50 Book Challenge Part Five

Think you'd love it, bookshops of course but also lots of quirky shops, vintage clothes etc and lots of good pubs/places to eat. Small but lovely. DS is with us and has bought the most hideous 80s shirt.

Best - wonderful! I've never been to Hay on Wye but have heard lots of good things about it.

Remus I may have found your bookshop Nirvana. I'm in Hay-on-Wye for a few days and one of the bookshops has a whole little section set up dedicated to Scott (see pics) and a wonderful steampunk staircase.
Pricey though.

Ooh glad to hear you enjoyed Nightwoods, spinningheart, looking forward to it more now!

I read South Riding in my 20s too, along with The Land of Green Ginger and many other Viragos. I can't remember much about it now, but remember enjoying it.

Copying my list across:

1)Rillington Place (Uncovered Editions)
2) An Evil Cradling: Brian Keenan.
3) John Profumo and Christine Keeler (Uncovered Editions)
4) The Secret Agent: Joseph Conrad
5) The Watergate Affair (Uncovered Editions)
6) The Russian Revolution (Uncovered Editions)
7) The Assassination of John F Kennedy (Uncovered Editions)
8) Falling Awake: Alice Oswald.
9) All the Presidents' Men: Bernstein and Woodward. R
10) Dr Thorne: Trollope (audiobook)
11) Framley Parsonage: Trollope (audiobook)
12) Saplings: Noel Streatfeild.
13) A Murder of Quality: John le Carré.
14) All the light we cannot see: Anthony Doerr.
15) Some rain must fall: Karl Ove Knausgård.
16) The Way of Wyrd: Brian Bates
17) The Small House at Allington (audiobook)
18) The Dark Forest: Liu Cixin
19) Say Something Back by Denise Riley
20) The Last Chronicle of Barset (audiobook)
21) Death's End: Liu Cixin
22) Sapiens: Yuval Noah Harari.

23) His Bloody Project: Graeme Macrae Burnet
24) The Essex Serpent: Sarah Perry
25) The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
26) Gorsky: Vesna Goldsworthy. This was a book my husband bought after hearing the author speak at an event. Inspired by The Great Gatsby and a rather unbelievable plot about very rich Russians in London.

Now on Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

Remus was actually referring to reviews on the blurb on the back of the book.
I have read south Riding , a while ago now but enjoyed it .

I've just started The Dust That Falls From Dreams by Louis de Bernieres. I used to be a big fan but he's disappointed me more often than not recently so not sure about it yet. Anyone have positive experience of it?

If I can't get into this one I'm going to give up and wait for altered to write the Adventures of Dipshit and Kazoo instead.

biblio he has already met her gaze with his piercing green eyes and he has been declared "a difficult man to lie to" so the signs are all there.

Hopefully the green eyes and extensive property holdings will help her, the principled researcher, overlook his illegal trafficking in antiquities and profiteering. I am now really enjoying the clunky expository dialogue, unmatched since the classic Euromance title Viking Magic by Angela Wells, written in commemoration of the signing of the Maastricht treaty.

PoeticLE your mention of moving to Wales "only...15 years ago" speaks volumes. I have it the other way around. I am the non-Welsh speaking child of a Welsh father and product of a gasp mixed marriage with an Englishwoman. Everyone is always shocked that I am not a Welsh speaker, despite never having lived in Wales. I love Wales though. There is something just great about it, I can't say exactly what.

My aunt will not use the local post office, the only business still running in the village except for the hairdresser and the pub, because the guy running it is English and consequently "has funny ideas."

Blimey, it makes Noel Streatfeild's ham-eating, Christmas-party-throwing Jews seem almost benign.

Remus, no, but it's on my to-read shelf as my DH read it and liked it a lot. He is a local government geek though.

I loved South Riding when I first read it in my early 20s Remus, and I think still like it because of that. Have you read Testament of Friendship? IIRC I think I read all WH's books off the back of reading & enjoying Vera Brittain's autobiographies.

(I'm now tempted to re-read Anderby Wold and The Land of Green Ginger seeing as they're both 99p on Kindle!)

RMC
I referred to Shardlake when reviewing Ashes but only to say how poorly it compared! I'd hoped Ashes might be god enough to fill the gap between Shardlakes, but sadly not. :(

I'm reading South Riding by Winifred Holtby which came highly recommended to me. It's okay - over long and prone to wittering and nonsense in places, but extremely tender and moving in other parts. Has anybody read it?

The best part in my aunt's novel would be where she would define the term "Welsh". Obviously, northerners, anyone from Gwent and the next town along would not be Welsh.

altered I laughed at the truth of that sentence. I live in Cardiff and when we venture north, my friends from the 'diff (who are as Welsh as can be) are regularly told they aren't Welsh, not really. I only moved to Wales 15 years ago and, while I love the country with all my heart, I have no illusions about being Welsh myself. It is maddening to see these divisions though. Helps in no way other than making someone feel mildly superior for about 25 seconds.

Could the tragically-bereaved aristo be the love interest to come? So handy when the previous family are all wiped out.

The action has moved on to Yorkshire now, so no more rants about Egypt. Happily, there is ample scope for cliché bingo.

She's gone to live with Mummy, and a KC spaniel, land rovers, green Barbour jackets, a claret drinking professor, pheasant shooting, tea, and a double-barrelled estate-owning aristocrat whose wife and children have just been killed in a tragic accident have all featured within the first 20 pages. Fantastic.

Altered love a good book rant.

42. The Ashes of London. Much reviewed on previous threads. Have had this one waiting for a while. It was ok, readable but lacked depth. Didn't really like the way it flitted between the two perspectives and points of view. Really jarred and I found it stopped the flow of the story. Read to the end but was pretty much past caring about the conclusion. Had seen references to Shardlake in reviews but didn't even come close for me.

You have to finish it altered for our amusement

This thread is my happy place .

Chuckling away at my desk here. Don't stop ranting altered!

OK, I know I have to stop for my own safety, but seriously. She is described as a devout believer, her husband has just died, they are in Church for his funeral prayers, but instead of wearing black and observing the mandatory 40 day mourning period and praying for her husband's soul while being supported by friends and family, the protagonist is planning to drive alone to Cairo and chats informally with the Minister who expects her at work the next working day. Which is incorrectly mentioned as a Monday . The working week is Sunday to Thursday mate!

Her father was an army officer on the personal staff of Gamal AbdelNasser but inexplicably was not jailed when he married a foreign national, which is a court martial offence in the Egyptian military. It is especially laughable that a high-ranking Egyptian army officer married a British citizen during the Suez crisis which is when the marriage would have taken place.

The least believable part though is when she asks for unpaid leave and arranges it in a chat with the minister instead of submitting herself to the usual three-month process of submitting and resubmitting the correct forms in triplicate to a variety of committees and sub-committees for approval and then fighting over whether she is still liable for insurance payments to cover the period of her absence. That and not leaving the house for forty days might have slowed the plot down a bit though.

That bit and anyone finding a public toilet in Cairo.

Satsuki agreed. The Seventh Sodding Scroll it is.

Cote I really enjoyed your playing too. For the record, no sausage fingers in evidence at all. My grandparents had a spinet which I used to attempt to play as a child. Luckily there were no close neighbours.

bibliomania, I love Irish Americans! One asked me if we have electricity in Scotland, congratulated me on my high standard of English, and argued with me about what constitutes a Forfar bridie. Another expected me to be personally acquainted with their cousin in Norway. Good times.

Looking forward to the rants, hopefully they will make me appear slightly less unhinged.

altered sorry to enjoy your misfortune. The Seventh Sodding Scroll it is.

cote that was mesmerising. To my untrained eye you are really very skilled and I enjoyed watching it. Does that instrument belong to you? It's quite a thing. I'm very envious as I always wanted to be proficient on the piano, but stopped lessons when I was ten as we couldn't afford them.

alteredimages, I'm absolutely loving your hatred for The Seventh Scroll and your insider knowledge. Where but for this thread would I find out about what the current Egyptian Minister of Antiquities likes to wear? And please do write your Stonehenge novel - I promise to read it and sneer.

I have read novels set in Ireland which grate similarly, especially when written by Americans. There was one book where I couldn't work out the dialogue at all, until I realised the author thought "I'm after doing x" meant "this is what I intend to do" as opposed to what it actually means, "I have just done this". I couldn't work out past v present at all. But that's just the delightful scatty colleen I am, tooraloo tooralay.

I'm on another of the Simon Serrailler series. When we say it's middle class, to be specific, it's very much upper middle - Joanna Trollope with a forensics tent dropped incongruously into the background. I've just read a section where Simon interviews a witness in her home, which is (horrors) a new build with a patch of lawn and no flowers and it's clean and tidy and characterless, and he's mentally comparing it with his sister's delightfully characterful home, with children and a dog and books all around. Ostensibly it's about how pets and children make a home, but the witness just happens to be a nurse while the sister is a doctor, and there is a huge dollop of class-bound assumptions about what makes a desirable home environment (it reminded me of Muriel Spark's short story "You should have seen the mess").

I suspect it's not going to stop me devouring the rest of the series, but I may rant from time to time.

1. The Wolf and The Raven - Steven MacKay

1. Greenwitch - Susan Cooper

1. Crosstalk - Connie Willis (Audible)

21. Edward I - A Great and Terrible King by Marc Morris
    Non-fiction and it's taken me a while to get though, but glad I read it.

22. Nomad by Alan partridge (on Audible)
    You need to be an Alan fan to get this - a spoof on those celebrity walks to find themselves. I do like Alan Partridge, but some of this fell a bit flat, same old jokes about fat backs and social awkwardness. Meh - 3/10

The best part in my aunt's novel would be where she would define the term "Welsh". Obviously, northerners, anyone from Gwent and the next town along would not be Welsh.

Haha Sadik. You're right, I can see my aunt writing a novel saying that.

It would still be untrue, but I wouldn't mind an Egyptian writing that. It just pissed me off having someone with no knowledge coming in and deciding that 85 to 90% of Egyptians aren't really Egyptians after all.