50 Book Challenge 2017 Part Eight

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the eighth and final 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 and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read. To anyone who hasn't posted, feel free to de-lurk and share with us what you've read this year.

The first thread of the year is here, the second one here, the third thread here, the fourth one here, the fifth one here, the sixth one here, and the seventh one here.

How have you got on so far this year?

This was my review:
I think the language is really good but I'm just not sure I understand what points he was trying to make, other than that splitting the atom probably wasn't a terribly good idea and it's probably not going to be good if more people learn how to do it. I just didn't think that he managed to build a world in the way that the best post-apocalyptic fiction does and I think he felt that he'd worked so hard to build and sustain the language that everything else was a bit superficial in comparison. But I may well be v thick and have totally missed the point somewhere.

Ah, see I thought Riddley Walker was packed with fascinating points and questions:

• how can we understand anything without the language to describe it
• how does language evolve/devolve
• why is self-destruction innate in human behaviour, and are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes (from Adam & Eve onwards)
• why do humans need storytelling, myths and religion, and how do these develop and function in societies
• what good is technology, and would we be better off without it

This is on top of the pure joy of reading the text - not an easy book to read, but one that rewards slowing down and concentrating, with every word chosen precisely for its meaning/s.

99 A Case of Possession by KJ Charles
Sequel to The Magpie Lord, reviewed above. More thoroughly enjoyable trash - warlocks, invasions of giant killer rats, dark secrets surfacing all over the place - and lots of sex.

Help 50bookers, I’m in serious danger of falling at the final hurdle. I have managed 50 but was aiming for 60, plus been doing a goodreads challenge all year and was making great progress until about 5 weeks ago, when all desire/ability to finish a book seems to have left me - 13 prompts still to go.

I’m part way through 3 books - From the Beast to the Blonde:On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, Maria Warner

Autumn - Ali Smith, this is the one I reckon I might finish this side of Christmas!

A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel, this is where the trouble started I think. Feel like I’ve been wrestling with it forever, and yet only 40% through. I feel like the thing has sapped my will to read (and possibly to live). I’m a huge Hilary Mantel fan usually (well - the Cromwell books and the short stories) but this feels like it’s been designed to be as difficult to get through as possible. Maybe because I studied the French Revolution in both French and History A-Levels and then again for both subjects at university and yet have wilfully forgotten every last detail of it since, and now my brain is refusing to accept this new attempt to fill it with Robespierre and co.

Anyway, here’s the list I did manage to finish before the shutdown:

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
6. Toast - Nigel Slater
7. A Man Called Ove - Fredrick Backman
8. Chess - Stefan Zweig
9. 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 39. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 40. The Year of the Runaways - Sunjeev Sahota 41. Changeless - Gail Carriger 42. Blameless - Gail Carriger 43. Heartless - Gail Carriger 44. The Japanese Lover - Isabel Allende 45. The Dog in the Marriage - Amy Hemel 46. Tigers in Red Weather - Liza Klaussmann 47. The Paying Guests - Sarah Water 48. American Gods - Neil Gaiman 49. We should all be feminists- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 50. Faro's Daughter - Georgette Heyerdahl 51. Emily Climbs - LM Montgomery 52. Americanah - ChimamandaNgoziAdichie

Composteleana -
Could you try the next two Robert Galbraith?
Not sure if you have read the Vera books- they have been my go to easy reads this year.
Also I really enjoyed The Dry. Page turning, entertaining and easy read.

Meg Agree entirely re your language points, but thought the book fell down on everything else, and didn't really have much to say. We'll have to agree to disagree. :)

113. This must be the place - Maggie O’Farrell This was a strange one and certainly not one of O’Farrell’s finest. The character of Daniel is the glue which hold many episodes over a 30ish year period tentatively together. At the core of the novel he is married to Claudette, a form famous film star who staged her own disappearance at the height of her fame ( Sleeping with Enemy style!) In the era of the internet this story line was just too ridiculous to comprehend. Found it all a bit of a chore towards the end.

@RMC123 thanks for recommending the Vera books, sound up my street, and yes the Robert Galbraith books are a good idea too. I made decent headway in the hairdressers with Autumn so perhaps I’ll finish that this evening and then make a fresh start on some more engaging material tomorrow!

I second the Vera books.

Just marking place. Have lost count and need to go back and pick up the thread.

I love the Vera books! I binge read them all except the most recent, The Seagull, this year and very much enjoyed doing so.

I finished my hundredth book last night: History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund a good read, with excellent descriptions of the bleak surroundings, it is disturbing and builds tension well as 14 year old Linda becomes increasingly attached to the family living across the remote Minnesota lake from the dilapidated ex commune home in which she lives. She soon begins to babysit for their 4 year boy and starts to realise all is not quite right with her new friends.

Murine I saw that Wolves book in the kindle sale the other day. Might give it a go given your review. Slogging painfully through A room with a view at the moment which I may abandon even though it's for book club. Life's too short and all that. I did love the film though!

48. Call Me by Your Name by Andre Aciman. I enjoyed the film of this (v slow, beautiful scenery, fairly romantic), but did not really enjoy the book at all- has anyone read it? I couldn't see what the author was aiming for- it did have that teenage self absorbed feel, like Bonjiur Tristesse, or I capture the Castle, but tbh I thought great parts of it were just rubbish! Only finished it to get closer to my 50!

Ooh Riddley Walker has gone straight on the wish list - thanks Meg

63. Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey Olivier is a sickly and pernickity French noble whose family somehow survived the revolution, but when times become uncertain again a couple of decades later, is packed off to America, ostensibly to study prison reform. He is accompanied by his secretary Parrot, originally from Devon, but much travelled, older and more experienced in the ways of the world than Olivier. This pair narrate alternate chapters, and are not really unreliable narrators as such... or are they? Although it is packed with action, it is also a very wordy book, which may annoy some, but I really enjoyed the flowery language. Having complained about the last book I completed (Undermajordomo Minor) being a bit of a boys own adventure, I realise my beef is with the execution not the concept - this is how you do it. The overall feel of this reminded me very much of Julian Rathbone - now he can do flowery tales by unreliable narrators. Does anyone even read Julian Rathbone any more? A look at Amazon suggests not, as most of his stuff is not on kindle. I will definitely seek out more Peter Carey on the basis of this.

68. Journey Under The Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino

Crime. A pawnbroker is found murdered in an abandoned building. The book takes place over the next 20 years, and mainly follows the stories of the pawnbrokers son, and the captivating daughter of the main suspect.

The time span involved meant lots of jumping forward a few months / years, lots of minor characters coming in and out of the main characters lives.

And slowly, the ways in which the two main characters are linked and working with each is built upon, with a cascade of crimes all stemming from the initial unsolved murder.

A good absorbing read.

41. Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: Reflections on Fairytales Katherine Langrish Essays on fairytales, many expanded from Langrish's blog of the same name. I really enjoyed this. Langrish clearly knows her stuff; she offers a new take on some familiar tales and introduced me to many I'd never heard of. If you think fairytales are knights and princesses, think again - these are all magical cooking pots, brave miller's daughters, kings of fairyland half in league with the devil, and selkie brides. Recommended if you have any interest in this sort of thing.

I'm reading Jack Reacher number 4. The toothbrush has been mentioned. "It was a plastic thing that came in half and clipped into his pocket like a pen." No mention of a cover, and the folding and clipping just sound like a recipe for getting more germs into crevices. I wouldn't.

66. The Other Wives Club - Shari Low

Signed up for kindle unlimited and downloaded this easy read. Had a rubbish sickly weekend and this was much needed about Adrian Gold celebrating his 50th on board a cruise with his two ex wives and current wife. Very chick lit but couldn’t handle the rest on Into Thin Air this weekend.

42. A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens Scrooge, ghosts, Tiny Tim, Bah humbug!, the works. It's incredibly cheesy, and drawn in VERY broad strokes, of course, but it's rather glorious despite that, and surprisingly witty. ("There's more of gravy about you than the grave!" cries Scrooge to Marley, trying to convince him that he's just indigestion.) I can just imagine Victorian families reading the whole thing out loud on Christmas Eve, and rather wish I had the sort of DH who would let me do it. I'm glad to have ticked off a classic on this year's list, and - for a member of the Slow Readers Group still hoping to reach 50 - it's also blessedly SHORT. God bless us, every one, etc etc.

103 The Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country by Helen Russell

Burnt out London journo goes to the back end of beyond in Denmark with husband who has a job with Lego, buys candles, pastries and interviews white middle class, middle aged Danish people who astonishingly report themselves to be extremely happy and Denmark to be utterly marvellous and better than anywhere else in the world for ever amen.
Read like a series of Grazia interviews with annoying bullet point summaries at the end of each month but apart from all that it was a reasonably enjoyable listen and I'd now quite like to go and visit Copenhagen.

104 Antigone by Sophocles
Bought to read before I start on Home Fire (modern reselling of Antigone)
Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, defies her Uncle, Creon, the King of Thebes by performing the burial rites for her brother Polyneices (killed in battle by her other brother Eteocles) and is sentenced to death.
Anguish and death ensues.
Really enjoyed this short play which despite being written in about 440BC contains some lines astonishingly relevant for current politics.

"The man who thinks that he alone is wise, that he is best in speech or counsel, such a man brought to the proof is found but emptiness."

Will definitely be reading more of his plays. Oedipus up next.

I remember studying Oedipus at school. That’s one that really stuck in my memory. Compelling but not one for the squeamish.

Antigone also super short for those wanting to reach their reading goal. Read it in an hour, it's free on the kindle, and you know, you can mention at dinner parties, "oh yeah, I've read some Sophocles" all casual like and folk will be totally [impressed]. It's also a bit mad with all the death and mega-drama is a bit like every Christmas Day East Enders episode ever but with togas, the underworld and some blind dude checking out the innards of dead birds.

Can Oedipus be even more gory than Antigone? I think there are two Oedipuses aren't there? Oedipus makes a mistake and Oedipus' mistake comes back to haunt him.

The one I remember is Oedipus Rex. I don’t think “mistake” is a strong enough word for the goings on in that!

It definitely gets very gory towards the end. Can’t comment on how gory it is compared with Antigone as I’m not familiar enough with Antigone. The Christmas Day Eastenders analogy - along with a dash of crime drama - would also work for Oedipus.

Excellent
I'm going in...

Yeah, I studied Oedipus at university, and it all gets a bit Shakespearian/Grant Mitchell at the end.
Plays! Now, THAT'S a good reading-goal idea. What should I read? What's everyone's favourite play? I did a whole module on Shakespeare too, so not him. Can't remember if I've read Antigone or not, though I do know the plot, so maybe.