50 Book Challenge 2019 Part Six

Just marking place. Have dropped off this thread of late though still reading.

Temporary the Ted Ciang book looks really good. On my tbr list now. Thanks

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

23. Diana Mosley: A Life by Jan Dalley This was in fact a re-read. It's a bit of a limited biography without any access to private papers so there's not a huge amount that is new to any Mitford reader (I'm not going to call myself a Mitford fan though realistically I probably am). What is nice is that Bryan Guinness has some reality in this book, and the sheer nastiness of Oswald Mosley as well as his appeal are not minimised. Diana Mosley remains as opaque in this book as she always is. The fact is that it's possibly best just to take her at face value - a aristocrat who cared deeply about surface appearances and had an attraction to anything that was regarded as unacceptable by her peers, because she wanted to be above or apart from the mainstream and thought it was a positive virtue to serve an authoritarian husband. This unfortunately led her to become an antisemitic fascist. If she hadn't been so extraordinarily rich and beautiful, she would never have been written about and would deservedly have been forgotten.

24. Stories of Your Life And Others by Ted Chiang Oh my God. This is so incredible. I have been completely absorbed by this book. It's not that I can't put it down, it's that I've had to put it down sometimes because it's so overwhelming. Given that I hate short stories and mostly hate sci fi, for me to find a book of sci fi short stories so good is quite something. Makes other writers look rather as if they are kind of throwing words into a pot and stirring them into a forgiving soup, while he constructs an extraordinary three dimensional model of the future out of mercury.

SatsukiKusakabe I read The Complete Maus some years ago and thought it was terrific and, as you say, powerful. Your review has prompted me to dig out my copy for a re-read. Briefly flicking through it reminded me in particular of how arresting and poignant it was to see his father's photograph on the penultimate page.

There’s a wide range of books read on here @RozHuntleysStump and you get to know after a while who shares similar tastes to you.

@Satsukikusakabe This is why I am trying not to be influenced so much by other people's reviews. I did not care for Offshore at all. I thought it was fairly pointless. I do get it is a little vignette of canal boat life but I just didn't appreciate it, I suppose.

I am still plodding on with a room with a view. It's good but a bit difficult to follow sometimes and I've been drinking lots of red wine the last couple of days...

Too many reallys in that and my review of Offshore almost unintelligible. Should never review on an empty stomach.

@SapatSea quite relieved to hear that as had only really seen a lot of rave reviews when I thought it was really only ok and in its attempts at injecting a bit of clumsy diversity it only succeeded in underlining how it was really only about one type of person, split into 3. Although one of them did have salad cream instead of olive oil on her lettuce growing up. Gritty stuff.

42. Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

This was an exquisitely written, charming and witty little book about houseboat community on the Thames in the 60s. The darkness of life never far from the convivial surface. There is a lot of detail about the hardships of life afloat, but it is seamlessly part of the story and not weighed down by it, and it is at heart it is a tale of people, what connects us to others, what we have to endure to live contented lives, what stops us from coming adrift and being carried away on the tide. It is quite funny and full of characters and character. It is my second Penelope Fitzgerald and I am growing to like her style very much indeed.

Satsuki That was exactly what I thought about Expectation too. Great review.

41. The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman

Powerful graphic novel of the Holocaust, with the Jewish people drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats. This is the account of the author’s father and his experiences in Poland after the Nazi invasion and of his time in Auschwitz; his telling of the story in the present is related alongside the past narrative. I have encountered many representations of the holocaust in print and on film, and this one really impressed on me the sense of the individual caught in history. Auschwitz was a shared experience of horror, but it was also a profoundly individual one; each person survived in a different way, were variously resourceful, determined, resigned, passive, knowing all the time survival was dependent on none of those things. Death was random, and unavoidable through any personal agency, and yet each person still asserted themselves against its inevitability. The Nazis tried to dehumanise their victims by making them an indistinguishable, homogenous group, and they failed, and stories like this are the proof of that failure. Vladek Spiegelman’s story is particular, and personal and unlike any other; only the heartbreak is universal. I can’t possibly do it justice so will stop trying.

tanaqui glad you enjoyed Standard Deviation despite the lack of statistics. I read an interview with Katherine Heiny where she said her favourite book was The Accidental Tourist which is why I read it and you can see the influence quite clearly.

40. Expectation by Anna Hope

This follows three best friends in their mid thirties and considers the paths that led them to their different points in life, contrasting the women they became with the expectations of their youth. This is not a bad read as such and if you are of that generation that grew up in the 90s and 2000s there is a lot to recognise, however it all got a bit blah for me (though I did keep reading) and somewhat ironically, hit all the notes and issues I have come to expect of modern novels. Things I learned from this book include: having a baby is stressful and tiring and changes your life, not having a baby is stressful and tiring and changes your life, being a lesbian environmental activist in Brighton is more fun and less stressful and tiring than being a housewife with a newborn in Canterbury, but actually it’s easier to switch from being one to the other than you might think, establishing a career as an actress is hard if you are not that talented, trying to have a career as an actress is more fun than trying to have a baby, relationships are hard if people cheat, best friends are actually pretty annoying and not that fun, best friends secretly find you pretty annoying too, all dads may as well not exist, all mums are difficult including you and we all die.

Tanaqui

Tanqui I agree about Standard Deviation. Just a nice book.

Olive Again by Elizabeth Strout
Olive Again. Hurray!! This book is fantastic, I just never wanted it to end. Elizabeth Strout is a master of observational writing that makes me laugh and sometimes shed a tear and it was great to spend time in Olive's company again. The book revists Olive where we left her in Olive KItteridge, Henry has died and Olive may have a nascent relationship with Jack Kerrison, a curmudgeonly ex Harvard lecturer. The narrative follows Olive as she negotiates the last decades of her life and we meet lots of her fellow Crosby town residents, each with a heartbreaking, poignant or hopeful story to be revealed. Characters from other Strout novels are revisited such as Isabelle (from Amy and Isabelle) and the family from the Burgess boys. and we also find out how Christopher, Olive's son is faring.. It's really great to see how things are panning out for them all.
Oh Godfrey! as Olive would say, I was so pleased to read this book, just so well written and observed. Fabulous.

54. Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny. Recommended by Satsuki and others earlier this thread, I had forgotten the details by the time I got to the top of the waiting list and was expecting a book on statistics! I really enjoyed this story, just about ordinary life, and loss, and autism - nothing really happens but I was just fully engrossed all the way through. Some moments were heart twisting, but they are the real heart twisting moments I think we feel every day, and I thought it was really well done.

Is it good or bad that as a 50 booker, my first image when reading that poem was him shagging the page of his book, not his poor (or possibly delighted!) Page!

SatsukiKusakabe My husband liked Home best of all. Good luck with your resolution!

@Palegreenstars I think the second episode was 40 min but it felt very layered. There are lots of tunes and jazz hands to keep you awake and Michelle Williams’s performance is 👌🏻. You can do this!

boiledegg I’ve had Home on my shelf for a while. I’m going to try in January to get through my book shelf before I pick up any new ones as have a habit of saving books for best (this resolution will lapse like free gym membership trial by Feb)

roz I don’t feel as if Gilead was a long book but I read it on the Kindle so not sure. Home for eg is only around 300 pages but I know you’re up against it numbers-wise!

@SatsukiKusakabe thanks will add that to the list of stuff to try not to fall asleep too!

Think I might try and watch 50 films next year and see if a target helps.

To those who enjoyed Gilead, I can also thoroughly recommend Home and Lila which tell the stories of Jack Boughton and Lila (John Ames's wife) respectively. Beautiful, beautiful writing.

I saw Gilead in the shops today but I am trying to get through shorter books at the moment. Might give it a go in the future though!

@ShakeItOff2000 I felt the same way about Gilead I thought I was going to be bored at the beginning but it swept me into it.

palegreenstars a lot of the time we watch sitcoms on weekday evenings as we fall asleep during films a lot of the time. I have started watching Fosse/Verdon on iplayer. The episodes are under an hour and it’s very good.

I have returned home from my expedition to Beverley. I had a great time trawling the book shops and charity shops. I got three leather bounds - Lady Chatterley's Lover, Shirley and A Passage to India. Also got loads of other books. 13 in total! The most expensive was 'My Name is Lucy Barton at 8.99. It better be good! Well I better get on with A room with a view or I will never get anywhere near the target of 50 books October - December!

I fell off the thread for a bit, and work has been mental so I've fallen a bit behind with the reading. Anyway, here's my two from the last few months:

16. City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert. Vivian Morris looks back on her life in 1940s and 50s New York City, having moved there at 19 to live with her aunt who owned and ran a theatre in the city. I really, really liked this. I had always given Gilbert a hard swerve thanks to Eat, Pray, Love, but this was great. The glamour of NYC in the 40s is beautifully done, and the characters are nicely developed. It's a story of sexual liberation and womanhood and friendship, and is really touching in places. I would recommend, I think.

17. Melmoth by Sarah Perry. A gothic horror novel about guilt, shame, punishment, and bearing witness. The central character is Helen Franklin, an Englishwoman living in Prague, who is given a manuscript from a terrified friend, containing a series of testimonies about Melmoth, a ghostly figure who witnesses humanity's cruel acts, and tries to lure those who have committed them into wandering the earth with her into eternity. Helen also starts to be tormented by Melmoth, as a result of a terrible act that she has kept hidden for years.

I liked this a lot. I enjoy gothic horror, and this ticked all the conventions - unreliable and multi-layered narration, menacing figures that may be supernatural but may equally be in the mind, the return of the repressed, a grotesque cast of characters and so on. It felt like a period piece, even though it was set in modern-day Prague, and that sense of timelessness was really well done. The supernatural elements, especially the figure of Melmoth herself and the way she manipulated time and space, were fantastically rendered, and Perry's writing is visceral and very visual (in fact, I felt like I was seeing it rather than reading it at times - it would be an amazing film). I also read The Essex Serpent and I think on some levels I liked this more - it felt like less hard work. But that's the genre element, I think.

Less good points: gothic fiction is generally very tightly plotted and I think she played a bit too fast and loose with the Melmoth mythology. It wasn't very clear what particularly summoned Melmoth. Sometimes it seemed to be the act itself which brought her into being, but then she seemed to be watching some people even before they committed the act. For some, it seemed to be just the act of reading the testimonies. And I'm not sure I was fully convinced by the connections that she was drawing between shameful and cruel acts, which ran from genocide to the Holocaust to the modern refugee crisis to letting a friend take the punishment for your own crime. They were all individually awful, but something didn't sit quite right with me. Maybe I need to think about it a bit more.

But still, I really enjoyed it and would definitely, definitely recommend.