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?

26. Ship of Magic - Robin Hobb
27. The Mad Ship - Robin Hobb
28. Ship of Destiny - Robin Hobb

This is the Liveship trilogy which I hadn't read before as I sped through all the Farseer/Fitz and Fool books first.

Really glad I read these although I wish I had read them in sequence as it would have helped with the later stories. The background and characters are richly drawn and the world she has created is quite compelling.

A great read if you like immersive fantasy which is rich in detail but not flabby (George R.R.Martin, take heed!).

47 Running Blind by Desmond Bagley. (actually read a little while back, but I forgot to include it in my updates)

Thriller set in Iceland during the cold war. I've been distinctly underwhelmed by the thrillers I've read recently, and wondered whether it was me or the books, so thought I'd go back to this one which is an old favourite from my teens.

It was written in 1970, and the main character has some rather period attitudes to women (a bit problematic given it's written in the 1st person and he's the hero!). But apart from that it's head and shoulders above the various cold-war set thrillers I've read recently, even despite the fact that I knew the ending.

I'm struggling a bit at the moment (with books, not life) as I'm trying to make a proper go at reading some of the books that have been mouldering on my to-read shelf for years and - er - have been remembering why they've been mouldering. Currently ploughing my way through Stella Gibbons' Here Be Dragons but everyone in it is irritating me. (I rather think they're supposed to be, but even so.)

Oh, I also read the Pottermore Presents ebooks mentioned upthread. I'm not counting them in my tally, because I ended up skimming rather. I think I've perhaps read too much fanfic covering the same ground . . .

Finished 47. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, by Christopher de Hemel

Loved this. In each chapter, the author takes you on a tour with him to a different institute around the world to examine a particular manuscript. He comments on the parchment (see the curve of the original animal skin), the handwriting, the illustrations. It's a beautiful book - wouldn't work on Kindle. I felt I should have been reading it in a leather armchair in a gentleman's library, with a crackling fire, a brandy snifter at my elbow, and shadowy ranks of books and busts massed around me. A book to savour, although I had to plough through it fairly quickly as it was due back at the library.

A few more to add.

35. Wyoming Trail Cheryl Moskowitz. A slightly unsatisfying meander through a woman's lifelong effort to make sense of her father's departure and to create a relationship with him.
36. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. This was cheap on Kindle the other day. Not as good as Into Thin Air. It was rather repetitive and tried to spin out a few facts into a gripping psychological exposé which didn't really work; I didn't really have much sympathy for Chris McCandless. The facts I found out online afterwards about the family etc were more interesting.
37. Phineas Finn Anthony Trollope (audiobook). Still enjoying Timothy West's leisurely narration of these. This one took me longer to get into than others and I found PF himself rather irritating. Enjoying Trollope's discussion of the frustration of the life of the 'ordinary upper class woman'.

Not sure what's up next.

26. The Power by Naomi Alderman. Part sci fi and part feminist novel, this imagines a world in which women gain the power to perform electric shocks with their fingers. The underlying theme is an exploration of the extent to which the existing patriarchy is due to the physical strength of men. I thought this was absolutely brilliant - a cracking story, and thought provoking too. Many thanks to those of you who recommended it on this thread.

Just managed to get Philip Kerr's new Bernie Gunther novel in Oxfam for a fiver. It's still a tenner on Kindle, so I'm chuffed!

25. The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender - Leslye Walton

Quite the change of pace and oh how I loved it. With a plot which features a girl who turns herself into a bird, one who cuts her own heart out and another who is born with wings, it could be seen as a bit daft. But actually, the magical realism for me was really just an interesting plot device for a story about love and relationships. I absolutely loved this - one of my standout reads so far.

Now to go back and catch up with the thread!

23. Le Clavier: Techniques, Factures, Interprétations by Cahier de la Société de Musique Ancienne de Nice (see photo)

I've been yearning for another book about dead Baroque musicians and settled for one about Baroque instruments instead. Sadly, it's in French so some of the more technical parts were a bit beyond me, but I did learn about some fascinating (and odd) early instruments such as the clavichord, spinet, and of course the harpsichord which yours truly has been working on for the past year or so

I doubt if anyone is looking to read a book about ancient musical instruments, so this won't be a long review but I thought it would be interesting to mention here one little fact I learned in this book: Yamaha has been manufacturing organs (since 1887) and pianos (since 1890) long before they went into the fast motorcycles business

bibliomania can I pull up another armchair and join you? It sounds lovely. We're staying with my parents in glamorous Essex and my dad has a copy of the manuscripts book! I am highly tempted now...

28 The Misremembered Man - Christine McKenna - this has been on my kindle ages, thinking it must have been a deal as it doesn't seem like something I'd really buy. Presents itself as a sort of gentle romantic comedy looking at life in rural Ireland in the 70s - despite making most of the characters seem like simpletons, I was sort of enjoying this bit, but then it's suddenly interspersed with chapters detailing the main male characters horrific upbringing in a catholic orphanage - with some truly gruesome depictions of abuse that I had to skim over in the end. It turns out not to be a romance at all, and has a heartening and quite satisfying resolution if you can overlook the very many coincidences the author relies on to get us there. Overall didn't quite work for me.

I'm reading 4 books per month. For last month (May) I read the following:

1. The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker.
2. Underground by Haruki Murakami.
3. The 3 Mistakes of My Life by Chetan Bhagat.
4. Eternal Bread by Alexander Belyaev.

It's always nice to see spinets mentioned Cote. My grandfather loved obscure muscial instruments and played the spinet, the serpent and the hurdy-gurdy. I am devoid of musical talent, but I used to love trying to play the spinet when I visited them and feeling how hard it was to press down the keys compared to a piano.

I have finished 16. The Return by Hisham Matar and have started 17. Bring Up the Bodies. I really enjoyed Wolf Hall but it's been a while since I read it and it's taking me a while to remember what was happening where Wolf Hall left off.

whippet, pull up that armchair! I think we have quite a lot of overlapping taste, so you might enjoy it, and it's the kind of book you can sample when you're in the mood rather than have to charge through end to end.

48. Notes from a Very Small Island, Anthony Stancomb
Non-fiction from Englishman about his move to a small island in Croatia. He's no prose stylist, and this is heavy on the quaint locals, but in fairness, he seems to have cobbled together enough understanding of the language to get a sense of what life is like for local people there. A reasonable holiday read if you're visiting the area.

49. The Various Haunts of Men, Susan Hill
The first in the Simon Seraillier crime series. As a pp said, it's better to read them in sequence - I knew what awaited a central character, which lessened the impact. The author always seems to have an axe to grind - beware complementary medicine! Assisted suicide is wrong! And frankly, I don't get why Simon S. is so irresistible to women. Getting a bit grumpy with this series.

Damn. The reason I didn't rejoin this thread this year is because I was spending a fortune! Have just read the last 2 pages and bought 5 books (or 3, depending on how you count them) - Pottermore Presents, the Guy Gavriel Kay one and the first Marie Brennan Natural History of Dragons one.

Please may I join now? I am longing to discuss Assassin's Fate, Fitz and the Fool by Robin Hobb.

Fire away cheddar!

Be interesting to hear your thoughts, cheddar. There are a few of us who've read Assasin's Fate recently.

So I've just gotten to "part two" in I Let You Go - Clare MacKintosh whilst on the bus home from work! Did not see that coming. Pity I always get to the good bits when I have to stop reading.

A Clockwork Orange is £1.99 in the Kindle monthly deals. A work of genius, imvho.

I've never read A Clockwork Orange so am rather tempted. Is it very violent?

Very, very, very. It took me years to get past the first ten pages, as they are so harrowing - but it honestly is superb.

Some very good books in this month's Kindle sale:

Out of Time - Miranda Sawyer
Keeping On, Keeping On and Writing Home - Alan Bennett.

I have never read A Clockwork Orange but did see it as a stage production when I was at uni. It was brilliant but quite horrific. We all marched down to the union afterwards desperately needing a drink only to find the actor who played Alex standing at the bar! It was genuinely hard to be around him. Poor fella.

The Things they Carried is in the monthly deal, and worth a read - although I found the second half much weaker than the first half.