50 Book Challenge 2019 Part Five

Satsuki, sorry!

Disappointing to hear that about Daisy Jones, Satsuji. It is on my Kindle waiting for a spare indulgent day when I planned to immerse myself in something fun and indulgent. For now, I'm trying to finish off some books I am part way through but with a pause for these two, both of which I galloped through.

64 The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend
DS insisted I read this because it is apparently the funniest book ever. I didn't have the heart to tell him I found it much funnier when I read it 30 years ago (and didn't want to dwell on the fact it has been 30 years!). It has held up remarkably well and is very acute in its observations of teenage life and all its angst. Plus is a very quick easy read. And perhaps it was never intended to be as funny as I found it once upon a time...

65 The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell
Book six in DTTMOT, and the best so far. War has just broken out, Nick is trying to get a commission and his friends carry on with their lives. This has an extended, and very funny, flashback to his childhood, an ageing cult leader and an extremely awkward dinner party. And several of my favourite characters from past books. And Widmerpool! I let out a small whoop of glee when he appeared the first time, in all his ponderous horror.

I am loving these, and each one is funnier and better written and more perfectly formed than the last. I suspect I may not wait until July to read book seven (the plan was one a month in 2019).

@floraloctopus yes it’s like Lord of the Flies, we’re all stranded waiting for the grown-ups to arrive and sort things out.

19. On the Cantatas of J. S. Bach - Vol 1 by Hendrik Slegtenhorts

I was hopeful about this but it turned out to be quite basic, focusing on the lyrics of the cantatas it mentions, and the writing was unbelievably awful. I don't think the author's English is good enough to write a book and suspect that this was a self-published Kindle thing. I'm not a native speaker if English either, but have not put together a sentence this pathetic since my early teens: "To build a continuing relationship with readers of like mind and interests is, because of its importance, what I, as a writer, seek."

It wasn't all bad and there were a few insights I'm glad I read but I'm still not recommending this book.

that sounds simple enough, what could go wrong?!

SatsukiKusakabe Nothing if we were all in charge

With the present political muppets (of all parties) heaven only knows.

[grin]@Piggywaspushed you might be right.

@floraloctopus that sounds simple enough, what could go wrong?!

Thanks @Sadik I had a look and mine doesn’t do BorrowBox but has some sort of equivalent so I’m going to have a go at setting it up.

13. Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I find it hard to rate books like this - on the one hand it was a pleasant enough bit of fun, a beach read kind of a book, and I didn’t have any trouble reading it through in a couple of sittings, however my pervading feeling was that it was a bit silly and not very good really. I love the music and the time period that the book centres on, it is obviously inspired somewhat by Fleetwood Mac (though not the same story) following the ups and downs of a band’s fortunes, whilst also taking look at the personal relationships and fallouts going on behind the music. But the thing for me is that it never got anywhere near as interesting in the book as the real life stories behind big bands like FM, and this was fiction so she could have done what she wanted with the premise, and instead chose one long round of repetitive and low stakes drug-taking interspersed with dodgy songs, jangly bracelets, more drugs, with some drunken non-events and braless almost-shenanigans thrown in and it was disappointing. Although I quite liked the idea of the interview style, and gave her a pass on writing Stevie Nicks quality lyrics, some of the dialogue was cringe-inducing, and it was a bit of a bloodless affair generally for a rock and roll chronicle. The other thing that annoyed me was the amount of attention given to the description of the looks of the female lead singer - I felt it was often more in keeping with a 90s/00s perspective on a female pop star, not the rock singers of the era she was writing about who often did not conform exactly to conventional standards of feminine attractiveness, in quite a deliberate way, so she didn’t feel real at all. Every outfit was lovingly described but they were not particularly of era so not sure what purpose it served. It passed an afternoon or two and got me listening to Rumours again so I shouldn’t be too harsh.

Terpsichore - No I haven't heard David Nott's Desert Island Discs, I will look it up, thanks.

TBH I hadn't heard of David Nott before War Doctor came up as a suggestion from Audible (because I listen to quite a lot of medical memoirs), but I'm very glad I have found out about his work now.

35. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. A reread and the first half left me as bamboozled as a decade ago. I enjoyed the writing but found the text really inaccessible and characters indistinguishable. But something clicked and I fell in love. By the end, well, I haven’t laughed and cried as much in a long time. Flawed female characterisation though.

36. The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris. Very popular novel from last year which does what it says on the tin. I actually didn’t realise this was based on a true story til the epilogue and couldn’t work out why such an interesting story we written so poorly. All we really learn about the protagonist is he loves women and is charming. Turns out it was a screen play first and that’s exactly what it felt like. The most passionate moment was an afterward written by a relative. I don’t think the author came across well and there was so much waffle about her writing experience - she’s also stayed frustratingly quiet on the criticism surrounding the historical inaccuracies. None the less I haven’t read anything about the holocaust in a while and it’s always good to remind yourself of these atrocities.

InMyOwnParticularIdiom did you hear David Nott on Desert Island Discs? It was very moving. Recommended listening if you fancy searching for it in the programme archives.

38. War Doctor - David Nott (Audible)

Memoir of Welsh vascular surgeon David Nott, who has volunteered in many of the war zones of the last 30 years (including Sarajevo, the Congo, Afghanistan and Syria). This is an often harrowing account, with the horrific injuries suffered by children having the greatest impact on Nott and the reader in turn.

He comes across as brave, openly thrill-seeking but also humble, and his dedication to his surgical colleagues in Aleppo was very moving. His efforts to get them out of the besieged city towards the end of the book made for extremely tense listening - these aren't stories where happy endings are guaranteed.

Like the film A Private War (about the journalist Marie Colvin), this has truly deepened my understanding of the inhuman evil of war.

Yes, I also enjoy Sarah Caudwell - she has a lot of fun with gender stereotypes.

Screw, Celia Fremlin was a new find for me last year, and I'm a convert.

Two short ones from the weekend:

69. Worst Case Scenario, by Helen Fitzgerald
Filed under crime fiction, but it's not your run--of-the-mill whodunit. The main character is a criminal justice social worker (as the author herself was), grappling with the menopause, and assigned to supervise a wife-killer who has been taken up by the men's rights movement. It's a pitch-black comedy, turning on a deep irony, and the effect is as jolting as downing a triple espresso in one go - recommended.

70. A Cure for Heartache, Mary Ann Grant
Quite a contrast: a memoir by a Canadian woman about how she coped with the end of her 25-year marriage by spending time in London and on a writer's retreat in France. It has a whiff of a later-life Eat Pray Love. The author is more impressed at the perspicacity of her insights than I am - she describes working in the British Library, portraying herself as thinking and writing and contributing to the wisdom of the ages, while never rising about the banalities of a mindfulness textbook. Innocent vanity aside, it's clearly all very sincere, and she digs up some good quotes from proper writers, so it's not a write-off.

I was listening to the audiobook , although the lie that I read the physical book and was so overwhelmed with du Maurier’s dramatic tension that I had to go and sit in my car to calm down would have been better.

AliasGrape, I really enjoyed Amy and Isabelle too. I did love Olive Kitteridge though - I thought the writing was exceptional.

I haven't updated for a while, despite reading the thread. My last few reads are, in brief:
51. Nora Webster - Colm Toibin
I enjoyed this quiet tale of newly widowed Nora and her children, set in the same Irish world as The Blackwater Lightship, though much earlier, in the 1960s. I liked the way she developed and grew in confidence and became her own person, which was not an easy task for a women in the Ireland of the time.

52. Sea Monsters - Chloe Aridjis
The 80s Mexican goth/alternative scene features in this unusual coming of age story in which the heroine makes bad relationship choices in an uncomfortably relatable teenage manner.

53. Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner
Unlikeable, pretentious American poet lives in Spain on a poetry grant and makes an arse of himself! It was hard to like this but the main character was so admittedly rubbish and flawed that I ended up feeling a little sympathetic.

54. The Gate of Angels - Penelope Fitzgerald
Classic Fitzgerald, understated but rather lovely and includes a ghost story element. Set in a made-up Cambridge college that doesn't allow women, so naturally a love story follows.

55. Do No Harm - Henry Marsh
Much reviewed on here, but I found this to be a fascinating account of the life of a brain surgeon. I remember some posters found him to be arrogant, which I agree he is, but I feel that the job, with all its inherent risks, could only be done by someone with the extreme self-belief and confidence to pick themselves up after making mistakes.

56. Venice Preserved - Thomas Otway
A classic restoration tragedy that I saw at the RSC this week. Death, plots and daggers abound! The stage version I saw set the play in a kind of 1980s blade-runner noir which was fascinating and strange.

57. Forest Dark - Nicole Krauss
I wanted to like this but I found this a slog, despite admiring the sophisticated writing. There are two parallel narratives to this novel, both concerned with Jewishness, Kafka and the notion of metamorphosis. Epstein is an older, successful and wealthy man who casts off his riches and is drawn back to Israel and the desert, and a middle-aged female writer in a failing marriage, who also travels to Israel to find inspiration for her latest novel. I probably missed something here to be honest but it wasn't an easy read.

Thanks for the tip . I may just do that but first will test on colleagues tomorrow although they don't read books

Yes, definitely a thriller. Psychological thriller. That's why Hitchcock loved her so. I do think Du Maurier is an underrated writer.

When you say gripping the steering wheel, I presume you were listening to the audiobook!?

You can start a new thread with spoiler in the title and ask it there Piggy. I preferred My Cousin Rachel to Rebecca too, properly gripping hands on the steering wheel tense I was. Can’t say any other thrillers (would you class it as a thriller?) I’ve read since have come anywhere close to making me feel how that book did.

26. Our House - Louise Candlish
Fiona comes home in a Friday afternoon to find a couple moving in. The only problem is that they’re moving into her house and she didn’t sell it.

This story is told from a few different angles with both characters giving their story of how things happened. It was written very well although I seen a few of the twists coming like we were being led to guess them. Overall a very good read and another off the TBR pile!

35. Olive Kitteridge Elizabeth Strout - I’ve read a lot of Strout this year (well 4 books so maybe not a lot ). This one I think has been well liked by posters on this thread - I’m sorry I can’t remember who now. I was less keen on this, though the writing is once again beautiful. I think I just prefer a fuller/more traditional storyline rather than the ‘loosely connected vignettes’ style. My favourite by this author has definitely been Amy and Isabelle

40. My Cousin Rachel. I have no idea why I haven't read this before : it is exactly the sort of book teenage me would have devoured. My gran had a shelf of books which I pilfered, thereby reading some strange oddities. The two Du Mauriers I read at 14 or so were the rather more obscure Glass Blowers and The House On The Strand.

I enjoyed Rachel although I thought it took a while to get used to Du Maurier's somewhat laboured style. The second half proved to be a proper page turner and its ambiguities are wonderful. I preferred it to Rebecca.

I want to ask a question about the last sentence but it's a mahoosive spoiler so I can't!!

37: Ordinary People - Diana Evans

I wouldn't normally be fussed about reading anything on a prize list but I've been trying to use the library for ebooks recently - via BorrowBox - and their selection isn't great, so I fell on this as one of the few things that looked like a good read (as an aside, it's frustrating not being able to put in a request for things to be added, but hey ho).

Anyway....I really enjoyed this. Quite long and talky but this very denseness was what drew me in. I have a fatal weakness for this kind of person/relationship-centred novel anyway and I liked Diana Evans's writing and the slightly fantastical edge (has South London ever seemed so mysterious and grandiose?). And I loved Ria.

My list so far this year

1.	Crash
2.	At the Wedding
3.	Bitter 
4.	Little Fires Everywhere 
5.	The Shut Eye
6.	A little life
7.	The Surrogate
8.	The Hunting Party
9.	Station 11
10.	The Facts about Life and Death
11.	Dear Mrs Bird
12.	Another Love
13.	Rubbernecker 
14.	Let me lie
15.	The seven deaths of Evelyn hardcastle
16.	The Silent Child

The last two are current and I just started a thread on Evelyn Hardcastle, anyone read it?

My faves in here have been the Belinda Bauer ones, so Snap, Rubber Necker, Facts about Life and Death.

I am also about the embark on all things Ian Rankin...

Am probably behind on book news compared to many on this thread, but did we all know Jessie Burton has a new book coming out in September?

35. To Throw Away Unopened – Viv Albertine

Before I started reading and posting on this thread, I read very little non-fiction and never read memoirs. I’m happy to say I’ve discovered that I love a good memoir, and have picked up many great recommendations from my fellow 50 bookers. This is most definitely a brilliant example of the genre, and a book I would never even have considered reading if it weren’t for this thread.

The writer intersperses a moving and detailed account of the last moments of her Mother’s life with ruminations on her own life as a middle aged ex-punk and sections covering a childhood spent surviving the ugly and painful breakdown of her parents’ marriage from both her Mother and her father’s perspective, and how this has formed her own character and made her who she is. But it’s so much more than that. She’s so brutally honest about who she is, her own weaknesses and shortcomings, I finished the book liking her very much and admiring her for not only being able to take such brutal stock of herself, but to do so with such kindness and compassion.

This is also a very funny book. I particularly liked the section about the painstaking preparations she makes before a date, including meticulous hair removal, salon blow dry, new underwear. As a fellow hairy woman, she definitely struck a chord with me. Her determination to stand up for herself in public places also stood out, and I found myself nodding along to these bits. I find that as I head into middle age, I am no longer willing to surrender my right to space in the world and fade into the background, as society seems to expect. One of my favourite reads of the year so far – thanks to everyone who bought this one to my attention.

I have been off this thread so long it had fallen off my list... I have been reading, but there has so much other stuff going on that I haven't got round to doing reviews, so I will just do some brief catch-ups.

I'm happy to see other people also enjoying Jenny Erpenbeck. I just read Go, Went, Gone (see below), and also read The End of Days last year. I think I have The Old Child and The Book of Words on my shelf waiting to be read.

28 Midlife: a Philosophical Guide - Kieran Setiya
Brief guide to the midlife crisis, from a philosopher going through it. Basically ends up recommending something akin to mindfulness. Worth reading but not exactly revolutionary and life changing.

29 Alone Time - Stephanie Rosenbloom
Travel writer for the New York Times on the pleasures of solo travel, in particular spending time alone in four cities (Paris, Florence, Istanbul, New York). Also ended up being about a sort of mindfulness, in a way - 'savouring' and enjoying being in the moment.

30 Pachinko - Min Jin Lee
A multi-generational story of a Korean family in Japan, spanning most of the 20th century, written by a Korean American novelist, and touching on themes of prejudice, belonging, resilience. A very good book; my only frustration was that it covered so much time and so many people that often you had just got to know a character when they were killed off in a historically accurate but seemingly perfunctory way.

31 In Praise of Shadows - Junichiro Tanizaki
Classic short treatise on Japanese aesthetics by one of Japan's great literary figures of the 20th century.

32 Go, Went, Gone - Jenny Erpenbeck
Retired Berlin professor gets to know a group of African asylum seekers as actual people. He has lived through the end of WWII and the upheavals of the cold war and afterwards, so (oddly, unlike many of his compatriots) can empathise with them as not undeserving 'others' but complicated victims and survivors of events outside their control, like many Europeans in the 20th century. No one is perfect in this book, but everyone is human.

33 How To Live - Vincent Deary
Another sort of midlife-crisis book, this time by a psychotherapist. Its main theme is how most of the time we live 'automatically', almost literally creatures of habit, until change forces us to adopt new habits and patterns of life; he suggests taking conscious charge of that process and thinking more about what we want to become automatic in our lives.

34 Vertigo - Joanna Walsh
A book of short stories which reminded me why I rarely read short stories: I find them very unsatisfying. These were good in their way - sketches of unhappy women and restless marriages, playing with forms you could not sustain for a whole novel, such as starting every sentence with "Let..." - but always vague and inconclusive, leaving no coherent impression. Maybe I should not have read the whole book at once but tried doing it a story at a time, to give them space to sink in individually.

18. Tombland (Shardlake #7) by C. J. Sansom

I love this historical crime fiction series about a hunchback lawyer in Tudor England, and this book did not disappoint although it could have been a lot shorter than 880 pages.

This time, Shardlake is charged by 16-year-old Elizabeth to find out the truth about her distant relative Boleyn who is going to be tried for the murder of his first wife who had been missing for 9 years but is recently found dead on his property. Investigations lead to Shardlake and his companions getting caught up in Kett's rebellion.

It was an interesting in verbose story, with good suspense and vivid characters. I enjoyed learning about life in Tudor England and this rebellion. This was a worthy sequel to all the other Shardlake books. Recommended.