50 Book Challenge 2016 Part Four

[southeastdweller]

Thread four 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, second thread here and third thread here.

How're you getting on so far?

18. One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night by Christopher Brookmyre nearly gave up on the first page due to gratuitous gore and violence. That settles down (a bit) after the first chapter. One of the funniest books I have read for a long time. Gritty, violent, beautifully observed mayhem centred round a school reunion that goes a tiny bit wrong. I know real life versions of all these people (except the ones running round with guns - I think). Can't believe I haven't read any of this author before, this is right up my street - contemporary, Scottish, funny. This was published in 1999, and some of the popular culture references which would have been spot on at the time are slightly going off the boil now - I think his books are probably best read fresh - and I have a lot of catching up to do. Thanks to Elle whose previous recommendation made me pick this up.

50. Polo by Jilly Cooper

This is another of her horsey books although I prefer reading about polo to showjumping. This one irritated me a bit though as it's the same time period as Riders and Rivals but the dates things happen change between the books and she also doesn't keep track of characters' ages very well. Still love it though! Now on The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous.

Ha cote - I've been largely ignoring the horoscope stuff, but then at the midway point got a bit excited when I recognised which characters related to which planets - saturnine, mercurial etc. Zodiac signs I only have a vague general knowledge of, just enough to realise what she's done is very clever! I can't believe she's sustained it as an organising principle without it getting a bit silly.

Remus and Cote For really ace Golding, have either of you tried The Inheritors? The plot is about a small family group of Neanderthals encountering one of the first groups of Homo sapiens. Incredible approach to language, language acquisition, and imagining and articulating concepts, and the characterisation of the Neanderthals in the family group is just amazing. The ending feels like Paradise Lost, honestly.

That sounds interesting Grendels. Thank you for the recommendation

Yay! Hope you like--a dear friend of mine (a very self-effacing chap usually) pressed it into my hands, saying "You MUST read this", and he was right.

Have read The Inheritors but it was many, many years ago and I didn't really appreciate it. Maybe I should give it another chance.

Book 42
Gone to Ground by Marie Jalowicz Simon Here

This is the account of a Jewish girl in Nazi Germany, who managed to survive the war in hiding as a ‘U Boat’ in Berlin. I found it really fascinating, particularly in the way that so many ordinary Germans were willing to help her. She’s a flawed narrator, horribly snobbish and a bit of a bitch, but that edge and sense of entitlement to life is probably what enabled her to survive when so many others were murdered. I’d recommend this.

30. Touchy Subjects, Emma Donaghue (of Room fame), my first collection of short stories this year; an eclectic mix of touching, sometimes sentimental tales, all centred around a particular taboo or sensitive subject from an expensively clad Good Samaritan struggling to touch a dirty -and possibly dead - homeless man to a woman's mishap with a turkey baster full of donated sperm. Entertaining, witty, sometimes dealing too much in caricatures but overall a good read.

AARRGGHH! Remus, I've just bought another two books and its all your fault! The Grayson Perry sounds right up my street, as much as his pots are not and Gone to Ground sounds gripping. I wonder if I can get either of them onto my book club list tonight (things have all gone rather random as the list provider is ill and hasn't prepared in advance).

My Book 17: Simon Callow's Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World which I think was a recommendation from on here. This is my sort of biography. An unusual look at Dickens, but one that brought him to life and made sense of why his novels were so melodramatic!

I'm in the middle of the Pulitzer Prize winner Voices from Chernobyl on which more later ...

I'm also very keen to hear about The Luminaries and the horoscope stuff Satsuki as I loved the book but never got the link.

Joyless - please get the Perry onto the book group list. Would be so much better than the usual shite that book groups read.

Have just spent £5.99 on a Kindle book. Here It has more than a thousand pages, so will hopefully be worth it!

21. The Winter Children by Lulu Taylor

Olivia and Dan want children, but their only hope is donor eggs. Dan isn't keen on using eggs from a stranger.

So we come to Dan's mistake number 1: Dan's old friend Francesca offers her eggs, and Dan and Francesca agree to keep this a secret from Olivia.

And Dan's mistake number 2: Dan and Olivia, along with their toddler twins conceived with Francesca's eggs, accept an offer to stay in a big house Francesca is renovating for free.

It becomes clear very quickly that Francesca is obsessed with Dan, and also with "her" twins. Why Dan ever thought any of this arrangement was a good idea remains a mystery throughout the book. Plus there's some flashbacks to things happening back when the old house was a girl's school.

It's an okay read. Not terribly interesting or compelling. I found it difficult to care very much about any of the characters and what happened to them.

43. Black Magic Sanction, Kim Harrison. Much more like it - in Rachel's never-ending stream of men, is it weird that my favourite is the demon? More action-packed urban fantasy.

In the last week I have also started but not finished The Chalet School Does It Again, Anne of Green Gables and White Boots.

Hope it is better than Jersusalem Remus!

34. Relativity by Antonia Hayes: a twelve-year-old boy in Australia is gifted at physics. Shaken as a baby by his father (who was tried and convicted), he lives with his mum and has never met his dad, until a handwritten letter from his father cracks open the past with all of its secrets. Competently written and actually extremely good at getting inside the mind of a gifted child - Ethan is brilliant but retains the maturity levels you'd expect from a twelve-year-old, even a very bright one - but my main beef was the way that the father character, a theoretical physicist, lives a "life of the mind" while the mother character, an ex-ballerina, is said to "think with her body" and gives up ballet out of guilt after Ethan's accident. The novel doesn't feel conservative in other ways, but it frustrates me that we're still in this boring place with gender stereotypes in fiction.

Maybe I shall write a novel about a woman who is a physicist and a mother, and whose perpetually neurotic husband harboured youthful dreams of opening his own yoga studio before the harsh realities of fatherhood set in. Or something

Cheddar, you are romping through that series! I have started the first one, but it all feels wierdly familiar (in a derivative way, I haven't read it before!) and I am not smitten- I do really like urban fantasy as a genre but struggle to find examples I like- I really wanted to like Rivers of London, but I didn't- does anyone have any recommendations? The last thing I loved in the genre was Sarah Rees Brennan's Demons Lexicon series, if that helps!

Chessie, you are tempting me to dig out my Jilly Coopers!

19. The Shepherd's Life: A Tale of the Lake District by James Rebanks Read this for book group next month. The title is fairy self-explanatory and there were no real surprises - it is the true story of a modern sheep farmer's life and experiences. A gentle, easy read, but not one that inspired any particular reaction in me. I'm not sure what I'll say at book group, really - I seem to be lacking a particular opinion on it.

Tanaqui Re. urban fantasy - I read The Skyscraper Throne trilogy by Tom Pollock recently and really enjoyed that.

By the way, I'm 70% through Seveneves and LOVING IT. It is an apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic novel à la "The Martian", all hard science and problem-solving

19. Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey To get my gripe out of the way first - this was much too long. Other than that a really good attempt to get inside the head of someone with dementia, all the frustrations and confusion, with glimpses of how her family and those she encounters treat her and cope with her erratic behaviour. As it's in the first person, sometimes we know or suspect what is really going on, but at other times we're just as in the dark as Maud, the narrator. Two missing person stories twine together, one from the present, the other from the 1940s, with the latter being much more lucidly related. I listened on audio, and the narration was too slow, which added to the frustration of an overlong book which keeps going over the same things. Plus the narrator's tendency to turn unemphasised syllables into 'i' sounds (chocklit, trousis, characters Helin and Douglis) was driving me nuts by the end. Sometimes it felt like a test of what my own patience with Maud would be like - and I don't know if I passed. Overall I'm glad I listened though.

Next audio book will be Bring Up The Bodies - got high expectations for that.

Book 22 Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift. A quick read fairly interesting.

18 the kind worth killing by Peter Swanson - * loved this! Psychological thriller, probably as good as Gone Girl, so much better than 16. the girl on the train* which I found disappointing after all the hype.

Ada's Algorithm is £1.09 is Kindle monthly deals.

Also picked up William Boyd Ordinary Thunderstorms, for dh more than me as he likes him better than I do but I'll probably read it.

They had an Alan Bennett and a Bill Bryson (Shakespeare, I think) in there as well.

Am 80% into The Luminaries and still around 200 pages from the end! In the delicious phase of wanting to get to the end but not wanting it to be over at the same time.

Thank you Satsuki! I have been waiting for that book's price to drop for quite some time, but somehow forgot to put it on my eReaderIQ list. Snapped it up now

Joyless, glad you liked the Charles Dickens book - I thought it was a great read.

I've just given up on Uprooted: On the Trail of the Green Man by Nina Lyon. I expected to like it - non-fiction, with the author visiting various sites connected with the green man carving and finding out about its history and meaning, but I found it charmless. The author is doing a PhD and wants to be the cool kid at the back of the doctoral seminar (hint: there are no cool kids at the back of a doctoral seminar), dropping in poorly-contextualised references to Derrida and Descartes and the drugs she took when she was younger. Even then it could have been good, but it just didn't work for me.

If my numbering is correct, I just finished:
31) The Silent Ones, William Broderick. Crime fiction - main character is a monk and a former barrister. Authentic - the writer is a former monk who became a barrister. It bravely tackled the issue of clerical abuse, and did so with great sensitivity to the victims. It raised questions about when you should believe in people's capacity to change. I thought this was really well done.