50 Book Challenge 2019 Part Five

Is there a Kindle summer sale or similar? I can't see anything on the Amazon site but there suddenly seems to be a lot of cheap books listed on EreaderIQ, and they weren't there this morning.

I fell off the thread! My reading has been non existent the last few weeks really, partly because I use the library BorrowBox app on my iPad and was using it to read Hotel World by Ali Smith when my iPad died and now I’ve just got it up and running the loan has expired and I have to reserve and wait again, plus my audiobook just wasn’t working for me (A Time Travellers Guide to Elizabethan England - just couldn’t maintain attention). And also, please don’t throw me off the thread, but my usual reading slot once I get in bed has been taken up by catching up with Love Island. I’m suitably ashamed.

I’ve got The Hangman’s Daughter on the go on my kindle which was one of those free ‘read around the world’ books Amazon did back in April, but it’s not gripping me.

Tanaqui thanks for the Temeraire series spreading tip. After I finished Throne of Jade I had decided pretty much the same, to save them for reading ruts of despondency or for episodes of ill health. Napoleonic warfare dragons will be just the ticket.

Satsuki wow that sentence really is a doozy. at Stitches Cheshire Cat boobs smile image.

My reading has ground to a pitiful trickle by way of Stephen King and a student. Started listening to 11:22:63 at the start of June, my first King I think I’ve read, but have had a blooming student all month who has required talking to and teaching in the car between patient visits thus severely cramping my listening capacity. Urgh! So inconsiderate of her. I’m enjoying this story so much but still have eight hours left. Can’t remember the last time it took over a month to listen to one book. Will almost certainly be asking for (non-horror) King recommendations after I finish this one.

Loving the beasts, Tanaqui!!!

Is it wierd that I now keep looking at my own beasts?!

39. The Bane Chronicles by Cassandra Clare and others. I've been watching Shadowhunters on Netflix (lots of cute boys, totally age inappropriate, entertaining drivel) so felt like revisiting the books; but I found the main novels rather dull. This short story collection has a couple of lovely lighthearted moments, but doesn't stand on its own.

Just came on 're My Sister but late to the party. Have bought.

Just noticed that My Sister the Serial Killer is in Kindle Daily Deals today.

Catching up as have been reading and running.
71 Expectations-Anna Hope This is a ARC - out 11th July I think. I read Wake By the same author years ago and it has really stuck with me. This is a group of women , mid to late 30's who have been friends for years. It is very much an observational novel, we find them at a cross roads in their lives re evaluating what has happened to them and making choices about their next steps. It isn't plot heavy but it does really concentrate on the feelings and motivations of character. Hope is extremely skilled at drawing individual portraits. Someone made a comparison the other day to Sally Rooney, but I personally found Rooney's characters dreary and self obsessed, these characters were far more relatable and I guess likeable. They were also nearer to my own age. Would say look out for it.
72. Tigers Child - Torey Hayden Book club read. A real life tale of working with a damaged child. Author is self obsessed and holier and than thou .
73.Bitter Orange - Claire Fuller. I thought this was excellent. Have read her previous two and thought they were ok. This one was very clever. We meet Frances Jellico as she is looking back to a fateful summer in her life. A summer when she was working and living a Bohemian life in a dilapidated mansion with a young and evocative couple. Recommend

53. Artemis by Andy Weir

Basically about a heist on the moon.
It’s a fairly lightweight read, especially compared to The Martian , but overall I enjoyed reading it.

Enjoying the quivering breasts and straining fabric immensely.

Loving the breast counting. I'm listening to Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks, and can happily report not a single case of breasts, male or female. (Voice, skin, hair - and in one case fur - colour, religion and political views are all described, but no breasts)

stitches yes - what is it supposed to mean?! I can’t imagine someone reading that back and thinking “yep, that’s staying”

Yy to 3.5 ratings too.

whippet I hadn’t seen your post when I wrote mine - rudimentary is the word of the day.

nowanearlynicemum I actually think no, it didn’t.

biblio I will accept the dubious honour as recompense for my ordeal. I don’t think it was even the worst one. He described nipples like “grapes” a page or two after. I’d be seeing my GP. Or the greengrocer.

16. Words Best Sung by Lee Stuart Evans

This is about Alistair. It’s the 60s. He’s bright, has a beautiful girlfriend and is working in his beloved railway while he decides whether he wants to go to university or settle down with the girl. Meanwhile, he follows his friends band around and gets in with the music scene he loves, and wistfully explores a bittersweet connection with his childhood sweetheart. It started ok, a humourous coming of age tale of family, friendship, music and romance, but I was actually pretty disgusted with it by the end. It was like boob bingo from halfway in, I was calling them out to my husband “more nipples! More straining fabric!” and if it had been an overall lighthearted fun read then ok, but it was interspersed with other, pretty terrible sexism and then, worse, random thoughts of violence toward almost every woman that crossed the protagonist’s path. The women “clip clop” around giggling, but if they show any agency of their own he will imagine slapping the “sluts” or choking them or other charming acts completely out of place in the type of book it was and with no real reason for it to be there. Awful. His girlfriend asks if he will see other girls when he goes away for the weekend and he angrily envisions strangling her and leaving her bloated corpse to float down the nearby river. I think this was a rudimentary attempt at humour. He then tells her a creepy story of a murder while she pleads with him to stop. He only does these things “because he loves her so much”. Her tights come down and they make amends. Another girl sexually propositions him and he has to restrain himself from smacking her across the face. He accuses his childhood friend of prostitution and the very thought of this is enough to make him treat her with such violence it had a lot in common with attempted rape. And yet, we are clearly meant to be rooting for this guy and his choices and his happy ending (of all varieties). Weird.

62. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
I was rather meh about this to be honest. Kya is known as the Marsh Girl. Abandoned by her family as a young child, she has learned to live on the fringes of society in the South Carolina inlets and marshes building up an astonishing relationship with the natural world around her. This book has been likened to Barbara Kingsolver, but I disagree. Whereas I find Kingsolver to be insightful literary fiction, I found this to be a light, easy and sometimes pleasing but oftentimes cliched and implausible fiction. Good holiday reading material perhaps.

FYI, breasts were not prominent literally or figuratively.

63. Lanny - Max Porter
Better than the above, but another book that missed the mark for me. How I wish I could rate 3.5 on Goodreads as this is a definite 3.5'er. Lanny lives in an English village with his ex-actress turned author mother and London-commuter father. Dead Papa Toothwort also lives there, a kind of village spirit/guardian/devil who listens to everyone and everything. The first section of the novel is set from the point of view of Lanny's parents and friends and is punctuated by the musings of Dead Papa Toothwort who listens to the fragments of conversations, which are written in swirling typeface across the pages. The story is about what happens to Lanny over a few days but is also a commentary on the history of England and what is happening now to the country in its current unsettled times. Goodish, and has a lot to say, but not quite right for me somehow. They loved it on Backlisted though - it's mentioned at the start of one of the episodes.

Breast count was rudimentary.

Satsuki that sentence has left me imagining a woman fading away like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland... only with her breasts being the last thing vanishing rather than her smile!

Yes, Bilgewater is a great book Biblio - and better than this one, I have to say. As is A Long Way From Verona.

Sounds reminiscent of Bilgewater, also by Jane Gardam, which was one of my favourite books as a teenager, Terp

I had no idea your love was so contingent, Remus

Speaking of which, Satsuki, ding, ding, ding, we have a new contender, straight to the top of the Breast Obsessed leaderboard. That is a deeply disturbing image.

Gobbled up Hard Pushed: A Midwife's Tale, by Leah Hazard. It's the latest addition to the recent crop of healthcare memoirs, and the standard across the board has been very high - there's a strong sense of integrity about them, as the authors have passionately-held views. I've always rather fancied the idea of myself as a doctor or nurse (or indeed midwife), swooping in with calm competence to deal with an emergency. The author lays bare what it feels like behind that professional mask, the sick feeling of anxiety you feel walking into the hospital. I knew things were in a bad way, but was still shocked that most of the midwives she knows are reliant on ADs/beta blockers to get them through. So unfair for dedicated, hard-working people to be put in impossible situations (knowing they stand to be blamed personally if things go wrong). Definitely worth the read.

I'm starting to feel a bit left out on the breast front - they never seem to get a mention in any of the books I read

Anyway...... 42: The Flight of the Maidens - Jane Gardam

Coming-of-age novel set in 1946. Hetty, Una, and German refugee Liselotte have all won scholarship places at university and in their last summer at home in their small Northern town, they grapple with family, relationships and the changes that lie ahead.

I like Jane Gardam's books and read this with pleasure for its flashes of comic brilliance and some beautiful descriptive writing. I suspect a lot of it was very autobiographical (she was the same age, in the same place, at the same time), but ultimately it's a bit meandering and in places becomes weirdly dream-like, especially in a passage where Lieselotte, the German refugee, goes to America at the invitation of a long-lost aunt. I would have liked her story to be more developed, but frustratingly it rather peters out at the end, whereas the other two girls are brought more sharply into focus.
Still, I liked this overall. A pleasant but not outstanding addition to the list.

Oh heavens satsuki!!! Sending you, or rather the author, a cold shower... and possibly registering him on a writing course!!?? That's a bloody awful sentence. I'm assuming there are other redeeming elements of the book...

I’m reading Words Best Sung and oh god the perkiness! Perkiness on every page. It’s too late for me but save yourselves. I’ve just read this “leaving the image of her breasts trembling like two perfectly set jellies hanging in the uncomfortable silence”. Send help!!!!!!

Remus

I have also just read Convenience Store Woman and agree that it's a very odd little book.

Also 70. Cartwheel by Jennifer duBois

American study abroad student returns to her apartment in Buenos Aires to find her roommate brutally murdered. She is arrested the next day. There are rumours both girls were in a love triangle with the next door neighbour. The time frame shifts back and forth from before and after the murder and is told from the POVs of the student, her father, the next door neighbour and the public prosecutor

This is supposed to be loosely inspired by the Amanda Knox case in Italy but apparently is an exact rip off of events according to many outraged people on Goodreads. I only vaguely remember it in the news but if you know a lot of the details then it allegedly spoils the book. The author is slammed for using pretentious vocab, but I can't say this stood out in the audio version. It wasn't very fast moving but quite compelling.

Biblio - so glad you liked Darkness. It would have been a real shame to lose you from the threads.