50 Book Challenge 2017 Part Eight

41. Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: Reflections on Fairytales Katherine Langrish Essays on fairytales, many expanded from Langrish's blog of the same name. I really enjoyed this. Langrish clearly knows her stuff; she offers a new take on some familiar tales and introduced me to many I'd never heard of. If you think fairytales are knights and princesses, think again - these are all magical cooking pots, brave miller's daughters, kings of fairyland half in league with the devil, and selkie brides. Recommended if you have any interest in this sort of thing.

68. Journey Under The Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino

Crime. A pawnbroker is found murdered in an abandoned building. The book takes place over the next 20 years, and mainly follows the stories of the pawnbrokers son, and the captivating daughter of the main suspect.

The time span involved meant lots of jumping forward a few months / years, lots of minor characters coming in and out of the main characters lives.

And slowly, the ways in which the two main characters are linked and working with each is built upon, with a cascade of crimes all stemming from the initial unsolved murder.

A good absorbing read.

Ooh Riddley Walker has gone straight on the wish list - thanks Meg

63. Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey Olivier is a sickly and pernickity French noble whose family somehow survived the revolution, but when times become uncertain again a couple of decades later, is packed off to America, ostensibly to study prison reform. He is accompanied by his secretary Parrot, originally from Devon, but much travelled, older and more experienced in the ways of the world than Olivier. This pair narrate alternate chapters, and are not really unreliable narrators as such... or are they? Although it is packed with action, it is also a very wordy book, which may annoy some, but I really enjoyed the flowery language. Having complained about the last book I completed (Undermajordomo Minor) being a bit of a boys own adventure, I realise my beef is with the execution not the concept - this is how you do it. The overall feel of this reminded me very much of Julian Rathbone - now he can do flowery tales by unreliable narrators. Does anyone even read Julian Rathbone any more? A look at Amazon suggests not, as most of his stuff is not on kindle. I will definitely seek out more Peter Carey on the basis of this.

48. Call Me by Your Name by Andre Aciman. I enjoyed the film of this (v slow, beautiful scenery, fairly romantic), but did not really enjoy the book at all- has anyone read it? I couldn't see what the author was aiming for- it did have that teenage self absorbed feel, like Bonjiur Tristesse, or I capture the Castle, but tbh I thought great parts of it were just rubbish! Only finished it to get closer to my 50!

Murine I saw that Wolves book in the kindle sale the other day. Might give it a go given your review. Slogging painfully through A room with a view at the moment which I may abandon even though it's for book club. Life's too short and all that. I did love the film though!

I love the Vera books! I binge read them all except the most recent, The Seagull, this year and very much enjoyed doing so.

I finished my hundredth book last night: History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund a good read, with excellent descriptions of the bleak surroundings, it is disturbing and builds tension well as 14 year old Linda becomes increasingly attached to the family living across the remote Minnesota lake from the dilapidated ex commune home in which she lives. She soon begins to babysit for their 4 year boy and starts to realise all is not quite right with her new friends.

I second the Vera books.

Just marking place. Have lost count and need to go back and pick up the thread.

@RMC123 thanks for recommending the Vera books, sound up my street, and yes the Robert Galbraith books are a good idea too. I made decent headway in the hairdressers with Autumn so perhaps I’ll finish that this evening and then make a fresh start on some more engaging material tomorrow!

113. This must be the place - Maggie O’Farrell This was a strange one and certainly not one of O’Farrell’s finest. The character of Daniel is the glue which hold many episodes over a 30ish year period tentatively together. At the core of the novel he is married to Claudette, a form famous film star who staged her own disappearance at the height of her fame ( Sleeping with Enemy style!) In the era of the internet this story line was just too ridiculous to comprehend. Found it all a bit of a chore towards the end.

Meg Agree entirely re your language points, but thought the book fell down on everything else, and didn't really have much to say. We'll have to agree to disagree. :)

Composteleana -
Could you try the next two Robert Galbraith?
Not sure if you have read the Vera books- they have been my go to easy reads this year.
Also I really enjoyed The Dry. Page turning, entertaining and easy read.

Help 50bookers, I’m in serious danger of falling at the final hurdle. I have managed 50 but was aiming for 60, plus been doing a goodreads challenge all year and was making great progress until about 5 weeks ago, when all desire/ability to finish a book seems to have left me - 13 prompts still to go.

I’m part way through 3 books - From the Beast to the Blonde:On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, Maria Warner

Autumn - Ali Smith, this is the one I reckon I might finish this side of Christmas!

A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel, this is where the trouble started I think. Feel like I’ve been wrestling with it forever, and yet only 40% through. I feel like the thing has sapped my will to read (and possibly to live). I’m a huge Hilary Mantel fan usually (well - the Cromwell books and the short stories) but this feels like it’s been designed to be as difficult to get through as possible. Maybe because I studied the French Revolution in both French and History A-Levels and then again for both subjects at university and yet have wilfully forgotten every last detail of it since, and now my brain is refusing to accept this new attempt to fill it with Robespierre and co.

Anyway, here’s the list I did manage to finish before the shutdown:

1. The Dark is Rising - Susan Cooper
2. The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding - Agatha Christie
3. Our Endless Numbered Days - Claire Fuller
4. Love Letters of Henry V111 to Anne Boleyn (totally counting this even though it's only about 70 pages, I'll read an extra long one at some point to balance it out!)
5. How to be Both - Ali Smith
6. Toast - Nigel Slater
7. A Man Called Ove - Fredrick Backman
8. Chess - Stefan Zweig
9. Beauvallet- Georgette Heyer

99 A Case of Possession by KJ Charles
Sequel to The Magpie Lord, reviewed above. More thoroughly enjoyable trash - warlocks, invasions of giant killer rats, dark secrets surfacing all over the place - and lots of sex.

Ah, see I thought Riddley Walker was packed with fascinating points and questions:

• how can we understand anything without the language to describe it
• how does language evolve/devolve
• why is self-destruction innate in human behaviour, and are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes (from Adam & Eve onwards)
• why do humans need storytelling, myths and religion, and how do these develop and function in societies
• what good is technology, and would we be better off without it

This is on top of the pure joy of reading the text - not an easy book to read, but one that rewards slowing down and concentrating, with every word chosen precisely for its meaning/s.

This was my review:
I think the language is really good but I'm just not sure I understand what points he was trying to make, other than that splitting the atom probably wasn't a terribly good idea and it's probably not going to be good if more people learn how to do it. I just didn't think that he managed to build a world in the way that the best post-apocalyptic fiction does and I think he felt that he'd worked so hard to build and sustain the language that everything else was a bit superficial in comparison. But I may well be v thick and have totally missed the point somewhere.

I didn't like Riddley Walker.

Artemis Andy Weir

This is by the author of The Martian - it has the same attention to scientific detail but here it seems more integrated. I loved "the sciencey bits" in The Martian, but those who were put off by them should probably give this a go. No potatoes appear.

If what you didn't like about The Martian was the narrator's voice though - then it may not be the book for you. The narrator of this is a young woman living on a lunar colony, scraping by working as a porter & making a bit of money smuggling contraband (like cigars) on the side, and while she is a different character to the main character in The Martian, there are similarities in the voice/occasional crude humour.

Unlike the Martian, Jazz is not isolated but in the middle of the small society she grew up in, where everyone knows her, knows her dad (who she has argued with), remember all her teenage fuckups and remind her about them, etc.

It's essentially a caper story - fast moving, funny, and irreverent. I stayed up rather too late to finish it.

an update from the slow readers' club. Work is insane at the moment and, shamefully, I'm A Celebrity is my trash TV weak spot, so I'm not getting much reading in. Anyway:

39. A Murder of Quality by John le Carre Stella Rode is a defiantly non-U misfit at the very establishment boarding school where her husband works. When she is found murdered, George Smiley is called in by an acquaintance of Stella's who knew Stella was in fear for her life.

A proper, old fashioned detective story, without a hint of espionage. Nicely structured whodunnit with the tension in all the right places.

Riddley walker is amazing Cote, I doubt you'll be disappointed

That book sounds right up my street, Meg

Thank you Sadik, that's an excellent suggestion. I adore David Attenborough so I'll give that a go.

51. Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban

Not sure I can do justice to this haunting and unsettling novel but will give it a go. Part of the SF Masterworks series, it's set thousands of years in the future, in a post-apocalytic Kent which was the Ground Zero for a nuclear detonation which sent mankind back into the Iron Age. There's a loose kind of government which spreads its messages across scattered settlements through travelling puppet shows, and folk memories of lost technologies are mixed with remnants of Christian stories and older folk myths. The most astonishing thing about this book is the language it's written in - a kind of decayed English - which was clearly an influence on Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell says as much in his afterword to my edition.

Anyway, this is one of those books which makes most others seem really inconsequential, and I can't recommend it highly enough to fans of speculative fiction, dysopian fiction, David Mitchell, and anyone with an interest in what can be done with the English language.

It's called Life on Air btw.

noodle, if you like David Attenborough, he reads his autobiography wonderfully as an audiobook - I can't imagine anyone wouldn't like it if they enjoy his work.

I'm on holiday this week and reading as much as I can, but it's gradually dawning on me that I'm probably not going to make it to 50 books this year. I'm definitely not going to finish the full Goodreads 'category' challenge although I'm hoping to make it through the main part of the challenge (40 books, but some of what I've read so far doesn't fit a category).

My list so far and some recent updates:

1. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
2. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
3. A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy
4. The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Society
5. Our Kind of Traitor by John Le Carre
6. The Woman in Cabin Ten by Ruth Ware
7. Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler
8. The Martian by Andy Weir
9. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

35. The Late Show, by Michael Connolly. I love his Harry Bosch books so I was excited to give this a go - new series with a woman detective as the protagonist. I enjoyed it, but her character wasn't really developed much - however I think I felt the same with the first few Bosch books so perhaps this will improve as we go. I'll certainly read the next one, if there is one.
36. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, by Samantha Irby. Memoir/essays, some of which I found really funny and some of which I found unbearably sad. Not a comfortable read but interesting.
37. The Power, by Naomi Alderman. Much reviewed already on this thread. I really enjoyed it, it moved along at a pretty fast clip and I'm still thinking about it a few days later.
38. Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan. Complete fluff. Mildly entertaining but far too long and much given to endless descriptions of lavish houses, couture fashion, etc. etc. I read this lying on a sunlounger and if I'd been at home I don't think I'd have bothered finishing it. Won't be hurrying to read any more in the series.
39. Dark Suits and Sad Songs, by Denzil Meyrick. One of his DCI Daley series - I really love these, extremely easy to read but very well plotted.

Did not finish - Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death and Jazz Chickens by Eddie Izzard. Borrowed this from the library for the 'audiobook' category of the Goodreads challenge. Couldn't get on with it at all. I think I was supposed to find all the rambling part of the charm. I most definitely did not. Still haven't managed to listen to an audiobook, think I'm going to fail on this category.