50 Book Challenge 2021 Part Eight

Just doing a big review dump here so that I can move into 2022 unencumbered.

63. Involuntary Witness, by Gianrico Carofiglio (trans. by Patrick Creagh). 3/5
    Lent to me by a friend. Less a whodunnit than a courtroom thriller. A satisfyingly multi-layered main character, and an implicit critique of the racism endemic in the Italian legal system.

64. Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. 4/5
    This novel gave me plenty to think about. It’s a mark of Ishiguro’s talent that he can create a first-person narrator who is a robot, and whose voice as a robot is (mostly) convincing, so that I turned the pages without questioning this premise. Yet Klara is also extremely sympathetic, and certain humans fail to measure up in comparison, which is perhaps the saddest thing about the story. Some of the social critique is quite damning, such as the parents who are literally willing to make their children ill in order to ensure that their offspring are intellectually superior.

65. Self-Compassion, by Kristin Neff. 4/5
    An American self-help book about how to be kinder to yourself. As someone who struggles a lot with perfectionist tendencies, I liked this a lot.

66. Jeune fille au balcon, by Leïla Sebbar. 4/5
    Sebbar writes wonderful collections of short stories, often about women in France and Algeria, and this collection (which I don’t think has been translated into English) was no exception. Particularly interesting was a story based on the real-life photography of Marc Garanger, who was commissioned by the French government in 1960 to take photos of Algerian village women who had been forced to remove their veils. I googled his name after I read the story, and there is so much anger, protest and resignation in these women’s faces. It feels ethically wrong to look at their photos, knowing that they didn’t want to be photographed and that the photography itself was an act of violence, but at the same time the photos constitute a powerful record of French (male) oppression and Algerian (female) resistance.

67. Beautiful World, Where Are You?, by Sally Rooney. 4/5
    This novel is quite ‘meta’, and feels self-referential, in that it’s a novel about how a young woman novelist acquires an unsought level of celebrity. I didn’t love it as much as Normal People, but I liked it better than Conversations with Friends. Rooney’s voice is distinctive and she has a real knack for making the familiar strange, such as when she describes the way people scroll through social media on their phones, assimilating all kinds of different information in seconds without ever changing expression. I liked the ending of the book as well.

68. Dusty Answer, by Rosamond Lehmann. 3/5
    This novel is fascinating in many ways (same-sex attraction, women students in 1920s Cambridge), but the style alienated me a little. The descriptions are very flowery, and the protagonist is quite self-absorbed. On the other hand, it captures the intensity of adolescent feelings very well.

69. Oh William!, by Elizabeth Strout. 5/5
    I loved this novel, which I suppose confirms me as a diehard Strout fan. I also loved My Name Is Lucy Barton, to which this book is a sequel. Strout shows how the effects of childhood trauma carry on affecting adult life, but she also shows how Lucy has been able to build a rich life of her own, despite her vulnerabilities, and to forge strong relationships with her own children. So this is a hopeful novel. Strout is just remarkably good at exposing the delicate clockwork of human relationships, and creating characters who make their way through the world with a compelling mix of blindness and insight.

70. The Promise, by Damon Galgut. 4/5
    A very skilfully written novel that moves from apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa. I particularly liked the way each section of the novel features a new religious figure (evangelical pastor, priest, New Age guru and so on), yet the character who is the most ethical in the book, the unsubtly named Amor, doesn’t seem to subscribe to any religion at all. It is Amor who is determined to keep the promise of the book’s title. She is almost too good to be true, but the juxtaposition between her quiet determination and the chaotic, messy lives of the rest of her family is a moving one.

71. Troilus and Cressida, by Shakespeare. 5/5
    Read because my son is working on this play for a school project. It’s a strange and messy play, one that famously eludes neat categories of genre. But the way Shakespeare retells the story of the Trojan war is, unsurprisingly, weird and wonderful. None of the heroes (with the possible exception of Hector) are very heroic, and Cressida herself is marvellous, her supposed sexual promiscuity matched by her razor-sharp wit.

@Boiledeggandtoast I love a podcast, that sounds really interesting, especially given Russia's posturing at present. I was also going to recommend a podcast if you're into them @Sadik. I really liked The Missing Crytoqueen and Sweet Bobby.

@PermanentTemporary so sorry about your husband. I was having a conversation with a close friend who suffers from depression about Queenie. She said one of the things that struck her was that the main character was able to get help while my friend struggled for years to get any referral from the NHS.

Will consider my highlights and post soon,I feel like it's been a really good year for books for me and most of my highlights have been books published this year.

Hello 50 bookers. I received just two books for Christmas plus a Waterstone's voucher.

I've been an irregular poster this year as I have got into a cycle of posting, lapsing, feeling guilty about coming back and then finally posting again. Permanent heartfelt to you, and thank you for collating the annual bolded list. My standouts this year were:

The Way of All Flesh - Ambrose Parry
The Heat of The Moment - Sabrina Cohen-Hatton
Expectation - Anna Hope
Dolce Vita Confidential - Shawn Levy
In Ghostly Japan - Lafcadio Hearn
The Dreamers - Karen Thompson Walker
Maigret's Memoirs - Georges Simenon
Miss Benson's Beetle - Rachel Joyce
Quite - Claudia Winkleman
Around The World In Eighty Days - Jules Verne
Madam, Will You Talk? - Mary Stewart
The Only Plane in the Sky - Garrett M Graff
Leave The World Behind - Rumaan Alam
The Break - Marian Keyes
The Wolf Den - Elodie Harper

The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett
Reread of an old favourite.

Why Buddhism Is True - Robert Wright
A look at secular Buddhist thought and practice from the perspective of evolutionary biology. More fun than it sounds and very enlightening (no pun intended).

The Good Thieves - Katherine Rundel
Wonderful children's book by the writer of Why You Should Read Children's Books Even Though You Are So Old and Wise.

Work - And Other Four Letter Words - Joseph Millson
This is my read of the year and led to much Muttley-sniggering. Millson is primarily a theatre actor, though he was apparently a regular in Peak Practice and Doctors and for some reason I thought he was a chef. I know nothing about theatre but he gives a fascinating account of what acting actually involves, from the rehearsal process to experimenting with the role on stage each night and the relationships that form within theatre companies. He is also very funny and writes movingly of his relationship with his father and children.

The Professor and the Parson - Adam Sisman
The true story of a man who, with varying levels of success, claimed over a period of forty years to be an Anglican priest (he was ordained but defrocked) and to have had a successful academic career at Oxford and several other institutions. He was also convicted once for bigamy, though he seems to had six or seven wives in total and may not have divorced all of them. I work at a university and read this with my head in my hands at times, as it is all too easy to see how this happened.

I think that's my lot for 2021. I have finished 63 books in total and have a couple more on the go. I like to carry over two or three unfinished books at the end of the year so that I get a couple of early finishes.

Just finished the truly excellent Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn. This has less breadth and reach than Caroline Criado Perez but more depth and detail and is a trawl through history, finding pretty depressing patterns.

It is an eye opener in places - particularly on the ambiguities of early health feminists and birth control pioneers who were also blatant eugenicists. It throws a spotlight on many of the tensions within feminism, including issues about the recognition of women who are not white. However, it also looks at the issues surrounding the mystification of pain and medical intervention , especially in affluent white women. Some pretty shocking stuff about experimentation on women , including the 20th century and, of course as highlighted by CCP, the lack of inclusion of women in medical trials - and the treatment (or lack thereof) of 'hysterical' female illnesses. Cleghorn focuses on how so much of medicine is paternalistic and focuses on women as reproductive entities. It is sad how modern some of her examples are (eg the total exclusion of women form HIV research)

It's s sensitive, yet angry , book. The author herself has Lupus so writes about her own experiences passionately.

It is churlish to point out what is missing as it is a long book! She would have to write a whole other book if she wanted greater global coverage, for example, so focuses almost entirely on the UK and the US. She spends a long time on the (absorbing) Victorian era, perhaps at the expense of the equally fascinating modern era.

She can't spell discreetly though! I am quite squeamish and the opening 100 or so pages did have me feeling rather faint at times...

(ps none of the very small passing comments about transwomen or people with ovaries bothered me and only seems to have bothered one person on Amazon. She explains her focus on women who are born female briefly and sensitively at the outset)

About two-thirds of the books I read were by female authors; just under half was non-fiction.

My favourite fiction was:
The Pull of the Stars, by Emma Donohue and The Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis.

Non-fiction:
Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer
A Bit of a Stretch, Chris Atkins
The Anglo-Saxons, Marc Morris

I'm currently really enjoying *The Wisdom of the Ancients, by Neil Oliver." The man can write, and it's nicely bookish too.

Snuck in a couple of last minute reads...

41. It Takes Blood And Guts - Skin

The Skunk Anansie singer's autobiography, read mainly for nostalgia as I worked in the music business in the 90s and knew some of the people involved. Little literary merit but an easy read alongside something a lot more heavy...

42. The Only Plane In The Sky - Garrett M Graff

Lots already said about this oral history of 9/11 so not too much to add, a shocking and sad read but shot through with heroism and kindness.

I’ve had a disappointing year and haven’t kept a list. I can’t honestly say that anything has stood out fiction wise but I’ve gone for easy reads in the main.
Non fiction wise I enjoyed
The Life of Stuff - susannah Walker
The Madness of Grief - Richard Coles
Hungry - Grace Dent

1. Outlander, Diana Gabaldon
2. Diary of a Provincial Lady, E M Delafield
3. The Duke & I, Julia Quinn
4. Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
5. Us, David Nicholls

1. Migrant City: A New History of London, Panikos Panayi

1. The Outsider, Albert Camus

My bolds.
@PermanentTemporary thank you for collating. Sorry for the way the system failed. I have a sibling who I lost in a similar way.

Really hope to join you all next year.

I've read some excellent books in 2021 (and very few duds), although I've yet to make 50 in a year. I'm in awe of those of you who do, and especially those who pass the 100 mark.

My standouts are:

Fiction:

Dusty Answer by Rosamund Lehman
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
The Land of Spices by Kate O'Brien
My Antonia by Willa Cather

Non-Fiction

The Years by Annie Ernaux
This Rare Spirit by Julia Copus
One of Them by Musa Okwonga

Poetry

Devotions by Mary Oliver
Charlotte Mew Selected Poetry and Prose

All my top reads were non-fiction and probably not that helpful but for what it's worth, they were:

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts - Christopher de Hamel
London Fog: The Biography - Christine L. Corton
Just My Type - Simon Garfield
The Only Plane in the Sky - Garrett M. Graff
The Ratline - Philippe Sands
East West Street - Philippe Sands
The Land Where Lemons Grow - Helena Attlee
Falling Upwards - Richard Holmes

I also loved a couple in the fiction category - Golden Hill by Francis Spufford and Mary Kelly's superbly weird/tense Due to a Death.

Cornishblues, I'm reading Slough House at the moment and loving it

Thanks for doing the number-crunching, Permanent, you're a ⭐️

PT, because my laptop dies I never carried across lists and bolded books but , if it's helpful.

I read a lot of quite heavy books this year , for some reason . Standouts were :

The Spirit Level by Wilkinson and Pickett
Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Authority Gap - Mary Ann Sieghart
The Gift of Rain- Tan Twan Eng

and
Unwell Women - Elinor Cleghorn . Review to follow before New Year!

Thank you for collating and hope you are OK.

So sorry to hear about your DH Permanent.

Having lurked a bit in the last couple of years, I enjoyed taking part in these threads this year, thanks southeast and everyone for all the reviews and conversation. I love that you lot both introduce me to books like The Appeal and give me an opinion on who might win the Booker prize when I’ve only read 1 and a quarter shortlisted books. This is the first time I’ve ever made any count or record of what I’ve read and it’s nice to have reviews to look back on. I did make 50 but will post without counting next year.

Didn’t read a great deal of non-fiction but what I did read was excellent and by and large surpassed the fiction, particularly Tony Parker’s Lighthouse and A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders (thanks, Meg).

Best looked-forward-to read was Mick Herron’s Slough House which was fab.

Best surprises for me were Ali Smith who I’d concluded years ago was over my head, but I enjoyed the first 3 Seasons this year and have Summer to look forward to. Also, Thursday Murder Club was great fun, but I nearly missed it because of the lettering on the cover.

Finally got round to reading Patricia Lockwood - enjoyed both Priestdaddy and ‘No one is talking about this’ especially the former.

Glad I retried Girl, Woman, Other as it was an excellent read once I got going and it led me to Mr Loverman which was a good holiday read alongside Grace Dent’s Hungry.

Also enjoyed Shuggie Bain, Born a Crime (great on audio), Everything Sad Is Untrue and Conundrum.

Most notable not-for-mes were Piranesi, Circe and the new Sally Rooney.

And these were my Christmas presents (no input from me)
I’ve already read And Away … it’s a modest and unaffected account of Bob Mortimer’s life and the times he struggled as well as some fun stories about his TV shows (I am a Vic and Bob fan from way back). I love Bob .. how can you not?
Isn’t the cover of Small Things Like These beautiful. It will be my next read to sneak in a short one before 2022

@PermanentTemporary 💕

PermanentTemporary and thank you so much for collating everyone's best reads.

Mine are:

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
The Shipping News by E Annie Proulx
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
Earth and Heaven by Sue Gee
The Only Plane in the Sky by Garrett M Graff
Small Island by Andrea Levy
And Away.. by Bob Mortimer

Four of these are books from quite a while ago. Although The Shipping News had been in my bookcase for years and I'd never got round to it before. A brilliant discovery and probably my number one book this year.

I'm going to include more rereads this year; more old favourites and classics and fewer hyped-up latest literary fiction best-sellers with quotes from their mates on the cover - usually employing phrases like skewering and razor-sharp - which can prove disappointing.

Note to self, engage brain before posting.

Sorry, should have said it's a podcast.

Apparently it is available on Audible too.

Sadik It's not an Audible, but I really recommend Series 1 of The Big Steal about Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Putin, and how Putin took post Soviet Russia from emerging democracy to kleptocracy. There's a new series just started which I haven't caught up on yet.

My highlights of the year were:

1. The Girl With The Louding Voice by Abi Daré
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
3. The Last House On Needless Street by Catronia Ward
4. The Long Song by Andrea Levy
5. The Pursuit Of Love by Nancy Mitford
6. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
7. Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers
8. Hungry by Grace Dent

Not a bad hit rate, and if I had to narrow it down to a top three it would be War & Peace, Hungry & The Long Song.
Now I'll stop spamming the thread and go back to read all the comments I've missed in the lead up to Christmas!

@PermanentTemporary so sorry you and your DH were let down so very badly

Looking forward to seeing the list of the bolds, if you need a hand let me know as I was planning to look through to get ideas for what to buy with my Amazon voucher. If not thanks so much for doing that.

I'm going to hold off on adding my final list as I'm hoping to finish the audible version of The Kraken Wakes this year. I won't get Needful Things finished as I stated it yesterday and it's huge.

Just finished 37. A Christmas Carol First Dickens I've read and will definitely try another one next year. Couldn't get scenes out of my head from The Muppet Christmas Carol though!

Full list for the year including standouts for the spreadsheet. Thanks for offering to collate @PermanentTemporary

1. Midnight Library - Matt Haig

1. We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2. Strange Weather in Tokyo - Hiromi Kawakami
3. The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett
4. Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell
5. The Nakano Book Shop - Hiromi Kawakami
6. The Truths We Hold - Kamala Harris

I DNFed TTOD too, we can have a little refuseniks club :)

I reckon I'm done for this year too, I've got a few things on the go, but none of them are really grabbing me (I'm saving my new Adrian Tchaikovsky for dull January weekends). Quite enjoying Humankind by Rutger Bregman, but it's more of a couple of chapters before bed kind of book.

I'd be grateful for any recommendations for really good Audible non-fiction, particularly politics / economics / social sciences. I'm currently listening to There is Nothing For You Here by Fiona Hill but again not really gripped. Unlike JD Vance, who is really good at expanding his own story of unlikely success into general lessons, it feels quite repetitive and unreflective so far. (I'm very similar in age to her, also come from a post industrial area, and also first - indeed so far only - member of my family to go to university. Maybe economics different to languages / Cambridge different to St Andrews, but I don't recall ever being asked pointed questions about where I came from / what my father did, nor comments on my accent.)

In total this year I've read 111 books, 49% non-fiction 51% fiction. 64% by women, 35% by men. 14% audio, 55% ebook (mix of kindle & library), 32% paper.

Top fiction definitely The Prince's Pen by Horatio Clare, non-fiction harder to pick a favourite, but ignoring the very niche (bee swarming / landrace gardening etc) my top three in no particular order would probably be Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson and A Libertarian Walks into a Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Bolded books for your spreadsheet Permanent - lots of them, it was definitely a good year overall

Patrick Hennessey: The Junior Officers Reading Club
Matthew Kneale: Pilgrims
Susanna Clarke: Piranesi
Horatio Clare: The Prince's Pen
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling: A Libertarian Walks into a Bear
Tishani Doshi: Fountainville
Jenny Kleeman: Sex Robots and Vegan Meat
Horatio Clare: Truant
Margee Kerr , Linda Rodriguez McRobbie: Ouch: Why pain hurts and why it doesn't have to
Azadeh Moaveni: Guest House for Young Widows
Henry Greely: Crispr People
Tim Harford: How to Make the World Add Up
Javier Blas & Jack Farchy: The World for Sale
Tao Paul Wimbush: The Lammas Ecovillage : Deep Roots & Stormy Skies
Grace Dent: Hungry
Merlin Sheldrake: Entangled Life
Polly Barton: Fifty Sounds
Sasha Swire: Diary of an MP's Wife
Helena Kennedy: Eve Was Shamed
Caitlin Moran: More than a woman
Lucy Kellaway: Re-educated
Wally Shaw: Swarming: Biology & Control
Musa Okwonga: One of Them
Eric Lonergan & Mark Blyth: Angrynomics
Walter Isaacson: The Code Breaker
Naomi Novik: The Last Graduate
Deborah Feldman: Unorthodox
Theodora Kroeber: Ishi in Two Worlds
John Lewis Sempel: The Running Hare
Daryl Gregory: The Album of Dr Moreau
Sarah Pinsker: We are Satellites
Alex Kotlowitz: There Are No Children Here
JD Vance: Hillbilly Elegy
Joseph Lofthouse: Landrace Gardening

My Christmas book haul! Two lovely cook books, the latest Stephen King (which I bought for DH but I'm including here as I really bought it for me!) And two random books. This is what happens when my husband is let loose in a book shop and randomly chooses from the biggest displays of books by people I vaguely like! He's bought me the second Richard Osman book, when I had no wish or intention of reading the first. Wondering if I can return this Does anyone know if it works as a stand alone novel? And Louis Theroux's latest which I will read and may enjoy, we'll see!

I've reached 49 books and I'm hopeful I'm still hopeful I'll reach 50 by NYE.
Latest reads are:
48. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Free on Audible read by Hugh Grant who did a good job I thought. A straightforward, personable narration which differentiated characters without histrionics and silly voices. Lovely to listen to whilst wrapping the presents.

49. Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. Translated from Japanese this is a gentle time travelling story made up of several people's interwoven experiences of travelling forwards and back in time from a nondescript basement cafe. There are several rules that have to be followed:

1. You must always sit in the same seat in the cafe (which involves waiting for the ghost who normally sits there to move, something she only does once a day.)
2. Once you travelled in time you cannot leave the seat.
3. You can only interact with people who have visited the cafe in the past.
4. Nothing you do or say in the past will chance the future however hard you try.
5. You must return to the present before the coffee you are served gets cold, failure to do this means you become the new cafe ghost trapped at the same table for eternity. It was okay, I found the protagonists names a bit confusing initially as they were unfamiliar to me and many sounded the same, I didn't dislike it but I wouldn't recommend it either.