50 Book Challenge 2019 Part Five

Is the Michele Paver "Wakenhyrst" Remus? I had an ARC and also found it tedious. Good premise but it all just dissapated as the story wore on.

whippetwoman read some Josephine Tey! It has really cheered me up!

I've really enjoyed reading all the reviews recently. I always read everything on this thread and get so many ideas. However, I'm finding it hard to read as much i'd like to at the moment (tiredness, social media, family stuff) and feel I'm setting myself up for failure with a huge pile of unread books on my bedside table. It's massive and makes me feel permanently guilty. Being a librarian doesn't help either as there's always just one more to borrow. I can't work out what I actually WANT to read as opposed to I think I SHOULD read. It's all stressing me out. Does anyone else get this? First world problem I know. Reading should be fun.
I should probably just chill out to be honest

41. To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey

Oh how very, very nice to read a crime novel written in light, witty prose, that doesn't skip around between narrators and tells the story in a linear fashion with no flashbacks. Just that really. I think I may be a bit modern-crime-novelled-out

25. Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman. Lent to me by a colleague, I didn’t enjoy the first few pages of this at all, but I struggled on as I didn’t want to disappoint my colleague and I was completely won over by the end. Bregman’s main point is that we’ve already arrived at a utopia of sorts, in that people are generally far wealthier, healthier and better fed than in years gone by, and perhaps now it’s time to redefine our vision of utopia. He then propounds various ideas including basic income for all, a shorter working week, open borders, and generally less inequality. Lots of interesting, challenging points backed by strong evidence.

I didn't require two chapters on elves - review of the week.

I've read a couple of things but haven't reviewed them yet and none of them have been any good. Currently reading the new Michelle Paver, which is about typical for her in that it promises a lot but doesn't quite deliver. I'm finding it a bit tedious, but will finish it today.

If anybody comes across my reading mojo, could you please pop it in the post to me?

Oh excellent- I'm about 50 pages in and enjoying it so far. I am attempting to get through as much as my "real" tbr pile before the end of June, when I come to the UK for work for 6 weeks and only bring my Kindle. (dunno why, as suitcase and post-ahead parcels get filled with goodies from Waterstones and Superdrug anyway!)

I would like Milkman to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Such an incredible insight into the invisible role of women in a conflict zone - my top book last year.

I really enjoyed the Northern Clemency too

35. Names For The Sea, Sarah Moss's book about spending a year in Iceland.

I went to Iceland a few years ago so found this an interesting insight into actual life in Iceland beyond the tourism. Moss was there during the banking collapse and the volcanic eruption. She frequently focuses on Icelander's mind-set and attitudes to being Icelandic and also their driving. I didn't notice quite how terrifying it was when I was there because DH's driving in blizzards was terrifying enough: but in retrospect I can see their car hire place was - well- laissez faire, and the hotel staff reassuring us of normal driving conditions was gung ho at best!

I do find Moss a bit irritatingly hipster, metropolitan, isn't everyone like me with their desire for fancy food like. And I didn't require two chapters on elves, must be honest.

Canterbury, I absolutely loved The Northern Clemency. Could not tell you much about it as I read it years ago when it first came out (and a quick Google suggests that it is a book of fine detail rather than sweeping plot) but I do remember enjoying it very much and recommending it furiously to lots of people. It may be one to re-read.

Thanks Terpsichore. I shall give Footsteps a try first.

boiledegg oh gosh, Caroline Herschel - YES. Thinking about all the women who had so much intelligence and talent and were allowed to use only a fraction of it, if at all....tragic.

I've got the Holmes biography of Coleridge but haven't managed to finish it yet (it is in 2 vols though) - Falling Upwards, about the history of ballooning, is fascinating though. As is his study of biography, Footsteps. It's a collection of essays about his own heroes (RL Stevenson, the Shelleys, Wordsworth) and some of his own adventures in biography. Really good.

44. Cousins, Salley Vickers

Confusing family saga. Not sure why I had this on my TBR as it's not my usual type of thing. It's the story of three generations of a well-to-do English family, ranging from around WW2 to somewhere near the present day. Various dramatic things happen. There are deliberately close echoes in the events that affect each generation, and this gets confusing as the timeline of the book jumps forward and back, and the characters names and nicknames can get mixed up. If I tell you that there's a fair bit of aching, sexy-emotional feeeeeelings-type-stuff going on and that nearly all the characters are closely related to one another, it may give a hint of why I found this book all rather strange and slightly repellent.

45. In Our Mad and Furious City, Guy Gunaratne

Winner of the Jhalak Prize and Booker longlisted. This book is set in London in the not-quite present. References to real life events are included but deliberately slightly scrambled so it's not clear when it's set. Racial and religious tensions are heightened after the murder of an off duty soldier by a black Muslim man (which is almost, but isn't, the real life murder of Lee Rigby). The main characters are three young men living in North London, on an estate that Gunaratne describes almost although it's a prison camp - the central yard where the boys gather to play football, the towers overlooking it from where people watch from their balconies. This is a claustrophobic and tense depiction of London life, and you read it holding your breath, waiting for something bad to happen.

46. Black, Listed, Jeffrey Boakye

I heard Jeffrey Boakye talking to Michael Rosen on Radio 4 a few weeks ago and it prompted me to seek this out. It's a project that sounds simple and turns out to be anything but - Boakye lists, then analyses, as many terms as he can used to describe black people or blackness. From the official to slang to insults to those strange sly adjectives that only seem to get used in certain contexts about certain people ("powerful" athletes, for example). Boakye is an English teacher (now a Head, I think) and reading this book is like a great lesson with your best English teacher - he knows the context, he knows the history, the allusions to other texts, but in the end he comes back with clear focus to the words themselves. Why do we use phrases like "mixed race", "ethnic minority"? Is "urban" experience synonymous with black experience? What's the significance of there being an accepted female equivalent of "rudeboy"?

If you want an approachable, witty book that will really get you thinking about race and black experience in modern Britain, I can highly recommend this.

47. Into the Water, Paula Hawkins

The last two books were both very readable but quite heavy going so I picked this up as an antidote. It's a psychological thriller/mystery by the author of The Girl on the Train. Julia returns to her childhood home following the death of her sister Nel, whose body has been found in a local body of water known as the Drowning Pool. She's far from the first woman to die there - in fact, before her death Nel had been working on a history of the witch duckings, suicides and suspicious deaths of women that have taken place in and around the Drowning Pool. If you can put up with multiple narrators, all of whom are unreliable as hell, this an absorbing and atmospheric easy read.

30. The Couple on Cedar Close Anna-Lou Weatherley.
    Very oddly written crime story. The perp was immediately identifiable and it seemed as though the writer who had had the idea of keeping them a secret ready for a Big Shocking Twist at the end kind of gave up on the idea (realising after about 50 pages we all knew anyway) and then starts writing from the killers' point of view. There were WRONGLY DATED flashbacks in it, where the main characters ages went wildly awry and despite being set in north London was full of American phraseology and language. I had to go and see if the author was actually American writing in a British setting, but nope.
    Skipped the last 20 pages or so because I hated them all.

31. the Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole (or something) The third in the series anyway. Well, wtf? A third of the book is extracts from AM's late teens and early twenties diaries, a third is a tedious sort of travelogue about Majorca from Sue Townsend, and the other third is a weird (and totally unfunny) parody of Margaret Thatcher's supposed teen diaries. I know ST was a national treasure, but jaysus this was bad. It's like she found half a dozen scribbled "Adrian" extracts she'd not published before and had no idea what to pad them out with and somehow the publishers gave her the go ahead to become a (not very good) travel writer. Bizarre.

After several duds in a row I'm hoping that the book I started last night The Northern Clemency will restore my faith or I might have to re-read one of my comfort food books.

Indigo- agreed!

Toomuch sounds like if An American Marriage takes the prize, we'll both be happy

I too have been catching up with my Women's Prize Reading and have just completed the short list with the two below. 64 & 66 I am the opposite of Indigo . Loved silence and think that Milkman is my least favourite

64. Ordinary people - Diana Evans This was a Book about the details. The little things that make up a person and a marriage. It was about the struggle to keep your identity in the fave of parent hood and long term relationships. Very London centric but very clear. A good observation on life. Don't expect plot, you will be disappointed but if you like a book that gets under the skin of its characters this might be for you.
65. Mrs Everything- Jennifer Weiner very aware I keep doing this and I am worried about annoying you lovely 50 Bookers but this was another ARC that I read for the blog. Out June 11th . Set in Detroit it tells the story of two sisters through the years. Beginning in 1950's ending in 2016, it is a commentary on how women's rights have developed, also touching on civil rights too. It looks at how life choices affect us and those around us, what it means to be a family and how hard that can be. This as a book that grew on me. It is quite a light touch but it was very readable and I wanted to see where the characters went. *
66. An American Marriag*e Last Women's Prize shortlisted Book. Really enjoyed this one. Portrayal of a young black couple separated by wrongful imprisonment. It has a lot to say about the treatment of young black men in The US particularly the South. Very well written, and heartbreaking in places

31. The Cut Out Girl – Bart Van Es

Saying I enjoyed this is probably the wrong word given the subject matter, but I found this in equal parts fascinating and moving. It’s been widely reviewed on here already and I think the consensus is that this is a very good account of the Jewish girl fostered by Bart Van Es’s grandparents during the Nazi occupation of Holland. I would agree. I particularly enjoyed the writers clear, understated prose which really highlighted the subject matter. Recommended.

32. The Silence of the Girls – Pat Barker

Returning to The Iliad after not enjoying The Song of Achilles very much was always a bit of a triumph of optimism over experience, but I was tempted by reviews describing this as a feminist re-telling of the tale. I so wanted to like this, but it just didn’t fly for me. I think one reviewer up thread - Bibliomania? described this as being as wooden as a trojan horse and I think that sums it up pretty accurately.

I did not think this was a feminist re-telling of The Iliad. The book starts promisingly enough with Briseis, a Trojan Queen as the first person narrator vividly describing the fall of Lyrnessus to the rampaging Greeks. I stayed with it despite having some reservations about weak characterisation (hence the woodeness), too many characters and too much happening, all of it quite bloody and violent to the extent I started to become numb to it.

About a third of the way through the narrative voice inexplicably switches to Achilles in the third person and Briseis’s voice drops back to appearing only every other chapter. It was almost as if the writer ultimately found Achilles and Patrolcus’s story far more interesting and kind of gave up a bit on Briseis, and the women in the story generally. This was so disappointing. Despite Briseis claiming the women called Achilles ‘the butcher’ right at the beginning of the book, what actually followed were many descriptions of Achille’s beauty and strength. Deciding to take the story in this direction meant I read on to the end without much enthusiasm and not caring much about what happened in the end. Sad, because I think an actual feminist re-telling of The Iliad would make a fantastic read.

I have now read all the books shortlisted for The Women’s Prize for fiction except Circe, which I’m not going to attempt as I have decided the re-telling of Greek myths although terribly fashionable at the moment, is just not my thing. I would like Milkman to win as I thought it was brilliant and one of my reads of the year thus far. Truly Milkman is a feminist re-telling of a different type of conflict, told confidently and without relegating the women back to their traditional supporting roles half way through. If not Milkman then I would like An American Marriage to win, as I loved the realistic way this addressed relationships and conflict.

The Age of Wonder sounds well worth reading. Also good for the heads up on print size - one for the Kindle option I reckon!

Terpsichore I noticed that Richard Holmes has written several other biographies. Are there any that you would particularly recommend?

Ps Wasn't Caroline Herschel amazing?!

I finished The storied life of A.J. Fikry, I'd really recommend it. It's a sad ending but also a happy ending. Sorry I'm not good at reviews.

Boiledegg so glad to hear your praise for Age of Wonder. It’s a marvellous book. As is pretty much everything Richard Holmes writes, but especially this.

I haven’t yet made time for Jenny Uglow’s ‘The Lunar Men’ (it’s on the eternal tbr pile) but I think there’s probably some crossover there in terms of time-period and personalities.

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes I heard this discussed on Radio 4's Bookclub and thought it sounded interesting, and it certainly is. It interweaves biographies of key scientists, explorers and literary figures of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, some of whom I had heard of (eg William and Caroline Herschel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and others who were new to me (eg Joseph Banks, Johann Wilhelm Ritter). I loved the way it brought together the sciences and arts, a reminder that they weren't always seen as mutually exclusive. It was also interesting to read about the discoveries in the context of what was believed at the time and how ideas developed. It's quite a long book with very small print but definitely a Good Read.

The Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck This is a beautifully written and unsettling novel focused on a house in Germany across the twentieth century. The impact of history on the lives of the inhabitants is subtly described to very powerful effect. The translation is seamless although my only, very minor, criticism is the occasional Americanism such as fall for autumn (and too many gottens).

42 The Fifth Gender by Gail Carriger

Light & fluffy sci-fi romance/mystery featuring human space station detective Hastion and Tristol - exiled member of the reclusive Galoi species.

This is the first sci-fi novel by the author (she mainly writes steampunk / fantasy), & she does a good job of creating a plausible alien culture. It's not explicitly stated, but evidently the various races have a common origin far back and adaptation / intentional genetic modification has resulted in significant but limited differences, always a useful backdrop to a culture-clash sci-fi novel.

The only downside for me was the rather overdone sex scenes - I've no objection to lots of sex in a book, but it does have to be done well not to be cringe-worthy, and I don't think GLC is that great at it. Having said that, they're easy enough to skip without detracting from the plot at all. a