50 Book Challenge 2017 Part Four

Satsuki

You are obviously a very talented author in your own right/write .

I particularly like this sentence:

He wore blue socks, one on his injured leg, and one on his uninjured leg, and another waited in his drawer

as there is just a hint that what is awaiting in the drawer may not be another blue sock. It may be another LEG!

(Seriously though - you have a gift. Promise me you will use it only for good . . . )

Updating.

20. The Last Chronicle of Barset (audiobook)
21. Death's End: Liu Cixin
22. Sapiens: Yuval Noah Harari. I thought this was thought-provoking and well-written. There were a few times where I thought that he just declared something without really justifying it ('wheat domesticated us' comes to mind) and I thought he was rather disingenuous in claiming not to understand why patriarchal societies were so dominant. Two of the reasons that he gave but dismissed were so clearly, to me, the reason. But no spoilers...

Now on His Bloody Project and enjoying it so far (about a fifth of the way through). I'm slightly irritated by the fluency and detail of the 'confession' but I was impressed with the way the author character anticipated and excused that at the start, knowing that readers like me would be querying its plausibility.

Satsuki - brilliant. Several English teachers, who ought to know better, recommended The Da Vinci Code to me. Absolutely terrible. I managed about 70 pages, through gritted teeth.

Satsuki happy and gin

17. Exposure by Helen Dunmore Took me a few goes to get into this but I'm so glad I persevered. Set in the Cold War period, the novel is an excellently written period piece and has really well drawn and complex characters. It's not a spy novel as such, though it has elements of it. There's a real sense of menace throughout. My only niggle is that the ending seemed a bit 'easy' in some ways, not a cop out exactly but I was expecting more somehow. Still well worth a read.

Stewart Lee: it's only to be hoped that Dan Brown never gets a job where he's required to deliver bad news. "Doctor, is he going to be alright?" " The seventy five year old died a painful death on the big green table. It was sad."

Have just finished reading you. Its use of Dan Brown at the end made me smile.

Satsuki. My SiL gave me The Da Vinci Code - I can only imagine she hadn't read it as she generally has good taste and picks things I'd like.

Gone back to The Essex Serpent - writing still beautiful, still not gripped by story. I can't decide whether to abandon or whether I should stick with it.

Satsuki and Happy pleased I am not the only woman be who HATED that book!

Satsuki

Satsuki

I think you're being harsh happy. It's not as easy as he makes it look.

The famous author admired the blue Parker fountain pen he held in his hand, a gift from his mother before she went to the rainforest to study the mating habits of trees, then used it to write dozens and dozens of terrible sentences. The silent scratch of the pen rang out loudly round the room he had worked in for 20 years, the sound bouncing back and smacking him in his handsome ear like a shark, as he constructed a cipher that would, he predicted with his superior predicting skills, be impossible to decipher, unless you watch Countdown regularly and are familiar with "anagrams". He wore blue socks, one on his injured leg, and one on his uninjured leg, and another waited in his drawer. He admired his reflected reflection in a dull spoon as he looked forward to eating a dinner of chicken, noodles, and intrigue.

That was one long train journey to Paris. If there's one memory that underlines why I love my Kindle so much it's that one - I never have to be stuck with one ill-chosen book again.

River yes, having had 50 Shades of Grey pressed on me, I felt obliged to read it. It's a terrible, terrible book.

That happened to me with that Dan Brown Stiches. The Da Vinci Code is appalling.

It's bad enough when the storyline is rubbish, bit truly unforgivable when this is combined with shite writing.

Nora Webster by Colm Toibin Thankyou for recommending this, HappyFlappy!

Glad you enjoyed it Murine [smils]

I'd definitely recommend, Cheerful. I don't know if the Kindle version would be worth looking at rather than the paper one though (if your DH has one) - I felt that for the best part of eleven quid for a paperback it was pretty poorly produced.

19. The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra - Vaseem Khan - On his last day at work before retirement, Inspector Chopra discovers he's going to inherit a baby elephant, and is troubled by the death of a young man who died during the night before. No one seems interested in investigating the death and assuming he drowned due to drunkeness - so Chopra starts his retirement by investigating his death, with a baby elephant in tow.

It's very slow and plodding, and a bit dull in parts, I stayed with it as it's a book club book for later in the year, but not one I'd recommend.

Sadik that sounds right up my DH's street, so will add that to my list of potential birthday presents.

Epic post here because I haven't posted for a while.

33. The Beautiful Dead by Belinda Bauer

Thriller about a serial killer who becomes obsessed with a news reporter. Pretty good although the end was a bit far-fetched and there was no real explanation of why the killer acted in the way he/she did or why he/she became obsessed with the reporter.

34. My Not So Perfect Life by Sophie Kinsella

This is very similar to all Kinsella's books. In this one, a woman is very envious of her boss's lifestyle, then has chance to observe it close up and realises it may not be as glamourous as it looks. Very fluffy and predictable, but I do like Kinsella's books so I enjoyed this.

35. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

Listened to this on Audible. Nice piece of nostalgia, but a bit too much detail on sailing techniques at times.

36. The Breakdown by B A Paris

Cass takes a shortcut down a country lane and drives past another woman. Later, Cass hears that the woman was murdered. Then Cass starts forgetting things and getting silent phone calls. Unfortunately, I worked out within a couple of chapters what was going on and I almost never do that, so I was disappointed to find that I was right.

37. The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller

I like books about books, but was disappointed with this. It's far more about him than it is about the books, and I found him snobbish and patronising so didn't really want to read about him! There was also nothing remotely dangerous in the reading list - it was all just stuff he had intended to read and never got round to.

38. The Twenty-Three by Linwood Barclay

This is the last in the Promise Falls trilogy, when we find out who has been causing all the chaos in the town and why. Kept me engrossed.

39. A Vintage Wedding by Katie Fforde

I knew within a chapter that this was going to irritate me, so I'm not sure why I kept reading. Two women separately move into a village and meet a third woman who already lives there. Within a couple of hours they have decided that they will be best friends and also start a business together running cheap weddings (despite none of them having any experience whatsoever). The rest of the book is about their business, which consists of organising two weddings, both for people they know, in ridiculously short timescales. Everything that happens is unbelievable - miraculously the village is full of people with relevant skills who don't mind donating their time/expertise/whatever for free of next to nothing. One of the women becomes expert at cake icing and wedding makeup after watching a couple of tutorials on YouTube. One of the women has a day job as an accountant, yet still inexplicably has time to organise a wedding within 10 days in April despite this being the busiest time of year for accountants. Oh yes, and there are the obligatory love interests. One does something silly and is then never seen again (despite this being a tiny village). One woman ends up with her ex-husband's brother, and not one person says anything about this being even the slightest bit odd. The third woman has OCD, meets a messy man and is miraculously cured. As I said, I don't know why I kept reading as I just got more and more irritated with it but I suppose I wanted to see if it would improve!

40. Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh

Already reviewed several times so won't say much except that after a few chapters it got a bit repetitive and he was very arrogant which irritated me (example - while queuing in a supermarket he has the thought that he shouldn't have to queue as he's much more important than all these other people).

41. Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

A parody of Jane Eyre where the heroine is a serial killer (tagline is 'Reader, I murdered him'). This started well, but about halfway in it starts with a different plotline relating to something that happened in the Punjab and started to drag. Also a few anachronistic words/phrases which jarred a bit. Entertaining enough!

Now starting Robert Goddard The Ends of the Earth - he is one of my favourite writers but his last few books haven't grabbed me. This is the last in a trilogy and I haven't been very excited by the others so not sure whether I will enjoy this or not. Also listening to Chris Packham's Fingers In The Sparkle Jar on Audible which I am enjoying.

Hi all. Think I've finished two books since I last posted...
11. Leap Year by Helen Russell From the author of The Year of Living Danishly, non-fiction looking at how people can prepare for and bring about change in different areas of their life. Listened to this on Audible, I enjoyed it and found it interesting.
12. A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler The story of three generations of the Whitshank family in Baltimore, how the various family members get along with each other and go about their lives in different eras (goes back and forward in time a lot, sometimes moving to a different setting or sometimes through a character remembering past events). One of the quotes on the cover says "it takes organised wit to write about human muddle as Tyler does". My favourite aspect of this novel was the way it looks at the stories that get passed on in families, tales of previous generations that become 'truths' about the family (even if one-sided or inaccurate), but actually how some of the big stories are the secrets/scandals/controversies that aren't shared widely and so get lost in time as the generations move on.
I think I could have loved this book, but I've been so busy/tired that it's taken me almost three weeks to read, some days only a few pages before falling asleep (yes, yes to both waking up when the book hit me on the head and trying to read on with one eye open while the other 'rested'!!). Really disappointed as I feel this slow going on my part spoiled it a bit for me. Wish I'd saved it as I now have a couple of weeks off work and more reading time. Will look out for more Anne Tyler, this was my first.
Might be Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close next. It's in my TBR pile, recent comments on here make me think I'm not going to enjoy it which has strangely spurred me on to get on with it. If I'm not going to like it, it might as well be tried and dismissed to the charity shop swiftly rather than sit around for an age like many of the others in the pile.

Stitches, I agree about the Divergent series but I didn't see the end of the last one coming!

Talking of YA books, I am very much looking forward to reading Illuminae and have ordered it for the library I work in (obviously not because I want to read it or anything). Its going to be made into a film. I hope it lives up to the hype. YA can go either way.

I enjoyed Born To Run very much, but it wasn't my favourite ever book or anything like that! I just happened to be reading it at a time when I wanted a new username

29 The Signal and the Noise: The art and science of prediction, by Nate Silver
I liked this book a lot - it's in the same vein as Thinking Fast & Slow / Black Swans, but much more entertainingly written (unsurprisingly given the author is a journalist/blogger). The book looks at predictions across a number of fields - sport / economics / chess / climate science amongst others and discusses the way we understand and think about the future. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the way in which Deep Blue was programmed for the matches against Kasparov. Definitely a stand out. The only negatives for me were small type/cheap paper - particularly because it made many of the graphs hard to read. It's pretty US-centric, but that doesn't really undermine the message (even the chapter on baseball - which I know is a sport something along the lines of rounders but that's about it . . .)

Has anyone read the Jefferson Tayte Mysteries by Stephen Robinson? They're in the Kindle Spring sale at 99p, wonder if they are in the same vein as Shardlake?

1. Having a Lovely Time - Jenny Eclair I'm not sure why I read this as it's pretty similar in its flaws to the other one I read (Life, Death and Vanilla Slices) - in that the men are all mainly 2D bastards and the women are 'fat' and repulsive at a size 16. Which was irritating. But it's a good easy read when sleep deprived...

^"series of ridiculously middle-class crime novels"

Shut up and take my money! How have I never tried one of these before?^

And mine! Straight to Amazon I go!

1. The Dark is Rising - Susan Cooper
2. The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding - Agatha Christie
3. Our Endless Numbered Days - Claire Fuller
4. Love Letters of Henry V111 to Anne Boleyn (totally counting this even though it's only about 70 pages, I'll read an extra long one at some point to balance it out!)

1. Toast - Nigel Slater
2. A Man Called Ove - Fredrick Backman
3. Chess - Stefan Zweig
4. Beauvallet- Georgette Heyer

Just finished 16. She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor, which I really enjoyed. Really interesting portrait of four early queens or queen consorts and an exploration of female power at the time. I thought it was well written, interesting enough to breeze through without feeling like a chore, but meaty and well researched enough to be compelling.

11. Allegiant by Veronica Roth

The conclusion of the Divergent trilogy. I'd been putting reading this off because the implausibility of the whole rigid personality based faction system - and the way their whole world seemed to be confined to one city - had been really annoying me by the end of book 2.

Anyway. Book 3. Tris, Tobias and a few others leave the city. What they find out there explains away a lot of the the faction system. And again, leads to not very interesting conflict and sacrifice.
It's a fair enough conclusion to the series, but it's not a book (or series) that I can feel much enthusiasm for.