50 Book Challenge 2016 Part Three

[southeastdweller]

Thread three 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.

First thread of 2016 is here and second thread here.

How're you getting on so far?

pterobore - I love Agatha Christie, although I rather binged on her books in 2012/3 and worked my way through most of them, it feels too soon for a re-read, although I might get inspired!

My favourites - "And then there was none", "the body in the library", "After the Funeral", "A pocketful of rye", "The mirror crack'd from side to side" - although I do love a lot of the Poirot books, although my favourites all seem to be Marple ones.

Agree with Canyouforgiveher - there's something very comforting about a good cosy murder mystery by Christie. I need to pull up her full list and see if there's any of the lesser known ones I've missed.

Mmm, never rated her. Really tried to like her work and have read a fair few over the years but didn't like them much at all. Admittedly they make a fine TV drama though, love the costumes, especially!

pterobore Have you heard of They Came to Baghdad? It's a lesser-known Christie and has the flavour of Graham Greene/John Buchan about it, since it's more of an espionage thriller than a murder mystery. My dad and I read it aloud together when I was a kid and I've never forgotten it. Check it out if you've read a lot of the standard Christies!

How exciting that library copies of Eileen and Freya are waiting for me to collect tomorrow . I'm really in the mood for something dark and creepy so Eileen sounds like it'll fit the bill.

Finished Mr Popper's Penguins with DS2 over the weekend. I haven't seen the film so no idea what they've done to the story (dread to think!) but the book is mostly charming (if utterly impossible!). It's the story of a house painter in America who is obsessed with polar exploration. He gets sent a penguin as a pet, but it gets sick and lonely, so a zoo send him a similarly lonely female penguin. This results in lots of penguin chicks eating his family out of house and home so they train them to perform to music to earn their keep, and go on tour around the USA. It all goes wrong when they get to New York which is too warm for the penguins.

The chapters are short and suitably silly for DS2's attention span and the peril is mild enough not to bother him too much. The end is utterly ridiculous, and left me feeling slightly disappointed, but he didn't seem to mind. It's another "of its time" book in terms of casual sexism etc too.

Just picked up Eileen from the library.

Marking place...

Haven't read a piece of fiction for ages and miss it terribly. Time to catch up!

Re Christie, I like Evil Under the Sun and The Mirror Crack'd. More of a Poirot fan than Marple. I haven't read any for years though.
Also loved the Stuart Maconie People's Songs mentioned above. I think it might have been me that recommended it last year. His Pies and Prejudice is good too.

Currently struggling with Brooklyn. It's so dull.

Just checking in:

11. First to Kill by Andrew Peterson - a bit of an airport thriller. American special forces guy has to deal with home grown terrorist. Very easy to read and I enjoyed it. Lots of gratuitous info about weapons and helicopters which I just skim read. If you're looking for an easy thriller then try this. And there's another 4 in the series.

Still cracking on with my 900 pager, I'm 500 pages in and getting really into it now. It's I Know this Much is True by Wally Lamb. I will add review when I'm finally finished!

My youngest DC has been sick since Saturday so I've been stuck at home with her. She's too chatty for me to get much reading done but I picked up a PG Wodehouse yesterday to help me through the cabin fever. Bertie Wooster always cheers me up!

Has anyone read Agatha Christies A Pale Horse? It's on my shelf but not sure if it's a goodun.

Ooooh canyouforgiveher and southeast let me know what you think of Eileen! Such weird and twisted fun.

20. Satin Island - Tom McCarthy
I seem to be one of the very few people to rate this book judging by the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads but I thought this was brilliant actually. U (we never find out his name, does it mean you? As in Us, Everyone?) works for an un-named but huge business that seems to do everything for everyone. He's a corporate anthropologist, tasked with writing a report that will explain, well, everything. This book is basically just his musings on things that catch his attention, oil-spills, the media, social media, skype etc. The book is laid out in the form of a business report. We never know if the book is actually THE report or not. Most people seem to really hate this. Not me!

21. Strong as Death - Guy de Maupassant
Although I did actually enjoy the rich prose, this novel is ultimately implausible and ridiculous. I still liked it though as I love the descriptions of Paris and the people. A well-renown Parisian painter has been involved in a long term love affair with a married Countess. They are all very discreet and respectable really. Then her now grown-up and beautiful daughter returns from the countryside and guess what happens...

22. Holes - Louis Sachar
Loved this! It's a children's/YA book and my daughter recommended this to me. Young Stanley Yelnats is convicted of a crime and sent to Camp Green Lake to serve out his detention. But why is Stanley always so unlucky in his life, and why, at the camp, do they spend all day digging holes? Such fun and ties up brilliantly at the end.

11 The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall

Set in the Lake District in a near-future UK where the economy, environment, food production, oil supplies etc have all collapsed. The country is now controlled by 'the Authority' and preserved/tinned food shipped in from richer countries.

One woman ('Sister') is tired of living in the city in grim conditions and goes to the fells where a rebel community of women has set up and is living 'unofficially', beyond the jurisdiction of the Authority. They're run by a strong character, Jackie Nixon, who Sister gradually realises if motivated by more than just the desire to live quietly outside the law.

This was an interesting idea and well written, but it didn't really come off the page for me. The characters were a bit flat, especially Jackie; if you believe the glowing quotes on the cover she is a formidable creation, but I didn't find her particularly compelling.

It signally lacked the visceral sense of despair and apprehension that a really good dystopian story gives, and didn't ring quite true enough (Margaret Atwood is the master of this, IMO, and this fell far short).

A bit underwhelming, in short.

Still on Black Rabbit Hall and am about to start Moriarty.

36. The Good, the Bad and the Undead, Kim Harrison. Book 2 in the Rachel Morgan series. This was a bit more like it! I wasn't massively impressed by book 1, but the Amazon reviews said that the series got much better after a slow start, so I decided to give it a try. It also didn't start particularly well with a somewhat disjointed fish-stealing episode, but then it got better and better. Rachel is struggling for money and starts helping the FIB with a witch hunter case, which leads to her falling afoul of Trent again. You get a lot more of Rachel's backstory and she stops being quite so whiny and starts to actually develop into a person. I have one big bugbear, though, her clothes are terrible. She's always wearing halter tops and leather 'pants' with a leather jacket. At one point she puts on her warmest halter top because she's cold - I was mentally screaming "try a jumper!" Halter tops are the same as halternecks, right? Bra? I don't know why a lot of American authors are shite at describing their heroine's clothes - Ilona Andrews is the same, but she gets away with it by making Kate Daniels be fashion-averse. Rachel is supposed to like clothes. Also, describing her as tall, flat-chested, skinny but with curves is confusing. The red nail varnish is also annoying, for some reason. Kim Harrison needs a course of Jilly Cooper - she is really good at describing clothes and making the weirdest things sound appealing (like Fen's sharkskin breeches or some of the mad 70s things worn by the likes of Octavia and Prudence). Anyway, slight digression there! I did really like it, especially once Rachel started finding unusual powers, and I've already downloaded the 3rd one.

I have that happy feeling when you find a 13 books series that is starting to shape up nicely!

TooExtra - that is so true about authors writing badly about clothes or hair or whatever.

In one of the books I've read recently (In a Dark Dark wood) one of the male characters is described as having trousers "that scream Paul Smith". Every time he was in a scene I was picturing his trousers with mouths shouting "Paul Smith Paul Smith!!!!"

27. Ten Days by Gillian Slovo, a novel that takes its inspiration from the 2011 Tottenham riots. There are three major characters: Peter Whiteley, the Home Secretary; Joshua Yares, the newly appointed Met Commissioner, and Cathy Mason, a mum who lives on a housing estate in South London and whose daughter gets caught up in the riots. The precipitating event is that a young mentally ill man from the neighbourhood dies in police custody, but the response from the local populace and the totally unnecessary violence of the police crackdown means that the whole thing escalates fast. There's a subplot about Whiteley's infidelity (he's having an affair with his Special Adviser), which I found a bit tedious (and gross; he's not a very pleasant man) and another one about Cathy's relationship to Banji, the father of her daughter. Bits of it read more like a screenplay for a mini-series, but it does a very good job of illustrating the communities that are so full of rage at decisions made by a government that seems to have nothing but contempt for them. I thought perhaps it could have been a bit more politically incisive: Slovo's not writing from within these communities, and she doesn't focus on the people who incite the riots, just on the innocent bystanders. It would have been nice to get some sense of the psychology behind the rioters themselves. Still, her portrait of the Metropolitan Police command structure is fascinating: corruption bumping up against budget cuts, the two things conspiring to make it impossible for police officers to do their jobs properly. Definitely a timely book.

whippetwoman - I have Satin Island, a really short book so it was one I was going to read fairly soon, I look forward to reading it

OnlyLovers - I felt like you about The Carhullan Army - I wanted to like it, and there were lots of good things about it, but in the end it just fell a bit flat and I didn't really care.

Relieved to hear that, Sadik! I kept thinking I might be not getting it. I only finished it in the hope that it would 'click' for me, actually, but it just didn't.

I love The Electric Michelangelo, Haweswater and The Wolf Border, so was surprised to be disappointed by this one. Have you read any of her others that you can recommend?

For those of you who like good fashion detail in books, I'm currently reading Americanah and there is a huge amount of detail about hair, specifically black women's hair, it's fascinating. Will give a full review when finished, not just of the hair bits.

'Trousers that scream Paul Smith' They would get annoying after a while.

Talk of fashion in books makes me think of a novel I read a while ago, The Pink Suit by Nicole Mary Kelby.

It's about the pink suit Jackie Kennedy was wearing when JFK was shot. It goes into the working and personal life of one of the dressmaker/designers at the place in New York that made it for her, and the way they worked with Chanel (it was a copy of a Chanel but made in America – quite common so that Jackie could keep her 'patriotic' credentials intact, apparently.

It's full of fascinating detail like that, as well as the actual business of making clothes, and the lives of immigrants or second-generation inhabitants in New York at that time. Well worth a read.

21. Johnson's Life of London by Boris Johnson

A re-read for me. Boris Johnson gives an overview of the history of London by focusing on some of the characters who have impacted on it and also the wider life of the nation. Starting with a look at London Bridge and ending with the Midland Grand Hotel, he covers Boudica, the Emperor Hadrian, Mellitus, Alfred the Great, William the Conqueror, Geoffrey Chaucer, Richard Whittington, William Shakespeare, Robert Hooke, Samuel Johnson, John Wilkes, JMW Turner, Lionel Rothschild, Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole, WT Stead, Winston Churchill, and Keith Richards. Very interesting and entertaining read.

About a third of the way through Girl in a Band. I liked the first 40 pages or so but am now finding it increasingly boring, meandering and lacking in purpose.

Meg - does it pick up again?

20 Brooklyn - Colm Toibin so dull I can't be bothered to say any more.

Best My dp enjoyed it iirc. I thought it was astonishingly boring/awful and didn't finish it.