50 Book Challenge 2019 Part Five

I loved wild swans when I read it in my teens. Might still have a copy around somewhere.

I liked Wild Swans. But I was at an impressionable age and biased because she was at my uni.

How's your reading slough of despond Remus? You might like warlight : it passes your well written test.

Also Wild Swans is £1.99. I thought it was really badly written and boring, but lots of people, including my dp, have loved it.

The Passage is 99p in the summer sale. The best of the series, imho, and worth a read.

Warlight : Michael Ondaatje. I think someone else reviewed this a while back. It's a really delicately written, almost ethereal book (Blake Morrison called it 'crepuscular' which I rather like) about the underworld of the war and its aftermath, carried on in 'warlight'. The motif of light is used throughout the book but there are also themes of memory, deception, love, childhood and abandonment. Ondaatje's style is quite similar to McEwan's , Atkinson's (in her war books) and , perhaps Faulks. But I would say I preferred this to Atkinson : it's subtler and less plot driven and I am not a fan of Faulks (breasts everywhere!). Ondaatje uses dialogue more sparingly than McEwan but has that same playing with truth and reality thematic concern. I never could get through The English Patient, even though I adore the film, but did like Anil's Ghost. This was not as interesting but an easier read.

30. Finders Keepers by Belinda Bauer. Police procedural set in Exmoor, where children are being snatched from their cars. This was okay. I didn't find the detectives (Reynolds and Rice) particularly engaging.

Yes, the summer sale isn't great (and I agree, it's almost impossible to find, so thanks for the link upthread), but I did come across Patrick deWitt's latest, French Exit, for a little over £1.

Summer sale is disappointing. I've never seen so many books I have no desire to read.

Read Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams. A young black woman casts a caustic eye over hook-up culture and the joys or otherwise of family ties in London. It's been likened to Bridget Jones, but I found it much bleaker, more like Fleabag in its portrayal of a damaged young woman having grim sex as a kind of self-harm. Also like Fleabag, I wouldn't say I found it funny, but it was quite compelling in its own way, with a distinctive voice.

Also read In the Dark and No Way Out by Cara Hunter, books two and three in her Oxford-set police procedural series. The second one was fine, with the compulsory twist at least shedding a new light on events. I disliked the third: the twist was fairly pointless and there was a gratuitous scene late in the book when a young boy woke up in his burning house and it was all pretty horrible.

Finally, This Secret Garden, Oxford Revisited, by Justin Cartwright Non-fiction in which the writer recounts his fondness for the city, or rather the university. Sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph it's all fine, but it doesn't really add up to much overall. Some anecdotes about his wide-eyed arrival as a young colonial, Some Academics I Have Known, Whither the Tutorial System? and some fairly superficial musing on the challenges of widening participation beyond social elites.

26. Melmoth by Sarah Perry (audiobook)
A multi-layered novel in which Melmoth, a ghostly figure dating back to the time of the crucifixion, stalks those haunted by loneliness and suffering. The most complete narrative is of Helen, a British woman in self-imposed exile in Prague. There she meets an academic, Karel, who has put together a dossier of original sources of Melmoth’s likely appearances through history, which make up further narrative strands. Gorgeously written (and gorgeously read by Emilia Fox), this had a similarly delicious gothic atmosphere as The Essex Serpent. However I didn’t feel that the structure worked brilliantly, and it left me wanting more exploration particularly of the modern day Prague characters and their relationships.

27. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
Inspector Grant is laid up in hospital with a broken leg. To ease his bored he begins to read about Richard III and the fate of the Princes in the Tower. He begins to piece together various bits of evidence that begin to suggest that perhaps Richard was not responsible for their disappearance after all. I enjoy Tudor/Plantagenet history, and detective fiction, so thought this would be right up my street. I was bored to be honest – not enough history to show anything new, and not detectivey enough to succeed on that front through. I might get my 12 year old to read it though, as they’re covering historial bias at the moment, and it would probably serve as a good introduction there.

119. The Bronte Cabinet by Deborah Lutz

Exploring aspects of the Bronte’s lives by taking objects they owned and using those to look at their hobbies and lifestyles. Interesting although if you have already read a lot about the Bronte’s you probably won’t learn anything new about them. However Lutz also explains how things fitted into wider society at the time which I found interesting.

Thanks Southeast

Thanks to the readers on this thread for many great recommendations

-May-
31) Vox by Christina Dalcher
32) City of Thieves by David Benioff
33) Murder in Mind (Hillary Greene #16) by Faith Martin
dnf The House by the River by Lena Manta
34) An American Princess by Annet van der Zijl
35) Hillary's Final Case (Hillary Greene #17) by Faith Martin
36) Twelve Red Herrings by Jeffery Archer
37) Gentle Sleep Book by Sarah Ockwell Smith
38) Closed Circles (Sandham Murders 2) by Vivica Sten
39) A Fatal Mistake by Faith Martin
40) Educated by Tara Westover
41) The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
42) Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reed
-June----
Dnf :The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu
43) Sleep by CL Taylor
44) The Palace of Lost Memories (After The Rift Book 0) by C. J. Archer
45) The Last by Hanna Jameson
Dnf The Corset by Laura Purcell
46) Transcription by Kate Atkinson
47) The Lost Man by Jane Harper

Second part of the books I've read so far this year. Great ones are in bold. Awful ones are in italics

Anyone got a link for the Kindle summer sale? I am struggling to find it. I know that sounds daft, but it's true!!
Not that I need anymore books

Any recommendations from the kindle summer sale. I picked up Elly Griffiths stand-alone The stranger diaries for 99p.

Welcome ladypenelope and challenge

Welcome myreadingchallenge

Hi, Challenge.

Current status = reading Philip Kerr's latest Bernie Gunther, Metropolis which was published posthumously. Enjoying it so far, although, as with some of the previous ones, I think some of his dialogue is a bit clunky and unbelievable. People tend to talk in 'speeches', rather than dialogue. I'll be sad to say goodbye to these.

Welcome aboard MyReadingChallenge, we're a friendly lot here but you may find yourself acquiring books at a frightening rate

I've just finished a couple more in double quick time (thankfully, one on Kindle and one from BorrowBox):

43: L'Appart - The Delights and Disasters of Making my Paris Home - David Lebovitz

I'm a big fan of David L's blog - he's an American chef (ex-Chez Panisse) living in Paris, and writes very engagingly on food and on his adopted city. This book includes some droolworthy recipes while recounting the horror story of his odyssey to buy, and then renovate, an apartment in Paris, during which process he was ripped off royally by just about everyone he encountered (with some honourable exceptions, including his boyfriend Romain, who had to come to the rescue more than once). As someone who's had their fair share of rogue buildersto contend with, I came out in a cold sweat more than once at the hair-raising events recounted here, but this is meant to be a light and fun read and mostly it is (assuming you haven't been traumatised as well).

44: My Sister the Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite

Another quick read. I really enjoyed this, although it wasn't entirely the comedy I'd somehow been expecting. It's much darker and more nuanced. Unfortunately it peters out towards the end and I felt wasn't quite an unqualified success, but I'm looking forward to reading more by this author.

Ah @FortunaMajor I bet it was your recommendation that made me wishlist The River, I think I had it on my TBR before I even realised it was by the same author as Celine.

Welcome @MyReadingChallenge!

Hope it isn’t too late to join but I’m aiming to read a book a week for the rest of the year after going on a bit of a reading hiatus since my son was born.

So far since I’ve started my “challenge” with

The Lonely City - Olivia Laing
Normal People - Sally Rooney
The Handmaids Tale - Margaret Attwood
Celestial Bodies - Jokha Alharthi
Heartburn - Nora Ephron

Really enjoyed all except Celestial Bodies - really wanted to love it but I found it boring with too many characters.

Next on the reading list is The Baroness by Hannah Rothschild.

Ladypenelope thank you. Glad you enjoyed it.
I like to write but think it might be a stretch to all me an author. I did write a children's book a long time ago and self published on Kindle. I wrote it for my nieces. I have aspirations to write a story set in the Fens but time is always against me. Teaching full time and 4 DC and just life. Maybe one day.
Fortuna I really enjoyed The State of Wonder

I read The River earlier this year, I thought it was very very good.

I had to abandon The Book of Night Women by Marlon James at around the 100 page mark. I had wanted to read it for ages, but I wasn't in the mood for it.

I am listening to The State of Wonder by Ann Patchett at the moment and really enjoying it. I've started using the Pocketbook app and have discovered that x1.3 is the perfect speed and it has a sleep timer so I don't wake up to spoilers in the middle of the night.

So many good suggestions from here recently that I have the Tower of Babel going on in the lounge - Books Amassed Beyond Expected Lifetime. I think I seriously need to go digital before I have an unfortunate crushing accident and get eaten by an Alsatian.

I have bought Common People.
Splother your blog is excellent, are you an author?