50 Book Challenge Part Five

'Greasing up engines' has just almost made me choke on my cauliflower cheese.

Stokey Radiance is science fiction amd more adult than YA. Catherynne Valente has written a fantasy children's series which my daughter loved and I have to read if I ever get Radiance finished .

Oh no, I liked how no one cared about the end of the world and they were far more interested in raisin bread and greasing up engines (not a euphemism) and the back catalogue of Bing Crosby. Lovely and unsettling.

It was twice, was it? Well, that was twice more than I wished to read. I agree that it wasn't entirely about 'Semen in Space'. It was also about the end of the world, except nobody really cared about that. But I mostly remember the wanking.

But but but he hardly wanked at all! I think he might have done so twice, and it was all very tastefully done. This book was not about intergalactic masturbation.

I really hoped that the aliens would eat the wanking vicar now that's not a sentence you hear every day of the week.

I'm 60% of my way through The City and the City and (unless the last 40% is v disappointing) heading towards Team Remus - sorry Cote!

Ha! Two members of Team Remus re: The City and the City. Glad you both enjoyed it.

I liked The Knife of Never Letting Go. I liked the 2nd less. The third was crap.

I really hoped that the aliens would eat the wanking vicar. I think The Book of Strange New Things would have been a far more satisfying book with this addition. Maybe I'll write a sequel.

I'm bookless and therefore hideous to live with. Sorry, DP.

couple more to add;

25. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows - story written predominately in the form of letters and diary entries following a London based journalist who is contacted by someone from the literary society in 1946. She corresponds, looks more into it and while being a gentle and whimsical story/book, does manage to touch on some pretty hard issues of the occupation. The German occupation and the hideous experiences of the Channel Islanders is an area of 'war time literature' that seems very under explored, this is "cosy" rather than hard hitting take on it, and some places the letter form didn't seem to work, and a couple of cultural mistakes making it clearer that the authors are American, but generally a lovely book.

Then I'm wading into the Cote vs Remus debate -
26. The City and The City - China Mieville - Sorry Cote, I'm team Remus in this one! I liked it, I thought it was a clever idea, and does have both shadows of cold war mentality and also the more modern "unseeing" of almost second cities of the poor/underclass within many highly developed cities across the world.

Quite a few reduced start of series books on Kindle today:
The Atrocity Archives Charles Stross - British Civil Service meets Lovecraft. Cthulhu and paperclips.
Fated Benedict Jacka. Alex Verus novel - if you like Harry Dresden, then this is worth checking out.
The Long Earth Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter - sprawling SF epic. I found it interesting but sort of started running out of steam in the later books.
The Silver Pigs Lindsay Davies. The first Falco book. Roman detective. Also the first Flavia Alba book (the following series about Falco's daughter).

Satsuki, you know me too well How long have we been trashing talking about books together?

Don't know where the so came from.

cote I laughed out loud at "no use so sugar coating it" - as if that's something you might do

I see the wanking vicar has made an appearance again too. I'm also reading city and the city and hope to actually finish a book as I haven't for ages now

I liked The Knife of Never Letting Go too (always with the proviso that it is a children's book and I read it - very quickly - as a children's book). I didn't read the others though.

I've just finished Into Thin Air which I read twice as I looked up the 1996 disaster online afterwards and I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed any crucial details in the book, given the varying accounts. I never did understand the desire to climb tall things and this really brought out the physical misery of the climb even when nothing goes wrong. A good read, so thanks for the 99p recommendation.

Thank you, Joyless, for some heads up on Shardlake. I now have a long queue of reading but will put that on my long-burn list.

I've just started the controversial City and the City.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is 99p today, in case anyone had missed reading it.

"My teenage ds has just completely rejected (after a couple of pages), The Knife of never letting go."

Good for him. I should have done the same, as can be seen from the resulting review:

CoteDAzur.......... 29/02/2016

14. The Knife Of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

No use sugar-coating it: This was crap. I don't know how it compares to what people usually read as YA but it was shockingly stupid, dull, and badly written with a 200-word vocabulary, featuring what must be the dumbest and least inspiring protagonist in the history of literature. I can't even call it a coming-of-age story because he was as gormless at the end as in the beginning. Gah.

Don't even get me started about the pathetic excuse for a story. People who can't be bothered to worldbuild should not try to write sci-fi imo. Why couldn't he set his story at any point of the world's history when people have settled at another continent island, for example? Complete rubbish.

I liked The Knife of Never Letting Go, though I don't think anyone else on this thread did. The next two in the trilogy were pointless and overlong though. Would have done better to have made the first one a couple of chapters longer and left it there.

30. Little Black Lies - Sharon Bolton

Have reached book 30 in what was a 60 book target for this year which I will hopefully surpass at this rate!

Catrin no longer speaks to her best friend. Not since she killed her sons. And is she plotting revenge? Set on the Falklands islands with a back story including some missing children this was a great read and I didn't want to put it down. Lots of twists and turns and surprisingly I had guessed the very last one. But not the one just before that.

Picked this up after reading Daisy in Chains by the same author and I think after this I'll be looking for some more I do love finding a new author!

I also abandoned The Knife of Never Letting Go,

I gave it longer than a few pages, but it didn't improve as far as I was concerned. I wouldn't recommend it.

Remus - you can't read Christmas murder mysteries in May! Surely there is a law of some kind??

Having said that, I read it at the proper time of year and it was still crap...

My teenage ds has just completely rejected (after a couple of pages), The Knife of never letting go. Is he a hopeless Philistine? Should I read it myself?

The A to Z of Spanish Culture Read this on holiday, and while I found it readable and enjoyable at the time, the only thing I now remember is that the author, Pilar Orti, is the voice of Xuli in the Go Jetters. Oh, and something about eating a grape for every chime on the New Year.

The Abyss Surrounds Us Emily Skrutskie
I liked the premise and the sample of this - giant gene-engineered beasts that escort ships to protect against piracy, but it turned out not to be so much sci-fi as angsty YA feeeeeeeelings.

The City & the City China Mieville
Much reviewed and discussed I'll put myself on the fan side - I enjoyed it.

London Falling
The Severed Streets
Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?
by Paul Cornell.
Have heard these recommended for a while for fans of the Rivers of London series. I'd say if you liked the premise of the PC Peter Grant books but not the execution, it's worth looking at these - the same London based occult crime, investigated by a special team in the Met. I sort of want to say they're the more grown up version but can't quite put my finger on why? Ensemble cast rather than a single narrator, and they don't have a convenient and kindly guide, so they spend a lot of time trying to find out how things work.

I love Barbara Kingslover's The Poisonwood Bible, and to a lesser extent, The Bean Trees. Have read Prodigal Summer but remember nothing about it. Recently quite liked Flight Behaviour.

But agree on The Lacuna and the slow start. It was a bit of a joke on a holiday with a friend a few years back, that I had to finish that 'effing book', I could have given up and ya know, just enjoyed the holiday, but I was determined. I did enjoy the latter part though.

I'm reading The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice at the moment. Seems a bit cliched at the moment but enjoyable, I'm only a few chapters in.

I missed the wanking vicar! What great piece of literature was this?

The little thread summary on "Threads I'm On" just showed "multimedia message" for Remus then. Was genuinely a little afraid to click in case it turned out to be video of wanking vicar...