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?

GrendelsMother23 - yes! I actually read Seven Killings first - can't believe I'd never even heard of Marlon james until he won the booker. I really enjoyed it. Very violent, a bit Tarantino-ish, but I was impressed with his writing, which led me to Night Women. Loved it so much! It was one of those books that left me bereft when it was over .

I wrote my uni dissertation on Toni Morrison .
My favourite book of hers was Paradise, which was slated quite widely by critics. I adored it, though. I must re-read some of her stuff - its been a while! .

Cote

Soup = 'The notion that a good tripe soup needed the addition of a pinch of powdered coriander was the kind of innovation which, if left unchecked, would gradually undermine the whole guild...the confusion would have entered men's minds....Patience, yes. Impatience led to coriander and hell fire.'

'Coriander and hell fire' might be my favourite quote ever. Forget Shakespeare, Austen, Morrissey etc.

Haha Remus you'll be amused to hear that what immediately popped into my mind when I read the 1st line of your post was "What? No! There is no coriander in tripe soup!"

I like the sound of Night Women-have just added it to my wish list. I randomly picked up The Suspicions of Mr Whicher - has anyone read it?

1. My brilliant friend by Elena Ferrante.
2. SPQR by Mary Beard
3. Perfume by Patrick Suskind
4. Expecting better by Emily Oster
5. The life changing magic of tidying by Marie Kondo.
6. Friends of the dusk by Phil Rickman
7. A god in ruins by Kate Atkinson.

1. Playing with fire by Tess Gerritsen. I love Tess Gerritsen's Rizzoli and Isles series so was excited to see this was available as an ebook through my library. It is a standalone story which follows Julia, a violinist, whose daughter Lily begins to behave strangely-is she trying to kill Julia and how can Julia stop her? Tess Gerritsen writes a good 'page-turner' type of narrative and I raced through this in a few hours. I enjoyed this but the Rizzoli and Isles series is slightly less frothy and more enjoyable in my opinion. Sometimes an undemanding read is just what you need though

1. Wreckage by Emily Bleeker. Light kindle impulse buy. Lilian and Dave are the only 2 survivors from a private plane that crashes in the Pacific with 5 people on board. Somehow they have survived 2 years, against all the odds. But how did they survive? And what exactly happened to everyone else? They have a dark secret that they are desperately trying to keep. Enjoyable enough, but ultimately forgettable.

Oops bold fail!

Night Women is 99p on Kindle at the moment. I've just bought it off the back of this thread, even though I told myself I wouldn't buy any more until I've caught up on unread ones. Ah well...

Elle - I've read Whicher and really enjoyed it.

13. Hot Zone - The Chilling True Story of an Ebola Outbreak by Richard Preston

This was fan-tas-tic! I picked it up when it was Kindle deal of the day, after reading that it was the book that the movie Contagion with Dustin Hoffman was based on. Although written very much like a thriller, this book is non-fiction - according to the author, with even the thoughts of the characters are what they said they thought at the time in interviews.

It is the story of 1989 Ebola outbreak in a Washington suburb, at an animal facility housing monkeys and the details are fascinating. I can't say I was that worried about Ebola before, but I have to say that I am now terrified A multitude of shocking mistakes were made during that outbreak, not least of which was that two people sniffed the super-contagious Ebola-filled blood sample to see if it had a bacterial smell Quite a few people were infected and the only reason why no human died during this outbreak while the monkey population was decimated (i.e. literally melted into monkey soup) was that by some twist of fate, this particular new strain just made people a bit sick and they got over it.

One thing that stood out for me in this book was just how similar the procedures and preparations of people working in "hot zone" of Level 4 infectious agents are to astronauts. There were parts of this book that were very similar to the book An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth - e.g. how slow they move because the slightest tear to their suit (called 'space suit', even) means certain death.

I was a bit at the last section of the book where the author goes off to visit the cave in Africa where the patient zero of this particular Ebola strain is thought to have caught it from. Why, FFS?!? Apparently, just to say "That spider could give me Ebola. And it could be that stalactite. Or that rock" etc. I can imagine the main characters of the book catching him at it and giving him a good walloping for risking contamination & spreading it around the world.

I loved this book, though. Highly recommended.

17. The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

This is a well written, witty little murder mystery, which I really enjoyed. It is both erudite and silly, which is not a bad combination. An 'impossible' crime, poetic riddles, and eccentric Oxford dons all feature. I would read another in the series.

It was recommended on here I think when it was 99p, so thank you to whoever highlighted it.

cote that book sounds equal parts fascinating and terrifying.

I read Whicher some years ago. It was quite good, but remember it tailing off in the second half. It was very interesting but I think if I'd been fully aware of the subject matter I wouldn't probably wouldn't have read it as I usually avoid that kind of thing, but it was lent to me by a friend.

20. Anatomy of a Soldier by Harry Parker--a novel about a British captain in Afghanistan who loses his legs in an IED, but told from the point of view of objects around him. Some of them are obvious things, like the tourniquet, the bomb, his prosthetics, but there are some less obvious ones: the bike and the trainers belonging to the teenage insurgent who plants the bomb, a snowflake, a razor. It shouldn't work, but it does. The only objection I had was an awkwardness to the sentences: stringing two clauses together with the word "and", then repeating 47 times in a page, only works if you're Cormac McCarthy and sometimes not even then. But, basically, this was ace. If you've read and liked The Things They Carried or Phil Klay's collection Redeployment, this should be your next stop.

Also, Broken, I really must read more Morrison. Beloved and The Bluest Eye were both devastatingly good. I'm thinking maybe Sula next?

DinosaursRoar its a long time since I'd read anything by Daphne Du Maurier and it reminded me that I like her writing and should probably try to read some more. I liked the fact that the more drawn in he became the more impatient he was with his poor wife and the children. I thought she portrayed his selfishness very well.

Elle good to hear a review of Tess Gerristen's Playing with Fire. I was wondering whether it was worth reading as i love the Rizzoli and Isles series (and the Tv show which is nothing like the books). Have you read any of her other one off thrillers? I picked up a couple cheap in the works and found Under the Knife great but wasn't too fussed by some of the others i read which are so memorable i've forgotten them.

I'm still plodding through with The girl caught in the spider's web and also started listening to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone, I've read it before and listened to it when i was much younger and my mum bought it for me on tape so is nice to have it portable!

I haven’t posted since the first thread as I just couldn’t keep up but I am back and am reading this thread from the beginning.
This is what I have read so far, with highlights in bold. I am going to try and keep up with this now.

1. An American Nomad – Stephen Braxton Thompson
2. The Hours – Michael Cunningham

3.The Unvanquished – William Faulkner

1. The Wolf Border – Sarah Hall
2. The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion
3. The Childhood of Jesus – J.M Coetzee

7.Olive Kitteridge – Elizabeth Strout - best book of the year so far.

1. Homeland and Other Stories – Barbara Kingsolver
2. A Place Called Winter – Patrick Gale

10.Slade House – David Mitchell 11.Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro - generally not liked on here but I loved it. 12. The Girl of the Train – Paula Hawkins 13. Reasons to Stay Alive – Matt Haig 14. A Bend in the River – V.S Naipul 15. A Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin 16.Grief is a Thing With Feathers – Max Porter

Currently reading We Are Called to Rise by Laura McBride (not good) and In the Heart of the Country by J.M Coetzee (very good).

I have missed hearing from everyone and getting your recommendation.

Sorry, bolding didn't work. Favourites have an * instead...

Yay just received my paperback copy of the lost Tudor princess by Alison Weir. I have been waiting for this book for ages. This is a book about Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox Henry v111 neice. I can't wait to read it.

I'm having a go at The Knife Of Never Letting Go or some such because DD is into YA now & I want to find some new books for her. Finding it dumb and boring so far. Can't believe I would be fascinated by this one even as a teenager. I'm at 10% and all that happened so far is the boy walked a bit, kicked his dogs 10+ times just for the hell of it, and told us everyone can hear each other's thoughts all the time and there are no girls/women.

I would expect people & society to change significantly if we could hear each other's thoughts all the time. And there would be some massive differences in how society works re future (or its lack thereof, really) if there are no girls or women around - if we know that ours is the last generation ever, what would change?

Maybe a 14-year-old with the apparent mental capacity of a 6-year-old is not the best narrator for a post-apocalyptic story but anyway. We will see.

28. Emily of New Moon, LM Montgomery. Following the death of her father, Emily goes to stay with her aunts at New Moon, her mother's childhood home. I love this book - more easy reading for when I'm tired.

Oooooohhhhhhh

Emily of New Moon my favorite childhood book EVER. Have it and the sequels on my kindle permanently too!

Your DD is lucky that someone takes an interest in her reading cote. I had no one and my reading was ridiculously random and dependent on local library as a result.

17. Ever After by Kim Harrison

Rachel Morgan, witch-turned-day-walking-demon, is tasked with stopping demonic realm the Ever-after from shrinking after she accidentally caused a rip in a ley line. But the most powerful demon in the Ever-after is after revenge against her and has stolen her friend and her goddaughter to use as leverage, and he is inciting the demons to sentence her to death for threatening the destruction of their realm.

Something a bit lighter than the recent archaeology! This is book 11 in the series and I've finally got round to buying the final two so will probably finish The Hollows series off in the next few weeks.

34. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix JK Rowling. Another reread!

17. Farewell to the East End by Jennifer Worth. The last in her midwife trilogy, although there is a fourth stand alone book In the Midst of Life which I may read at a later date. This one was as good as Call The Midwife, with a return to midwife work rather than treatment of elderly patients. This one was bleak, though, with the tale of an entire family wiped out by tuberculosis, back street abortions and the damage caused by them, infanticide when families were unable to cope with yet another baby.

It's interesting to see how very differently the tv series treats the characters. Trixie, Sister Bernadette, and Cynthia all had completely different lives. As did Chummy.

18. Billionaire Boy by David Walliams. Read to DS. We both really enjoyed this one, with its non too subtle message that money doesn't by you happiness.

Buy not by .... (autocorrect fail).

I didn't know there was another book by Jennifer Worth. Thank you Quog this is on my tbr list

Fated by Benedict Jacka. Urban fantasy which I read following recommendations on here. I enjoyed it - not the best fantasy novel ever, but a pleasant light read. The style reminded me rather of Mercedes Lackey's earlier books (though obviously she's not urban fantasy), a bit clunky but a good plot to carry things along.

Cote, I've read a lot of YA owing to having a teenager of my own, and I have to say I've not been that thrilled by Patrick Ness. I didn't get more than a chapter or so into The Knife of Never Letting Go, which is quite unusual for me with a YA fantasy novel, normally I'll at least skim to the end. How old is your dd?