50 Book Challenge 2019 Part Five

Although I enjoyed both the final Strike and Shardlake books they could both have done with some serious editing

31. The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble.

I really liked this book. Candida Wilton, a recently divorced middle aged lady, moves to London and gets on with her life. It reminded me of Siri Hustveld’s The Summer without Men written with wit and dry observation of everyday life and relationships/friendships of women in their middle age. Quietly readable.

32. Regeneration by Pat Barker.
(Audible)

A fiction, although based on some true facts, predominantly set in Craiglockhart Psychiatric Hospital during WW1 where soldiers with psychiatric illnesses caused by the war are sent. The book deals with this and the various treatments and attitudes of the time. This is my second Pat Barker book and I admire how she manages to convey emotion in an understated and convincing way. A moving book and excellent narration by Peter Firth.

Akala's Natives is 99p in the new batch of monthly deals. Well worth it - my review is up this thread 😊

I liked Strike AND Shardlake. Lethal White was far better than the second Strike though - that was pretty dire. Yes to them being at least a third too long though.

I didn't make it past the first Strike book, which I absolutely hated, so yes I would choose on every occasion to spend some quality time with an under edited Shardlake and his pals than to ever again read anything by JK.

Canterbury Absolutely right.

Agree that Tombland substantially better than Lethal White but it could definitely have used some culling.

I have to say the Shardlake book is infinitely better than the Strike one.

I only read the first Strike book (and can't remember what it was called, it made such an impression on me) but I do remember muttering to myself about JK's editors being scared to tell a National Treasure she needs to aim for "200 fewer pages" in every bloody thing she wrote after The Chamber of Secrets.

Remus - We do agree on the books we hate, just not on the ones we like

Yes, it was awful. I just don't care about Strike's stump. I really don't. It adds nothing to the story or to the character. It feels like a stupid decision to make the detective an amputee, just to make him speshial.

Cote - It's awful, isn't it?

This was my review:

Well, I’m afraid I thought this was terrible. I really like Strike – I care about him and want him to be happy – but do I care enough to keep investing in huge novels (this one was almost 700 pages when 350 would have done) that are both boring and badly written? Probably not. The plot was really slight, the characters two dimensional (even Robin and Strike) and some of the grammar was bloody awful. There’s a limit to how many times I can cope with Strike limping or caressing his stump, and a limit to how many times I can cope with Robin and Matthew hurling the same insults at each other. Tedious. I’m out.

17. Lethal White (Cormoran Strike #4) by J K Rowling Robert Galbraith

This was long-winded, pretentious, dull, pointless crap. Fuck all happens in the first 18% or so, where the reader suffers endless ruminations on how Strike & Robin pine for each other and how Strike finds it hard to walk because, don't you know, he doesn't have half a leg. It's all very boring chic lit and yet another example of a woman author being unable to write a murder mystery without fucking whining about feeeeeeliiiingssss.

I would have found it hard to forgive J K Rowling for the first 1/5 even if the rest were excellent but it was dull, slow, and often slowed down even further with inexplicable diversions into everyone's love lives.

Utterly pointless Ibsen quotes at the start of each chapter just made it worse.

If anyone is wondering, I'm not recommending this tosh.

Bringing my list over (Highlights in bold- as you can see, the year started well, not had a real page turner for weeks)

1) This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay
2) Paper Aeroplanes by Dawn O’Porter
3) The Glass menagerie by Tennessee Williams
4) Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler
5) Endurance by Alfred Lancing
6) Lord of the Flies by William Golding
7) Animal Farm by George Orwell
8) Hagseed by Margaret Attwood
9) Tin Man by Sarah Winman
10) Heartstone by CJ Sansom
11) The Light Between Oceans by ML Steadman
12) Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
13) Weird Thing People say in Bookshops
14) Educated by Tara Westover
15) Llywbrau Cul by Mared Lewis
16) Lamentation by CJ Sansom
17)Jane Seymour -The Haunted Queen by Alision Weir
18)The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne
19) 12 babies on a bike by Dot May Dunn
20) Everything I Never told you by Celeste Ng
21)Becoming Michelle Obama
22) Elizabeth II – The Life of a Monarch
23) A Month in the Country by JL Carr
24) The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend
25) Eighty Days around the World by Michael Palin
26) The Librarian Salley Vickers
27) Mortal Engines by Phillip Reeve
28) Notes from a Big Country by Bill Bryson
29) Artemis by Andy Weir

30)Just William by Richmal Crompton
This was a real nostalgia trip for me as my mum is a huge William fan and I have lots of childhood memories of having bits of these stories being read aloud and laughing about them.
I think the stories have dated a bit, for example having a maid and a cook in the house, but William's unshakable logic and eloquence when he is trying to navigate the bewildering adult world of rules and expectations is still funny and excellent writing.

An easy, comfortable read.

31)Small Island by Andrea Levy
This is the story of Hortense and Gilbert, a newly married couple from Jamaica whose migrate to the UK after the end of WWII, and their white landlady Queenie who befriends them.
I thought it would be the story of a young Jamaican couple and their experiences as they try to make their way in post war Britain, but there was actually very little of this.
There was a lot of back story of childhoods, which were marginally interesting but not really relevant, and then a lot about Queenie's husband Bernard during the war.
It was an easy read but really didn't hold my interest in the early part of the book and it was a bit of a chore. It did pick up a bit but not enough to make it the great read about the Windrush generation I was looking for.

32)Take Six Girls by Laura Thompson
I have read quite a lot of historical books on 20th Century British history and royalty as this period fascinates me, this seemed like a logical next read and while I was vaguely familiar with the Mitford name I really didn't know that much about them.

As the title suggests, six sisters - Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Jessica, Unity and Deborah, all from a privileged, now disappeared world of country houses, governesses and society parties. As the didn't go to school, they grew up almost solely in each others company and their strange insular relationships were well documented through letters.
All of them became remarkable in their own way - Nancy was a well known novelist, Diana was married to the massively wealthy heir to the Guiness empire but left him for Oswald Mosely the leader of the British Fascists and spent most of WWII in Holloway Prison, Jessica joined the Communists, Unity was friends with Hitler and shot herself in the head the day war broke out, Deborah became the Duchess of Devonshire and restored Chatsworth.

It was an interesting read, but found it difficult to follow as the timelines jumped around so much and it was not always clear which sister the author was talking about at any given time.
Would read more about the Mitfords though, interesting family.

24 My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
25 Two Girls Down by Louisa Luna
26 The Heavens by Sandra Newman

Dh bought me Two Girls Down because it had been promoted to him as featuring 'a female Jack Reacher.' It does have an interesting kick-ass heroine, who we probably look forward to hearing more about in subsequent stories. Whether "Women want to be her, men want to be with her" would apply across the board I think would be in doubt, but book does have an endorsement from Lee Child on the cover. The plot concerns the female PI looking for two missing girls, she is helped along by an ex cop and the story contains lots and lots of following up leads and clues one step ahead of the police.

The Heavens is more unusual. It is an intricately crafted account of the life of a woman who may or may not be a time traveller, or may or may not be a lunatic. I only enjoyed it a medium amount, and I found a GoodReads review that put the finger on why - the parts set in modern New York are just better than the parts set in Elizabethan London. That aside, it has a really unusual flavour and atmosphere and is certainly worth a look.

Finished The House on Vesper Sands, by Paraic O'Donnell. Supernatural crime fiction in a Victorian Gothic setting. On the whole I rather enjoyed it. A few too many characters, which means that some are left with too little to do, including the seamstress in the opening chapter whose whole purpose is to leave an interesting corpse, but overall it was engaging enough to keep me going.

Also read Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good, by James Davies. The name tells you all - its about the poor empirical basis for psychiatric diagnoses, the distortion of research by Big Pharma, and weak curative powers of anti-depressants. Interesting as a polemic, and he makes valid points, but I felt that it lacked balance and nuance. If anti-depressants rely almost entirely on the placebo effect, why are some drugs more effective than others for individuals?

Good news - you don't have to drum me out of the regiment, as I've started This Thing of Darkness and so far I like it. It reminds me a lot, for unsubtle reasons, of the Patrick O'Brian Master and Commander series.

Underland is on my kindle waiting to be read, my son's reading it at the moment but has the real book. I've bought The Lost Words (books bought to use in school don't count as expenditure do they?!) but am busy lesson planning at the moment so am reading up on Northern Ireland and trying to think of inspiration for young children.

I'm reading a Lesley Pearce book in bed for light relief.

21. Underland - Robert Macfarlane

An interruption to my Top 50 rereads schedule, as I needed a Kindle book for a trip away - and I'm very pleased I made the break. This is his best book yet, I think - an absolutely fascinating exploration of our relationship with the world below our feet, from deep cave systems to the fungal 'Wood Wide Web' that connects trees, via prehistoric cave paintings and storage sites for radioactive waste. It's also terrifying on the impact humans have made on the underground environment in our short time on the planet. Anyway this is highly recommended.

Museum - I'm reading the latest Shardlake book Tombland now, as well

Ham Shardlake

23. Contact by Carl Sagan A classic sci-fi novel written in the early 80s. A message begins arriving from space before the turn of the millennium. This mainly follows the story of one scientist through her backstory and involvement in this. It is focussed on how the message affects people on earth. We learn almost nothing about the race that sent it, and seems more a vehicle to work through the hot issues of the day at the time of publication than to explore the 'contact' of the title. I probably would have loved this if I'd read it back in the 80s but it didn't feel that relevant now.

24. Hidden Depths by Ann Cleeves Vera #3. Vera's idiosyncratic character is really starting to come through in this one. As usual with Ann Cleeves, there's a big cast of characters with a tangled web of possible suspects and motivations, I'm enjoying the ride, then when the actual reveal happens, I'm left a bit underwhelmed and unconvinced by their particular supposed motivation. Minor criticism though, I'll definitely continue reading these.

25. Tombland by CJ Samson It was long. Shardlake is asked to investigate a murder in Norfolk. He rides around Norfolk a lot. His back hurts often - he mentions it often. He is caught up with some revolting peasantry which has been thoroughly researched and every word of that research must be used. I would have welcomed an intervention by elves at this point. Several hundred pages later, he remembers he is investigating a murder, and solves it. I quite enjoyed this when I was reading it in a kind of meditative way, i.e. immersing myself in Shardlake's world, which Sansom writes beautifully, rather than for plot. It was still a bit of a slog though.

26. Affinity by Sarah Waters The kind of Victorian titillation that Sarah Waters does best. With a theme of spiritualism and the setting of a woman's prison how can she go wrong really? Add in a narrator who is an impressionable, mentally unstable, bored and stifled rich young woman and you just watch in horror as this leads to its natural conclusion. Not as great a book as Fingersmith, but cast in the same mould.

42. Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

Not what I expected at all, largely because it was very short - a novella rather than a novel. I would have known this if I'd bothered looking it up beforehand! It's hard to know how to describe this book - a mix between free-form, normal prose and sort-of poetry, it is written from the point of view of the husband/father, his sons and Crow, the author's own version of Ted Hughes' Crow, following the death of the wife/mother. Crow is an imagined/mythical creature who cares for the family whilst they are "hopeless" (rather than grieving, which the author points out goes on forever) in his own very particular way. Some parts (principally the parts written in Crow's voice, although I found some of those bits very compelling), left me a bit cold, but the father and sons' parts felt very real and visceral, whilst at the same time being slightly other-worldly. Perhaps that is how grief can be characterised. Beautifully written and made me think - and cry.

In case anyone's watching Gentleman Jack on BBC1 at the moment, Sally Wainwright and Anne Choma's companion book to the series, including extracts from Anne Lister's diaries, is 99p on Kindle today.

I'm reading Lister's diaries at the moment, review to follow shortly (once I've got Moby Dick out of the way for my book group!)

Remus

18. The Siege by Helen Dunmore - really enjoyed it although I wasn't convinced by the main character or the episodic nature of the story. I find it quite strange actually how much I enjoyed it despite those faults (in my humble opinion obviously!)

19. The Dreams of Bethany Melmonth by William Boyd - I love William Boyd but didn't really like this; short stories just aren't my thing I think. I also found Bethany (protagonist of the main story) a very unconvincing character, dare I say that I am skeptical of the ability of an older man to write a young girl convincingly?

Sea - yes. I've just finished it. It got worse and worse in the second half and by the end, I think she was even boring herself. Poor.

Rosenshine’s Principles In Action : Tom Sherrington.This is a really short and user friendly introduction to and summary of Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction , which are gaining traction in UK schools (although, personally, I baulk at the word 'instruction’ in my old fashioned progressive way, perhaps!) , largely coupled with a knowledge curriculum agenda. None of Rosenshine appears to be rocket science to me, but the book is short, accessible, has useful tips and would definitely, definitely be useful to anyone who is starting out in teaching, wants to refresh their practice , or wants to update themselves on current pedagogical trends. As a bonus, the main body of the book is only 50 pages! Tom Sherrington trained as physics teacher but covers a good range of subjects and writes clearly and engagingly. A bit overpriced at present for such a short book at £8.99.

No elves as a bonus.