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?

41 Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor

Much reviewed on here. I didn't think it was terrible, but wasn't particularly taken with it. I doubt I'll bother with more in the series.

I'm still on The Woman In White - feels like I've been reading it for about a year

15. The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, by Heather O'Neill
16. All Our Wrong Todays, by Elan Mastai
17. The Unquiet Dead, by Ausma Zehanat Khan
18. My Name Is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout
19. Fifteen Dogs, by Andre Alexis
20. Party Girls Die in Pearls, by Plum Sykes

Frederick Forsyth's autobiography The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue is 99p just for today

29. Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada. Set in 1940s Berlin it details the interwoven lives of ordinary people under the Nazi regime and one couple's small resistance to it.

I don't know how I feel about this one yet. It took me ages to get through as I have had limited reading time recently, it's quite slow burning and harrowing to read . It was well written and interesting. I hadn't realised that some of the characters were based on real people. Largely it just made me very sad about humanity despite the redemptive qualities of many of the characters.

Laptop and Kindle Ban bascialy confirmed now So I am going to have to Look at covers for my Paperbacks as I am to Embarrassed to be seen reading books that are not supposed to be read by a man while on the Beach.
Plus I will have to find a computer there which is impossible now as while I am away I have to pick my uni options and it cant be done on a phone so I will have to do it via a computer somewhere there.

You can carry Kindle/ laptop in the hold. A bit annoying as you can't have it on the flight but no reason that you can't take then with you.

Has Theban actually been confirmed? Can't find it anywhere in the news.

26. Uprooted - Naomi Novak 'Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on the border, full of malevolent power, and its shadow lies over her life.'

Fantasy not totally my thing, I read this for a prompt on a reading challenge. I actually quite enjoyed it in a twisted fairy tale kind of way, but some irritating aspects and I had to skim past the battle scenes in the end they got tedious. Started better than it ended definitely.

52. Take Six Girls: The lives of the Mitford Sisters by Laura Thompson
I have certainly read better books about this family. This one jumps about all over the place and it times is really hard to follow. It is primarily focused on the girls lives in the 1930's and throughout the Second World War, inevitably focusing on their widely opposing political beliefs. The author is favourite sister is clearly Nancy; she quotes from and draws parallels with her novels throughout the book. I was no surprise to find that she has written a stand alone Nancy Mitford biography.
She has little time for Jessica (Decca), dismissing her as a silly privileged girl who never stopped rebelling. In fact she has much more sympathy with fascist Unity and Diana.
The latter years of their lives are glossed over in a matter of pages.
Mary Lovell's biography is a much better book.

Fortuna - Alone in Berlin is a great book. I think that the translation is perhaps a little clunky. It is however a compelling story with profoundly moral questions. It struck me as very 'contemporary' despite being written in 1946.

Stitches. That sounds familiar. DD regularly raids the recycling and she came home from a week away with a rucksack full of rocks, and is insisting on keeping them. She will never give away any toys ever, or clothes she has grown out of. I think this will be a slog.

DS is ok as long as he has his sword and his cowboy costume, but he drew stripes all down his legs yesterday so he could be a tiger and they won't wash off. Argh. He also is convinced that at nursery they told him that he can fly like a bird, and has been practising over the weekend by jumping off the back of the sofa. I am glad that his French comprehension is improving but clearly some things are lost in translation.

As a result I have been taking refuge in my kindle and am continuing with The Paper Menagerie. I love it and don't want it to end.

26. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver Took a while to get through this as, despite her marvellous writing, I just wasn't gripped in the early stages. This story of a half American, half Mexican novelist who works in the household of Frida Kahlo in Mexico and later falls foul of 1940s / 50s anti communist witch hunts in America, is told in the form of extracts from diaries and articles, and I think it is this format that made me feel a bit detached from it initially, but in the later stages was used to great effect (don't want to say more...spoilers). Also novels which have a novelist as the main character always have to work hard to convince me they are not just navel gazing. This one certainly worked hard enough and I ended up loving it by the time all the threads were pulled together at the end.

27. Scaredy Cat by Mark Billingham Good well paced cop / murder thriller set in London. Second outing for DI Tom Thorne. The murder descriptions are too graphic for me, but otherwise really enjoyed this, and didn't guess who dunnit until just before the reveal. This was on my dad's kindle, and there's one more from this series on there, which I'm definitely going to read.

A weekend with loads of reading time...a rare treat for me!
18. At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier
Set in the mid 1800s, this novel opens in the Black Swamp area of Ohio as the Goodenough family try to scrape out a living against a backdrop of feuding and violence between parents James and Sadie. Following an incident, not revealed until later on in the book, son Robert heads west to leave his family behind, and this novel is really his story as he makes a life in California in the 1850s.
I loved this! Having time to get absorbed in it definitely helped compared to some of my recent reading. I found the setting fascinating, both in time and place, and as the book developed I was drawn in by the characters. References to trees, particularly the apple trees the Goodenoughs grow in Ohio and the redwoods and sequoias of California, are threaded through the story beautifully and central to the plot. I enjoyed the plot, forgiving a brief soap opera type episode as it enabled the author to wrap the story up with a conclusion that I liked!

20. The Fixer by Joseph Finder

Out-of-work journalist discovers millions hidden in the walls of his dad's old home, and mayhem ensues. Dad can't help or explain as he is incapacitated following stroke 20 years ago, which it now seems was brought on by a heavy beating.

This was a quick & light read with the right dose of suspense & intrigue, although the ending was rushed, I felt. I like Joseph Finder's books in general and would recommend his stuff to anyone looking criminal investigation / corporate espionage etc type stories.

MuseumofHam thank you for saying how slow the start of The Lacuna is. I tried it some years ago and didn't make it very far before returning it to the library, but have loved some of her other work more recently. I'll give it another try.

Ontopofthesunset the Shardlake books are very different to Winter in Madrid which I found grim with a capital G. He’s written another - a bit more modern & whose name I forget - which I simply found very dull. I think he needs to stick with Shardlake and I believe the good news on that subject is there's another one in the pipeline.

My books 22-24 are Artic Summer by Damon Galgut, Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (thank you Cote for nudging it up my TBR list) and War Brides by Helen Bryan. I found the first two excellent reads, in different ways. The first is about E M Forster's travels to the East - India predominantly (twice) and Turkey. I felt Galgut captured the complexities of India and Indians beautifully and affectionately. I found myself liking Forster and wanting to read his books, despite having seen the films first. Also wanting to read more by Damon Galgut. The second has already been well-reviewed by Cote and I concur - falling somewhere between thriller & police procedural, it's more a wonderful work on the nature of Russia and Russians (and all the other nationalities that made up the USSR). The third was a lighthearted bit of fluff containing a couple of glaring factual errors and so annoyed rather than provided relaxation.

Museum and Joyless - Lacuna is still on my too read pile after I abandoned it about 5 (or may be more ) years ago. Not in the mood for books I can't get into at the moment. Life is too busy and I need an immediate escape rather than a slog.
53. Silent Child - Sarah A Denzil. Easy read thriller about a woman whose son goes missing / presumed drowned and then reappears half naked and traumatised 10 years later, just as she is about to give birth to her second child.
Full of inaccuracies, and the timeline was bizarre but I did keep reading, even if it only took 24 hours.

24. Watching Edie by Camilla Way

Psychological thriller.
Before - Edie and Heather were friends as teenagers, before it all went horribly wrong (details of this aren't revealed until the end of the book).
After - Edie hasn't seen Heather for about 16 years. And then Heather reappears when Edie really needs someone. But why is Heather back in Edie's life and what does she want?

This did not end up where I thought it was heading. And the ending was grim and unsettling. Not sure how I feel about this TBH.

42 Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

Excellent account of the car-crash that was the Coalition Provisional Authority that ruled Iraq following the war in Iraq and fall of Saddam Hussein. A pretty spectacular story of incompetence, political place-men & unbelievable naivety. As one interviewee put it "I'm a neo-conservative who was mugged by reality".

A re-read, but I found it well worth re-visiting. One can only hope that the author is somewhere embedded in the Trump administration, and will write a similar book on the experience.

33. Lion by Saroo Brierley

The tale of a five-year-old boy from a poor village in India who one day boarded a train alone, ended up in Calcutta, and who did not find his way home for twenty-five years. This is Saroo's own story, which was made into a film recently. He was found on the streets of Calcutta and eventually adopted by an Australian couple, growing up in Tasmania. Eventually, after months of searching on Google Earth, he identified the town where he was born and was reunited with his mother and siblings. His memory for the detail of this little place in India which he left by accident aged five was astonishing and although it's a very short book the story is quite fascinating.

Just popping in to say 'Hello' and to say I tried and failed with two Barbara K books - far too slow and boring at the start, and I couldn't be bothered to invest more time on them.

I'm reading and hating a Georgette Heyer who-dunnit. Ordinarily I wouldn't bother finishing it, but need something lightweight at the minute, so I'll see it through to the bitter end now.

33. The Nix by Nathan Hill. I loved this, one of my favourites so far this year, and the best thing about it was I had absolutely no expectations when I started it. It's a big book, around 650 pages and it flew. There are a couple of central characters, namely a fairly miserable professor in an American university, and his mother Faye, from whom he has been estranged for a many number of years after she left him and his father in small town America. The book covers 1968 to 2011 (I think..) and location moves from small town, to Chicago, to Norway.

34. A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny. Book 2 of Inspector Gamache. I liked books 1 and 2, and keen to keep going. Nice to know there are 10 more Gamache books waiting for me.

I have started Under the Udala Trees by Chinela Okparanta on Audible. The narrator is reading too slowly! But I am willing to keep going with it.

Started reading Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. Don't know much about it and actually I can't remember what I have even read so far. May have to start over..

21. Raising Boys by Step Biddulph

This had some good insight but very few and far between, lost in hundreds of fucking pages of "Stories From The Heart", complete with a cutesie heart drawing I don't know why so many friends were raving about this book over the years.

Cote - MN has been promoting a new Biddulph book about girls, I'm not sure whether to try it as I hear very mixed reviews of his books. The kindle sample was pathetically short and gave me very little idea of whether it would be useful. These parenting books always seem to be masses of padding with one or two insights.

19. Catastrophe 1914: Europe goes to war by Max Hastings. I finally finished listening to this almost 30hr audio book. I knew embarrassingly little about the start of WW1 before listening to this book, hopefully I won't forget it all too quickly. Mostly interesting, occasionally dull, and often very hard to listen to (Narrator often reads a letter written by some poor young sod, then tells us about his terrible death soon after). Hastings argues that WW1 was pretty much inevitable and lays the blame squarely on Germany. I still can't get my head round the number of casualties.

I won't bother, LadyDepp. It's an article stretched into a book. Waste of time.