50 Book Challenge 2019 Part Two

Oh no, it adds jeopardy! All good fun!

Infinite Jest sounds like it serves up a treat then, I must look out for it.

PIggy I like the idea of a random number generator, I might give that a go. I'd be a bit wary of it making reading feel like a chore though!

Good reviews exexpat - To Throw Away Unopened and Infinite Jest are both on my tbr list.

exexpat, I am so glad you liked To Throw Away Unopened . It was such a beautiful and angry book, and I really value women being given space to have such thoughts and views.

And yes, there is a lot of tennis in Infinite Jest. Like you I am interspersing it with (in my case) lots of other books but am getting sucked in so suspect at some point I’ll go all in and abandon everything else. It is very funny but does require a lot of attention.

5. My year of rest and relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
A young woman decides to spend a year mostly asleep with the help of prescription drugs. It’s set in Manhattan in 2000/1.

It was an interesting premise with some good writing but I found it a bit dull in the middle. I just couldn’t care about the horrible poor little rich girl. Nice bits of nostalgia but there is an inevitability of any book set in 2001 in New York which is a bit boring to read again.

I am a bit ashamed but , in my defence, tomorrow is Sunday and I don't own A Suitable Boy yet and Amazon won't deliver it til Monday to my work address really bad excuses as own a Kindle

Ah, I thought it might be a US thing but Amazon didn't say!!

But Piggy!!!! Surely if the random number generator says A Suitable Boy it must be obeyed!!??!!

I say this as someone who is seriously thinking of putting a random number generator in place and holds you in high esteem as you seem to follow it to the letter, err number.

The clash was with The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.

FTR Haven't read either, just clicked on the GR link as a friend has just finished it and it's in the update feed.

Piggy From the horse's mouth

Stuart Turton : Yes, 'Seven Deaths' and '7 1/2 Deaths' are exactly the same. We had a clash in the US and had to change the title there, hence 7 1/2. Don't worry, you're getting exactly the same amount of murder for your money, though.

toomuch Thanks for the puppy love. She's mostly an arsehole, so she's lucky she's pretty.

I have just spent a very confused half hour reading the opening to The Luminaries, only to figure out I got it mixed up with The Immortalists and it isn't the book I thought it was. Astrology/ Fortuneteller/ Mumbo jumbo, it's all the same January was obviously longer than I realised.

10 Any Old Diamonds by KJ Charles

Duke's son Lord Alexander Pyne--ffoulkes - more generally known as Alec Pyne, struggling artist working for the illustrated papers - commissions jewel thieves the Lilywhite Boys to help him steal his step-mother's famous diamonds as revenge for what he sees as his father's betrayal and abandonment of his first wife and children.

A nice change from the over-long Cassandra Clare I read last, this was proper grown-up romance. Short, sharp, with a plot that never quite goes as you expect (but of course with a Happy Ever After). Perfect reading for a cold winter weekend.

Also, cna anyone solve the mystery (less deadly) of why there is a hardcover edition of this called The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle?? When? Why? How? What? Wherefore??

2019 is providing me so far with books that are a bit of a slog. I have now finished number 5 The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. Crikey what a brain hurter this book is. I really can't decide if I liked it as I was so embroiled in trying to remember who everyone was and the clues scattered behind. The ending was a bit silly : but that was almost certainly intentional ,as Turton openly credits his homage to Agatha Christie.

A curate's egg of a book. At least it is definitely different!

The random number generator has now treid to give me A Suitable Boy. Not sure I am ready for 1000 pages so may leave that til half term and squeeze in the new Catherine Chidgey before it.

Thanks Fran, I'll go for it.

Brizzle, Eats, Shoots and Leaves is an entertaining read, as is Talk to the Hand (Lynne Truss's plea for good manners and politeness), but then both are right up my street!

Thanks for the heads up toomuchsplother.
I'll dig out my Kindle and take a look.

Read all about it is 99p at the moment so I've snapped it up, thanks for the recommendation.

I haven't read Eats, shoots and leaves - it's said to be funny but my perception is that it's quite dry? Is it worth a go at £1.99?

And 6 To Throw Away Unopened - Viv Albertine
Second memoir by the former punk musician (The Slits), after Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys.

This one is mainly focused on the death of her mother (one strand of the narrative takes you through the night of her death almost minute-by-minute), breaking out into Viv's complex feelings about her parents, sister and upbringing, as well as her current life as a divorced, 60-ish mother of a teenage daughter, her disastrous relationships, and her feelings about men, women and the myth of romance. She is brutally honest about everything and everyone, and it is a painful but brilliant read.

I haven't been on here for the past couple of weeks (and this entire thread) as I am tied up with Infinite Jest - not only is it over 1,000 pages long, including footnotes, but each page seems to take at least twice as long to read as a page in any other novel, as the prose is so dense (and the font is tiny). I am sort of enjoying it, so far, and have actually laughed out loud a few times; some aspects are a little irritating, but probably not enough so to stop me carrying on. I have to say there is a lot more about tennis than I expected.

I have taken a few breaks from it, and so have also finished a couple of non-fiction books over the past week or two:

5 A Sense of Direction - Gideon Lewis-Kraus
The author is approaching 30 and frittering his time away in Berlin (smoking, drinking, clubbing, hanging out at art gallery openings and having casual sex) with no real idea about what he is doing with his life, as well as having some unresolved issues with his family (e.g. his father, a rabbi, came out as gay in his 40s and embraced a totally new lifestyle, abandoning his wife and two sons), so he agrees to do the 800km Camino de Santiago walking pilgrimage in northern Spain with a friend. Despite the pain and tedium he finds it (mildly) transformative, so decides to tackle the even longer 88-temple pilgrimage on the island of Shikoku, Japan, as a solo traveller. And finally he joins a huge gathering of Hassidic Jews celebrating the Jewish new year at the tomb of a mystic rabbi in Ukraine, this time with his father and brother. The trip does not resolve everything, but by the end, he and his father and brother have gone some way towards mending their relationship or at least accepting each other's flaws.

The book is partly a travelogue, but mainly about how the idea and practice of pilgrimage can be meaningful even as a non-believer: it forces you to surrender to an established routine and set of practices that take you away from everyday life and makes you examine your responses to pain, tiredness, other people and your own life. In a way, the longer and more pointless the pilgrimage, the better. That all sounds very worthy, but it is not written in a heavy, soul-searching, self-improvement-type way at all.

It has occurred to me that reading Infinite Jest could be seen as a kind of stationary pilgrimage - anyone who does it is probably doing it not for fun but as an endurance challenge, and it is as much about how you cope and persist as about the book itself. Not as many blisters, perhaps, but the risk of wrist and eye strain from holding the book at a readable angle in bed...

9. A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles

Not a quick read, this one, but a lovely book. Count Alexander Rostov is placed under house arrest in Moscow's premier hotel in the early days of Communist rule - and the book is an account of the life he makes there. It's not a page-turner and the plot is perhaps not the main point, but there is one and I don't want to spoil it so won't reveal details here. The main joy of the book is in the writing; it's like a beautifully turned piece of furniture from the 1930s. And despite its subject matter, it is a happy book; the story of a man who is spared through what is revealed at one point to be a lucky chance, but who also turns what to others would be a prison into a rich and fulfilling life. A book to be savoured.

Barrow's Boys is excellent. Looking at my exploration helf, I'd also recommend:
The Worst Journey in the World - everyone should read this utterly wonderful book
Into the Silence
Touching the Void
Fatal Passage
Cold by Ranulph Fiennes
Franklin by Andrew Lambert
Shackleton by Roland Huntford
Captain Scott's Marvel about the glorious Birdie Bowers

Hound I think the third Alan Johnson is on Kindle monthly deals at the moment

1. Confessions of a Barrister by Russell Winnock I think I had this mixed up with The Secret Barrister when I bought it! I didn’t think it’d be up to much when I saw it was part of a “Confessions of [insert profession]” series of books, but it was really enjoyable. The author is a criminal barrister who writes in an accessible and humorous way, recounting several interesting cases including his first murder trial. A page turner which gave an interesting insight into the court system.

4. Please, Mr Postman - A Memoir by Alan Johnson

This is the second in a series of memoirs by former Labour Home Secretary, Alan Johnson.
I read the first of these, This Boy, when it was released, to much critical acclaim, some years ago. Its sequel, this book, flew under my radar and I picked it up in the library a week ago.
This Boy focuses on Johnson's childhood growing up in west London slums in the 50s and 60s. It's very raw and moving.
Please Mr Postman follows straight on and covers Johnson's marriage, children, move out of London to a council estate in Slough, his early career as a postman and movement towards trade unions and Labour politics.
This isn't as gritty or harrowing
as it's predecessor, Johnson's life improved significantly in his early adulthood. I still found it fascinating and, in some places, quite moving. I enjoyed learning about how the post office worked in the 1960s and 70s, even down to the details about how the mail was hand sorted. I also enjoyed the references to the Britwell estate in Slough where Johnson and his family lived. I myself lived in Slough for a while and I always enjoy books where I am familiar with a place.
It very much reads as the middle of a trilogy though. It's not worth reading, I don't think, if you haven't read the first one, and it ends very abruptly, so now I need to get back to the library to pick up the third one!

I have now finished:

6. Memory Songs- James Cook. This is a memoir about the music of the 70s, 80s and 90s including the author's own band Flamingoes which had moderate success. This book was mostly enjoyable but dragged a bit at times. I thought the concept of 'memory songs', i.e. particular songs which stick in one's mind and are always associated with a particular time and place, could have been developed more thoroughly.

7. Read All About It- Paul Cuddihy. This is another memoir about reading. I particularly liked the parts of the year when the author's reading had a theme, such as his 'month of trilogies' and when he read the entire Booker Prize shortlist.

8. The Boys are Back- Simon Carr. I've read this at least twice before and I think it's lovely, even though the ending is slightly weak. It's the true story of a man navigating his way through single parenthood after his wife dies of cancer. There are some very funny anecdotes in addition to the sad chapters. Unusually, the film is even more delightful than the book: it is rather different, however, as it is set in Australia instead of New Zealand and Oxford.

As usual, I have several other books on the go, but I'm concentrating most on 'The Revenant' by Michael Punke, which is excellent so far.

I am also eying up the Monthly Deals on the Kindle: I've downloaded several samples, so I'll see what catches my imagination the most. Of the monthly deals I've already read, I would particularly recommend 'Back Story' by David Mitchell and 'Long Road from Jarrow' by Stuart Maconie. If there is anyone who hasn't read 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' by Lynne Truss that is, of course, a must!