50 Book Challenge 2016 Part Two

[southeastdweller]

Thread two of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2016, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, it's not too late to join, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

Previous 2016 thread here

I don't think the author gets to categorise their own books, no. That smacks of literary wankery, in my opinion.

10. The Accidental Sorceror, KE Mills. Re-read. Light but funny fantasy - crap wizard Gerald has a magical accident that unleashes his true potential (or potentia, as it is termed). Worth reading for the wonderfully acerbic character of Reg, a (female) talking bird with a dark past. This is the first of a series - I've read them all before but will now proceed to re-read them all. I re-read a lot!

I think book categorisation is largely (if not solely) a marketing tool, and there is necessarily going to be a lot of variation within genres. So if MA writes a book set in the near future of a speculative nature, then yes it's probably going to be science fiction, even if it doesn't involve as much science as The Martian, and is more to do with emotions and relationships than Arthur C Clarke's output. Having said that I'm sure I've mainly seen her on the general fiction shelves.

A lot of books straddle the lines somewhat, because hopefully they come from a creative impulse rather than a completely commercial one. I think the author has as much say in the type of book they think they've written as anyone else, but it's all a bit arbitrary.

I'm not doing too well so far. I've been alternately limping through and skim-reading A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk. It's very tedious. My husband loves Pamuk but it is not doing it for me. Every tiny detail of the main character's life is described and it is mind-numbingly dull at times. I so wanted to like it because I love Turkey and have a fascination with the history and culture and Pamuk is its big Nobel winning writer...but... Nope.

I'm also listening to Middlemarch (read by Juliet Stevenson) and although parts of it are engaging I find my mind drifting.

I wanted to clear some things off the iPad/Kindle so I read Me Before You over a couple of evenings last week. It was okay but everyone I know raves about it. I found it a bit simplistic and obvious.

Not sure where I'm going next book wise but possibly A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter. A non-fiction autobiographical account written in the 1930s. I've wanted to read it since reading Michèle Paver's Dark Matter a few years ago but couldn't get hold of it.

I should add that the books I mentioned are the first three things of the year and I've managed to finish just one so far. Desperate to get through with the others and move on.

Oh crapfatbanana, I've really REALLY struggled with Orhan Pamuk. I took out My Name is RED from the library years ago and eventually brought it back about 6m later. The librarian asked me how I got on with it and I had to admit I had not been able to read it. He said no one he asked had ever finished it...

That's the one that I tried to read years ago (bought as a holiday read) and failed. I have also made feeble attempts with Snow, Istanbul and The New Life and quickly given up. I just don't think me and Orhan are meant to be.

another couple finished:

4. An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth - Chris Hadfield - has been reviewed here several times so will keep it brief. Lovely book! I don't think I was as 'moved' as others, and in places it's a bit too preachy for me, but I loved his passion, which seemed infectious - the section when he's actually on ISS you can feel his excitment and passion in the pages. Great to read now when Cbeebies are going all out on all things spacey.

5. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury - a 'modern classic' - set in a future where books are banned and as all properties are fireproofed, 'firemen' have the job of burning banned books, not putting out fires. To put it politely, "it's of it's era" - there's a certain manic, shoutiness that was common in any books/films that were supposed to be political or passionate in the late 50s/60s. From a modern viewpoint, it just makes everyone seem irritating and the main protagonist didn't seem to have any depth to him. I'm sure others have read it and got something different from it. I was recommended it by someone who put it in the same catagory as 1984 - which might have spoilt it for me as I was expecting something a bit more impressive!

On to some light and fluffy reads for a few days!

"I took out My Name is RED from the library years ago and eventually brought it back about 6m later. The librarian asked me how I got on with it and I had to admit I had not been able to read it. He said no one he asked had ever finished it..."

I'm not surprised. I have tried to read My Name Is Red several times and just couldn't. I had previously read and loved his The New Life back when in university when I was taking very long overnight bus journeys (relevant to the story) and The Black Book which I thought was very atmospheric, mysterious, and brilliant. I got along quite well with Snow, as well, although I did wonder what foreign readers who are less familiar with Turkey's modern history and political issues got out of it.

If anyone is interested, Orhan Pamuk has studied in English all his life and his Turkish prose has a distinct "English" feel to it, as if he wrote in English and translated to Turkish in his head. This is said to be why his books are easy to translate into European languages. His sentences sometimes feel unnaturally long and contrived in Turkish, but would read well when translated into English.

"Most of what Margaret Attwood has written isn't science fiction - or couldn't be considered to be science fiction - as the writer herself doesn't consider it science fiction."

It is, actually, regardless of however desperately M Atwood wants her books NOT to be called SF. Sounds to me like a profoundly racist person insisting her children have an African father and are really dark-skinned but they are not mixed-race. Um... they are, and that's not a bad thing at all. Just like Atwood's books are mostly SF and that is not a bad thing at all, except in her literary-snob head.

Ursula LeGuin has made scathing comments about Atwood's denial re SF:

"To my mind, The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that's half prediction, half satire. But Margaret Atwood doesn't want any of her books to be called science fiction. In her recent, brilliant essay collection, Moving Targets, she says that everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have already happened, so they can't be science fiction, which is "fiction in which things happen that are not possible today." This arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn't want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto."

Here are Atwood's words as well as LeGuin's, if anyone is interested in reading more.

1. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
Bit frightened to give my opinion of this book...I enjoyed it on the whole although didn't think too much about it as a 'sci fi' read and just as a story on its own. Found the author's description of the characters as 'the second violin', 'the viola' rather annoying.
My first book completed! Yay!

Word - I enjoyed it too - the 'feelings' thats don't like helped by it being so far in the future after the epidemic, the 'how will we grow crops?' had been sort of skimmed over and you could get on with how people were living, rather than just surviving (if that makes sense!). I also found that way of discribing people annoying and had forgotten it! (seems dismissive, is it a 'thing' people working in orchestras do?)

Dinosaurs - I think it may well be a thing people in orchestras do. It just read as being a bit showoff and pretentious, I thought.

"you could get on with how people were living, rather than just surviving (if that makes sense!)"

Except that people would realistically would be just surviving in that sort of scenario. They would not be spending most of their time daydreaming about what a great thing air-conditioning was. They would be struggling to hunt, crops would fail, there would be sanitation problems and disease. People would get infections and die. Life would not continue like in the 21st century, with all comforts of modern life enabling our lifestyle.

"I also found that way of discribing people annoying and had forgotten it! (seems dismissive, is it a 'thing' people working in orchestras do?)"

It's not. People in orchestras become very close - more so than players in a team. You would expect them to call each other by their first names.

Just to be clear I'm not saying that I think that Margaret Attwood's books such as Oryx and Crake are not science fiction. I'm saying that a lot of her other writing isn't science fiction at all - such as Alias Grace and Cat's Eye - and therefore if you read them expecting them to be science fiction you'd be disappointed. But on the other hand, if you don't really like science fiction, don't dismiss all her other writing because it is completely different.

It is a bit like David Mitchell's Black Swan Green which is nothing like most of his other books (Cloud Atlas, Number 9 Dream, etc). which was discussed on a previous thread which is completely different from expectations.

I don't think an author can tell you how to categorise their writing and tell you as the reader what it is or isn't. The reader makes their mind up about that.

3 Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
The worst thing about this book was just that I’d not read it until now. I wasn’t sure I would like it but I loved it. Basically about heaven, hell, the birth of the son of the devil and the end of time. I usually shy away from fantasy type novels and then read them and wonder why I shy away from them. I really really enjoyed this and have more Terry Pratchett lined up.

4 Bird watching with your eyes closed by Simon Barnes
This book aims to help you recognise bird song, something that really appealed to me. I read this on Kindle whilst googling the different birds through the RSPB website. I already knew a few of the common ones; blackbird, robin, magpie, crow, goldfinch. And now I know about two more… Doesn’t sound like the best accolade for the book and I think it’s something I will have to keep coming back to. If you’ve enjoyed Meadowland then you might like this too.

I'm with Cote in that, in general, I don't get on terribly well with female writers, especially modern ones.

Hilary Mantel - terrible writing style gets in the way of what could have been a great story (WH). Read a couple of others of hers too and they were badly written and didn't have the luxury of a fascinating historical figure to make an interesting story either.

Kate Atkinson - lazy writer, over-reliant on coincidences, and formulaic.

Sarah Waters - bores me. Nowhere near as clever and cutting edge as she appears to think she is. Tedious characters doing nothing very interesting.

Marilynne Robinson - couldn't even finish one of hers. Found it mind-numbingly dull.

Margaret Atwood - have given up on her in disgust. I don't think she's a dreadful writer, but I do think that her other agendas get in the way of her just telling a decent story.

I won't hear a bad word said about Jane Austen though!

I still don't really get the sex divide though. I could list several modern male writers I don't enjoy reading but it wouldn't lead me to say I didn't like male writers in general. There is so much out there, some I like, a lot I don't, and only a few authors I think that I can really get on with to the point I'd want to read a lot of them, that it makes no sense to me to think of it that way. Just hadn't found one I liked, rather than, they must all be shit.

But I guess this is why Charlotte was Currer all those years ago and Joanne still needed to be JK now.

I'm not saying they are all shit - and can think of plenty of terrible male writers - but, for me, finding a female writer I like is much harder. Tbh though, I don't like that many modern male fiction writers either!

or Enid Blyton???!!!

Never even heard of Marilynne Robinson, must go check her out...

Well, am with you on Austen, at least, Remus! Imho, Sarah Waters is a huge talent, love her precise period descriptions and careful characters. Not a great fan of Atwood either, but admire how she has pushed boundaries over the years; she's not an easy or enjoyable read, especially the dystopian world of The Handmaid's Tale, for instance, but a literary icon nonetheless.

Oh and i hate most sci-fi...

I know what you mean Satsuk, of all the ways to talk about what I like/don't like, I wouldn't raise the sex of the writer as one of them.

I guess some have noticed a much stronger trend for them personally than you and me maybe?

I'd never dismiss a first book either. If I don't like a first book, I ain't trying any more. But I would tend to find a first (or even the first few books) are often the best, especially for the more generic writers. The likes of Jane Greene, Katie Forde, Marian Keyes etc. Frederick Forsyth too did this on me. The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa file are fantastic. The rest, totally meh.

Kate Atkinson goes against this general trend for me as I did not particularly like her earlier books (have only read Behind the Scenes in fact), but love Life After Life.

I really wanted to like Sarah W. She writes about lots of the kinds of things I'm interested in, but her writing just doesn't work for me.

I'm happy to hear ill of Blyton, who had many flaws, but I stand by my right to read 'The Secret Island' in the bath when I need cheering up!

I thought of you today, Wilting - have you ever read any Martin Millar, by any chance?

Nope, what sort of stuff does he write?

Millar
I loved him years ago. Think Brixton, New York, urban grit, Punk, crazy fantasy, mayhem, madness, the New York Dolls and lesbian fairies and you'll be part way there. I got 'The Good Fairies of New York' v cheap on Kindle, having not read it for donkeys' years. It's great fun - a bit like 'John Dies at the End' without the rubbish bits. I'm thoroughly enjoying revisiting it.

It is interesting how we select books, especially op these days where the few are heavily promoted. I find non fiction really hard to read these days, but again, probably need to light on the right thing.

SW and MA have never really appealed to me. I have to say Kate Atkinson didn't either until I read her and got something different than I was expecting. Her writing is excellent I think, witty, moving but devoid of sentimentality...Hilary Mantel tried something different and sustained it well. She gets a lot of stick for her style but I wouldn't have read it if it had been a bog standard historical novel. Haven't tried beyond WH & BUTB though.