50 Book Challenge 2017 Part Six

@noodlezoodle Yay, the popsugar one? It was linked on the first thread of this 50 book challenge, I've never done either this mumsnet 50 book or a prompt based reading challenge before so thought I'd give it a go! I'm about 27 books into the main challenge and have read 1 or 2 of the 'advanced' list. I'm enjoying it and read some things I maybe wouldn't otherwise (some with good reason, others surprised me!). However, I'm getting to the point where I just want to read what I want to read now, without reference to prompts, so I'm not always going for challenge books.

Composteleana I think we're doing the same reading challenge - how are you getting on? You're well ahead of me, I need to catch up a bit. I also read The Husband's Secret for that prompt and felt much the same as you about it.

KeithLeMonde that's made me really want to read The Interestings! It's been on my TBR list for a while but I'd somehow missed that it was set in New York which is always a plus point for me.

75. Jane Austen at Home, Lucy Worsley. I was wondering what new element she was likely to bring to a story that's been told so often. And yes, the material was all familiar, but she tells it well and has a good sense of the wider Georgian period, so I enjoyed it anyway.

76. Travelling Light Alastair Sawdays Tales from his travels. Author is publisher of Sawdays travel guides. Can't particularly recommend the book, which is okay, but I do like his eye for the idiosyncratic.

Now on 77. Born a Crime, Trevor Noah. Memoir written by comedian who was born as a mixed-race child in Apartheid-era South Africa. The material sounds like it belongs in a misery memoir, but he tells it with such warmth and love and an eye for the absurd that it's far more heartwarming than it has any right to be. Thanks, Max, great recommendation.

47. Max Gate, Damien Wilkins
    Thomas Hardy lies dying. In his household, his second wife, servants and gathered literary friends await the event. There is disagreement and discord, particularly over where he should be buried - the local church that he has chosen, or Westminster Abbey with the greats? Interesting read - much spikier and real than I expected from the insipid cover.

48. The Interestings, Meg Wollitzer
    "Whatever became of the most talented people you once knew?". A nice long holiday read if anyone's looking for one :) Opens in the 70s with a group of teenagers attending an artsy summer camp in upstate New York. Follows their lives as they grow up, achieving or abandoning their dreams. The city of New York is a character too, changing and adapting from the 70s through the yuppy 80s, the emergence of AIDS, the changes under Rudy Giuliani and of course the 9/11 attacks.

Characters were very well-drawn and this was a good read. I did think it dragged in places though (it's about 500 pages) and the constant jumping about between time periods was confusing.

49. Bitch in a Bonnet, Robert Rodi A recommendation from here. Was really looking forward to this catty, sharp book about Jane Austen but found it a real disappointment. YES, he's absolutely right that Austen is not the fluffy romance writer than some misguided fans make her out to be, and he has a great ear for her humour and irony. However, this book was bad on a number of levels. Repetitive - I think it was possibly cobbled together from a series of articles or blog posts as each chapter seemed to start with a bit of a recap, go over some jokes already made, then end with a linguistic flourish. The same points were laboured constantly. Annoying - dear God, his style. It was all "Slam dunk, Chiquita! High five, Mary C, and back in your box, Fanny!". This was funny for about two pages and then became extremely annoying. My biggest problem with this book, though, was that it was so misguided. He is either ignorant of, or has decided to ignore, much of the social and literary context of the novels, and sees them through modern eyes. There's so much he misses out (the key question, for example, of WHY marriage was so key to women at the time, which really sits at the heart of all of JA's novels) and so much that he gets wrong (like the whole of Mansfield Park). There is also a passage where he chooses to comment on the behaviour of modern women and give advice on why some of them are unable to find a man - one of those moments where you would really like to reach into a book and slap the author.

82. Swing Time - Zadie Smith. I enjoyed this but it wasn't a 'Wow' book for me. Not sure it would be on 'my' ManBooker Prize list. Very much like other Zadie Smiths I have read, woman looking for her place and finding her cultural identity. Compared to Lincoln in the Bardo which I have been very vocal, and possibly quite boring, in my delight at it seemed very ordinary.
We are off on holiday later this week and I am going to have a crack at reading through the ManBooker Prize long list. I have never even been remotely inspired to do this before but I am really keen to see if there is anything there that I think can hold a candle to Lincoln.

Re: Conrad. I was 20 when I read Heart of Darkness and in the middle of a Literature degree. I had read all kinds of quite 'grown up stuff' but whilst I could appreciate the technical ability of Conrad the whole thing left me cold. My DH who I met at University, also reading English loved it.

museum I had that same problem with narrative voice in A Town Like Alice - it's very difficult to pull off writing from that perspective within the story without creating holes. It is done so well in Gatsby for example. I'm talking about your niggle in ref to The Power BTW, sorry.

Morning all. Lots to catch up on yet again. I do need to get better at posting on these threads.

57 Anything is Possible - Elizabeth Strout - A follow up to My Name is Lucy Barton. Whilst I enjoyed this book I didn't like it as much as the first one. Maybe because My Name is Lucy Barton felt different to other things I had read and this felt a bit samey.

58 The Girls - Emma Cline - Much reviewed on this thread already. I had high hopes for this but sadly was left disappointed and agree with South's review.

59 In the Darkest Corner - Elizabeth Haynes - This is a dark psychological thriller about an abusive relationship. With alternating chapters between the present and the past the reader discovers how fun and party loving Cathy turns into a traumatised shadow of her former self. This was recommended by a friend and it is a disturbing but great read. A cut above other thrillers I have recently read.

60 A Fault in Our Stars - John Green - This tells the story of 16 year old cancel suffer Hazel and her friends and loves. I felt very so so about this book and didn't feel particularity drawn to the characters or their stories.

61 - The Poison Tree - Erin Kelly - I finally managed to get this out of the library after seeing it recommended on this site. An excellent read which kept me guessing throughout.

Current reading Fatherland by Robert Harris.

47. All Is Not Forgotten - Wendy Walker

In small town Fairview a girl is violently raped at a party. Whilst in the hospital after the event she is given a drug to wipe her memory of the assault. However, it is not that simple and she struggles to adjust to the feelings she has with no memories to link them to. After she attempts to take her life she begins to see a psychiatrist to try and unravel her memories and the recovery process also begins for her parents.

This was an okay read. I'm not sure I particularly liked having a whole book told from outside the main character's point of view as it is told by the psychiatrist but it worked as a means to see how everything came together. I was surprised by the ending and didn't see it coming at all!

Now onto book 48. Needful Things - Stephen King and hoping it is as good as the other two Stephen King books I have read this year!

I don't know if Conrad is generally read in early teens is it? Usually A level/university. I got a lot out of reading Conrad but his writing, though dense, is pretty dull so I wouldn't read him for entertainment now.

I've just bought A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles and Fatherland by Robert Harris in the monthly deals, wasn't tempted by a lot else. They also had Rules of Civility but going to hold fire on that for now.

The only Conrad I've read is Heart Of Darkness and I loved it. It's hard to believe that English was not his native language. His prose is original yet beautiful, his subject matter ageless & pertinent, and his execution flawless - heart of "darkness" on the map (i.e. uncharted territories on the map of Africa) vs the darkness in people's hearts.

It might be a mistake to make kids read it in their early teens, though. You are not at all prepared to read a book like that at that age, when you are better equipped to deal with To Kill A Mockingbird etc.

Hi TooExtra , hope you're enjoying The Somnambulist etc a bit more now. I think your criticism is quite correct. I was prepared to forgive, as it's clearly intended to be a light / fun read, but given it's going to be a series, she probably should have spent some time developing the early stages of the partnership. The first Lisa Tuttle book I read was Windhaven back when I was 12 or 13 (so some time ago ), and I've liked her stuff ever since. Re-read it last year, and it still stands up pretty well.

41. The Power by Naomi Alderman Much reviewed already, I'll join the majority saying I liked it, and I'll be thinking about it for a while. If I may have a gripe, I would have preferred it as a straight novel, rather than wrapping it up in the conceit that it was written by a man several thousand years after the event. This threw up some inconsistencies which niggled - how could the 'writer' have such a good grasp on contemporary culture, language, gender politics, digital communications etc, when the correspondence and the captions to the artefact illustrations show how clearly so much of this is supposed to have been lost, rewritten, guessed at. These bits were well done, but just didn't hang together with the main narrative; she should have found some other way of conveying the long term implications. Just a niggle though, overall this was great.

I really liked Wide Sargasso Sea, but mainly for the descriptions and sense of place, rather than the story.

Best - I found it completely underwhelming. But I don't like Jane Eyre much either, and I can't be doing with texts that bang a feminist gong either, so I don't imagine it was ever really going to work for me, to be fair.

Forgive all the typos, have been up half the night with work.

I recall that I liked Mr Pip too but don't remember much about it.

77- 78, acoupke of books by Cathy Kelly, very light and formulaic, happen endings all wrapped up nicely. Just what I needed for a week off work.

79. Jane Eyre It must be twenty years since I last read this and I struggled initially. I remember the first time I read it aged 12 and the impact Jane had on me, I loved her, so feisty and straight and puritan. I always was mesmerised by the awful school too. Oddly, I struggled to get past that part now. Must be my age. Anyway I persisted and ended up loving it all over again. I'd forgotten huge chunks of it though and that there was such a big convenient coincidence in the story. Shed a tear or two all the same.

Do I want to read Wide Sargasso Sea? Remus didn't you hate it?

Agreed, Satsuki. Not sure I'd want to read it again. I devoured it a few years ago in a plane journey to Greece. Was glad I hadn't saved it for poolside reading!

Yes remus to clarify I thought Mr Pip was a good read, but
that the content wasn't always, er, likeable and couldn't face it again.

38. The Husbands Secret - Liane Moriarty Read this as it is set at Easter and therefore met one of the prompts on the reading challenge I'm doing. I'd struggled to find a book I wanted to read that met that prompt (set at a holiday other than Christmas) and wasn't that keen to read this one particularly, although I'd really enjoyed the tv series of Big Little Lies, based on the book also by Liane Moriarty. This one was ok, bit obvious in places and a bit too 'neatly' wrapped up, and I found the characters decisions pretty unrelatable at times, but I was still interested enough to read to the end.

I liked Mr Pip too.

I liked Handful of Dust - it is crazy but makes a sort of sense as remus says. Have you read Mr Pip? I felt that drew a lot from it. Dickens in the jungle and savagery vs civilisation taken a step further though I didn't much like it and wouldn't read again!

I've warmed to Dickens somewhat but yes torture and ditto Conrad.

22. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood This was good, an accomplished and thought-provoking dystopia that hasn't dated that badly (unfortunately!) would recommend it.

Now starting Metroland by Julian Barnes and finishing the rather disappointingly bland Bossypants by Tina Fey.

47. Heart-Shaped Bruise by Tanya Byrne

The story of notorious Emily Koll, incarcerated in a psychiatric unit of a Young Offenders Institute. She's in there because of crimes committed in her desire to get vengeance on the girl who stabbed Emily's gangster father. All is slowly revealed throughout the book.
Fairly average overall.

I did The Secret Agent for A Level. That and Anthony and Cleo nearly put me off reading for life.

I too have only read one Conrad, and found that one was plenty. I was on holiday in Italy and had finished all the books I'd brought, so ended up with an abandoned copy of The Secret Agent. Gloomy, and so dense as to be almost impenetrable. Both confused and confusing. Urgh.

Remus I only ever read one Conrad, Heart of Darkness during my degree. Nothing would ever persuade me to read another.

I think it's saying something along the lines of 'It's a jungle out there' meaning the heart of British society, not just the actual jungle - it's supposed to raise questions about what so-called 'civilised man' actually is.

For me the most terrifying thing is having to read Dickens forever. The horror (see what I did there?). I keep meaning to re-read Conrad but never quite feel up to it.