50 Book Challenge 2022 Part Three

nowanearly - It even has a sequel called Noble House

I read Shogun what feels like a hundred years ago but remember loving it. Had no idea there were other books in the same vein. Thanks for the review Cote

Thank you @Gingerwarthog. I will take a look

I fall asleep holding my kindle most nights!

17. The Girl With the Louding Voice by Abi Dare. This is the story of Adunni, who is 14 and devastated by her mother's death. She wants to finish school, but her father marries her off to an older man. Will she have the opportunity to pursue her dreams? Adunni is an appealing character and I enjoyed this a lot.

11. Tai-Pan by James Clavell

This was beautifully written, gigantic in scope, intelligent, witty, and profound. It was everything I like in historical fiction, much like the author's previous book Shogun.

It is the story of British Hong Kong's early days, centering the head of the largest British trading house doing business with China, and focusing on the political power plays, personal, commercial, and military decisions that paved the way. All of the 30-odd characters are meticulously drawn, their personalities, motivations and even humour recognizable to the reader. Cultural and often irreconcilable differences between British people and their Chinese friends, opponents, and concubines are portrayed in stark relief. The story is engaging and the prose is beautiful.

I enjoyed every one of this book's 732 pages. Highly recommended.

You read my mind, boiledegg, I’ve already reserved Foster from the library!

Also chiming in to endorse In Our Time as a good listen; I’m another who often resorts to it on sleepless nights (and then has to catch up because I’ve dropped off and missed interesting bits). I’d heard the one about the year without a summer and it was fascinating. The fact that Frankenstein might never have been written, if not for the climate impacts of the eruption of Tambora (ie solid rain while the Shelleys, Byron & co were holed up in Villa Diodati) is something to ponder...! But there are so many good editions to choose, and lots of literary ones.

Sadik - I thought Angels was really weak. I felt Keyes was struggling to understand a character she had observed so well from the outside.

That's interesting that you've struggled with The Five remus, I have it on tbr but haven't gotten round to it yet. I also enjoyed Lady Worsley's Whim by her, which I believe has been re-printed as The Scandalous Lady W after the tv adaptation. Which I also haven't watched but may try to get to sometime

CornishBlues I sometimes need to trick my brain that I’m not really trying to go to sleep, podcasts often do the trick. I like Dead to Me too, though sometimes it’s a bit loud and doesn’t work. In Our Time is great but often so interesting I have to listen to ones I’ve already heard otherwise I get annoyed that I missed the end!

A comfort-listening podcast to fall asleep to is genius Alias , I need to find myself one.

Have spent the last few weeks unable to focus on any reading other than for work purposes or newspapers.
This is very unlike me.
However, I enjoyed The Outrun by Amy Liptrot a few years ago and thought I would try The Instant.
In The Instant she goes to live in Berlin (looking for love and raccoons). She is variously successful.
I enjoy Liptrot's eye for detail and her searing honesty ( although given what we're seeing in the news at the moment she can seem self-indulgent and self obsessed.)
For me the real love interest of the book is Berlin itself and its smells, sounds and the life evident in the descriptions of the places she lives and frequents. The club scenes are particularly good.
I would recommend it - although you might find yourself losing patience with her at times as she lets herself be emotionally manipulated by her German lover.

15. Dogs of War - Adrian Tchaikovsky Rex is a bioform dog soldier. As far as I can make out this means he is a dog but with enhanced size & strength and also has some human attributes like hands and the ability to reason and speak. He also has some internal hardware, databases & comms and stuff. This makes him a terrifyingly efficient soldier, along with his squad Honey (a bear), Dragon (scary reptile thing) and Bees (a swarm of bees). Rex wants nothing more than to be a Good Dog. His only real desire is to obey his Master, who turns out to be a bad man, which Rex learns by degrees with the careful coaching of Honey, who has superior intelligence.

This isn't really my kind of thing, I read it on the recommendation of DH, who loves this kind of stuff. I thought the parts narrated by Rex were excellent, he perfectly captured the mind of a dog (or what I imagine the mind of a dog is like), but the parts dealing with the humans and the ethics of owning a reasoning entity were less well done and didn't really work for me. Above all, I like a book to be written beautifully. The Rex part worked in this, the humans not so much.

Thank you from me too Viking for the link - I love In Our Time but definitely find myself scrolling through the episodes and almost choosing at random. I often default to the Eleanor of Aquitaine one when my mind is a bit frazzled at bedtime, I’ve heard it so many times that I don’t mind falling asleep half way through.

And many thanks to Viking for the link.

Cassandre and Terpsichore I'm so glad you liked Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Please do also try Foster which I like even more. (Apologies to long-term 50 Bookers who may recall that I have been banging on about Foster for some years.)

I fell off the thread and have had nothing to update for absolutely ages now, after a fairly strong start in Jan and Feb!

I HAVE been reading, but very very slowly making my way through my latest. It’s no reflection on the book itself, which was excellent, but more on me and how I struggle with non-fiction. I only seem to be able to read/ take it in in very short bursts and therefore it always slows me down.

Anyway, I’ve now finished and definitely recommend 15. The Sleeping Beauties - Suzanne O’Sullivan . The author is a leading neurologist and this is an exploration of the phenomenon of psychosomatic disorders, mass hysteria and other culture-bound syndromes or so called ‘mystery illnesses’ around the world. It’s an absolutely fascinating look at how illness can be the result of living in a particular place, time and culture. I’m pretty sure I was guilty of thinking of psychosomatic illnesses as being ‘not really real’ before and this book definitely taught me a lot. It was maddening and frustrating at times too, particularly from a feminist perspective where we see that these illnesses are often taken more seriously and seen as having a more tangible, physical cause when in adults and especially men, but dismissed as ‘hysteria’ when they happen in the young and especially women.

Really fascinating, but I better move onto some fiction to get my numbers up now

26: Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan

Cassandre's excellent review above reminded me that I'd bought this when it was 99p recently, and that I also heard a rave review of it on Radio 4's A Good Read. It is indeed very brief - a long short story, really - but packs a significant punch and lingers in the thoughts long after you’ve finished reading. I also loved the skill with which Claire Keegan evoked the setting, a small, everyday Irish town that seemed suspended in time. Although it takes place in the 1980s, this could almost have been a century or two centuries earlier (bar the motor traffic and televisions). Definitely worth a read.

23. Angels by Marian Keyes Third of the Walsh sister books, featuring Maggie (the 'good' sister). I didn't enjoy this as much as Rachel's Holiday & in fact nearly gave up about half way through. It felt like there was a lot of predictable/ stereotyped characters (and we got more of Mammy Walsh's prejudice against lesbians). The second half picked up though, with the underlying reasons behind Maggie's actions explained.

eitak

Looking forward to browsing the IOT list, thanks for posting.

My latest read was A Will to Kill by RV Raman , a very decent contemporary locked-room country house mystery, with the country house located in misty Indian hills, with trains, landslides and even a suit of armour. A good, escapist read.

Viking I agree! That list is brilliant so thank you. I've bookmarked it to look through properly but even flicking through I've noticed quite a few episodes I'm going to listen to. I love IOT and am always trying to get people to listen to it. The year without a summer episode was voted by listeners into the top ten best episodes: the other 9 are a good starting point especially the episode called P v NP which is mind bending

Viking, that list is amazing! I'm obsessed by IOT but find it hard(ish) to navigate the many options. I've now got a long long list of things to listen to.

eitak22, I'm so sorry for your loss.

I'm doing a bit of a review dump (some of these books I read in February!).

12. The Wreath, Sigrid Undset, trans. by Tina Nunnally 4/5
    It took me ages to finish this book, maybe because I was in bed with Covid at the time. I have mixed feelings about it, but will definitely read the rest of the trilogy. The setting (14th c Norway) is historically interesting, and the prose is appealingly minimalist and lucid. However there’s an earnestness to it all that made the story feel heavy to me at times (many medieval texts are full of humour, obscenity even, but not this novel!). The life of the author herself seems fascinating. The daughter of a medieval archaeologist, she converted to Christianity as an adult. She had a daughter with severe learning disabilities, and supported charities for disabled children. However, she distanced herself from feminism and the women’s movement. She fled Norway when the Nazis invaded, and returned after the war. All in all, I became almost more interested in her biography than in the story of her heroine Kristin Lavransdatter. But I do look forward to seeing what happens to Kristin as well!

13. Tales from Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin 4/5
    I read this during the stress of term time and it was very soothing. I love Le Guin’s Earthsea books. This book was published in 2001, so substantially later than the first volumes in the series, and her approach in many of the stories is quite explicitly feminist (even though women play a starring role in The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu as well).

14. Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan 5/5
    I absolutely loved this novella. (Why was it not on the Women’s Prize longlist?) It’s set in mid-1980s Ireland, the story of a coal merchant with a family of daughters who lives close to one of the infamous Magdalen laundries. He is himself the son of an unwed mother, and he sometimes lies awake at night worrying about ‘small things’, like a hungry kid he’s seen on the street. Essentially, it’s a book about ethical choices: how far would you go to help someone in trouble, when church and state are telling you that there’s nothing to worry about? The story is all the more powerful for being so understated. I will buy this and reread it when it comes out in paperback.

15. The Fell, Sarah Moss 4/5
    I always like Moss’s novels and this one was no exception. However, I found it hard to read at times, at it evokes lockdown anxiety – lockdown desperation, even – almost too well. It also made me angry all over again at Boris and the Tories, who were partying away while the rest of the nation were angsting over whether it was OK to venture outdoors for a solitary walk. Quite frankly, fuck them. The portrait of the teenage boy in this novel is also particularly well done.

16. Le Pays des autres [The Country of Others], Leila Slimani 4/5
    This was a great read – thank you, @JaninaDuszejko! It’s a family saga set in post WW2 Morocco. I loved the themes of cultural hybridity and motherhood. The story of the heroine Mathilde is based on Slimani’s French grandmother, Anne Dhobb (now deceased) who left her native Alsace to marry an Arab man and settle on the outskirts of the city of Meknes. Her daughter Aïsha is also a great character, a timid but ferociously clever child pushed against her will into a colonial Catholic school. On the other hand the book felt a little sensationalist to me at points (there’s a passage toward the end where domestic abuse is followed by intense consensual sex, ugh. Slimani likes to shock her readers). And although Slimani herself is French-Moroccan, the story seems to embrace the French point of view more than the Arab one. Many of the most sympathetic characters of the novel are white; the native Moroccan characters (for me anyway) emerge as more other. This is the first volume of a trilogy and the second volume has just come out in France. I hadn’t realised until recently quite how famous Slimani is in France; Macron has given her a special role as French cultural ambassador, and the new book Regardez-nous danser / Watch Us Dance is being advertised all over Paris, on bus stop posters and so on. Incidentally, I was interested to read that Anne Dhobb (the historical counterpart to Mathilde) wrote her own memoir of life in Morocco. However, it seems to be out of print. I wonder how much Slimani drew on her grandmother’s memoir to write her own fictional account.

Enjoyed The Covent Garden Ladies many years ago. I still haven't managed to get through more than a few pages of The Five though.