been meaning to look out for that book.

41. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. Already reviewed many times on this thread. The author writes evocatively of post-war working-class Naples, and of the relationship (close but complex) between the main character and her best friend. Although I enjoyed this, I was slightly daunted to find that it's the first in a series of four. I feel like that might be a bit too much of a good thing!

I've lost track of my list and how many books I've read, but I've just bought The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu after seeing it really well recommended on these threads. It's the most excited I've been about a book for a long time, and I just needed to tell people who would understand my excitement Are the sequels equally good?

ok! Cote really didn't like the book

So 37) Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner. I read this as a teenager but didn't recall much, other than the serene cover. I enjoyed the reading experience of this. The writing is tight, dry, witty with some very keen observations around the nature of women (I especially liked the comment that some women make a "cult of themselves" so true). From that point of view, a v good book. However, I can't say I loved the actual plot very much. Independent spinster sent off in disgrace so her absence can soothe the offended sensibilities of her friends and neighbours. Hotel is full of such inconvenient women in fact. The book is sold as a romance but it really isn't imo. It is more of an awakening of Edith to the nature of herself. I think overall the book is showing its age, there is a jarring not only between our current views of women and those in the book, but even within the book, there is sometimes a dissonance between the fates of the women and their treatment by the author, and intrusive modernity (calls for more sex in her writings etc). While I was relieved with the ending, I didn't think it rang anything as true as the first half. It's as if Brookner herself felt forced to try and tie the book up as some sort of romance. Maybe that is part of the point? I don't know. I did enjoy it, mainly for the wit. The style of writing reminds me of Pym.

Lost an 'm' there.

Adds 'Read ore French books' to my list.

Book 89
Ordeal by Innocence by *Agatha Christie
Typical Christie – wealthy family whose world is rocked by a murder and everybody now a suspect. This one is slightly different in that the murder happened before the events of the novel and somebody convicted, but has been discovered to have been innocent. It was okay – it has the flaws that most of her work does in that it’s sexist, racist, elitist etc etc. Its biggest flaw was a silly ending.

If you like this sort of thing, I really would recommend you to read more French books. They are full of this sort of navel-gazing "oh look how clever I am to have drawn your attention to this completely irrelevant whatever".

If that is indeed what he was trying to do, it should have taken a short story. Maybe. It is bordering on criminal to make people read page after page after bloody nonsensical page where the author is talking about his problems at home or how he makes stuff up.

I am Jack's Complete Lack Of Interest in all of that and am frankly struggling to remember another book I hated as much as this garbled and very dull collection of minor anecdotes that this man calls a book.

My point is that he is not a traditional literary 'unreliable narrator' (which is an invention by a writer for a particular narrative purpose) but is deliberately playing with the idea of the unreliability of narration. And the anecdote stuff (red lorry or yellow lorry, or whatever) is a deliberate tool to support the idea that any teller of stories (ie a writer, not a character designed by a writer) will only ever be able to tell a 'version' of the story, not the whole story, or even, necessarily, the 'right' story. His point is that he can't 'just get on with it' without it being flawed, or biased, or shaped by himself and his own unreliability.

"He's deliberately putting himself in the role of an unreliable narrator because, inevitably, anybody who 're-tells' history is essentially unreliable."

I honestly don't get your point here because "unreliable narrator" doesn't mean anyone who tells a story is unreliable. Even eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, because nobody's memory is perfect. That is not at all what I was saying.

He may have been going for an exercise in post-modernist whatever, but the book that he ended up publishing is just not very good. It is a collection of mostly irrelevant and superficial anecdotes, details of which he makes up as he goes along. I am very VERY uninterested in his imagined "visions" and dull flip-flops as in "Was the color of the Mercedes blue or green? Blue? No green. I asked Natacha and she remembered blue. I remember green" etc etc etc ad nauseam. I felt like grabbing him by the shoulders and screaming into his face WHO THE FUCK CARES?!?!? JUST GET ON WITH IT.

He lets you in behind the scenes cote. That is exactly what I liked about it. I assume you don't think operation mincemeat is true word for word? I wouldn't call him unreliable, I'd call him honest

I know what an unreliable narrator is! He's deliberately putting himself in the role of an unreliable narrator because, inevitably, anybody who 're-tells' history is essentially unreliable. The story is shaped by the storyteller etc etc. It's essentially an exercise in post-post-modernism, I guess.

Totally disagree that he doesn't 'respect' history too. Of course he's 'visualising'' history - he wasn't there; his views of it will be distorted by what he's read or been told, as well as by his own beliefs etc. Even non-fiction history is distorted by the writer, as well as by the reader (see Reader-response criticism also).

Anyway, we clearly (see Reader response criticism!) got v different things out of our reading experience!

"Unreliable narrator - yes, because any author who writes a novel about a historical event is unreliable"

Even witnesses are unreliable, yes.

That is not what I meant, though. I used the literary term Unreliable Narrator to mean a narrator whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised - as in, a narrator who is mentally ill, or is deliberately distorting events, or has a cognitive disability. He either doesn't understand what he sees OR he is likely to lie to us about it, so we can't believe what he says.

Laurent Bidet is an unreliable narrator simply because he makes lots of stuff up AND tells us he does. Therefore, what he doesn't say he made up is hard to believe.

He also regularly says nonsense like "I’ve said that I don’t want to write a historical handbook. This story is personal. That’s why my visions sometimes get mixed up with the known facts. It’s just how it is." HIs visions???

"’I'm not sure yet if I’m going to ‘visualize’ (that is, invent!) this meeting or not. If I do, it will be the clinching proof that fiction does not respect anything." - No, Laurent. It's not that "fiction" doesn't respect anything. It is that YOU don't respect the actual historical event and are confabulating.

And he agrees with me:

"I’M FIGHTING A losing battle. I can’t tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect – and these people, these real people who actually existed."

"Our worth should be measured by our aspirations more than our works.’ That means I’m allowed to make a mess of my book" - Err no, Laurent. You are not

To each their own and all that but I am that you actually liked this book and honestly think we should stick to recommending non-fiction to each other in the future

book 25 I think Ian Mortimer A time travellers guide to Elizabethan England I have been reading this book for weeks. I thought it would be as interesting as the first book in this series a time travellers guide to Medevil england oh how wrong could I be. If you like history books I wouldn't recommend this book as it was so boring. It was like treading through treacle. I am actually a huge fan of Tudor history and this book just annoyed me so much. The history was accurate but I am pretty sure it could have been presented better. Moving on from this disappointment and onto book 2 of the live ship trilogy

Unreliable narrator - yes, because any author who writes a novel about a historical event is unreliable, unless they were actually present at the event. Most choose to ignore that though, and create narrators/characters putting forward a particular (unreliable!) viewpoint of specific people in a specific place at a specific time. The unreliability of the narration is the whole point!

We will seriously have to agree to disagree on this one, you old muppet you!

43. One Shot (Jack Reacher #9) by Lee Child

This is the book that Tom Cruise made into a film. I had skipped it during my J Reacher reading fest, because I had watched the film already knew the story. Well, it turns out that the book is again better than the film. It was OK - a good palate cleanser after HHhH.

42. HHhH by Laurent Binet

I have already talked rather extensively on my disappointment with this book following glowing reviews on this thread, so it will probably come as no surprise that I hated every page of it. Apologies to its fans.

When I started reading it, I was hoping for an Operation Mincemeat or at least a historical novel of substance. What I got was a collection of minor and often irrelevant anecdotes, written by a self-important, navel-gazing, flippant, unreliable narrator who thinks flip-flopping all around the place makes his writing speshul. Wolf Hall written by a teenager, complete with the same hateworthy present tense and bad grammar. Bad translation was just the icing on the (bitter) cake.

Despite all the "Ooh I read so much on this topic. Ooh look, I have this document and that document in front of me right now" crooning, I didn't get the impression that the author knows much about this period and the organisation behind Heydrich's assassination. The details we are told about are mostly irrelevant, stuff nobody really cares to know about - what the house was like, what kind of dresses someone liked to wear, etc. Meanwhile, the story itself is neglected and is only picked up once in a while, when the author grows tired of whining about the stuff going on in his own life.

I can hardly explain how badly this book grated with me, but perhaps some examples would help:

I tell myself that everything can be useful, that I must immerse myself in a period to understand its spirit – and the thread of knowledge, once you pull at it, continues unravelling on its own. The vastness of the information I amass ends up frightening me. >>> Don't be frightened, little boy. We'll protect you.

I’ll have to resist the temptation to flaunt my knowledge by writing too many details for this or that scene that I’ve researched too much, I must admit that in this case – regarding Heydrich’s birthplace – my knowledge is a bit sketchy. There are two towns in Germany called Halle, and I don’t even know which one I’m talking about. For the time being, I think it’s not important. We’ll see. >>> Oh yes. You sound really knowledgeable on the subject.

THERE IS NOTHING more artificial in a historical narrative than this kind of dialogue >>> Why did you write it then? WHY?

But that particular day he takes a beating in the first round. Who is his opponent? I haven’t been able to find out. I imagine a left-hander: quick, clever, dark-haired. Perhaps not Jewish – that would be a bit much – but maybe a quarter Jewish. >>> Why make up ridiculous stuff like this? Who cares about the color of his opponent's hair color? Why mention Jewish heritage at all, especially if you don't know that he had any?

faithful to my long-held disgust for realistic novels, I say to myself: Yuk! >>> And you dare write a historical one???

I’VE BEEN TALKING rubbish, the victim of both a faulty memory and an overactive imagination. In fact, the head of the British secret service at this time was called ‘C’ – not ‘M’ as in James Bond. Heydrich too called himself ‘C’, and not ‘H’. >>> The book is full of crap like this. He says one thing and then corrects himself literally on the next page. Yes, he has been talking rubbish. A lot if it. Fucking bullshit artist

At 9:00 a.m., the first German tank enters the city. 84 ACTUALLY I DON’T know if it was a tank that first entered Prague. >>> Another example of the continuous flip-flopping and bullshit.

Natacha’s sister is getting married, but I’m not invited to the wedding. Natacha called me a ‘little shit’. I don’t think she can bear me anymore. My life is in ruins. >>> I'm with Natacha. I really am.

The Nazis love burning books, but not files. German efficiency? Who knows if the SA didn’t wipe their asses with some of those precious archives. >>> How did this book win an award? HOW??? I despair.

I’m all too aware that my two heroes are late making their entrance. But perhaps it’s no bad thing if they have to wait. Perhaps it will give them more substance. Perhaps the mark they’ve made in history and on my memory might imprint itself even more profoundly in these pages. Perhaps this long wait in the antechamber of my brain will restore some of their reality, and not just vulgar plausibility. Perhaps, perhaps … but nothing could be less sure! >>> For the sake of all that is literary, what on God's green Earth are you rambling about???

If anyone is in doubt, I'm not recommending this book

ok, further update:

35. The Bees by Laline Paull; this was fascinating, set in a beehive, it follows one of the lowest caste bees Flora 717, who narrowly avoids being killed at birth for abnormal variation. It does of course anthropomorphize the bees, but I believe it is all based on observed patterns and known bee behaviour. The result is a hypnotic cultish environment where status is strictly observed and deviancy harshly punished. The hive is all. Bees are regularly sacrificed for its benefit and the Queen is fiercely protected, as is the status of the bees around her. Flora is special however, different and her fate is central to the book. I really enjoyed this, the author really managed to create a sense of creepy alienness around the bees, the world building is very effective. You also meet spiders who can tell your thoughts, sly and dangerous wasps and a few flies . It's really quite different, worth a look if it interests you at all.

36. Hitler by Ian Kershaw. Well this was grim. I learned a lot. I've always been fascinated as to how on earth the German people ended up VOTING for Hitler and this certainly makes a fairly good effort to explain. This is a condensed version of the two volume biography. It is not wholly successful, but at a 1000 pages, I'm rather relieved I didn't attempt the two volume version. Hitler appears very much the product of a perfect storm. One thing I had not really understood was the extent of the collapse post WW1 of public and establishment confidence in democracy. All power bases were working towards an authoritarian government. The people wanted a saviour and scapegoats. There was huge anti-semitism at the time regardless of Hitler. The moral depravity of the regime swiftly compromised those who might have opposed him and others were ruthlessly murdered. Another unique feature was how very centred the regime was on Hitler himself. He was the source of authority. There were no committees, no effective government administration. Underlings "worked towards the Fuhrer" and in this way, terrifying ideology-based action was constantly ramped up to gain favour and promotion. The law was Hitler. Hitler's fate was Germany's and he preferred annihilation to surrender. Even towards the end, no one appeared able to wrest power from him. I was a bit dazed by the time I finished. I will probably read more accounts in time. It is such a perplexing harrowing phenomenon. A heart of darkness in Europe and not that long ago either.

Currently on Hotel du Lac which I am enjoying Will need something else short and light then too to recover further!

82. The Brandons, Angela Thirkell
More arch comedy from the 1930s - it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but I love it. Village fetes, comic servants, imperious nannies, and the mild love affair of a clergyman.

83. A Symphony of Echoes, Jodi Taylor
More madcap adventures of the time-travelling historians from St Mary's. Not great literature, but fun.