50 Book Challenge 2017 Part Two

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the second thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2017, 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.

The previous thread is here.

How're you getting on so far?

I loved (no, admired and fell in love with) This Thing Of Darkness.

Arthur & George was good, and I enjoyed it very much. But it was no TTOD.

I didn't care at all for Flowers For Algernon.

Meanwhile, I finished the Handel book but I have to get my thoughts together to write a proper review of it, which will have to be tomorrow.

Get ready for another long rambling post about a dead Baroque musician

I liked Flowers for Algernon!

RMC I hated Labyrinthe, don't bother with it!

5. The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie. A good Marple, definitely worth a read- seem to recall it was good on TV too!

1. Gansta Granny, David Walliams. After Anna Karenina my next audiobook needed to be short and silly. This fit the bill perfectly.

Interesting to see the (unsurprisingly, given that it's Cote and Remus) conflicting views on Flowers For Algernon. I was planning on reading that soon.

Interesting to hear views on FFA......I recommended it to my DP and he hated it. We really don't like the same things!

Looking through the huge tbr pile I've realised I'm a kindle addict and with good reason! My sister gave me her copy of Olive Sturridge at Christmas.....Lordy Lord....even with multifocal help the font is teeny....how on earth have you guys managed to read that?!? I may also have to pass on Shackleton by Michael Smith for the same reason. Is it just me??

Actually, what Remus said about Flowers For Algernon is pretty much exactly what I have said in my review of the book:

"It's about a middle-aged man with a very low IQ being used as a guinea pig in an operation that quickly raises his IQ to about 180. It's quite good where it describes his ascent from well-meaning idiot to normal and then genius, but the latter half of the book isn't that convincing IMHO."

A rare moment of agreement about a fiction book for me & remus

And here's mine: Blimey, Cote - we must stop meeting like this.

"A young man with learning difficulties is operated on in a scientific experiment to try to make a genius out of him, following promising initial experiments on mice (particularly the Algernon of the title). I thought the concept was good, and the structure was also good. It begins with Charlie unable to spell, punctuate or really understand what’s going to be done to him or any of the potential implications, and then after the operation we see the writing style change into an increasingly twattish intellectualism. And here’s where my problem was – the middle section, where he’s a rather troubled genius, is by far the weakest part of the book. I won’t say anything about the ending, other than that I thought it worked."

It can't be wrong if it feels so good, Remus

happy what I liked particularly liked about HBP was the effect it had on me as a reader, eliciting my sympathy but then making me consider it from a different angle (don't want to spoil). I thought about the implications and possibilities of it all for a while after, so that influenced how I viewed it as a whole.

Will start Flowers for Algernon soonish, I think. My dh read it and liked it.

Oh, it feels soooo good.

Haha, you two! You won't be able to to keep up this facade of wildly divergent opinions for much longer you know

1. A man called Ove - enjoyed far more than I was expecting to, a couple of reservations but overall a good read and made me really quite emotional at the end.

Drdiva - the MN thread about The Tiger who came to tea was one of the funniest things I've ever read on this website (and there have been some corkers).

Finally finished my 3rd book, not sure why I am so slow this year, I think I need to slip in a couple of short ones to catch up!

1. Dissolution by CJ Sansom. I've finally read my first Shardlake! For those who haven't read any of the series Shardlake is a hunchbacked lawyer living in Tudor times and in this book he is tasked with solving a murder in a monastery. I did enjoy it, didn't guess the ending, and really enjoyed the Tudor setting, but I somehow didn't get wrapped up in it like I thought I would. I also found it difficult remembering which monk was which! Sansom is a wonderful writer though, I had to wrap up warm to read his depictions of the freezing conditions.

Just started Tenant of Wildfell Hall which is very promising.

gettingthere do come back and report on how you get on with Sunset Song. Everyone I know in Scotland read it at school and it's one of our shared memories of growing up IYKWIM. It would be interesting to hear the opinion of someone coming to it for the first time as an adult.

I'd like to get round to Barchester Towers before long but with more book group reads piling up it's receding into the distance .. the trouble is I feel I want to read the whole series at one go and there's never going to be time!

Arthur and George is really good btw

1. The One We Fell in Love With - Paige Toon
2. This Is Where It Ends - Marieke Nijkamp
3. The Girl Who Lied - Sue Fortin

4. Girls on Fire - Robin Wasserman 5. The Heat of Betrayal - Douglas Kennedy

1. Forget You Had a Daughter: Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton - Sandra Gregory

7. Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell For a bit of light reading I really enjoyed this easy book about a young girl starting alongside her twin sister while the both deal with it differently and learn not to depend on their smaller worlds.

1. Trust in Me - Sophie McKenzie

This should have been more promising. A woman who's sister was murdered and the killer was never found discovers her best friend has committed suicide. She doesn't believe it was suicide and with some help sets to prove murder. I thought I'd figured it out but was wrong! But wasn't as gripping as I wanted it to be.

1. Close Enough to Kill - Beverly Barton

Now onto book 9!

ladydepp I found Dissolution quite slow going and "Monk-y" and the next two a bit faster paced.

I've never read any Trollope highland.

1. Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre set in the 17th Century Venetia Digby is a famous beauty but past her first 'bloom'. She starts drinking a concoction called viper wine in order to restore her beauty. Her husband Kenelm is enthusiastic about books, learning and scientific discoveries. There are echoes from the future which appear in the book - some of them through ideas which appear in his mind but some of them through the deliberate placing of anachronistic details, for example Van Gogh's Sunflowers makes an appearance. It is a post modern novel where the author even gives herself a small cameo. Eyre has developed the story around the real lives of the main characters - they were real people. I enjoyed it - it was funny and sad and thought provoking.

highlandandcoo I wonder if you know that Barchester Towers isn't the first book of the series, it is The Warden so that's the one to start with if you want to read them in order. They are well worth reading I really enjoyed them.

3 Treatment by Mo Hayder which was a bit too scary to read when DH was out in london for the night

Am now reading The Watchmaker of Filigree Street which is gentle and dainty but I think is going to be really meaty later on.

I couldn't get into The Essex Serpent at all.

1. How to Be Both - Ali Smith. This book is divided into two sections which can be read in either order. One is narrated by an Italian painter around the renaissance and the other is narrated by a teenage school girl in modern day. there is some connection between the two - the girl went to Italy the year before with her mother, who has since died, and saw the painter's frescoes. And in the painter section, the narrator watches the girl in modern times, looking at the paintings and interacting with friends. I had the Kindle version which had the painter's story first then the girl's story, then switches it round and has the girl's story first and then the painter's. I think "real" books were random as to which order they were printed in. I think I would have felt more connected to it with the girl's story first - it's a bit more real and poignant. I'm not sure whether it actually works as a narrative technique, I felt each story could have been a bit fuller. I'd have liked to read more about both characters, I didn't feel either story was finished. But it's an interesting play on narrative technique, it'll probably end up as a GSCE text in years to come.

Trollope is a great pleasure of mine and The Warden is a good place to start. I've also read a very good biography of Anthony Trollope, he had a very interesting life!

9. Rhapsody in Green, Charlotte Mendelson
Short essays about the author's delight in her tiny garden. I got this from the library because I acquired a small patch of ground a year ago and would like to do something with it. I was vaguely hoping for a "how to" manual. This is not it. It's still a pleasant read though, funny and rapturous. It would make a good bedtime book, or a present for a gardening-mad mother-in-law.

I haven't read Flowers for Algernon for years but my overriding impression was that the short story (which I read first) was excellent and deserved to win a Hugo, while the novel felt to me as though it had been lengthened to a pre-determined size almost.

I've just looked at the Wikipedia page for the story to refresh my memory. I won't quote as it would be a spoiler for those who are about to read it, but the second paragraph of the background section - on the author's inspiration for the story - is really sad. Although circumstances may be making me more sensitive about this I guess.

Satsuki - thanks for that, I'll add Shardlake 2 to my "buy if it's cheap on the kindle" pile. That pile is getting rather large .