50 Book Challenge Part Five

Yes Diana Wynne Jones wrote the best children's fantasy. Howl's moving castle my favourite but love most of them and can't wait for my kids to be of age.

My favourite DWJ books were Howl's Moving Castle, Homeward Bounders and Witch Week.

Power of 3 was my favourite as a child (overlooked eldest myself!), eclipsed by Howls Moving Castle; also love the Spellcoats (obviously!), and Witch Week.

I also loved Moon Tiger, Cedar.

My favourite DWJs were Charmed Life, Power of Three, Magicians of Caprona and Dogsbody.

I loved Diana Wynne Jones as a child. Liked Charmed Life, but my absolute favourites were The Homeward Bounders and The Power of Three.

I've since read most of hers that I didn't read back then under the guise of buying books for dd

Remus I know exactly what you mean about AMS.

I have given up on The City and The City. It wasn't that I didn't get the idea of the two cities, in fact I thought that was quite clever, I just didn't like the characters as found them annoying.

Book 51
The Handsome Man's De Luxe Café – Alexander McCall Smith
This was just what I needed this week in the sense that I needed something that’s pretty much a hug in a book. However, I thought it was one of the weakest of this series and doubt I’ll bother with any more. The ‘mysteries’ being investigated are getting slighter with each one, and the characters are the same characters, saying and doing exactly the same things in exactly the same ways. I actually think he just cuts old manuscripts up, throws them in the air, and then glues them back together in a slightly different order.

Somewhere my numbers have gone wrong. Never mind.

49. Love Poems by Carol Ann Duffy I only started reading poetry this year so taking tentative steps into what I like and what I don't like. I didn't like this one. I liked her collection The Bees because all the poems flowed, you could see the themes and how the book had been curated (is that how it's done? I have no idea how poetry books are put together). This book felt like a sub committee from the publishers had gone through her back catalogue going "Is this one about Love? Yeah, well its got a bit of sex in and its all about feelings so stick it in." It was all a jumble. I didn't enjoy it, although there were some lovely poems in there.

50 This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki
Graphic novel pilfered from dd1 as the love poems were making me cross. Do we do graphic novels in this list?
YA, snap shot of a teenage girl's summer holiday spent at a cabin by a lake with her friend who she meets up with every year. Clever and touching and beautifully illustrated. I loved the scenes of them illegally watching horror films on DVD. v YA though, angsty level 11.

51 Slade House by David Mitchell
A sort of off-shoot story to his The Bone Clocks, although you could read it as a stand alone. Mysterious twins lure an unsuspecting victim through a hidden iron door into Slade House once every nine years to do to them. Another multi-narrative book along the lines of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks.
I think I'm done now with this format. Cloud Atlas was amazing and Bone Clocks was OK but this felt a bit half-arsed. It wasn't scary either, it was mostly just a bit silly. Passed the time of day in the car though. The narration was good.

23. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
    Claudia lies dying in a hospital bed and reflects on her life - lovers, family, friends. In particular she reflects on her time in Egypt during World War 2. Very well written book - she creates a character of real depth in Claudia and also includes reflections from other characters' perspectives so that you know that what Claudia thinks isn't always true.

24. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey
    A novella set sometime in the 1920s. Dolly is getting married. Relatives and friends gather at the house in preparation. Strachey manages to create a little world using very sparing language and is cynical on the subject of marriage. Funny, I enjoyed it.

25 At Freddie's by Penelope Fitzgerald
Freddie is an elderly woman who runs a down at heel stage school in Covent Garden in the early 1960s. She is a very well written character - formidable, able to get her own way, doing everything for the sake of the school. Fitzgerald brilliantly evokes the back stage world of the theatre: the character actors, the stage hands, the child actors showing off. Really enjoyed this book.

Keith interested to hear what you think about The Dark Circle. It's got a few flaws, and I don't think it deserves to win theBaileys, but I really enjoyed it as an interesting and easy read. I think she conveys life in a TB sanatorium really well and its interesting to see how the doctor-patient relationship has changed from that period of time to now.

Great to see other Charmed Life fans! Nobody I know in real life has heard of it. Tanaqui it's disappointing to hear the other books are a bit variable - but I shall see if DD fancies The Lives of Christopher Chant. And yes KeithLeMonde IMO better than Harry Potter.

Ohhhhhh, I love Diana Wynne Jones. Sooo much better than JK Rowling IMHO (sorry Potter-lovers). I've given Charmed Life to all my godchildren for one birthday or another :)

I'm actually intrigued by the idea of wanking in space (haven't read the book BTW, just picking up the idea from this thread). We visited the Kennedy Space Centre this year and were fascinated to learn about the mechanics of using the toilet in space. If you were a man having a wank in zero gravity, I am guessing you would have to be quite careful

Scribbly, I've added The Dark Circle to my TBR, it sounds good :)

I gave up on the Cornish Trilogy, had to admit eventually that it was not for me!

33 The Tidal Zone, Sarah Moss

My first book by this author. Has been reviewed on here several times so I won't rehash the plot but it's a book about parental anxiety and how we react when illness/death threaten our safe family lives. Thought the writing was excellent and the characters were utterly believable. I'd be interested to read her other books to find out whether Adam was a beautifully constructed, subtle depiction of a rather priggish, anxious super-middle-class SAHD who will only let his daughters eat naice food, or if some of that self-flagellating snobbery is a default setting for her characters. I recall my disappointment at having LOVED Eva in We Need to Talk About Kevin, and then reading another Lionel Shriver and finding a very similar character there, suggesting that this was just how Shriver writes people.

Charmed Life is one of my favourite books ever- just perfectly pitched and never overwritten. The others (not so much sequels as loosely linked) are a bit more variable- I rather like The Lives of Christopher Chant, but iirc, it was written quite a long time later and the flavour is different. Witch Week is only very loosely linked but it is fab, very very funny!

Not selfish at all, we like happy passengers. It makes the process of "get them on, get them gone" so much easier. And Kindles mean people aren't lugging around tons of books and messing up the weight and balance.

Fortunamajor that certainly puts my rather selfish worries into perspective! Thanks for the flight wishes !

RMC Not as happy as me. I have to sign the documents to say the aircraft is loaded safely for take off. I've literally had sleepless nights over this. Have a good flight.

I've just started A Conspiracy of Violence by Susanna Gregory, about a government spy at the beginning of the Restoration. I wanted to read her medieval series first really, as they are supposed to be similar to Ellis Peter's Cadfael, but this was what I had available.

Indigo Charmed Life was a huge favourite of mine as a child.

23. In Watermelon Sugar - Richard Brautigan

The perfect palate cleanser after weeks of Wilkie Collins, this is a short, sweet and whimsical parable about human nature and its self-destructive urges, set in a community where the sun shines a different colour every day and people literally craft everything they need out of watermelon sugar. Its simplicity and beauty save it from becoming overly twee; it certainly wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea but if you like Kurt Vonnegut then I'd say give it a go.

Remus definitely agree about the traumatic living arrangements but I do think that there was something about her character / actions before her marriage that made me feel that too. I haven't got the book so I can't look it up I am afraid.

One for TeamCote.

I'm hating The City and The City. Very irritated so far.

Son definitely somewhere on the spectrum, I'd say. Cora has been living with a violent and unpredictable man, which has affected her ability to maintain 'normal' relationships - and the son is that man's child, so maybe hard for her to fully connect to.

Agree that the doctor was the best character. I liked Will better before all the snogging stuff began.

And the boy with all his collections etc . It was screaming Asperger's to me.