50 Book Challenge Part Five

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fifth 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, the second one here, the third thread here and the fourth one here.

What are you reading?

"It [NLMG] is an alternative universe."

There is no evidence of that. It looks like this universe, this world, these very people, just a bit in the future (like the vast majority of SF).

"You obviously couldn't practically clone everyone and not everyone would ever need an organ, so you have a 'pool' of organ donors fresh and ready to give."

Increasing the number of organ donations from strangers is not that hard - [[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/french-citizens-organ-donors-france-opt-out-donation-hospital-healthcare-doctors-a7508576.html France, Spain, and Austria have a system of "presumed consent", meaning everyone is an organ donor unless they opt out.

But tissue rejection is a huge problem with stranger donation. You will continually be on immune suppressants and still your body will eventually reject it. It is just not believable that anyone would go to the trouble and expense of just making lots of clones without any effort to match them to people who need the organs. The story is just not developed enough as it is. I Need More Info

But I don't think you need the info. You can just accept it. You can accept that science has advanced so that rejection is not the issue it was. I don't need an explanation of how everything in the hypothetical universe works. That would be a different and potentially less interesting book. The book's not about how the science works. It's about what would happen if it did work like that. And I'm ok with that.

May I join? I've been trying to get back into reading, with mixed results, and love reading through these threads! I used to read enough books to build a paper battleship, and reading was one of the joys of life but my health (especially OCD) has been chipping slowly away at that joy and last year I read very few new books, hence the goal to focus more on reading this year.

My list of completed books so far:

1. Ruby by Cynthia Bond
2. Whispers Underground by Ben Aaronovitch
3. Dear Ijeawele by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
4. The Island at the End of Everything by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Ruby is the second most disturbing book I have ever read (years ago I read part of one of Marquis de Sade's which takes top spot). It hung around in my head for days, but not for good reasons. There were things I liked about it which is why I continued to the end.There were interesting characters and sometimes I found myself enjoying the descriptions. Until the next part with a disturbing supernatural occurrence or graphic description of sexual abuse. I wish I hadn't read it though.

Whispers Underground was a strong sequel and I enjoyed it.

Dear Ijeawele is not an actual book IMHO. It was born as a Facebook post and if you view it as an extended Facebook post then it's a very good one, but it's too short and not explored enough to be packaged as a whole book. I'm only counting it here to make my list look longer. I should probably read one of her actual novels.

The Island at the End of Everything was a real impulse purchase. I picked it up because it had a lovely cover and it turned out to be lovely inside too! The characters and their relationships, the prose, the plot...I have nothing to comment negatively on and I would recommend it to anyone who likes children's fiction.

I'm currently reading The Girl With All The Gifts and I'm really enjoying it!

44. The Private lives of the Tudors - Tracy Borman - another one to feed my Tudor habit . Didn't tell me much I didn't know about the actual events of the time. In fact it was a bit of a whistle stop tour in that way. This was all about the detail of their lives. I found it quite fascinating. The medical stuff was amazing. Some of it was just weird, some gruesome and some actually quite enlightened. The research was thorough and it was an easy and interesting read. Will definitely pick up her Thomas Cromwell book at some point.

I think it would have made NLMG less frustrating to read if the author had worked even a vague solution in there.

Have Kathy overhear some conversation about this only being possible because of the work Dr X did in overcoming tissue rejection. Or a conversation about how there's no need to worry about the clones running off because they're lobotomised when they're x years old or whatever.

I don't necessarily need detailed explanations of everything, but some acknowledgement that this is an issue that would need to have been resolved in the book's world would have helped me to enjoy the book more.

And the alternative universe of a book doesn't need to be explicitly identified as alternative or, indeed, very different from this one (as in His Dark Materials where the main characters slip between universes that are sometimes almost identical.) We know it's a different imagined world because children are being cloned for organ harvest and brought up in closed communities. That doesn't happen in this one, therefore the author has imagined a different universe. In a similar way I don't need to know in The Left Hand of Darkness exactly how the Gethenian body biologically changes during kemmer; I accept that it does.

Laptop and Kindle Ban likely to be introduced for Flights to America. I suspect it will soon be extended.
If it is is there anywhere to buy covers for Paperback's so no - one knows what you are reading.

Convincing world building is a crucial part of good science fiction though. A skilled writer, like Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness, builds up the picture so deftly and subtly that you don't notice the huge amount of info being conveyed.

"I don't think you need the info. You can just accept it."

Can't, really. I've never been able to suspend disbelief. Never believed in God, not even as a child.

"You can accept that science has advanced so that rejection is not the issue it was."

I'm the reader, not associate author tasked with filling plot holes to help the book make sense, though. I like a book that is well constructed into an internally constructed whole. I don't like one where there are plot holes I have to fill with somewhat plausible theories.

"I don't need an explanation of how everything in the hypothetical universe works."

It's not a hypothetical universe, though. It is this universe, our world Earth, human beings with English names.

"We know it's a different imagined world because children are being cloned for organ harvest and brought up in closed communities. That doesn't happen in this one, therefore the author has imagined a different universe."

No, he imagined a possible future in this universe, on this very world.

"A different universe" has a specific meaning in sci-fi - as in, a universe created separately than our own (where rules of physics are different, for example), or one which forked from ours at some point (possibly because of a paradox or multiverse interpretation).

Yes, exactly, stitches and slightly.

Outside the specific use of 'alternative universe' in science fiction, every book is an imagined universe. The fact that it is according to you a future version of this universe doesn't stop it being allowed to have its own rules. So much of fiction allows the reader to fill in assumptions and gaps. I don't think a lack of explanation about how science now has become science then counts as a plot hole. But we clearly will disagree on this.

I understand that you are using the word "universe" in a metaphorical sense but NLMG is a sci-fI book and when you talk about SF books taking place in another universe, that has a specific meaning.

In any case, if what you say were the case then no worldbuilding would ever be necessary in any fiction, since it's all happening in another "universe" and we don't need to be told much about it, just fill in the holes according to our imagination.

Never Let Me Go seems to me like science fiction by someone who doesn't write or read science fiction- it is frustrating to me in the same was His Bloody Project was (but re detective fiction). They are both well written, but they both take a certain genre, a trope, and use that format without following "thr rules", yet don't offer anything to replace them- they are not subverting or playing with the genre; for me they are just cheating. And I think people who like NLMG are people who generally don't read sci-fi, so just enjoy it as literature (and similar for HBP), but for me, there is something lacking.

The Cazalets- I am sure I have read them but can I do a brief plot check?! (Spoilers!). Are they the ones where one of the posh women rescues one of the char lady's daughters from being tied to a chair because she is so bright? And one women escapes from occupied France by going to a posh hotel, putting on a dress and basically prostituting herself to the ships captain? Or have I mixed them up with something else?

Tanaqui definitely not the Cazalets!

No, that's not The Cazalets Tanaqui!

Maybe that's true re not reading a great deal of true science fiction - I'm judging NLMG (which is by no means one of the best books I've ever read but I remember it, which means it was one of the good books I've read) as I would judge, say, Paddington - I don't discount it just because there are currently no talking bears in Notting Hill, but I enjoy thinking about what life would be like if a family did adopt one.

By the way, I really admire Le Guin.

Like I said I read NLMG a very long time ago and it didn't provoke this debate within me. I don't read a lot of Sci Fi at all but I think I saw this book as in the dystopian fiction range. The feeling of absolute control stops the characters from rebelling. It had shades of the Handmaids Tale for me. The ending of the film version where she does shoot the Commander and end up living in caravan are just wrong! Interestingly I never thought of His Bloody Project as a detective novel. If anything I thought it was a clear Social Commentary / History novel.

"Paddington - I don't discount it just because there are currently no talking bears in Notting Hill, but I enjoy thinking about what life would be like if a family did adopt one."

I'm a big SF reader and of course we don't discount SF books because there are currently no faster-than-light space travel, contact with alien species, transfer of human consciousness to other bodies, time travel, etc

The point is that in a good SF book that explores what would happen with technologies that don't (yet?) exist, the author must put together credible details in an internally consistent whole and convince the reader that the events described in the story are at the very least possible, if not probable. This is called worldbuilding and is essential in SF. It is what sets apart great books and great authors from silly ones.

Needless to say, Paddington is a children's bedtime story, not a SF book truly exploring the possibility of talking bear living with a family. As such, it is not held up to the same standards and does not have to convince the reader that such a story can possibly happen, in the way that the author describes.

NLMG is sadly closer to Paddington than a proper SF book written for adults, where the author would have at least made a decent effort at world building.

Incidentally, I agree with Ursula Le Guin who has said "“No writer can successfully use the ‘surface elements’ of a literary genre — far less its profound capacities — for a serious purpose, while despising it to the point of fearing identification with it”

She was referring to Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro.

I think it's like Tanaqui says above - if an author tries to write in a genre w/o understanding what the expectations are, e.g. writes a whodunnit and fails to deliver who actually did it, just meanders off somewhere else, it can be an absolutely infuriating experience for a reader who has had certain expectations set up. A knowledgeable genre writer can subvert those expectatations by showing they're doing it deliberately, and that doesn't rattle in the same way ignorance does (and can be hugely entertaining, as in The Laundry Files).

I think what's happening with books like NLMG and possibly Station Eleven is that it's possible to read them through a literary fiction lens or a science fiction lens. Through a lit lens you see a decent narrative, characterisation etc, through a sci-fi lens you see shitty worldbuilding that drops you out of the story.

I think that's probably the main issue here. I read all books as just books, not as genre books. I don't have particular expectations of crime or science fiction and wouldn't expect a writer to have to conform to any particular expectations when writing a novel. I wouldn't have thought of classifying NLMG as science fiction any more than I would have thought of classifying His Bloody Project as a crime/whodunnit. For me, the issue of organ rejection might cross my mind but it wouldn't bother me - I would assume in this fictitious world that that wasn't an issue. And I wouldn't expect the characters to tell me about it because in that book we have a blinkered and limited narrator.

On the other hand, in a book like Room, the illogicalities of the plot and of the character behaviours do irritate me. Or in a book like All the Light We Cannot See the terrible writing really irks me.

Ontop agree completely with that. I tend to enjoy book based on character, plot and depth of writing etc. Whether they conform to a particular genre really doesn't worry me. And to be honest it's rare I get too hung up on a book I haven't enjoyed. Too many books, too little time to keep going over it.

54. Confetti Confidential by Holly McQueen

Mindless fluff about a woman setting up as a wedding planner. Very similar in tone to the Shopoholic series so if you like those you might like this. I found out when I'd finished it's the third in a trilogy but that didn't seem to matter.

25. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri.

I'm not normally a fan of short stories but I really enjoyed this collection by Lahiri. She is an American writer of Bengali origin and these stories focus on Indian/American characters (mainly second and third generations) and how they cope with their mixed cultural environment. A real treat to read; it's beautifully written. Simple stories of every day life which resonate.