50 Book Challenge 2017 Part Three

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the third 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 first thread of the year is here and the second one here.

HappyFlappy I too avoided David Mitchell because I thought he was the telly Mitchell. I couldn't understand why these pseudo-writers were getting so much publicity. The penny only dropped when I saw the author's picture on the back of a copy of Slade House. So you're in rarefied company

Thank you, PoeticLE

I now feel slightly less of an idiot. Like you, I thought - Oh, they've published him on the back of his being a "funny" man on the telly - and nearly missed one of the most original writers ever.

Narrow escape there (Phew)

@ David Mitchell confusion!

(Do you know there's a novelist called Elizabeth Taylor and she wasn't in National Velvet? )

@ David Mitchell confusion!

(Do you know there's a novelist called Elizabeth Taylor and she wasn't in National Velvet? )

Sorry for posting twice

I like the idea that the comedian David Mitchell might have written a book that went on to be a film starring Tom Hanks and was still, you know, waddling around the panel show circuit. He has written a memoir, though, I believe.

18. Saints of the Shadow Bible by Ian Rankin. #19 in the Rebus series. Typical Rebus, multiple crimes end up being related and he pisses everyone off on his way to solving them. In this one his dodgy past comes back to haunt him. His old unit are implicated in a cover up from the early 80s when policing was like Life on Mars. Everyone else has retired leaving Rebus under suspicion. Rankin is always a good easy read with an engaging detective story.

I read most of the original Rebus series over 10 years ago and didn't realise there were new ones until I found Standing in Another Man's Grave in a charity shop last year. I was delighted. Reading about the same characters was like catching up with a group of old friends. I found this one by chance in the library and enjoyed it so much that I went back this morning to pick up the next one. I also got the 2 standalone Malcolm Fox books to give a try.

I love a good series. I was a huge fan of Cadfael and Falco. I was pleased to find out Lindsay Davies has started a new series with Flavia Alba. I want to start these soon.

12. How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to making Friends with your Mind by Pema Chödrön.

Having been very stressed in work and life I have turned to the famous Williams and Penman Mindfulness book and am finding it helpful and therapeutic. This Pema Chödrön book is a guide to meditation and actually underlines the teaching found in the Mindfulness book although with a more Buddhist slant. I am planning to continue with meditation and I'm sure this short book will be helpful as a reference in the months ahead.

13. Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
Excellent, atmospheric and brutal. A definite classic.

And bringing my list over with highlights in bold:
1. The Story of a New Name (Book 2 of Neopolitan Novels) by Elena Ferrante.
2. Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter.

1. Beauty by Robin McKinley.
2. Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall.

5. The Last Policeman: A Novel (The Last Policeman Book I) by Ben H.Winters.

1. Red Rising by Pierce Brown.
2. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.
3. Any Human Heart by William Boyd.
4. The Pure in Heart (Simon Serailler Book 2) by Susan Hill.

10. Joyland by Stephen King. 11. Jerusalem:The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore. 12. How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to making Friends with your Mind by Pema Chödrön. 13. Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

I read A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre last year and would recommend it. Apparently it's his most autobiographical, it's certainly got a pretty crazy narrative structure.

10. The Merchant's House - Kate Ellis. This is the first in a series about a black detective who's just moved to Devon and has a degree in archaeology. A small boy has gone missing, a woman had been murdered, and there's a dig in a merchants house where a skeleton of a baby and then woman are found. Easy read but well thought out. I'd read more of hers.

Book 15
Ghosts of Everest: The Search for Mallory and Irvine - Jochen Hemmleb
Brilliant. Loved this – it does exactly what it says on the tin, which is to describe, with enthusiasm and a little reverence, the search for Mallory and Irvine and the ultimate discovery of Mallory’s body. Did they summit Everest? The book’s conclusion is that we don’t know and shouldn’t really care. Highly recommended to any of you who enjoyed Into Thin Air or other climbing books.

1. Confusion, Elizabeth Jane Howard

Nothing to say about the Cazalets which hasn't been said before. Cheerfulmuddler I see you have read the previous two in the series. Do you want this one before it goes off to the charity shop? Happy to pop it into the post to you.

Monty - "I've only read one John Le Carré book (A Most Wanted Man) and I didn't get on with it. Gave up halfway through."

Yes, that's one of the later Le Carré books that were rubbish. Nothing happened in that book (and I mean nothing) and details were wrong, as well. Another was Absolute Friends, which served to say a few things about the Iraq war etc I guess but was otherwise pointless.

Ghosts of Everest sounds good Remus. Will look for that one.

"Nothing happened in that book (and I mean nothing)"

Yep, that's my overriding memory of the half I read, Cote. Not a damn thing happening.

Best - Happy to pop it in the post to you, if you don't mind sending it back afterwards (I keep all my mountaineering and polar ones, even amidst fairly serious culling of everything else!).

Are you sure Remus, I'd love that.

Can I ask a daft question please?

What is HHhH?

16 A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia's War with the West by Luke Harding
Account by a former Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, expelled at least in part for his articles about the murder. Does what it says on the tin, but tbh not that much more - I'm not sure I'm greatly more informed than from reading the many newspaper articles about the case. I also didn't feel that the author was likely to take a balanced view on any aspects of the Russian state - perhaps unsurprising, but not really helpful.

What I'd love to read if anyone can recommend anything is book/s about the life of everyday average people in small town / rural Russia and how things have changed since the end of communism. (I really enjoyed 'Nothing is True and Everything is Possible' by Peter Pomerantsev, but it was mostly focused on Moscow and the middle classes upwards.)

Pass - It is a very very dumb book, supposedly about the assassination attempt on Hitler's life but in fact about the whiny author having a whine about his life, his oh such incredibly profound knowledge on said assassination attempt, and other such completely uninteresting whiny crap on how he deliberately lies or perhaps just doesn't care to provide facts about this story.

Oh I see! Thank you Cote. That review made me chuckle. I thought I was missing some sort of acronym

Keith Are you sure? If so, I would love that, thank you very much. Very keen to read more Cazalets.

Passmethecrisps I was wondering that!

Cote - cough - HIMMLER

I felt all along that I wanted to read an actual proper period novel about a fascinating story that I previously did not know (the attempted assassination of Himmler by two Czechs) but he goes really meta and talks about himself and his writing process as he goes along, in a way I found very annoying. The point he is making becomes one note quickly

My mistake Heydrich, my apologies Cote, it is an acronym Pass it's

Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich

Himmler's brain is called Heydrich

Oh yeah. I've clearly been successful in my attempt to forget as much as I could if that odious nonsense.

Well I'm going to get into review ping pong with cote about HHhH again - it is not a dumb book, just because you didn't like it

25. HHhH by Laurent Binet

Wonderful, unforgettable, book.

Original, humane, meticulous, and utterly gripping account of 'Operation Anthropoid', the plot to assassinate senior Nazi Reinhard Heydrich, 'The Hangman of Prague', by the Czech (and Slovak) Resistance fighters Gabcik and Kubis. Interwoven with the factual events is Binet's commentary on the nature of his endeavour; to write a historical 'novel' that respects its subject, taking into account the danger of reducing real people to characters in a story, and the significance of the choices made in the process of researching and retelling history. I learned many new things about this period, and visited again the sheer horror that never fades; that of The Final Solution and those who perpetrated it.