50 Book Challenge 2017 Part Seven

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the seventh 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, the fourth one here, the fifth one here, and the sixth one here.

What are you reading?

Remus I am reading All Creatures Great and Small at the moment, and it's gorgeous. Not getting much holiday reading done as the kids need supervising in the sea, and by the time they're in bed I'm slightly too drunk. Proper update when I get back

I did Dr Faustus for A level, loved it.

Screw

A good moment to add:
73 The Tragical History of Dr Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe listened to on Audible
Not a particularly great version - it's very cut, and there's quite a bit of background noise.

Still, it's a fabulous play, and the readings are good if quite 1950s actor voice. Good to have on audio (I can do the washing up and mentally arrange my own modern-dress-climate-change-parable staging as I go along).

And yes, I did it for A level too (Along with Volpone, which I also love, and which annoyingly isn't available on Audible.)

28. Persuasion - Jane Austen I read this on a v windy Lyme beach not far from the scene of Louisa's dramatic Cobb fall. I really enjoyed this - probably more than I did when I first read it.
    29 love Nina - Nina Stibbe A light gossipy read of a nanny's view of family life in a literary N London home where Alan Bennett (AB) pops around and interjects his opinions. Written in the form of letters home to her sister it was perfect to read in snatched moments when my children allowed me a reading break. 30 Marrying off Mother and Other Stories - Gerald Durrell A collection of short stories - again perfect for the school holidays to be able to dip in and out of. The title story has been covered in the ITV series but all the others were new to me. Gerald Durrell is a great story teller and I enjoyed them all.
29. I'm not with the Band - A Writer's Life Lost in Music by Sylvia Patterson After reading Stuart Maconie's 'Cider with Roadies' thus was quite a different take on a music journalist's experience. None of the pop / rock stars covered in this book come across particularly well and the money freelance journalists were paid is shocking. Another compelling read though.

I remember loving the James Herriot books about 26 years ago. I'm very pleased to hear they are still a great read now.

I was thinking of buying Derren Brown's book 'Happy' but it's £4.99 on kindle while the PB is only £3.84! How does that work? I don't want a hard copy...

I'm really fortunate to live a few doors down from the library, so I do visit often and treat it as an extension of my bookshelf. It's only a smaller library of the borough group, but the collection as a whole is very good and the website is excellent. It's 90p for a reservation or to have something brought over from another in the group. I usually wait until I have reason to be in the town with the largest library and take out a dozen books. They don't charge for you to return them to the "wrong" library. It's no hardship to pop in to return items. They have just reduced the opening hours which is a shame, but then I have a very odd working pattern which generally gives me opportunity to visit. If I were M-F 9-5 then I would have no hope of going.

39. Revelation by CJ Sansom on audio. I am enjoying these, but I think I need a break before the next one. I've turned 'sardonic' into a drinking game and got quite sloshed one evening as it appears with great regularity.

I've put The Essex Serpent to one side for now as I think it needs more attention than I can give it. I only have the time to snatch a few pages here and there at the moment.

I love my local library too. Practically everything I read is from mine so I save a fortune. Again I can browse the entire library collection online and can collect at my local library for free. Again fines can be quite steep but email reminders are sent out a few days before they are due.

65 Lincoln in the Bardo - As I said in my last post I did think this was a clever book but I felt it was overly long and the ending was disappointing.

66 - Domina - L S Hilton - This was another Mumsnet giveaway win. It was so disappointing. Tipped as a dangerous and exciting thriller I found it confusing and I it really didn't engage me at all. Whilst I don't expect books I read to be nicely tied up I was frustrated by the cliffhanger ending which will be resolved I assume in part 3.

Currently reading The Little Drummer Girl - John Le Carre - A very clever plot which I think is a bit wasted on me as whilst I understand the general gist some of the nuisances are confusing.

I also love the library but I'm very jealous of those with free reservations - it's a pound here so I tend not to bother. What is good is that I can renew online, plus all the libraries in this area are linked so I can take a book out in the city where I work, and return it in the town where I live 45 miles away and vice versa. Very useful!!

115. Jane Austen, The Secret Radical by Helena Kelly

I can't make my mind up about this. She goes through each novel in turn pointing out the subtext which modern readers apparently miss. Some are well known - Mansfield Park and slavery for example - but others maybe less so - e.g. Emma being 'about' the process of enclosing land that was formerly publicly available. I enjoyed learning some more background about the period Austen was writing in, but there were some claims Kelly made which I wasn't sure about, such as a passage in Northanger Abbey which is ostensibly about opening a cabinet actually being about female masturbation. Overall an interesting read though.

116. A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley

How murder became entertainment, starting with famous real life cases in the 1800s and how these were reported, through to The Golden Age of detective fiction in the 1920s-1940s. Not a massively in depth study but easy to read and despite the subject matter, entertaining! My only complaint is that she gives spoilers about some well known detective books which I hadn't actually read, which was a bit annoying.

Don't think I'll be reading that Austen one, Chessie. Some people don't half like to write some nonsense about Jane!

New update.

55. Think by Simon Blackburn. A short introduction to the key questions of philosophy as an academic discipline - one of my son's set texts for next year. I enjoyed this and found it well written and thought provoking. It introduces some of the major arguments and positions that different philosophers and schools have adopted from the Greeks to the present.
56. The Revenant by Michael Punke. I thought this got off to a great start and was very keen to begin with, but by about a third of the way through I had become disenchanted. I liked his straighforward past tense style, though there was a bit too much viewpoint shifting. Endless 'how I made a raft out of buffalo skin', 'how my fire nearly went out in the snow', 'how I survived a Native American attack for the umpteenth time while for the umpteenth time all my fellow travellers were killed' and 'how I dreamt about revenge while chewing a bit of raw skunk liver' tales merged to become indistinguishable. I really just wanted him to freeze or drown or be shot by an arrow like everyone else in the book.

57. Commonwealth by Ann Patchett I guess this was OK, but confusingly structured and it dragged on. It was stylistically very much of its type - character-based fiction written by American women writers - which I find irksome. Certain characters were kind of abandoned and story lines started which never really went anywhere. Spoiler: The central conceit of finding someone's based a best seller on your life was interesting but almost immediately abandoned, I thought.
58. The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higoshida Very short book by Japanese teenager with autism, translated by David Mitchell. Interesting look inside the world of a non-verbal teenager, but I know that there has been some controversy about the way the book was written and the authenticity of it due to the number of different mediations it's undergone.

Now onto A Gentleman in Moscow.

44. The Silent Hours - Cesca Major - a book covering the lives of a group of people living in a French village near Limoges during the war, going forward to a woman who is in a nunnery in 1952, unable to speak, who was clearly injured during the war. It becomes clear that she is the mother of one of the other main characters, Isabelle, who falls in love with a Jewish man - who also tells his story through the book. A young boy of around 10 is the other main narrator.

This was slightly ruined for me as I knew about the event in the war in this location that the story was leading up too. I couldn't really engage with the romance, it all felt a little contrived to make what was already a tragic story more emotional.

Ok but not one for people who aren't big on feelings.

62. The Celts by Alice Roberts

The book accompanying the TV series from a year or so back. It explores what we actually know about the Celts, looking at both the long held belief that they emerged in central Europe and the more recent theory that ties their origins to the Atlantic coast area, such as the British Isles, and includes the earliest evidence of a Celtic language which comes from Portugal.

I've seen some intersting Austen books mentioned, up goes the tbr!

Finished 11. The Handmaids Tale Much reviewed of course, really enjoyed this and I'm looking forward to starting my my second Atwood Alias Grace

I've also started a book and university blog, am I allowed to link? Might be of interest to those who've studied Literature at uni.

www.thearmchaircritic.co.uk

studentarmchaircritic.wordpress.com

Wrong URL -twice- There we go

Ohun will take a look

94. See what I have done. Retelling of the Lizzie Borden case, which I know others have read and reviewed. Have always had a grim fascination with this tale since working on a Theatre in Education piece at university.
Was never going to be a cheery read but did convey how strange the Borden household was even before the murders. Lots of blood and vomit as you would expect. Also a very strange recurring theme of fingernails! Stuff getting in them, people biting them, disposing of them, thinking about them. Found that very weird! Gave it three stars on Goodreads. Readable but not a standout.

117. Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life by Samantha Ellis

Nice to read a book about Anne, the least known of the sisters. I'm still not sure I know much more about her than I did before, though. This focuses a lot on Anne's books, and draws conclusions of what Anne must have been like based on what she wrote. I liked the structure, with each chapter based around a person important to Anne and what that person taught her or the effect they had on her. Not bad, but not the best Bronte book out there (sorry don't know how to do the umlaut on my phone!)

Enjoyed that review of The Revenant" very much, Sunset*.

Book 79
Cousin Kate by Georgette Heyer
Really enjoyed this. A bit darker than Heyer’s usual romps. I think she’d maybe been reading Collins, rather than Austen, when she wrote this one.

63. The Vanishing Witch by Karen Maitland

Set in Lincoln in 1380, it's the tale of wool merchant Robert of Bassingham, an important figure in the city and a man whose family and business suffer a series of misfortunes after he meets and starts to advise an attractive widow on investments. HIs wife, suffering jealous, falls seriously ill, his eldest son is angry and suspicious, and his business suffers from thefts with suspicions falling on the Florentines who are also trading in the city. After the death of his wife, Robert marries Catlin who brings her elderly servant and rapidly growing daughter to live in his house, but the disasters keep coming. Meanwhile, Richard II's poll tax provokes discontent in the country and a rebellion led by Wat Tyler marches on London. Throughout all this, the servant of Robert's first wife has her suspicions that her master's new wife is using witchcraft and that Robert is being led to his doom.

I'm glad you liked the review, Remus. Have you read the book? I was genuinely disappointed as I was really into it for the first few chapters.

I read it and was also a bit disappointed. I thought there was a lot of time wasted on backstories of minor characters and was disappointed by the ending. I then watched the film which was really, really, really boring.

44. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline I enjoyed the first quarter of the book, where the author sets the scene of a dystopian near future which many get respite from by spending much of their time logged into a souped up VR version of the internet, the Oasis, and the setting up of an 80s themed quest to basically win the internet. I enjoyed the last quarter of the book, as said quest was pacily reaching its conclusion. The middle was flabby, with too much detailed description of processy stuff. I was hoping for more of an 80s nostalgia fest than I got, as this didn't really reflect what I was up to in the 80s. Ultimately, that didn't matter though, as I ended up enjoying the story in its own right.

May I join? My son (he's 10) and I set a challenge to read a book a week this year and thus far have managed it (he's smashed it!). Some of my favourite reads have been The Power, The Essex Serpent, His Bloody Project, The Goldfinch, 13 Reasons Why, All the Light We Cannot See, Elizabeth is Missing. Only two.I've struggled with are The Other Walker Woman, and The North Water (I think. I did not finish it).

Currently reading Donna Tartt's The Secret History after enjoking the Goldfinch immensely. It's very good.

Also got a historical fiction book called 'The Fair Fight' from the library recently and very much enjoyed it. Was very well done. And 'The Lie Tree' too.