50 Book Challenge 2021 Part Eight

Thanks Eine! Definitely one of my top books this year.

Tiny bit depressed that I think all my bolded titles this year will be nonfiction. Well, there's still time...

37. The Bookshop - Penelope Fitzgerald

Typically sharp and funny, though short tale of a woman's attempt to open a bookshop in a coastal Suffolk village in 1959, not to the liking of all the residents. I particularly enjoyed the marshy setting as it's just down the road from where I live.

So glad to have helped so many of you discover The Only Plane In The Sky this year.

Haunting. Powerful. Essential.

61. The Only Plane in the Sky by Garrett Graff
Thanks to Terpsichore, this cost me all of 99p. And it's a total barnstormer. A huge work of patchwork, piecing together vast arrays of oral history and new interviews. And as anyone who's ever made patchwork knows, it's incredibly skilled work. A heart-rending book and I loved it.

There's also some jawdropping moments of sourness. Karl Rove inserting a vast plug for Halliburton into an interview about President Bush's day. The journalist who interviewed Osama Bin Laden in 1998, when he had declared war on America, saying that he was frustrated he hadn't yet managed to get America to declare war back.

116. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (Audible)

As a child David Strorm befriends a little girl named Sophie and helps conceal the fact she has six toes. This small difference makes her a mutant in their society, and a blasphemy.

But David himself has a secret, and the time may come too, when he needs to run for his life.

I LOVED this. It was so ably read by Noah Reid from Schitts Creek, but also really well written, it was deep, dark and atmospheric and completely believable as a dystopian set up. I also really liked Wyndham's Day Of The Triffids which is the only other of his I've read, I will be definitely looking at more Wyndham in 2022

99: Tom Stoppard: A Life - Hermione Lee

Massive biography, weighing in at over 2,000 pages (luckily quite a lot of that was shaved off by notes, index, bibliography etc).

I'm not, in fact, a particular Stoppard devotee but his life story is interesting, as the son of Czech Jewish parents who escaped the Nazis by a hair's-breadth and arrived in England via India (his father never made it, dying tragically along the way). His Jewish roots were never mentioned again by his mother and it wasn't until he was in his late 50s that it hit him, with shattering force, that most of his family had died in concentration camps.

I like Lee's writing a lot and was engaged enough to persevere, enjoying the theatre talk and the details of Stoppard's increasingly glamorous life, although there were long stretches where my attention wandered during the extremely detailed descriptions of plots. Worth reading for anyone interested in theatre, but you do need to commit to this one, I feel.

48. Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman I was confident I wouldn't like this, being by a celebrity I ought to know of, but I was socially outmanoeuvred into borrowing it and reluctantly started it out of politeness. Well, I found it an absolute hoot. Our plucky band of underestimated nonagenarians investigate cold-cases until a new murder occurs for them to enjoy. The victim accepts justice with good grace; the gang stay ahead of the police but good-naturedly accept correction on addressing officers appropriately; the ringleader’s memories of an eventful career include babysitting chess-playing defectors in safe-houses. All great fun but alongside it there is also the weight of loss and the fear of losing partner or self to dementia.

After a couple of disappointing DNFs of books I’d been looking forward to, this was a joyous discovery. I managed to borrow the audiobook alongside the paperback and listened to rather than read some sections - the audio is excellent and enhanced the humour beautifully.

All the Walsh sisters books by Marian Keyes are good. I think Helen's is the only one I haven't read.

There’s a follow up to Rachel’s Holiday being released next year.

114. The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan Interesting collection of essays, the first and longest of which was written as a response to the killings by self proclaimed 'incel' Elliot Rodger. I'm not sure there's a huge amount new for anyone who has read a reasonable amount of 70s/80s/etc feminist writing (quite a bit of quoting of bell hooks), and on the whole the conclusions she reaches are 'it's complicated'. But I think that's fair enough, especially when your audience is probably mostly quite young.
     It did remind me though why I like SFF so much - I can think of several novels that have explored many of the issues in this collection and brought them to life / dealt with the nuances and complications much more eloquently than an essay can reasonably be expected to do.

I love Rachel’s Holiday. One of my favourite books.

67. Rachel's Holiday - Marian Keyes

I enjoyed this book, and have to say that if you pick it up looking no further than the title and cover, you will be in for a hell of a shock. This book is not the lighthearted chick lit you will no doubt be expecting. I hate the term chick lit, it makes a book sound like it's all funny, sexy, romance, and giggles.

The fact books of this genre are written by women is the cause for the category title, 'chick lit', imagine books written by men, aimed mostly at men, being put in the category 'dick lit'? You could tell from the category title mostly men would be interested, and the book would still reinforce the 'grrr it's for men' view. (Oops, rant over)

Rachel's Holiday is so much more than 'chick lit' if you take that to mean rainbows, sunshine, love, and it always being a skip off into the sunset at the end, it IS funny, also sad, insightful, and shows peoples behaviours and the effect they have on others, but most importantly on themselves.

We learn Rachel's story, and in doing so, it makes you look at aspects of your own life (and how you deal with these). We meet Rachel at the start (rock bottom) of her journey, and learn, often as she herself does, issues affecting her life, job, relationships and family. I felt myself rooting for Rachel, despite the selfish, needy, troubled, woman she is, or maybe because of it. None of us live a perfect life, and even if we don't face the addiction issues she does, it doesn't mean people can't have the same sort of troubles.

I found this book quite powerful in an unexpected way.

Thanks @southeastdweller

Here's my list

1. Cilka's Journey - Heather Morris
2. The Testaments - Margaret Atwood

1. The Baby Group - Caroline Corcoran
2. Who Killed Ruby - Camilla Way
3. The Angina Monologues - Samer Nashe
4. The Shelf - Helly Acton
5. Too Scared To Tell - Cathy Glass
6. I Can't Believe You Just Said That - Danny Wallace
7. No One Ever Has Sex On A Tuesday - Tracy Bloom

I have a 12yo DS, and this has prompted me to dig out the Dark is Rising series from his older sibling's bedroom and get him started on it!

Another The Dark is Rising fan here. Will dig it out if I make it to my parents' house this Christmas.

I've acquired a big pile of cosy old-fashioned crime novels at various second-hand bookshops over the year, so my intention is to burrow my way into those for the winter.

I think 12 is perfect for The Dark is Rising. Hope he/she enjoys it!

@Stokey I think I first read it in primary school, there was a TV adaptation on children's BBC I think, and I borrowed it from the library off the back of that. I think at 12 I would have got more out of it. The protagonist is 11 yo if that helps?

What age would you recommend The Dark is Rising for? I may get it for my 12 year old. Does that sound about right? I feel like I read it at school but can't remember it at all.

Sons of the Waves by Stephen Taylor Terrific account of the lives of ordinary seaman in the "Heroic Age of Sail" 1740-1840. This was a fascinating read, covering a huge range of topics - from mutinies to battles (including the Battles of the Nile and Trafalgar), life on board ship to the plight of families left behind, press gangs to punishments on board and off - and gosh, it was a difficult life for very little reward (indeed sailor's pay remained the same for nearly 150 years.) All this at a time of great political change around the world, most notably the French Revolution, American Independence and the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in Britain. I turned down the top of pages (I know, I know) that I particularly wanted to mention but found at the end there are far too many. Recommended (although I should perhaps point out that, as you might expect, it is quite a long book at 440 pages).

An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel A coming-of-age story of three girls from a Catholic school* in the north-west who all move on to the same London university and halls of residence in the autumn of 1970. Hilary Mantel has a wonderful turn of phrase, and her description of the girls' school reminded me of my own girls' grammar school in the 1970s: "Frigid courtesy was extended to us, as an example of how to conduct ourselves when we were adults. Our excesses and errors were kept in check by sarcasm....We were not told to be humble. We were made to be." The girls' time at university is told over the first winter and reflects the social issues facing young women with wit and pathos. I loved nearly all of this book, but I did find the ending slightly unsatisfactory.

• Nuns are involved but I don't think it counts as true Nun-Fiction.

60. Animal Farm - George Orwell An allegory for the Russian revolution. The animals stage a rebellion against their tyrannical master and claim their farm as their own. The utopian idyll anticipated by the animals fails to materialise as the pigs take over running the farm until they become indistinguishable from the humans they worked to overthrow in the early stages of the rebellion.

A nice, short, comforting re-read.

Started This Thing of Darkness. After a lifetime of ignoring naval terms in the hope they’d give up and go away, I’m going to need a picture of a ship with parts labelled, aren’t I?

Sadik Thanks for the review of There are no Children Here. I've not come across it before (I've read the other 2 books you mention) and have added it to my wish list.

I should have been warned off by your review, noodle! As it is, the cover bristles with ecstatic puff quotes, and it was named in a round-up of good thrillers in one of the newspapers. The publicist did an amazing job at any rate.

@PermanentTemporary it's absolutely bloody awful!

I'm also cracking up because I'm trying to keep a reading notebook at the moment, and looking back at my increasingly infuriated scribbles, I found myself fully aligned with biblio: Fred keeps popping up, eating an apple. Crap motif? But the apple is never mentioned when he drops his bike and papers and is scrabbling around to pick them up. Perhaps he has 3 hands?

I was also apparently enraged by Julian's repeated winking, with some agitated all caps scrawl that it was SOMETIMES TWICE IN THE SAME PARAGRAPH. Having read the ending this was far from the book's greatest crimes. Genuinely one of the worst things I've ever read.

Oh yes @noodlezoodle I loved yours too but didn't realise it was the same book...