50 Book Challenge 2015 Part 2

[Southeastdweller]

Thread two of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The idea is to read 50 books (or more!) in 2015.

Previous thread here

Breathing Lessons, Ladder of Years, Spool of Blue Thread - all fantastic, though others are wonderful too (though admittedly I haven't read all if hers). Start with those three.

thanks!

I'm an Anne Tyler fan too - my favourite is Back When We Were Grown Ups.

14. A Mother's Story by Amanda Prowse, written from the point of view of a (fictional) woman with severe PND. This is realistic, gripping and really tugs at your heartstrings - possibly not the perfect mother's day choice! Thanks for the recommendation, esiotrot and mumslife.

tumble, It looks good. Just added it to my order.

OK, have not been reading my usual sort of literature this year - have been stressed and looking mostly for comforting escapist stuff and rereads of old favourites. So ..

After Call the Midwife and Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth (both well worth reading) polished off the Cazalet Chronicles 1-4 in order to read :

1. All Change by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Written towards the end of her life and many years after the others in the series. Less good, IMO, and I found some of the plot development difficult to accept ( Archie and Clary's relationship, for example) but still glad I read it.

10. Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. Loved this years ago and enjoyed it again, maybe not quite so much.

11. Love in a Cold Climate. As above.

12. Netherwood by Jane Sanderson. For book group. Set in the Yorkshire coalfields, a rags-to-riches story but also including some gritty realities about the dangers of coal-mining. Not amazing, but I would probably read the sequel.

13. A Horseman Riding By, Book 1, by RF Delderfield. A huge family saga set at the beginning of the 20th century. I can hardly remember anything from the first time I read it, but enjoyed it again. A wee bit dated, but detailed and absorbing. Documents an era of social change through the lives of tenant farmers on a private estate.

14. The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle by Kirsty Wark. For book group. Better than I expected. KW clearly loves the island of Arran and evokes it beautifully. The delving into the past is well done ( although I'm getting very tired of this time-slip sort of narrative), and the love story is OK, apart from a couple of cheesey pieces of description which should have been edited out. Although I suspect they were probably edited in, as she generally writes pretty well. I'm planning a visit to Arran this summer - haven't been since I was a child - on the strength of the memories evoked by reading this book.

15. Alys Always by Harriet Lane. Psychological thriller (?) Over-rated IMO .. unremarkable and predictable. Unless I've missed something? Reviews have been full of praise, however the author comes from the London literary world and that tends to help. Would be interested to hear what anyone else thought.

Now reading Charlotte by David Foenkinos (for French book group) and Book 2 of A Horseman Riding by.

After that hope to have time to tackle Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

highland - You are cutting it really close for JS & Mr N. You only have 13 days to read it.

I am loving this thread this year. So many well thought out reviews and great book recommendations. If my Amazon wish list was a book shelf it would have fallen down by now!

10. The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin.

Double figures! This acclaimed book was not one for me. For those who have not read it it follows a broken family in Ireland, the relationship between woman, brother, mother and grandmother- all the grievances and secrets come to a head when the brother falls unwell. I'm afraid I found it all a bit boring and whiney.

11. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Wow, quite a story. A tumultuous journey through the lives of 3 generations of a family from The Dominican Republic. Passionate, tragic, engrossing.

I think I need a bit of light relief now!

Book 6 C is for Corpse, bought in a job lot with A and B, thempting as it is to whistle through the alphabet for this challenge I am now moving on for a bit

I'm 30 percent through js and Mr n, I'm really enjoying it so far so it's going quite quickly...think I shall be ok for the 28th, especially as I have a couple of days off this week which I intend to spend lozacking about the house with a book in hand...bliss!

Cote you are probably right. I might have to put the Delderfield on hold and get stuck into JSAMN. As a rough guide I read about a page a minute .. which is approximately 16-17 hours' reading time .. yes, you have a point

23. Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut

My first novel by Damon Galgut and one which I had been keen to read for a while.

It is a fictional account of E M Forster's life, focussing specifically on the inspiration for his final novel A Passage To India and also his frustrations and often fruitless search for love and companionship.

It is clear that Damon Galgut carried out an immense amount of research for this novel. However, whilst I have given my review 4 stars for its sheer literary quality, I want to qualify that. There were some aspects of the telling of the story which I thought were a little in poor taste and which made me feel uncomfortable.

Had this been a purely invented character rather than one based upon E M Forster I wouldn't have had a problem. Accepted that Forster was homosexual. His close friendships with both Masood, his former pupil, and Mohammed whom he met whilst he was working in Egypt during the 1914-18 War presumably are as true to the telling as possible. I felt the portrayal of his search for love, and his timidity and fear of expressing his feelings for others was well done, written sensitively and sympathetically. One can only feel sorrow that his life was rather lacking in love and affection. But certain imagined events, which could not possibly have been known, inferred a loss of dignity upon someone who is unable to answer for himself. There must still be people alive who knew him and perhaps would feel some discomfort on his behalf. But maybe it's just me feeling embarrassed on his behalf.

Putting aside those few issues, this was as good a read as I had hoped for and will now encourage me to get on and read Forster's novels!

21. David Bell The Hiding Place

I loved this , really gripping murder mystery . It's about a four year old going missing 25 years ago & the main character is his sister

I read David Bell's Cemetary Girl too which is really good

Tumble tumble glad you enjoyed A Mothers Story but completely agree , not a perfect Mother's Day choice !!

Oh, ShakeIt, that's my favourite Toibin novel :(. I loved that one, but didn't warm to his most recent one, Nora Webster. I thought that, whilst it was well written, I just didn't like the story and found Nora quite an annoying, unsympathetic and abrasive character.

Book 9 - The Shock of the Fall. This is the story of Matthew Homes, a young man suffering with mental illness following the loss of his brother when very young. I would definitely recommend it. The first person narration draws you in and keeps you turning page after page. It is at times difficult to follow but due to the nature of the story and the illness of the narrator, it seems to fit perfectly and makes the narrator much more believable. Matthews story is told sympathetically without becoming overly sentimental and is a good insight into mental illness and the care system in the UK.

Now onto the first book in the Merrily Watkins Mysteries series.

My TBR pile keeps getting bigger and bigger - Duchess, that book sounds very interesting. Have you read any Forster, before? I can recommend Maurice and Howards End (as well as both films).

I love Maurice. The film is amasing. OMG Rupert Graves in Maurice makes me feel faint

Southeast- I'm reading Where Angels Fear To Tread at the moment. I like it so far.

Haven't read any others but have seen the films of A Passage To India, Maurice and A Room With A View although not recently.

Agree Rupert Graves but also James Wilby rather pleasant on the eye too

Meant to add that I hope to work my way through Forster's novels this year So many books on my reading list now as well

23. A House for Mr Biswas, V.S. Naipaul Mr Mohun Biswas, an Indian in Trinidad, son of a sugarcane labourer, cursed from birth, yearns for a home he can call his own, but first he must fight against his own tendency toward fatalism and failure, and his wife's madcap and domineering family.

I've always been put off reading Naipaul due to his reputation as a bombastic, arrogant, sexist man. Certainly, Naipaul has very little sympathy for the unlikeable characters in this book - they are, aside from the children, uniformly idiotic - but as a whole this novel is simply marvellous: measured, well-paced, fluently written, comic, sardonic, sad and frustrating (the family, not the novel) with sumptuous descriptions of mid-20th century Indo-Trinidadian life. A modern classic masterpiece of Dickensian proportions.

I am now reading Naipaul's A Bend in the River which is also turning out to be brilliant.

I've had a stressful few days so have been seeking escapism in books

10. Secret Diary of Adrian Mole book1 . Last read in 1983. Every bit as funny as I remember, if not more so from an adult perspective.

11. Amanda Prowse - mothers Story. Did enjoy this a lot - seems the wrong thing to say about a book with such a bleak subject - and raced through it no time. I read it on kindle and my main gripe was that the novel ended at 64%, so I was expecting much more in terms of story and twists. I ended up with a 'oh is that it then' feeling at the end.

12. Skim read Adele Parks - State We're In. Didn't grab me at all.

Feel the need to read something a bit more heavyweight now but probably won't

"thelittlebooktroll" - it's hard to know where to start with Anne Tyler! I haven't read all of them. Breathing Lessons is one of those I haven't read, so don't know. My personal favourites, I think, are The Accidental Tourist and An Amateur Marriage, but this latest one is really good too.

A couple of short books to bump up my reading rate after Jonathan Strange!

11. Catcher in the Rye - at times funny, at times sad, the story of Holden Caulfield, a fairly privileged teenager from a dysfunctional family who keeps being chucked out of posh schools for underperforming. He spends a weekend in New York avoiding going home and musing on life. There's always a sense that something awful could happen to him, but nothing actually does, and on the whole he comes across as a sympathetic character who will probably be fine if he can just get through being a teenager. Obviously it is dated (set in 1950s) but still enjoyable.
12. Not Dark Yet - an account of one man's attempt to organise an annual cricket match in an Oxfordshire village. Read because I needed to read a sports related book for a Goodreads challenge and this was sitting on the shelf, but probably only for serious cricket buffs of a certain age, gender and outlook on life.

Now on to Sarah Moss 'Bodies of Light'.

thelittlebooktroll I really enjoyed Anne Tyler's Saint Maybe - I've read a number of hers, mostly a few years ago, but this one has stayed with me more than most. I've got The Beginner's Goodbye sitting on my Kindle, must get round to reading it before being tempted by the new one

I can't wait to read the new Anne Tyler but am saving it for my holiday. She's one of my favourite authors. My favourites are Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons and Ladder of Years. I reread Accidental Tourist every year or so.