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?

Spinning
I've only read A Quiet Belief in Angels by RJ Ellory and didn't think much of it. I guess The Dry had a similar sparseness about it, but far more engaging.

40. Game of Thrones - George R. R. Martin
41. Clash of Kings - George R. R. Martin

Just been on holiday so took a break from the Booker and went back to read the Game of Thrones series again. It's been a while since I read them and I wanted to refresh my memory of where the book stories got to. Got through the first two and will be working my way through the rest. I'm hoping the next instalment will be out next year!

42. The Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs - Tristan Gooley

Picked this up as a holiday read too. Loved it- such a fascinating collection of aids to natural navigation - my favourite sections were on trees, plants and lichens. Highly recommended for outdoorsy types or people who are interested in the natural world.

Remus, my favourites are The Ivy Tree, Nine Coaches Waiting and The Gabriel Hounds. But they are all very similar in feel and general niceness.

I thought The Narrow Road to the Deep North was just a badly written book - bad structure, bad writing, bad characters. I'm amazed it was so lauded. I didn't think it was exactly boring, just really not very good.

TooExtra and Tanaqui, many thanks for suggestions - I've actually bought Curse of Chalion as found it very cheap on ebay, and it looks like I'll really enjoy the whole series so might as well start at the beginning.

Shopaholic sounds like it might also be a good call (I think we have very similar tastes Tanaqui), and I bet they'll have it in the library, so will also try that one next. Determinedly trying to finish my not-very-exciting Audible and paper books I've got on the go before moving on though!

Forgot one!

146. Every Living Thing, James Herriot. I love James Herriot. This is set slightly later when his children are 6-10, so it's a little light on Siegfried and there's no Tristan at all (boo!) but it's still lovely. Beautiful nature and animals, wry self-deprecating humour. Perfect!

Tristan's the best thing about them. Love whatshisname who plays him in the TV series - perfect casting.

Thanks, Cheddar. Have bought Nine Coaches Waiting (99p)

I quite like the later Herriot they have a wistfulness about them of time moving on, but I was in love with Tristan and Siegfried and loved it in the bachelor days. Couldn't ever take to the TV show as they were all too hot firmly fixed in my imagination.

I had a very soft spot for both brothers.. The casting really was spot on wasn't it?

78 Eggs or Anarchy by William Sitwell

Biography of Lord Woolton, Minister for Food during the second world war, with the main focus on this part of his life. I found this pretty meh - only got through it out of determination to actually finish something.

I never watched the TV series - think I took one look and decided the characters just didn't look right.

Just had to step in to say that The Narrow Road.... is one of the best books I've ever read, I loved it, and actually stopped to stroke the cover when I walked past it on the shelf the other day! A very deserving Booker winner in my extremely humble opinion.

I haven't updated my list for ages, but I really enjoyed The Dry as a quick palate cleansing thriller, well written and very evocative of place.

I'm currently enjoying a bit of Wodehouse Blandings froth after breaking my heart over A Little Life. I need a little break before reading anything sad ever again.

147. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque. Incredibly powerful writing about the lost generation of young men who left school to join up to fight in the Great War. I've read a lot about the British/Commonwealth soldiers fighting in WWI, but I don't think I've read much from the German point of view, and certainly nothing by a contemporary author. I was expecting something a bit more martially jingoistic, standing up for the Fatherland etc etc, and although the Fatherland was mentioned, it was in the context of the characters wondering what the point was, of the destruction and death and horror. And the most poignant part of all is an effect that the author didn't plan - the fact that 20 years later they would go and do it all again, that men who fought in their 20s would go on to warmonger in their 40s. I cannot imagine how you could live through that and then go on to sabre-rattle and incite WWII. I've read contemporary authors (LM Montgomery springs to mind, as does Frances Hodgson Burnett) where society coped with the war and its aftermath by telling themselves that the war was the birthpang of a brave new world, that it was a necessary evil to usher in a better way of life. Remarque touches on this theme too, although Paul cannot imagine how he would deliver it.

I read Birdsong for book club a couple of years ago and I wasn't particularly impressed (Sebastian Faulkes always fails to make his people interesting and relatable, for me), but everyone else in the group was blown away by the description of the trenches and the devastation. Now, I hope Faulkes read AQOTWF before he wrote Birdsong, but his version doesn't hold a candle to it.

Cheddar AQOTWF sounds fascinating. I did actually love Birdsong though

51. Dear Ijeawele Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Lovely little gem of a book that I read in an hour this morning. Fifteen tenets of teaching your daughter how to be a feminist without burning their bras One to keep and dip into I think.

Remus I like This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart. Read it earlier this year and it stands up well - young woman in Corfu, dolphins, good looking young man, enjoyable mystery.
I do also like Nine Coaches Waiting. Haven't read it for a while though.
I bought a cheap box set of them from TheBookPeople a couple of years ago.

56. The Maze Runner by James Dashner

YA. Thomas wakes in the middle of a dangerous and mysterious maze, amongst a group of teenage boys, all lacking all memory of how they got there or their previous life.

Not one I really got into. The entire maze setup is too implausible, and never properly explained (although it might be in one of the 2 sequels that I'm probably not going to bother reading). The boys are generally annoying, use lots of made up swear words, and I found it difficult to care about what happened to any of them.

I think everyone should read All Quiet. I think Birdsong is to All Quiet what Narrow Road is to the Railway Man imo - pale and slightly mawkish in comparison. Narrow Road so lurid and overblown compared to the quiet dignity of TRM for e.g that I almost found it insulting to the lived experiences of the survivors (I read them in quick succession which probably did it) Sorry ladydepp - but I do recommend TRM if you haven't read it yet

That's ok Satsuki - I think I like lurid and overblown. Is this a bad time to admit that I liked Birdsong too . Time for an overdue update:

30. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - a bit of non-fiction about extremely successful people or outliers. Gladwell's argument is that people are highly successful due to luck, birthdates and opportunity rather than due to any natural talent. The anecdotes are interesting but it all feels a bit thin and repetitive.

31. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara - This doorstop of a book ripped my heart out, stomped on it a bit and then put it back. A really difficult read about a group of college friends, one of whom has suffered brutal abuse. I can't say I enjoyed it but I found it rather mesmerising.

32. Crisis by Frank Gardner the BBC journalist - audiobook - Frederick Forsyth style thriller about an evil Colombian drug lord. I enjoyed it, but needed lots of suspension of disbelief!

33. The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith - Nice characters, rather dull plotline. I liked the TV adaptation more than the book.

34. The Dry by Jane Harper - mentioned already on this thread, I really enjoyed this Australian thriller too.

35. Carry On Jeeves by PG Wodehouse - I love PG Wodehouse and the stories in this book are the usual delightful froth.

36 Out of Bounds by Val McDermid - Scottish murder mystery with a twist. I enjoyed it.

37. One Man's Everest by Kenton Cool. Mr. Cool (whose wife's name is Jazz - yes, really) is one heck of a mountain climber. He has climbed Everest 12 times (!), guided Ranulph Fiennes up the Eiger North face, was first to do the Triple Crown (Everest plus 2 others in one push) etc... etc... but sadly he is not a great writer. This autobiography was strange - lots of pages about getting pissed with his mates and then really short passages on reaching important summits and nearly dying. Interesting if you like this sort of thing, but it's certainly not Touching the Void or Into Thin Air.

38. Call for the Dead by John Le Carré - audiobook. Le Carré's first book and first appearance of George Smiley. It started off slowly but really revved up and I really enjoyed it. Le Carré's are not my favourite type of thriller but this was good and the narration was great.

Agree with everyone else about All Quiet.

Have just bought Nine Coaches Waiting - thanks for the rec and 99p info.

Ooh, The Ivy Tree is also 99p. #addstobasket

79 The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson
Listened to on Audible for a very slow 12 1/2 hours. I think the best I can say about this for the most part is that it was soothingly dull.

It's a shame, because the underlying concept - an amalgam of economic history and economic geography examining the impact of containerisation on the world economy - should be fascinating. Unfortunately, most of this element gets skimmed through in the last couple of chapters, with the great majority of the book being a blow-by-blow history of the development of container shipping. Even that could have been much more interesting than it was (the negotations to agree international box sizes, for example) - but sadly IMO the writing style just didn't quite cut it.

Thinking to go for Born A Crime as my next Audible choice - reviews on here make it sound a great deal more snappy than my last couple of books - unless anyone has any other great recs.

(I'm part way through The Devil in the Marshalsea as well so might try again to get into it, should be exactly my cup of tea, but I find the protagonist just a bit too irritating.)

All Quiet was a library loan that I immediately went out and bought because I know I'll read it again and again. The quality of the writing is phenomenal.

I thought it would just be me that has slowed down this summer. I really haven't had the time or the energy recently. I went to the short reads section of the library looking for something interesting to ignite my passion for reading again. This wasn't it.

40. The Spy by Paulo Coelho. The last letter of Mata Hari to her lawyer explaining the actions that led to her execution as a spy, followed by a letter from her lawyer justifying that he couldn't help her.

This is my second and last Paulo Coehlo. It felt very glib and superficial. He reduced her to a silly, shallow woman only interested in clothes, when she'd led a pretty tragic and difficult life. I really couldn't recommend it and would actively avoid anything else by him in the future. The only redeeming feature was the length.

Born a Crime is fab, Sadik. It's snappy all right, and I still laugh to myself at odd moments at his story about a dancer named Hitler.

69. Two Bottles of Relish by Lord Dunsany

I've never come across Lord Dunsany before, but apparently he was a prolific author mainly in the high fantasy genre. This, however, is a collection of short detective stories, frequently with a particularly unusual or twisted murder plot in a similar vein to Roald Dahl and his Tales of the Unexpected. Really enjoyed it.