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?

Not selfish at all, we like happy passengers. It makes the process of "get them on, get them gone" so much easier. And Kindles mean people aren't lugging around tons of books and messing up the weight and balance.

Charmed Life is one of my favourite books ever- just perfectly pitched and never overwritten. The others (not so much sequels as loosely linked) are a bit more variable- I rather like The Lives of Christopher Chant, but iirc, it was written quite a long time later and the flavour is different. Witch Week is only very loosely linked but it is fab, very very funny!

Ohhhhhh, I love Diana Wynne Jones. Sooo much better than JK Rowling IMHO (sorry Potter-lovers). I've given Charmed Life to all my godchildren for one birthday or another :)

I'm actually intrigued by the idea of wanking in space (haven't read the book BTW, just picking up the idea from this thread). We visited the Kennedy Space Centre this year and were fascinated to learn about the mechanics of using the toilet in space. If you were a man having a wank in zero gravity, I am guessing you would have to be quite careful

Scribbly, I've added The Dark Circle to my TBR, it sounds good :)

I gave up on the Cornish Trilogy, had to admit eventually that it was not for me!

33 The Tidal Zone, Sarah Moss

My first book by this author. Has been reviewed on here several times so I won't rehash the plot but it's a book about parental anxiety and how we react when illness/death threaten our safe family lives. Thought the writing was excellent and the characters were utterly believable. I'd be interested to read her other books to find out whether Adam was a beautifully constructed, subtle depiction of a rather priggish, anxious super-middle-class SAHD who will only let his daughters eat naice food, or if some of that self-flagellating snobbery is a default setting for her characters. I recall my disappointment at having LOVED Eva in We Need to Talk About Kevin, and then reading another Lionel Shriver and finding a very similar character there, suggesting that this was just how Shriver writes people.

Great to see other Charmed Life fans! Nobody I know in real life has heard of it. Tanaqui it's disappointing to hear the other books are a bit variable - but I shall see if DD fancies The Lives of Christopher Chant. And yes KeithLeMonde IMO better than Harry Potter.

Keith interested to hear what you think about The Dark Circle. It's got a few flaws, and I don't think it deserves to win theBaileys, but I really enjoyed it as an interesting and easy read. I think she conveys life in a TB sanatorium really well and its interesting to see how the doctor-patient relationship has changed from that period of time to now.

23. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
    Claudia lies dying in a hospital bed and reflects on her life - lovers, family, friends. In particular she reflects on her time in Egypt during World War 2. Very well written book - she creates a character of real depth in Claudia and also includes reflections from other characters' perspectives so that you know that what Claudia thinks isn't always true.

24. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey
    A novella set sometime in the 1920s. Dolly is getting married. Relatives and friends gather at the house in preparation. Strachey manages to create a little world using very sparing language and is cynical on the subject of marriage. Funny, I enjoyed it.

25 At Freddie's by Penelope Fitzgerald
Freddie is an elderly woman who runs a down at heel stage school in Covent Garden in the early 1960s. She is a very well written character - formidable, able to get her own way, doing everything for the sake of the school. Fitzgerald brilliantly evokes the back stage world of the theatre: the character actors, the stage hands, the child actors showing off. Really enjoyed this book.

Somewhere my numbers have gone wrong. Never mind.

49. Love Poems by Carol Ann Duffy I only started reading poetry this year so taking tentative steps into what I like and what I don't like. I didn't like this one. I liked her collection The Bees because all the poems flowed, you could see the themes and how the book had been curated (is that how it's done? I have no idea how poetry books are put together). This book felt like a sub committee from the publishers had gone through her back catalogue going "Is this one about Love? Yeah, well its got a bit of sex in and its all about feelings so stick it in." It was all a jumble. I didn't enjoy it, although there were some lovely poems in there.

50 This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki
Graphic novel pilfered from dd1 as the love poems were making me cross. Do we do graphic novels in this list?
YA, snap shot of a teenage girl's summer holiday spent at a cabin by a lake with her friend who she meets up with every year. Clever and touching and beautifully illustrated. I loved the scenes of them illegally watching horror films on DVD. v YA though, angsty level 11.

51 Slade House by David Mitchell
A sort of off-shoot story to his The Bone Clocks, although you could read it as a stand alone. Mysterious twins lure an unsuspecting victim through a hidden iron door into Slade House once every nine years to do to them. Another multi-narrative book along the lines of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks.
I think I'm done now with this format. Cloud Atlas was amazing and Bone Clocks was OK but this felt a bit half-arsed. It wasn't scary either, it was mostly just a bit silly. Passed the time of day in the car though. The narration was good.

Book 51
The Handsome Man's De Luxe Café – Alexander McCall Smith
This was just what I needed this week in the sense that I needed something that’s pretty much a hug in a book. However, I thought it was one of the weakest of this series and doubt I’ll bother with any more. The ‘mysteries’ being investigated are getting slighter with each one, and the characters are the same characters, saying and doing exactly the same things in exactly the same ways. I actually think he just cuts old manuscripts up, throws them in the air, and then glues them back together in a slightly different order.

Remus I know exactly what you mean about AMS.

I have given up on The City and The City. It wasn't that I didn't get the idea of the two cities, in fact I thought that was quite clever, I just didn't like the characters as found them annoying.

I loved Diana Wynne Jones as a child. Liked Charmed Life, but my absolute favourites were The Homeward Bounders and The Power of Three.

I've since read most of hers that I didn't read back then under the guise of buying books for dd

My favourite DWJs were Charmed Life, Power of Three, Magicians of Caprona and Dogsbody.

I also loved Moon Tiger, Cedar.

Power of 3 was my favourite as a child (overlooked eldest myself!), eclipsed by Howls Moving Castle; also love the Spellcoats (obviously!), and Witch Week.

My favourite DWJ books were Howl's Moving Castle, Homeward Bounders and Witch Week.

Yes Diana Wynne Jones wrote the best children's fantasy. Howl's moving castle my favourite but love most of them and can't wait for my kids to be of age.

Bitch in a Bonnet is 99p at the moment, if any Austen fans haven't read it yet.

Finished book number 8, Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky, a (supposedly semi) autobiographical tale of gentle, bohemian parental neglect. A hippy-dippy, English, middle class mother takes her two daughters to Morocco, this extended two year road trip is viewed through the eyes of, and narrated by, the younger of the two daughter, who is only four or five years old as the book opens. Often she narrates circumstances beyond her understanding but the reader picks up on the sub text. Perhaps this novel was ground breaking when it was published in 1992, or maybe the Kate Winslet film has increased its renown but having looked forward to reading it, it didn't live up to my expectations. The child narrator angle was, to my mind, done better in Jennifer Lauck's Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found, and the tale of a childhood marred by feckless parentage is more vividly realised and grippingly told in Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle.

On to book 9, Douglas Murray's The Strange Death Of Europe.

43 Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field by Eleanor Farjeon

I was prompted to re-read this after talking about it with a friend. It's a book of short fairy-tale type stories set in a loose framing narrative with the eponymous Martin telling stories in an effort to get six small girls to go to bed.

It was a favourite of mine as a child, and I think some of the stories are still absolute stand-outs. 'Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep' is relatively well known and published as a stand alone book, but several others are lovely, especially 'Tom Cobble and Ooney' & the story of the Tanthony Pig. A few have dated quite badly though, so I can see why it's no longer in print. I used to skip the bits with Martin Pippin as a child, but they're rather entertaining as an adult - I'm sure they were put in to amuse grown-ups reading the book aloud.

29. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (Book 1 of The Inheritance Trilogy) by NK Jemisin.

I quite enjoyed this fantasy story. Grand-daughter is forced to return the City and into bidding to be heir. Politics, gods, magic ensue.

30. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

Continuing to work my way through some of the classics. I think this has slightly dated but I could analogise television with media/internet. People locked into false environments (celebrity/consumerism/drugs), forgetting and destroying books/ideas and following the party line. Guy Montag becomes angry, very angry and sad. Is his world all there is? In finding books and words he tries to make sense of it all and make a difference.

Oh and I meant to say I thought The Class was great too, Sadik. Reminded me a bit of Buffy..

54. Georgiana - Duchess of Devonshire - Amanda Foreman Very well researched biography of an undoubtedly fascinating woman. Society hostess, deeply involved in politics, compulsive gambler who racked up thousands of pounds worth of debt. In fact debt worth millions in 'today's money' Family life reads like a Georgian Jeremy Kyle show! Lover of husband living within the family for a good proportion of their married life, illegitimate children on both sides of the marriage etc etc.
Another book I should have loved but at times it was really hard going. I found the political sections really hard to get to grips with. Possibly I was reading this at a time when RL is just too full on. Having just read a Mitford biography, then this, I fully intended to move on to a Bess of Hardwick biography. Completely exploiting the Chatsworth connection, but just can't face another biography at the moment- need something lighter in between.

34. The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

One summer's day in 1961, teenage Laurel is hiding out in her tree house and day dreaming of her future, but then becomes witness to a shocking crime. Forty years later, Laurel is a successful actress filming a series of interviews about her life and worrying for the health of her mother. The shades of the past come back to haunt her and she starts to piece together her mother's secret, which goes back to her life in London during the Second World War.

Morton tends to stick with the formula of interweaving the past and present in her novels. I overdosed on them a few years back so this is the first I've read in a while and although I thought it was fairly obvious what the big secret was before the final reveal it is still a well told story.

RMC123, good to hear someone else read Sarah Denzil's Silent child: I had the same reaction as you more or less, this book also took me 24 hours to read (so works great for reading challenges and is a fairly good page turner); but I agree, full of inaccuracies and sloppy writing.

Right, number 17 on my list is Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's wife. Has anyone read this?
This is a true story, well written & quick paced account of zookeeper couple, Antonina Zabinska and her husband Jan Zabinski in WW2 Warsaw (Poland). This couple rescued about 300 jews at the time, from the Warsaw ghetto, sheltering them in their zoo.
A fascinating story if you're interested in stories of resistance during WW2 (which I am). Many detailed descriptions of the zoo, the animals, the physical surroundings--if you like that kind of thing. The characters in my opinion were lacking in how they were drawn out, but still this made an interesting read. I would now love to visit Warsaw & go to the zoo which as I see is now a museum.
I haven't watched the movie yet, but will do so now that I've finished the book.

28. Allegiant by Veronica Roth Conclusion of angsty YA dystopian trilogy. I read book one Divergent last year, then snapped up this book cheap and waited for part two to drop in price, which it never did. I wasn't that invested anyway, and had heard, possibly on this thread, that it's book three that clears up the annoying gaping plot holes from book one. It sort of does, but I still found the explanations for groups of people not knowing certain things pretty clunky. About eleven million people must have pointed out to the author that the way things were set up meant that the two main characters must have known each other as children, so right at the end is a grudging half page total cop out chapter to 'explain' this. The narration of the chapters swaps between the two main characters but they speak in the same style and were thinking pretty similar angsty thoughts about the same things in the same timeline, so it only served to make me forget who was speaking. I was reading this during a trip to Berlin, so I appreciated the overall concept that dividing society artificially by factions and labelling some people as genetically pure and some as genetically damaged was always going to end badly, but on the whole I didn't think much of this.

51. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

A book about loneliness. Eleanor lives alone, She has no family (except Mummy who she speaks to on the phone once a week) and no friends. Her day to day life is a repeating routine (catching the bus, Telegraph crossword, sandwich and crisps for lunch, listening the The Archers, pesto pasta for dinner). On Fridays after work she treats herself to a Tesco pizza and two litres of vodka and the she doesn't talk to another soul until Monday. She is awkward, completely lacking in social skills and has no verbal filter, so pretty much says whatever she is thinking.
At work she meets Raymond the new IT guy and they end up helping an old man called Sammy this sets in motion a series of events which start to change Eleaor's life and lead her to question her past.
I bet this book will be a big hit this year. It's very like The Rosie Project as Eleanor is so lacking in social graces (due to past abuses and loneliness) and as such there are some genuinely funny actual laugh out loud moments. There are also moments of great pathos and Gail Honeyman does a good job at conveying what it's like to be genuinely lonely. Sometimes she pushes the comedy too far though and it stops being believable which is a shame.
A funny, engaging and heart warming read which also turned out to be a real page turner.