50 Book Challenge 2018 Part Five

Thanking you!

Good luck Piggy

Yes mum !

Good luck Piggy - now stop mumsnetting and do your prep!

Thank you stitches and remus . I regularly grumble on MN about not getting interviews and now I have had three this year!

Sorry, Piggy - missed that. Good luck!

Meg - Imagine seeing life in such colours/shapes though.

Good luck for the interview Piggy

21. One Trick Pony - Nathan Hale

Read at the behest of DS1, this is a cool little graphic novel from an artist I hadn't come across before. It's set in a dystopian future where creepy alien 'pipers' have harvested all the planet's technology; Strata and her family are salvaging what remains of humanity's technological history when they unearth a robot horse that turns out to be a bit special. Simply, but atmospherically illustrated and a good, pacy story.

Remus I agree - it's the kind of art that looks like it was beamed down from another planet - he was clearly all kinds of crazy, but what an incredible vision of the world.

Meg - I must admit that I think Blake's paintings are vastly superior to his poems.

60: The Forest Lake Mystery - Palle Rosenkrantz Published in 1903, this was a Kindle monthly deal, and touted as the first Danish detective story. I enjoyed it. It was a bit too long and it meandered a bit to swoon over Venice for a while, but it had some nice touches of humour, and a really endearing central character. It reminded me a bit of an earlier version of Boris Akunin's Erast Fandorin books, if anybody knows those.

Just finished Mary Beard's very interesting Women and Power. It is, as many PPs have pointed out very short! Though provoking and made me look at how I view power in some new ways. I also used some of her points about women in mythology in a lesson today so thanks Mary!

No reading tonight : big interview to prep for...

20. Blake - Peter Ackroyd

Highly illuminating, fascinating, and very moving biography of the visionary poet-painter who was never recognised in his own lifetime. I was only familiar with Blake's most famous poetical works (and had never really encountered his painting) but they have an incredible power, which this book really helps to put into context.

SouthE agreed. Initially I thought Hugh Grant was way off beam casting wise, (Given I thought Jeremy Thorpe shared a greater likeness to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's child catcher than the very attractive HG) but he and Ben Whishaw did a great job. They also made Paddington 2 in 2017 & HG has said 'I've spent all year trying to either kill, imprison or bugger Ben Whishaw…'
The Jeremy Thorpe scandal is one of those stories that would be rejected as being too unbelievable if it weren't true!

36. The Expats by Chris Pavone

A pair of US expats with lots of secrets move to Luxembourg for a new start. But it’s not long before another American couple arrive and seem a bit too interested in them. Are the dark secrets in their past catching up with them?

Entertaining but not outstanding. The sort of book that’d be a good holiday read.

37. My Sweet Revenge by Jane Fallon

When Paula discovers that her husband Robert is having an affair, she resolves to make Robert fall back in love with her before leaving him, so that she can break his heart.

I struggled a bit with the central premise here - I can understand someone wanting their ex to see what he’s missing, but spending months and months love bombing the husband you secretly despise seemed to be stretching plausibility a bit too far for me.
However, despite that, I enjoyed reading this.

I watched A Very English Scandal, Southeastdweller and I'm reading the book. What did you think of the adaptation?

Sounds interesting Shakeitoff have added to the pile!

I don’t think I can put it as clearly (or entertainingly) as you ScribblyGum and I love the idea of Uplit in petticoats but perhaps it boils down to what some readers expect before they engage with the texts? In that sense I’m probably more like Remus. Since I’ve not read either I’d go on who published them, where they’re reviewed and how they’re presented/packaged in marketing terms. I know that those facts tend to sway me when considering ‘literary’ novels by authors I don’t know. So, taking that as a way of comparing them they both seem to be positioned as ‘literary’ (the agent for ‘Mermaid ‘explicitly states this): they’re both on ‘literary’ lists, Harvill Secker publishes work by Coetzee and Binet and prides itself on being a home for ‘Nobel’ and ‘prize-winning’ writers, and Serpent’s Tail has similar associations although a bit more transgressive/avant-garde; they also have very similar cover designs. Hermes-Gower makes a point of the fact that she did the UEA writing course, which is associated still (?) with a certain quality of writing, certainly it bestows an upmarket brand identity on its writers (not sure that’s really deserved personally) but that leads me to a comparison with writers like Rose Tremain. Although, before reading the comments here, I’d assumed that ‘Mermaid’ would be more like ‘The Luminaries’ which was an explicitly literary work, although I didn’t actually like it. I assumed ‘Serpent’ would be more ‘frothy’ I suppose simply because it’s everywhere.
In actual terms I find the boundaries between the literary and the commercial difficult to define. Take Sarah Waters, her work’s quite commercial but she manages to operate on a number of levels, so it’s not necessary to recognise references to Foucault/Bentham (? long time since I've read it) in ‘Affinity’ when she discusses prisons, and that fact doesn’t make the book harder to read or necessarily more/less enjoyable So does her background in academia and how that informs her novels make them ‘literary’? Or does their ‘readability’ make them ‘commercial’? Also, as a reader I find the distinction can be annoying: I consider Chandler as great a writer as Faulkner, say, just working in a different set of traditions. Similarly, I don’t think ‘Never Let Me Go’ - which has been so lauded as a literary work - would do so well if it was up against the science fiction it borrows from so heavily.
I think I'm ending up coming down on both sides and on neither does 'Mermaid' seem to triumph. Sounds as if it's been marketed as 'literary' setting up expectations it doesn't meet and reads as 'frothy' but disjointed?

25. Swimming Lessons Clare Fuller “Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband Gil about the truth of their marriage, but instead of giving them to him, she hides them in the thousands of books he has collected over the years. When Ingrid has written her final letter she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her beautiful but dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two daughters"

This, like Fullers first novel, is told across two timelines. It alternates between the letters Ingrid writes and her perspective, and that of her now adult daughter Flora. I found Flora a really quite infuriating character, selfish and childish, but as the story develops it becomes understandable why. I like the way the story is revealed layer by layer almost, and how your perspective switches throughout. I didn’t love it exactly, but it definitely kept me interested.

This was a library book I need to return soon, but now I really will get back to Snow Falling on Cedars

I know it's a while since I read it but isn't Mermaid set in the Georgian period? My memory is that it was late 1700's. It is a very different period to the austere Victorian values that run through Serpent. I do agree that Serpent will stand the test of time better but I honestly don't see that there is a lot to compare within the two books other than the superficial things I noted yesterday. For me Serpent's strength is its themes, drawn from Victorian Literature and the period in general. Mermaid however relies on its strength of character - I really enjoyed the way Gower brought characters to life - and its sense of fun.

Corvus I've only ever listened to Wolf Hall as an audiobook and absolutely love it. It's on my dad's kindle as an e-book, and am considering reading it, but I realise there's a risk I might fall out of love with it (and he, Cromwell) in that format.

I actually came on to review my latest completion, but I can't decide what type of cheese it is, so obviously haven't analysed it enough. Will come back tomorrow.

40 Blood Charged by Lindsay Buroker

Book 3 in the Dragon Blood series. Sorceress Sardelle, pirate-scientist Tolomek, and Biggles-esq fighter pilot Ridge (along with suitably colourful supporting cast) are sent on a secret mission into enemy territory to retrieve a devastating new weapon.

About as far from literary fiction as you can get, but pleasingly enjoyable all the same. Books 1-3 came as kindle freebies, but I'll definitely buy book 4.

If anybody tells me I have to teach Wolf Hall for A level, I will resign.

I think you're safe. Not enough symbolism in it to waffle on about, surely?

i struggled with it first time round, but gave it a chance as an audiobook and got into it then. Breastfeeding, so a captive audience. Also wanted to get my money's worth from my free audible credit.

It's a wonderful book but I think it has more to say about history than it does about literature, if that makes any sense.

31. To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell.

This is a non-fiction book about the Transhumanist movement, who are a group of people (from this book they would appear to be mostly men, with a large base in Silicon Valley) who believe in the melding of humans with machines and technology in order to improve ourselves and also to prolong life, amongst other beliefs. Mark O’Connell interviews and hangs out with various sects of this movement beginning with a chapter on cryo-storage; where the dead (either full body or just as heads) are in frozen storage, waiting for the day when they will be re-animated in a new body.

I liked it for challenging my own views on life and death. Would I want to be immortal or even live for another 200 years? What is it to be human? Are we already part machine, attached as we are to our phones, tablets and laptops? Would I want to be uploaded to a computer network and down loaded into a more reliable and long-lasting body (a wave to Altered Carbon)?

I don’t think I want to live forever, or for that matter, even for a few more hundred years. According to the arguments of one transhumanist that is because of ‘deathist’ ideology - “a need to protect myself against the terror of death by trying to convince myself that death is not actually not so terrible.” But I think living for hundreds of years just makes me feel incredibly tired, maybe I could be rejuvenated to my 20’s energy and current mindset?

There is a chapter about the slightly terrifying prospect that machines will eventually destroy the human race, not maliciously but because they are following their programming. Or just because someone made a mistake in their programming or didn’t fully consider the consequences of their actions.

My one gripe is the series of unnecessary complex words, maybe to make it seem more ‘sciencey’ but all it meant to me is that reading certain paragraphs could be quite an ordeal. Overall, though, an interesting read.

I also think The Dry is worth a try for 99p, it’s a good holiday page-turner.

Yes, although that is a somewhat unsettling notion satsuki (I love thePaddington films with a passion unbridled)

He was in The Accused first, I think. As a youngster . And he makes recent Bond films for me :)