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?

Hi buck3t. Don't worry about numbers just join in with reviews of what you've read when you're ready

Eye prescription sorted so finally got some reading done. Here are my holiday reads:

Metroland by Julian Barnes Precocious coming of age tale. The protagonist longs to leave suburbia for an excitement and intellectual adventure in Paris. Thus follows him there, and, inevitably back again, and examines his feelings about it. Well written as ever by JB - I would read anything by him I think - but slight and very much a starter novel. Amusing and thoughtful.

Fatherland by Robert Harris This has got to be up there as one of my best reads of the year so far, for sheer page-turning into the night enjoyment. An exploration of life in Germany had Hitler been successful in WWII, told through the eyes of an SS officer with reservations, and taking the form of a police procedural. It takes many twists and turns and the minor revelations along the way hint at the concealment of the devastating truth which underpins and undermines the current reality.

The Gunslinger by Stephen King This was OK, he keeps you reading until the end, but at times I looked up from it and thought what nonsense is this However, I believe others (including SK himself) who have said this is just the gateway to the world and that the story picks up in the second book, so I will be acquiring The Drawing of the Three and continuing with the journey to the Dark Tower but only because it's you, Stephen !!

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson I've tried to get into this before with difficulty but pleased I came back to it as I really enjoyed the little vignettes about a grandmother and granddaughter dealing with ageing and loss during an island summer. Sweet but not cloying, clear-eyed but not bitter, there were many thoughtful observations about living and dying woven through with delightful descriptions of the natural world and imagery that captures the birth and death of a season.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip K Dick Thoughtful, intriguing sci-fi that picks up considerably in the second half. It doesn't fully deliver on all its ideas, but it's an enjoyable read about what it means to be human, that still feels relevant in many ways.

I'm currently reading and thoroughly enjoying Rush Oh!

82. Statues without Shadows, Anna Swann
Family memoir - woman investigates her parents' suicides in the 1960s. A bit more dramatic than most family histories, but when you come down to it, family histories are of most interest to the family itself rather than outsiders. Okay, but not a must-read.

83. and 84. A Cotswolds Killing and Slaughter in the Cotswolds by Rebecca Tope. A little light murder for the holidays. House-sitter looks into mysterious deaths. Okay as these things go.

Book 81
Little Novels by *Wilkie Collins
More Wilkie fun, this time in a collection of novellas, designed to be read before bed (and mostly where I read them). These varied in quality but overall I enjoyed. They were typically Wilkie in being a bit overblown at times and occasionally rather daft, but I like what he does with friendships between men, and with having women who are more than mere decoration.

Satsuki - Looking forward to your review of The Drawing of the Three - yet another book left in pieces on the Remus and Cote battleground.

I willI NEVER forgive you for Drawing Of The Three, Remus

A cowboy fantasy novel that features an ill & weak protagonist and the most ridiculous "monster" of all time. A giant crab that doesn't stop saying Dum-a-chum? Dick-a-chick?. Really?

39. Exit West - Mohsin Hamid

Another read from the Booker longlist and the weakest of the ones I've read so far. It started off strongly and I like the idea of the metaphorical doors opening for refugees to escape through. However, once the main protaganists went through the door, the story just didn't grip in the same way. I much preferred the first half and by the end I'd come to care very little about them. I'm not sure if that was a symptom of their own changing relationship or the fact that once they were refugees, there wasn't that strong sense of individual lives caught in a disaster.

Perhaps I should credit the author with cleverly creating that sense of growing alienation and lack of care about individual refugees but I don't think it was intentional sadly...

Would be interesting to see what others thought.

Boldly interested to hear your review of Exit West It is the next on my Booker list when I finish the mammoth 4,3,2,1. Which others have you read? Apologises , you have probably reviewed them here already but on my phone and going back through the thread is proving problematic!

Cote - the fact that you were able to read it and not fall utterly in love with the gorgeous Roland means that you're probably incurable.

RMC123, I've only read 4 titles so far! Lincoln in the Bardo, The Underground Railroad, Days Without End and Exit West.

I'm really intrigued by 4,3,2,1 but the size puts me off a bit. I'm trying to read the shorter ones first. Next up for me is Reservoir 13.

"Gorgeous Roland"? Err... Are you talking about the feverish loser who could barely walk?

You know nothing! I'm talking about an albeit feverish, but also tall, dark, snake-hipped, blue eyed, fast-fingered figure of a man, who can dance, tell stories, cook AND save the world.

Exactly what more do you want?

Oh wait. I know what's missing...you like your heroes to grow potatoes and talk Maths to you, right?

44. and 45. Three Corvettes by Nicholas Monsarrat and Nine Lives by Alan C. Deere. Towards the end of our holiday DH ran out of reading material, so I selflessly lent him my overstuffed kindle and received these paperbacks in return. Both are true experiences of the authors' military service during WWII - the first a volunteer naval officer and the second an RAF pilot, one of Churchill's 'The Few' from the Battle of Britain. These were interesting and I learnt something but not really my cup of tea.

45. Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter. Julia, Lydia and Claire are sisters until Julia, age 19, disappears and doesn't return. 24 years later, her sisters have never really got over her disappearance, and are no longer speaking to each other - until events conspire to bring them back together to find out what really happened to Julia. A page-turning thriller, not particularly memorable but just what I felt like reading at the time!

121. A God In Ruins by Kate Atkinson

I've had this on my to read list for a while. Wish I had read it sooner, I loved it!

Just checking in to get this back on my TIO.

Still crawling through Citizen Clem, currently somewhere mired in the 1920s.

For light relief I bought Captive Prince, recommended on a thread I started about really trashy books. I think it definitely counts on that front (IIRC the person who recommended it definted really trashy books as ones you file on your bookshelf spine inwards ) - it definitely isn't the fluffy romance that I actually needed but I'm hooked by the plot now!

"you like your heroes to grow potatoes and talk Maths to you, right?"
Is it awful that this would probably be my perfect man . . .

I haven't seen any evidence of those things in the first book Remus but looking forward to getting to know Roland a little better, and I suppose I'll cross the dick-a-chick when I come to it.

The very idea of cote judging a book on some frippery such as the fanciability of the main character is hilarious

He'll differentiate your integers. He'll find the root of your x, square your y, and normalise your distribution. He's your irrational number, your cosine, your number bond, the tangent that becomes the solution to your exponential equation.

And he grows a mean Maris Piper to boot.

(I'm still ploughing my way through Wolf Hall. Only about 80 pages to go, though!)

Hi all,

Not updated for a while, was focusing on finishing dissertation and then been on holiday.

Copying list over from where I think I was up to, bold for those I particularly enjoyed.

1. The Dark is Rising - Susan Cooper
2. The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding - Agatha Christie
3. Our Endless Numbered Days - Claire Fuller
4. Love Letters of Henry V111 to Anne Boleyn (totally counting this even though it's only about 70 pages, I'll read an extra long one at some point to balance it out!)

5. How to be Both - Ali Smith

1. Toast - Nigel Slater
2. A Man Called Ove - Fredrick Backman
3. Chess - Stefan Zweig
4. Beauvallet- Georgette Heyer

10. The Book Thief - Marcus Zusak 11. The Story of a New Name - Elena Ferrante 12. The Glorious Heresies- Lisa McInerney 13. The Girls at the Kingfisher Club -Genevieve Valentine 14. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 15. Soulless - Gail Carriger 16. She-Wolves: the Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth - Helen Castor 17. Exposure - Helen Dunmore 18. The Cuckoo's Calling - Robert JK Rowling Galbraith 19. The Grand Babylon Hotel - Arnold Bennet 20. The Humans - Matt Haig 21. The Princess Bride - William Goldman 22. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August - Claire North 23. Bitch in a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen from the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps (Volume 1) - Robert Rodi 24. Good Kings Bad Kings - Susan Nussbaum 25. Right ho, Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse 26. Uprooted - Naomi Novik 27. The lost art of keeping secrets - Eva Rice 28. The Misremembered Man - Christine McKenna 29. A God In Ruins - Kate Atkinson 30. Rivers of London - Ben Aaranovitch 31. A House-Boat on the Styx - John Kendrick Bangs 32. Those who leave and those who stay - Elena Ferrante 33. Working the ruins: Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education 34. Elizabeth is Missing - Emma Healey 35. The Story of the Lost Child - Elena Ferrante 36. My Cousin Rachel - Daphne DuMaurier 37. Lost for Words - Stephanie Butland 38. The Husbands Secret - Liane Moriarty

Holiday reads ....

39. -Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
    A re read of one of my all time favourites, a perfect palate cleanser after all the dissertation stuff.

40. The Year of the Runaways - Sunjeev Sahota
    Mixed feelings about this, was hard going at times but the stories did grip and move me, would have liked a more detailed resolution to some of them.

41. Changeless - Gail Carriger

42. Blameless - Gail Carriger

43. Heartless - Gail Carriger
    This series is my guilty pleasure, silly, sexy steampunk lite meets vampires and werewolves and so far from my usual cup of tea but I read the first one (Soulless) for a reading challenge prompt and was hooked. Mixed bag, some parts of these later ones were just too silly, but overall enjoyable nonsense.

44. The Japanese Lover - Isabel Allende
    Enjoyable fairly easy read, I liked this a lot.

45. The Dog in the Marriage - Amy Hemel
    Short story collection - more vignettes than stories really. Lovely writing but could have done with a bit more story in the stories, I get that a lot was implied, much was open ended and the reader was encouraged to do the work of filling in the gaps, but page after page of that got a bit tedious. Some truly beautiful sentences though - some sections read more like poetry.

46. Tigers in Red Weather - Liza Klaussman
    This was a fab little beach read, started out quite typical family history/saga then got darker and twistier as it went on. I really enjoyed how your suspicions are raised then built on layer by layer. Though I just saw a very low star review on goodreads with the comment 'maybe I'm just tired of drunk rich people' and I can certainly see how, if you feel that way, this wouldn't be the book for you.

Yes I got fed up with tigers compostoleana it wasn't bad as such but you have to be in the mood for it and I wasn't. The characters were awful.

Composteleana I love Gail Carriger, at her best her books are perfect fluffy nonsense. Have you read any of her Finishing School series? If not, they're YA, and the first one isn't much good IMO, but the later ones are lovely - lots of the characters from the Parasol Protectorate but in their teens.

Cheerful

Satsuki I think if I'd have read it at any other time than at the end of a very lazy (and pretty drunken) holiday I probably wouldn't have had time for it. I suppose I just enjoyed going into it expecting one thing and ending up with a much darker and weirder story, though I'd have quite liked a bit more on Helena and her weird marriage and less on, say, Hughes and his boring man feelings re wife vs affair.

Sadik - I shall look out for those thank you!

Cote far too busy thinking about square roots and root vegetables to notice how beautiful Roland is. Her loss.

Sadik - well, you're welcome to the guy in The Martian. I'd rather be in Mid-World, lobsters and all.

"You know nothing! I'm talking about an albeit feverish, but also tall, dark, snake-hipped..."

I like blonds, so ner

And what exactly is a snake-hipped man?

"... blue eyed, fast-fingered figure of a man, who can dance, tell stories, cook AND save the world."

Yeah well he didn't do any of that in that book.

Exactly what more do you want?

"you like your heroes to grow potatoes and talk Maths to you, right? "

You know me too well, Remus

"He'll differentiate your integers. He'll find the root of your x, square your y, and normalise your distribution. He's your irrational number, your cosine, your number bond, the tangent that becomes the solution to your exponential equation."

Oooh, stop it