50 Book Challenge Part Five

Apart from Captain C's mandolin I have abandoned every Louis de Bernieres I have tried to read!
Congrats Monty and welcome Indigo.

Congratulations monty that sounds lovely

Hi Indigo

Congratulations, Monty and welcome, Indigo.

I haven’t updated for ages,, but for once it’s for positive reasons rather than the usual no time/unwell/things getting in the way of reading culprits. I got married in March, and in the weeks since I’ve been happily relaxing, reading, gardening and doing all sorts of nice things as a form of home-honeymoon, as our proper honeymoon isn’t until September. I kept up with the thread, but haven’t really been around the digital world much.

Time to jump back in now though, and as there’s a fair few to review I’ll keep each one short.

12. Gangsta Granny, David Walliams. If I remember rightly (was a while ago now)I picked this because I needed a new audiobookfor a journey and some food shopping, but didn’t have much storage space left on my phone, so it had to be really short. Not bad, couple of funny descriptions (helps if you’re in a light-hearted mood when listening to it – I was).

13. Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie. Didn’t get around to this when I was younger so am glad to have read it now. I enjoyed it for the most part but found some sections a tad dull.

14. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury. I hadn’t read anything by Bradbury before – I really liked this. Weird, intense and scarily believable.

15. Feral, George Monbiot. A look at rewilding, how best to achieve it in Britain, how it varies from conservation, and the difficulties associated with it. Made me re-think quite a few values and beliefs I previously held. Informative, well researched, often subjective: Monbiot admits that his views can be a tad extreme, such is his commitment to the topic.

16. The Virgin Gardener, Laetitia Maklouf. A set of lovely ideas for gardening without a garden. I bought this a few years ago when I was living in a flat. We bought our first house last year, and I’ve been doing a lot of gardening recently, so re-read this for inspiration.

17. The River Cottage Handbook No. 4: Veg Patch, Mark Diacono. Guiding my first foray into vegetable gardening, immensely useful, have gone back to it umpteen times.

18. Howards End, E. M. Forster. A lovely novel about the struggle between inner life and outer life, the social and economic changes in the early 1900s, and how different classes interact with one another. Three families: the Schlegels, who value culture, literature and beauty; the Wilcox family, businesslike and focused on money and practicality; and the Basts, a working class family struggling to fund their way and fit in. I’m sure many of you will have read this. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

19. The Snow Spider Trilogy, Jenny Nimmo. A children’s fantasy book (not actually a trilogy of books, it is one book split into three parts). My mum took a detour from the only genre she typically reads (crime) to read this last year, and really enjoyed it, so asked me to read it too so she could share it with me. I can see why, as a first-time reader of anything fantastical, she liked this so much, but as a regular reader of that genre it fell short for me. I’ll get her to read His Dark Materials so she can experience some really wonderful fantasy written for children– I’m envious of her reading it for the first time!

20. Spectacles, Sue Perkins. Liked this – funny, well-paced, not too much focus on any one aspect of her life, as is sometimes the case with autobiographies/memoirs.

21. Howards End is on the Landing, Susan Hill. A book about books. Author Susan Hill decides to spend a year only reading books she already has at home, and combines writing about this with some insight into her reading/writing inspiration and some name-dropping stories of authors she has met. Enjoyed it and took lots of notes, as if my TBR list isn’t long enough.

22. Just One Damned Thing After Another, Jodi Taylor. The first in the St Mary’s Chronicles books about time-travelling historians. Light, silly, funny. Just right for when I want something entertaining and don’t care too much about writing quality.

23. My Roots, Monty Don. Collection of his Observer articles spanning a decade from mid 90s to mid 00s. I love that man, I really do. And his garden. I could read about it all day.

Sorry for the ridiculous length of that! I'll be on top of it from now on.

Cote - Nice to see MN appreciating your Cloud Atlas analysis! www.mumsnet.com/books/marmite-modern-classics

I enjoyed Corelli and especially liked his South American trilogy, but was only 17 when I read them so don't know if they would stand up to a reread now. I thought his writing was good previously but the last couple have been turgid in that department too.

Satsuki - Louis de B sure likes to lecture. Captain C's Mandolin would have been a good book, if the writer had understood that sometimes (lots of times), less is more.

Did you hate it, Cote? I know nothing at all about it, other than that I seem to remember somebody on here recommending it to me years ago.

Remus - I would be interested to hear what you think about The City & The City. Given our polar opposite tastes in fiction, you must love it

Remus snap! Came on to say I'd bought those too

I'm continuing my terrible time. I can't count this one as I've ditched it The Dust That Falls from Dreams by Louis de Bernieres. This really is a lot of research about WW1 disguised as a novel, with dull, interchangeable Edwardian characters that are as flat as my Mum's Yorkshire puddings (seriously: they are like fritters).

I was trundling along thinking it was ok, then I had to wade through pages of supposed "dialogue" that was really an essay on the air war that I could not imagine anyone delivering orally. To make it worse, this was spoken by a young pilot who was telling some assembled young women all sorts of gory stories of the "murders" he'd committed in the name of war, turning rivers red with blood and so forth.

Then a vicar describes a man's death to a young, unmarried, woman, saying "he took a bullet to the face that blew the back of his head off. That sort of thing happened quite a lot". Over biscuits. He says that to her. OH NO HE BLOODY DIDN'T. There is no way any man, in 1918, much less a vicar, would say something so casually brutal in that situation.

Men came back from that war unable to speak of anything they witnessed, much less chit chat about it at afternoon tea for an audience of women. It struck me as so very poor a representation of that time and generation as to be almost insulting. Read All Quiet on the Western Front instead, and weep.

46. Just Henry by Michelle magorian
As Stitches and Remus said no* where near as good as Goodnight Mr Tom.* A return to many of the same themes of Mr Tom ; children finding a mentor, discovering of previously unseen gifts, friendships, domestic violence and coming of age. But this book was over long and wasn't balanced by the realism. Too many happy endings made it all just too unbelievable.

Hello! Hope it's not too late to join. Here's my list so far. Highlights in bold. Haven't read anything awful so far this year.

1. My Brilliant Friend – Elena Ferrante

2. Days of Abandonment – Elena Ferrante

3. Days Without End – Sebastian Barry

4. Eileen – Ottessa Moshfegh

5. Grief is the thing with feathers – Max Porter

6. A Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin

7. Casting Off – Elizabeth Jane Howard

8. The Gustav Sonata – Rose Tremain

9. The Problem with Sheep and Goats – Joanna Cannon

10. All for Nothing – Walter Kempowski

11. Call of the Wild – Jack London

12. Black Beauty – Anna Sewell

13. Everyone Brave is Forgiven – Chris Cleave

14. Amsterdam – Ian McEwan

15. The Invention of Wings – Sue Monk Kidd

16. We are all completely beside ourselves – Karen Joy Fowler

17. All Change – Elizabeth Jane Howard

18. Hagseed – Margaret Atwood

19. LaRose - Louise Erdrich

I'm about 3/4 way through this one and really enjoying it. The story of two Ojibwe families in North Dakota starting in 1999, but encompassing events from family history hundreds of years ago and more recently in the sixties and seventies. Lively and vividly drawn characters and an interesting plot. I particularly like the dialogue; she has a fantastic way of capturing the funny and sad way people interact with each other. Recommended!

Book 44
The Cornish Coast Murder by John Bude
A British Library Crime Classic, which was enjoyable enough but didn’t set the world on fire. It’s one of those crime novels where the victim was, to all accounts, a bit of a bastard, so various people had reasons to kill him. The potential problem, of course, is that the reader then doesn’t care much. It was okay.

Have bought The City and the City and The Pursuit of Love in the monthly Kindle sale.

30. Restless, William Boyd

Boyd is a brilliant story teller and you know what you're getting with him. This started off seemingly a little unfocused, but he's very clever at pulling the strands together. Perfectly paced (IMHO), this tells the parallel stories of Eva, a young woman recruited as a spy during WW2, and Ruth, her daughter who finds out, during the hot summer of 1976, what her mother has been hiding from her all these years. Ruth is more than just a plot device; she is an interesting character with a story of her own, and while many of the questions raised in Eva's half of the plot are given at least suggested solutions, Ruth is left with some deliberately loose threads which raise questions about the parallels between her mother's story and her own.

57. The Memory Garden by Rachel Hore

I've enjoyed other books by Hore, but this one was disappointing. It's one of those books where a story in the past links with a story in the present. You know the ones, they're always set in Cornwall and have a picture of a gate on the cover. In this one, the story from the past didn't go into much depth and there was too much focus on the present day story which was a shame as the present day heroine was really annoying and whiny.

15. Bitter Water by Gordon Ferris. Follows directly on from The Hanging Shed, I didn't enjoy it quite as much, but a good solid detective story.

Just finished number 23. Bitch in a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen from the stiffs, the snobs, the simps and the saps by Robert Rodi

Much reviewed on here, which is why I read it. I enjoyed it, like a highlight reel of best bits. His tone grated occasionally, but enjoyed overall. I'll look out for the second one but not straight away.

buy not by obviously

1. The Wolf and The Raven - Steven MacKay

1. Greenwitch - Susan Cooper

1. Crosstalk - Connie Willis (Audible)

25: Behind Closed Doors by BA Paris.
I know it's been reviewed several times, but I did rattle through this fairly quickly so definitely enjoyed it. I had some issues with the plot ( I had a few moments thinking what the MN Relationships board would be saying), but a decent read.

Now reading The Handmaid's Tale for Bookclub
And still plowing through the Cazlalet's on Audible. I'm nearly 70% through now, and it's only just holding my attention. Will probably finish this one out of principal and not bother with the rest. Might by the DVD for me and mum to watch next time I go to stay, rather than giving it precious reading time, as while it's just about interesting enough to stop reading it, it is only just

24. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry Much reviewed, so I'll be brief. This was a beautiful slow burn of a book. I started off thinking it was rather overpopulated with characters, and just wanted to know about the main characters Cora and Will. However, I ended up being moved by and involved in every person's story and how they all joined together, and that felt right, because at the core of this book was an examination of the many different types of love and friendship that exist, and the generosity of spirit or jealousy that can let them flourish or inhibit them. Loved this.

21. Footsteps by Richard Holmes. A biography with a difference. For one thing, it covers four different people, all writers / poets of the Romantic era - Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley and Gerard de Nerval. It's impossible to do justice to them all in a single book so he focuses on following their footsteps during a certain period of each of their lives - Stevenson in the Cevennes area of France, Shelley in Italy and the other two in Paris. He also has some interesting observations about the art of writing a biography. Enjoyable to read, although not the right book if you want to find out about the whole life of any of the subjects.

17. Enigma by Robert Harris
    Is there a spy at Bletchley Park? What has happened to Charlotte? How can they crack the codes and save the North Atlantic convoys? This was a good spy yarn although I found parts of the story a bit unlikely. I read this on holiday and it was the perfect easy going holiday read.

18. Under Another Sky by Charlotte Higginson
    This is a book about the Romans in Britain and how and where we can still see traces of them today. Very interesting, learnt lots.

19. The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown by Vaseem Khan
    An Indian private detective is in the room when the British Crown is stolen. Our hero sets out to find out who stole it and why. Enjoyable read even though the plot was a nonsense.

20. How to be a Tudor by Ruth Goodison
    A book about life during Tudor times - how they lived their lives, from what they had for breakfast to how they made their beds. Very interesting although rather too much detail in places - I found my mind wandering particularly in the section about dancing.

27 - The Hand That first Held Mine - Maggie O'Farrell - This book alternates between two stories. First up is 1950's and Lexi Sinclair who moves from Devon to London and becomes a sucessful journalist working at her partner's newspaper in Soho. The second is modern day and Elina and Ted are struggling to come to terms with being new parents. The two stories come together superbly towards the end of the book. I feel also that it was a pretty accurate portrayal of the newborn stage. Whilst, i enjoyed reading this book, I didn't love it quite as much as I did The Vanishing of Esme Lennox.

28 - Rush Oh - I tried this thanks to the previous reviews on the thread and as such won't go over old ground. I agree with the previous comments about the unique and engaging voice of the narrator through this book who really did make it. Without trying to give away the plot I was disappointed by a really big coincidence at the end of the book which just felt a bit too convenient for my liking but apart from that I would highly recommend. The pictures in the book also really added to it.

29 - I See You - Claire Mackintosh - Zoe Walker flicks through the local free paper one day and sees a picture of herself in the classifieds sections accompanied by just a phone number and web address. The next day there is a picture of another woman and the day after another one. I loved Claire Mackintosh's first book but found this one a bit run of the mill and it simply didn't grab me as much.

Currently reading Me Before You - Jo Jo Moyes

Goodness, I've not posted for ages! Have been plodding through;

23. Sovereign - C. J. Sansom - it's the 3rd in the Shadlake series, and while a good book, I made the mistake of getting it out of the library rather than downloading to the kindle, at 650 pages it's bloody heavy and so I didn't bother carrying it around with me! This book covers the period of Henry VIII progress to York, with Catherine Howard's shenanigans beginning to be noticed... Our Shadlake has been dragged along to help and gets to York just before the progress, but a couple of days before the King arrives, a man is knocked off a ladder and his last words to Shadlake makes him think there's trouble afoot. (there is). It's a good mystery with mutiple plotting going on.

24. Truly Madly Guilty - Liane Moriarty

Six adults meet for a spontaneous barbecue and they're all left wishing they never went. This book explores how things can go wrong fast and how people can be left feeling guilty for all sorts of reasons and how they deal with or don't. Also deals with a few mental health issues.

I quite enjoyed this and was intrigued to find out what had happened as this isn't clear until later in the book. I did guess that last twist in the book but it was rather enjoyable.

Blimey - I dropped out a couple of weeks ago and this thread has topsied!