50 Book Challenge 2019 Part Five

Thank you for the new thread.

26. Ammonites and Leaping Fish by Penelope Lively She explores time and memory and the way that particular objects can capture memories for us. Written from the perspective of having turned 80. Very interesting. I want to look up her account of growing up in Egypt which I've been meaning to read for ages.

27 Wilding by Isabella Tree
The author's account of how they stopped farming their land and turned it back to nature. A bit depressing in places as she lists all the ways we're busy destroying our environment but a positive outcome for their small part of Sussex. I was interested in how much of a negative response they had from other local landowners in the early days who criticised them for wasting their land. Also interesting how much time can be wasted by the various agencies involved sitting around discussing whether you can call it 'rewilding' or not!

28 Madensky Square by Eva Ibbottson
Set in 1900s Vienna our narrator runs her own clothes shop on Madensky Square and writes about the lives of her neighbours, customers, etc. Well written but a little too sickly sweet for me by the end.

Oh, heck. Yes, that was bad .

Slightly unfortunate typo, Pepe....I read The Moon's a Balloon as a young teenager and was slightly scandalised and also laughed till I cried.

My last few books:

57) The Importance of Being Aisling, Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen
Sequel. Doesn't pretend to be literature, but it's an amusing portrait of small-town Irish life.

58). A Sucky Love Story, Brittani Louise Taylor
An account written by an American Youtuber about falling for a wealthy and charming European doctor who is not quite who he seems to be. Again, not literary, but I found her story quite compelling. It shows very clearly how you be in a relationship and working very hard to sell yourself a romanticised account of that relationship even though part of you knows that it's horribly wrong.

59). In Search of England, H V Morton
1920s motoring tour of England. Lots of romanticised rhapsodies: "then the mists of time seemed to part and I saw stern-faced knights of old riding out on their faithful steeds" etc etc. If I'm in the mood, I like this sort of thing, but it needs to be taken in small doses.

*60). All the Single Ladies, Rebecca Traister. American non-fiction about how unmarried women have contributed to social change. I'm sympathetic to the overarching point, but I wasn't blown away by the book. She seems to have read a lot and talked to a lot of people, but she doesn't seem to have thought very much - I can't really find any argument, other than "this happened". Maybe her message is more incendiary than it appears in the conservative heartlands of America.

61). Gene Eating, Giles Yeo
Took me a while to click that the title is a pun on "clean eating" - one of many feeble but rather endearing dad jokes as the Cambridge geneticist takes on claims about how to lose weight and examines the science behind them. It's not bad, although I did get bogged down in an early chapter which went into a bit more genetic detail than I strictly needed. The take-home message is that you have to work out what works for you as an individual, as it won't be the same for everyone.

62. The Temptation of Forgiveness, Donna Leon
Part of the long-running crime series set in Venice. The series has been feeling a bit sour for a while now - endless diatribes about the multitude of tourists and the Chinese shops and the endemic corruption and pollution.

I haven't read anything that has blown me away in a long time. Reserving This Thing of Darkness for half-term, so we shall see.

Ducking in to say I finished The Koon's A Balloon last night too, and agree with Bakewell. He's a shameless name-dropper but cheerfully admits that, and has good reason to be. It's a fun and funny read, and I appreciated the fact it's not the sort of thing I'd usually read.

@Sadik glad you enjoyed Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy too. It's not an easy read. How scary just how close we came to wiping out lifein Europe. I have an interest in risk and health and safety and this is an object lesson in how not to manage risks.

@Tarahumara I'm in the like camp for Station Eleven very good take on a distopia.

My current read is #45 The Moon's a Balloon David Nivens autobiography which I bought in this months Kindle Deals. My guilty pleasure growing up was black and white films on a Saturday afternoon so I am familiar with many golden age films. I didn't realise he had such a full life outside of acting and in particular his contribution to WWII. Overall I am enjoying it. Niven is an entitled white male living a life far removed from mine in a world that certainly doesn't exist any more which makes it hard to connect to at times. However the variety of people and things he did make this worth a read. He also comes across as someone who likes the people he is with. Certainly very different from what I have been reading recently.

I've just discovered that the first DTTMOT is available as an audiobook from my library, so reserved it to see if it works in that format for me. Should be a good few hours listening if it does!

39. Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy

I went for this as my Audible monthly book based on BakewellTarts review, and wasn't disappointed. A really good exploration of the background to the disaster, incredibly gripping section as it unfolds, then equally thorough analysis of the literal and metaphorical fall-out. Many thanks for the recommendation, Bakewell :)

I've gone off to the Lake District again while the weather is glorious. It's too hot to read! Spending the days yomping up ruddy great hills and too busy with the map and gorgeous scenery to concentrate on audiobooks either.

59. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (A Dance to the Music of Time #5) by Anthony Powell (audiobook)

Life goes on for Jenkins' set against the backdrop of the abdication and the Spanish Civil War. With war around the corner the group react in different ways.

Absolutely hooked on these. He really captured the zeitgeist and manages to relate how people go about life with the major events of the century happening around them. I think I'll probably keep going with these as I'm not sure I can ration them to one a month from now on.

About 100 pages in to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Bonkers and brilliant in equal measure. Thank goodness for the family tree at the start!

15. Fruit of the lemon – Andrea Levy Based in both London and Jamaica, Levy's third book finds yet another engaging way to tell the story of families like hers who arrived in Britain on banana boats in the 40s and 50s. Faith, the main character, grows up knowing little of her Jamaican heritage and it’s only when she’s confronted with more and more acts of blatant racism that she seeks to know more about her origins. Definitely recommend!

Thanks for new thread @southeastdweller..

I just finished No. 17 Daughters of the Winter Queen by Nancy Goldstone, an excellent historical biography, although I was a little disappointed when the focus shifted so abruptly from the Winter Queen to her daughters, as she was such an interesting character, I would have enjoyed more focus on her later life. I might have to find another biography of her.

I’m very very behind but
17) Sorry to disrupt the peace by Patty Cottrell
It’s basically the aftermath of a woman finding out her adoptive brother has died.
An interesting book as the main character is not likeable.
Really enjoyed it.

30. The 7 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Thurton.

This is the story of a man who repeats the day of Evelyn Hardcastle’s death over and over in different characters bodies to try and solve the crime. Ground Hog Day meets Agatha Christie. I did enjoy this a lot and cared about the twists and turns. I found the female characters a bit problematic and actually all the characters were a little wooden. Perhaps because the premise left many characters with no memories prior to that day there wasn’t a huge amount of character development. The whodunnit element was good though.

Belatedly carrying over my list from the last thread:

1. The Crossing Places - Elly Griffiths
2. Things I Don't Want to Know - Deborah Levy
3. The History of Wolves - Emily Fridlund
4. Black Hole Blues and Other Songs From Outer Space - Janna Levin
5. Smile - Roddy Doyle
6. Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted - Andrew Wilson
7. The Story of a Marriage - Andrew Seer Green
8. The Child That Books Built - Francis Spufford
9. My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh

And two more to add:

22. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. Dystopian fiction imagining life on earth in the near future after a flu epidemic decimates the population. I seem to remember that this divides opinions on the thread, and I do agree with the people who found the world-building element shoddy and unrealistic. However, I was able to suspend disbelief most of the time and enjoyed the storyline and the characters.

23. A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler. I am an Anne Tyler fan and the first half of this was right up there with my favourites, but then the perspective and time period shifted and I didn't enjoy the second half as much.

Not sure if anyone else on this thread has read The Confessions of Frannie Langton, a recent novel by newcomer , Sara Collins. Still rare in the UK(as I told a boy the other day who refuses to believe there is such a thing as a white saviour narrative) to find a book with a black central female protagonist written by a black , female writer. Collins was a lawyer , and then left it to take up a Creative Writing MSt at Cambridge. This rang some alarm bells and it does feel like a Creative Writing thesis. In fact, it began life as a short story and you can tell : it feels too long for the story (which is at times, horrifying) it tells so loses impact. It really picks up from about page 280, which tells you something!!

It's another unreliable narrator accused of a crime with added sex and lesbians story - reminded me of The Observations/ Burial Rites , and a little bit of Sugar Money but also takes inspiration from Moll Flanders and quotes and alludes to Byron, Keats, Shakespeare.

The bit I did find interesting was the bit that reminded me of TTOD : the eugenics of the 19th century, the views on race amongst the 'greatest brains' . This is shocking and horrifying and I wish this , in some ways, didn't take up such a small part of the novel. The whole opium eating stuff I found not so interesting.

I am sure Collins will write another novel, and I would probably read it.
One Amazon reviewer did bemoan the simile in every second sentence. Now , this is an exaggeration. However, once I had had this pointed out to me, I couldn't help but notice them (and she uses a motif of apples CONSTANTLY) : she does use a simile roughly every third sentence at one point! The book did need a kindly editor to trim it a touch!

40. The Farm by Emily McKay

Vampire like creatures called Ticks have overrun the USA. Because the ticks find teenagers extra tasty, most teenagers have been locked up in camps (or farms) until they turn 18.
But Lily’s not staying put. She’s got a plan. She’s going to escape with her twin sister and head north to Canada.
Unless she gets talked into joining a resistance movement by former classmate Carter.

It’s all very YA. Lots of angsty romance, teenager with special power that might save America, and improbable plot points.

Thank you grim. Just catching up. Have some updates but just too tired tonight and GCSES start tomorrow!

GrimUpNorth - Agree re Breakfast at Tiffany's. Horribly racist and homophobic in places but, beyond that, it's exquisite. Much darker than the film and some really lovely writing.

Place marking. I'll post my list soon.

Thanks for the new thread southeast and I also echo PepelePew that this thread has improved the range and variety of my reading. And Splother well done on the blog! It’s a real time-stealer and beautifully done! Bringing over my list plus some catching up on reviews below:

1 - An Infamous Army - Georgette Heyer
2 - Zero Zero Zero - Roberto Saviano
3 - Milkman - Anna Burns
4 - The Bounty - Caroline Alexander
5 - The Sleep of Reason - David James Smith
6 - Moby Dick - Herman Melville
7 - Mike at Wrykyn - P.G.Wodehouse
8 - At Freddie’s - Penelope Fitzgerald
9 - Winter - Ali Smith
10 - Village of Secrets - Caroline Moorhead
11 - Back Story - David Mitchell
12 - Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe
13 - How not to be a Boy - Robert Webb
14 - Waterloo - Victor Hugo
15 - A Murder is Announced - Agatha Christie
16 - The Cranes Dance - Meg Howrey
17 - Astonish Me - Maggie Shipstead
18 - Witnessing Waterloo - David Crane
19 - The Girls of Slender Means - Muriel Spark
20 - The Things I Would Tell You - edited by Sabrina Mahfouz
Think I’m in line with the general thread reaction to this compilation of writing by British Muslim women. It was patchy in quality but did contain some very interesting stuff. I thought some of the poetry and Shaista Aziz’s essay on ‘honour killings’ in Pakistan were the strongest contributions.

21 - Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese - Patrick Leigh Fermor
One of my favourites of the year so far. I read this while (and because) we were on holiday in the Mani, mainland Greece, over Easter weekend and it is a lively account of Fermor (and his future wife) travelling on foot and by boat through the Mani peninsula in the late 1940s, staying with fishing and peasant families in the remote villages and describing the history, folklore and mythology of the region. He tells the sometimes bleak and violent history in a way that is often very funny (e.g. how the Maniots were always engaging in feuds, each family building taller and taller towers so that they could drop rocks from them to smash the marble roofs of their enemies) and captures the life and culture of what was probably one of the last true ‘backwaters’ in Europe in its final days before the arrival of roads and radios opened it up to outside influence. Fermor is one of those posh, eccentric Englishman (he was expelled from public school, was one of the earliest members of what became the SAS and fought with the Cretan resistance during the war) who is somehow extremely knowledgeable about lots of things - he spoke perfect Greek and could write at length on Byzantine art. A really interesting read.

22 - An American Princess: Many Lives of Allene Tew - Annejet van der Zijl
Picked this up as a free Kindle offer in translation from Dutch. Description of Tew’s early life in what was then a frontier town in Michigan is interesting but after that there was not much that I thought made her worth a biography. She was very rich and married 5 times. It seemed that she ‘sponsored’ a protégé of hers to marry into the Dutch royal family and I imagine that is why the book is of interest in the Netherlands, but didn’t really do it for me.

23 - Winter Men - Jesper Bugge Koke
Another free Kindle offer in translation. Easy to read novel about two brothers from Hamburg who end up joining the SS. Not particularly gripping and a rather surface treatment of what could have been a very interesting subject.

24 - The Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker
I am a massive Pat Barker fan (Regeneration trilogy has to be up there with my all-time favourites) but this didn’t really do it for me. She is a totally competent writer as always and the evocation of time and place in the early chapters was very vivid, but I suppose I just don’t ‘get’ the trend for re-writing classic stories from the perspective of the women involved. They are by definition bit-players, and so Barker is constrained by the existing narrative framework from having her heroine take any real agency. Spoiler alert I thought the bit where Briseis hid on the cart next to Hector’s dead body when they were taking him back to Troy was an interesting attempt to deal with this but then of course she couldn’t go through with is as it wasn’t 'true'. I came away thinking Barker actually would have been happier writing (and I might have been happier reading) her own account of Achilles story.

25 - Arabella - Georgette Heyer
Heyer is my go-to for comfort reading and this is one of her best. I love the conversations between Mr Beaumaris and the mongrel dog Arabella makes him adopt.

26 - Breakfast at Tiffany’s - Truman Capote
A re-read for book group. If you can looks past the racist language/attitudes of the era this is such a beautiful encapsulation of story, character and description into a tiny novella that it should be prescribed to every novelist with a tendency to exceed 400 pages.

27 - Swear Down - Russ Litten
A sort-of-mystery about a London policeman of Nigerian descent investigating a stabbing in Hackney. Not life-changing as a novel but an interesting angle on the lives of some of the kids involved in that kind of awful violence we are seeing so much of at the moment. I read it on the recommendation of a friend who is a youth worker in London and thought it was quite a realistic portrayal but would be interested in any other more in-depth recommendations of novels on the subject?

28 - The Beast - Alexander Starritt
This was very entertaining. Consciously following in the footsteps of Scoop, it’s a darkly comic novel centring mainly around the sub-desk of a newspaper which is incredibly obviously the Daily Mail. A quick read and managed to be both funny and terrifyingly plausible at the same time. It doesn't say so in his biography (probably for legal reasons) but I would be gobsmacked if the writer didn't at some point do a shift or two in the Mail's newsroom.

29 - The Secret Olympian - Anonymous
Had this on my Kindle for ages and just finished it off. Mildly interesting insight into being an Olympic athlete (probably a rower) but nothing amazing.

30 - A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell
This has catapulted me firmly onto the Dance to the Music of Time bandwagon. Loved the writing, got through the whole thing in a day and now half way through the next one. Is there any better feeling than ‘discovering’ a series that you like with loads more books to go? Although I am now also sharing in Fortuna’s concerns that I may be the Widmerpool of my group.

If you don’t know who the Widmerpool is, it must be you, right?

Thanks whippetwoman. Definitely my next read!

Finally get round to joining the new thread and you're nearly 100 posts in! Bringing my list over:

1. Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass – Stephen King
2. Normal People – Sally Rooney
3. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle – Stuart Turton
4. Mornings in Jenin – Susan Abulhawa
5. Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata
6. Behind Closed Doors – B.A. Paris
7. Elizabeth is Missing – Emma Healey
8. Commonwealth – Ann Patchett
9. A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles
10. The Wife – Meg Wolitzer
11. Guns Germs and Steel – Jared Diamond
12. Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi
13. Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla – Stephen King
14. Reservoir 13 – Jon McGregor
15. Love Your Enemies – Nicola Barker
16. Crazy Rich Asians – Kevin Kwan
17. The Hunting Party – Lucy Foley
18. After the Crash – Michel Bussi
19. The Sympathizer – Viet Thanh Ngyuyen
20. Stuart: a life backwards – Alexander Masters
21. Misogynies – Joan Smith
22. The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller
23. The Rotters’ Club – Jonathan Coe
24. The Closed Circle – Jonathan Coe
25. Middle England – Jonathan Coe
26. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
27. When God was a Rabbit – Sarah Winman
28. Our House – Louise Candlish
29. Bel Canto – Ann Patchett
30. The Darkness – Ragnar Jonasson
31. Educated – Tara Westover
32. The Wych Elm – Tana French
33. If Beale Street Could Talk – James Baldwin
34. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
35. The Door – Magda Szabo
36. The Comforts of Home – Susan Hill

And my most recent:

37. Loitering With Intent – Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark wrote my favourite book ever (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) and this was Booker shortlisted so I'm not quite sure why I've not read it before. It is pure, vintage Spark - written in the early 80s, it draws on her own experiences as a young female author in the late 40s/early 50s. Fleur Talbot gets a job as a sort of editor to a group of high-society potential autobiographers, brought together by the (it emerges) somewhat sinister Sir Quentin Oliver. Does he have an ulterior motive for this enterprise (of course! it's Muriel Spark!)? Sparkian capers ensue, with the usual dark undertow. As with all of Spark's books, the joy is in the light yet caustic tone, the uneasy tensions within her universe, and the absolutely perfect, inimitable prose. No-one writes with more economy than Spark. A dark, glimmering gem of a book.

@Boiledeggandtoast I read Visitation earlier this year and enjoyed it. It's quite a powerful, if short, read. I am also looking to seek out more of her writing this year.

Indigosalt I hope you enjoy it, I'd be interested to know how you find it compares to Life after Life. I have now moved Visitation to the top of my TBR pile!

Boiledegg I also have Visitation on my wish list - had a scout round at the library on my last visit only to discover they had a copy, but it was out...I feel quite excited to have discovered her so I can seek out her other novels. Thanks for the recommendation re The End of Days - will check it out.

Many thanks for the [not very] new thread!!

My list:

1. The Girls by Emma Cline
2. Coming Home by Rosamunde Pilcher
3. Becoming by Michelle Obama

1. Smut by Alan Bennett

1. Convenience store woman by Sayata Murata
2. Calypso by David Sedaris

16 Will You Love Me? by Cathy Glass
17 Breaking the Silence by Casey Watson
If you know what these sorts of books are like, you know what these sorts of books are like. I can't defend reading them as I think the act of writing them is quite dodgy, though at least I feel more sure that the child described in book 16 has consented. They are rather like thrillers in that the world they describe is oddly reassuring despite the 'misery lit' elements - there are always at least some 'good' social workers and teachers, the foster carers always have great insight and get at least some results. I was trying to watch Norsemen on Netflix but had to give up and I read these instead. Telly just tends to be too extreme for me now, whereas with books, whatever they describe, I can cope with it better.