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?

I like the Hangman's Daughter series. I forgive the author because he is German and may not have realised the trope he was perpetuating when naming his first book. Also Die Henkerstochter in German has a bit of a ring to it.

Pleased to report that The Paying Guests has picked up a bit. Nearly there. Also currently wallowing in some Wally Lamb misery. Also nearly there.

I generally agree about ‘The Male Profession’s Female Relative’ type books too, (do have The Bonesetter’s Daughter on my kindle but have been put off by that very thing so far) - noticed back in 2013 www.thehairpin.com/2013/09/the-male-professions-female-relative/

Still I’m giving Georgette Heyer a pass on this one. Different era and the title is appropriate in this case I think, plus Faro is the game rather than a male - in fact the character’s parents don’t really feature.

I’m rereading Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery again for popsugar reading challenge prompt (a book you loved as a child). I’ve reread all the Anne of .... books several times already so thought I’d opt for this other series instead. For me it doesn’t stand up to the reread as well as the Anne books, despite being basically the same thing only with a dark haired heroine.

I’m also really enjoying Americanah on audiobook and just started A Place of Greater Safety Hilary Mantel.

Been on short holiday involving much drinking and I've only read one book! Unheard of for me.

155. The Rest of Us Just Live Here, Patrick Ness. Clever take on the Buffy/LJ Smith/Stephen King's It school of young adultry where an indie kid/small group of indie kids (cf The Losers Club in It) are the Chosen Ones who save the day by blowing up the high school. This is the story of the kids who don't do that - whose lives are normal, who are battling demons like anorexia or OCD or alcoholic parents, not literal demons who can be vanquished in one final showdown. I massively enjoyed this - I was a bit fantasy-ed out and it really hit the spot.

Composteleana, I love the Emily books - think Emily Climbs is my favourite - but my god, the Dean/Teddy love triangle is toe-curlingly awful to modern adult eyes!

TooExtra I think it’s Dean I’m having the issue with to be honest, lusting after 13 year old Emily!

I really wanted to love that Patrick Ness Cheddar, I thought it was such a good idea; but it didnt quite come to life for me. Perhaps I wasn't quite in the right mood and should read it again.

I loved Anne of GG as a child but have only seen Emily as an adult and just can't get into it- I think that does sometimes happen as the suspension of disbelief is so different- I loved Pollyanna for example and I know that that is not ubiquitous here!

Unfortunately the sequel to Wolf of the Plains isn't as good.

Book 95
Library of Souls (3rd in Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series)
Having thought the 1st of these was style over substance, and the 2nd pretty bad, I hadn’t intended to read this one, but found it in a charity shop for 30p. I’d say it was worth about that. The three books in this series look beautiful, but the writing is really not very good.

44. The Rules Of Musical Interpretation In The Baroque Era (17th-18th Centuries), Common To All Instruments by Jean Claude Veilhan

I read & reviewed the French original of this book earlier this year. It was interesting only to those of us interested in playing Baroque music exactly as it should be played but much of it passed over my head, because written French is so much weirder than spoken French. I managed to track down this English translation and very much enjoyed reading it.

2. City of Mirrors the third and final chapter in the Passage Trilogy)

The book tells the story of Zero, before the change. It explains the whys. Then it continues the stories of the heroes from the second book 'The Twelve'. Only 21 years from when we last left them. The intensity of emotion surprised me, but this post-apocalytic world, shows the fortitude of the human spirit. The final showdown was so visual I could see it like a movie in my mind. The last chapter was interesting reading. A jump to the future shows us how the past is recorded, purely on guesswork, but with the natural desire to keep learning more and making concrete discoveries.
Just imagine if you could hear directly from Noah or Jesus, their version if events.

I hear their making it into a TV show. If the follow the books it can be done well.

Emily of New Moon - I didn't notice Dean so much when I read it as a child, as I was mainly haunted by Emily being told by her father that he was dying. My father was always preparing us for his imminent death (orphaned young himself, although he's still going strong and I've over 40) so it got to me.

I think the last book I mentioned was "Come, Tell me How you Live, by Agatha Christie", which was fascinating as a glimpse of the Middle East in the 1930s. Since then:

97. Mr Gandy's Grand Tour, Alan Titchmarsh
I knew it wasn't going to be great literature, but I liked it anyway - thoroughly sentimental, but sometimes that's what you want. Man in late middle age has been living a dutiful half-life for years, then is suddenly set free to live out his dream of exploring Europe. The author doesn't attempt to portray any continental Europeans, with one exception - he stays in thoroughly Anglophone circles. But the story doesn't go for an easy happy ending, and it felt like its heart was in the right place.

98. The Angry Chef, Anthony Warden
Not quite what I expected - was looking forward to cheap laughs about clean eating, but he spends more time defending the scientific method. I liked his explanation of regression to the mean and feel like I might actually have grasped it now, but I'm not sure I'd wholeheartedly recommend the book.

99. The Book of Forgotten Authors, Christopher Fowler
Short chapters on authors that once were well-known (and quite a few would still be known to readers of this thread) and still worth looking out for. I wouldn't necessarily agree with all his choices, but I added some names to my list of books to look out for if combing through a second-hand bookshop.

100. Good Behaviour, Molly Keane. Her books as described as dark comedies, but I find them so bleak that it's hard to enjoy the comedy. Narrated by the daughter of an Anglo-Irish family, who fails to understand the events unfolding around her - a young woman who can't read sexual signals at all. Oh, the unsatisfied yearning for love.

101. The Hanging Tree, Ben Aaronovitch. Urban fantasy - narrator is police officer in department dealing with magic. It's been a while since I read the previous books, so I'm not quite keeping up with the plot, but I like his take on modern policing and the way he refuses to let white be the unspoken default for characters.

Tanaqui I agree with you on the Patrick Ness - fantastic idea, but I just didn't feel it quite came off.

I loved Emily of New Moon as a child - probably more than Anne - but didn't think they stood up so well to re-reading as an adult.

Some things you need to read at the right time.

34. Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass. Downloaded this for ds2 who is studying the American civil war, but he couldn't get into it. Coincidentally Douglass was a character in Transatlantic which I read the other day, but that was rubbish and this was very good! Not dissimilar to 12 years a slave, I would definitely recommend and it is free on Kindle.

75. The Witch by Ronald Hutton

Subtitled "A history of fear from ancient times to the present", this is very much an academic (and fascinating) study of the development of the concept of the witch as a figure of malevolent magic up to and including the main period of the European witch trials. It includes enthnographic comparisons of the ideas of magic as well as examination of ancient and ealier medieval ideas from written texts and local popular traditions to see how and why elements which later combined in the testimonies of the trials developed and differed in the different parts of Europe. So, for example, in some communities the evil eye was an attribute that a person may possess entirely involuntarily and so the effects were not that person's fault whereas in another area it was regarded as deliberately used to cause harm and so the belief that a person used the evil eye was a sign of them being a witch. The development of the different ideas in various geographic areas was really interesting and something I wasn't terribly aware of before.

Haven't updated for a while.

42. The People at Number 9 - Felicity Everett. Bought on a whim at Sainsbury's, this is a novel with a big ‘keeping up with the Jones’ theme wand some good observations but all in all it wasn’t that memorable and the author would have been better off not including the sub-plot about home schooling, which made the book drag a little. It’s currently 99p on Kindle and I’d recommend it as a light diversion.

43. Standard Deviation - Katherine Heiny. Read this novel set in contemporary New York because of a gushing quote on the front from Kate Atkinson. Half-way through the author goes on her soapbox to tell us about the trials and tribulations of her/the parents in the book raising an autistic child which bored me. And the wife character was implausibly written.

44. Mummy's Boy - Larry Lamb. Average memoir from the actor best known as Mick from Gavin and Stacey and Archie from EastEnders.

45. Wonder - R J Palacio. The best-selling YA novel about the experiences of a ten year old American boy with a severe facial abnormality. Nicely done on the whole but too sentimental at the end.

Gave up today on The Chimp Paradox, a self-help book built on the principals of CBT (which the author doesn’t admit to). I thought the analogies he used were irritating and dumb and much of what I read was simplistic. Now on The Child in Time by Ian McEwan.

I liked the Patrick Ness. I thought the OCD storyline was very well done, and I liked how the main character's insecurities were dealt with - acknowledged as a big deal to him but gently put in the context of his friends' problems. I thought it captured something very honest about adolescence - although the typical YA issue bingo was frustrating, as was the big story happening off screen.

The Patrick Ness book sounds a bit like Relentlessly Mundane strangehorizons.com/fiction/relentlessly-mundane/

49. The Dry by Jane Harper. Crime thriller - Aaron Falk returns to his hometown in rural Australia for an old friend's funeral, and stays to investigate his death. Readable but not memorable.

103. The Seagull - Ann Cleeves The latest Vera book. Decided to treat myself as I was in need of a book I knew I would enjoy and wouldn’t be too challenging. Engaging and entertaining as usual, but the familiar, if slight irritation that Vera would have been taken off the case due to close personal involvement.

Just about to start Anatomy of a Soldier for book club.

Placemarking as have completely lost track of the thread since I started a full time job in September.

Work hasn't damaged my reading too much but has definitely eaten into my MNing about reading.

I've just finished Autumn by Ali Smith, which was the usual style over substance IMO. Lots of rave reviews about how this was the first post-Brexit novel, but in reality it barely dealt with it.

And have just started The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver, which was in the Kindle sale.

Will update properly soon with numbers and books read and all that stuff, just wanted to say hi

Just catching up with you all. Have finished my Game of Thrones re-reads and it was good to get a refresher of where the storylines in the books got to for various characters.

Just started Daemon which Cote recommended upthread - liking it so far.

57. The Lullaby Girl - Aly Sidgwick

A girl is washed up in a loch unable to speak. All she can is sing a Norwegian lullaby. Where is she from? And how did she get here?

This one seemed to take a little bit more time to grab me but once it got going I was hooked to find out what was going on. Think the ending was a bit hit and miss but other than that quite an interesting book.

Now to pick my next book for on the plane

76. Red Rising by Pierce Brown

I think a few people have read and liked this - it is really good. Set on Mars and focused on Darrow, a Red who is a miner in the interior of the planet, working to extract a form of helium that is used in the process of terraforming the planet to make it habitable. The Earth is dying, and the Reds are the pioneers working to provide humanity with a new home. Except that's not true. Mars has been terraformed and inhabited for generations, but the Reds in the mines are kept in the dark about the reality, worked and treated as slaves in a Society where people are positioned according to the colour they are born to and in which the Golds keep control. Darrow is recruited by the Sons of Ares, a group of rebels, to infiltrate the Gold command school in an attempt to bring down Society from within. The command school is a literal battlefield where only one House can come out on top, and the leader of that House will be recruited to the highest levels of Society and power. It's brutal and vicious, and Darrow has to win.

Currently on An odyssey : a father, a son and an epic, by Daniel Mendelsohn.
The author teaches The Odyssey - his father asks if he can sit in on his class, and they also take an Odyssey-themed cruised together. This is a reflection on fathers and sons, seen through the prism of the Odyssey and his own relationship with his father. This is exactly the kind of thing I love to read, partly because it makes me feel clever without having to work too hard. But I loved the Odyssey when I read it, although clearly my reading was shallow and I'm getting a lot more out of it thanks to his explanations. The father-son stuff is fairly commonplace and probably matters more to the writer than the reader.

156. The Mitford Murders, Jessica Fellowes. Slightly random concept here - Jessica Fellowes is the niece of Julian Fellowes and has written some Downton tie-in books. So she's practised in taking existing characters and writing new chapters for them, and that's kind of what she's done here. The novel centres on Louisa, a girl who goes to be nursery maid to the Mitford family when Nancy is 16. The murder referenced in the title is a real-life murder - a nurse, Florence Nightingale Shore, was found murdered in a train in 1919 - which was never solved. This is Fellowes' take on solving the murder using Nancy Mitford and Louisa as the detectives. It's a bit...amateur. The class references seem wrong (Louisa is ridiculously forward with Lord and Lady Redesdale for a nursery maid), there's no attempt at dialect to show the class of different characters, and the writing isn't particularly brilliant. One thing that particularly stood out was Fellowes mixing her pronouns to make sentences confusing, eg "Nanny and Unity were arguing about X, and then she took her spoon and ate her egg" (that's not a real example because I haven't got the book to hand but there were frequent bits like that, where it's not clear whether the person eating the egg is Nanny or Unity).

I actually spent a lot of the book sniffing at the writing, and the characterisation. When you have Nancy's own fictionalised version of her parents in Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love, Fellowes' version rings false and bland. The mystery itself wasn't particularly well-done either. I read it because DH bought it for my birthday, but I won't be reading the sequels!

Also I had a bit of a class chip about someone who is described as living in London and Oxfordshire - more money and connections than actual talent!