50 Book Challenge 2018 Part Four

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fourth thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2018, 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 and the third one here.

How're you getting on so far?

Have earmarked Closely Watched Trains.

28. Val McDermid - Insidious Intent

Dr Tony Hill is still helping DCI Carol Jordan avoid drinking as the new regional murder investigation team (ReMIT) get started on their first case. A body is discovered in a burned out car on a quiet country road. But this wasn't an accident - a killer who knows how to keep himself hidden is on the loose and ReMIT is facing the possibility that their first case might be their first failure.

It's everything you would expect from Val McDermid, although maybe a shade less gruesome than some. Good read.

Just finished A Woman’s Work by Harriet Harman . Really well written and readable.

Just checking in to get my most recent books down before I read thread:

1. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce - I really enjoyed this story about a man having a late-life crisis. Loads of interesting characters and some very thoughtful reflections on life.

1. The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon - 10 year old girl and her friend try to solve the mystery of a missing neighbour. I wanted to like this but it annoyed me so much. It takes place mainly in 1976 and I think the author googled '1976 British cultural references' and then pinged one on every page. When she ran out she just used Angel Delight over and over again until I wanted to throw the book against the wall. Some of the metaphors and imagery were so contorted I had to read them a few times and still didn't get them. 'The sound of people not worrying' is a favourite. Or 'it followed him from room to room like water pouring from a glass'

1. A short walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby - Someone recommended this to me, it was ok, a few very funny parts but mostly it dragged. It's the true story of an extremely hazardous (and pointless) journey to the wildest part of Afghanistan in the 1950s.

10 The Plague by Albert Camus - well this was cheery - not. Short but challenging book that's an allegory for the German occupation of France. Plague hits a colonial French city in Algeria - cue lots of very French introspection and philosophical musings. A bit brain hurty for me.

11. Fire and Fury - Inside the Trump White house by Michael Wolff - badly edited book about the utter insanity that is the Trump administration. It would be amusing if it weren't so ghastly. No one comes out of it well, I can see why the Trump yoyos wanted it blocked. Scarier than Stephen King.

12. Locked on by Mark Greaney/Tom Clancy - usual Jack Ryan spy tosh - everyone is called Jack, John, Jack (yes 2), Sam, Pat or Ding. One syllable names only in this world. Black ops spy stuff - love it! I listen to them as audio books, keep me going through long walks and boring housework.

Ladydepp if Goats and Sheep annoyed you, definitely give Three things about Elsie a miss!

Stitches - you can't read Christmas stories in March!

Glad to see Station Eleven coming round again . I'll stick my head out >>>> I liked it

Mmm, Angel Delight. Spot the child of the seventies. I suspect it would just be a disappointment if I had it now...

I spent most of the weekend in bed reading with a slightly unpleasant virus. Books 33-35 were all short easy reads. I'm going to try The Wasp Factory next which has been on my TBR pile forever.

33 - Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

Perhaps I saw this recommended on here? This was short, elegant and really powerful. A story of a servant girl's morning spent with her rich lover before he goes to meet his fiancé. Less about mothers and more about the absence of mothers.

34 - Women and Power by Mary Beard

Frustratingly short. The ideas never really got going and it raised several important questions which it never answered properly. I know the basis of the book was two lectures - not sure they warranted being published in print form.

35 - Vital Conversations by Alec Grimsley

As self-help/management books go this was pretty good and I've been putting the techniques for having those important but tricky discussions into practice already with a lot of success.

36 - You Don't Know Me by Imran Mahmood

So good. It's written by a criminal barrister and is a crime novel set among the gangs of south London. It's the story of a defendant in a murder trial told in his words as he presents the summing up of his case to the jury having dismissed his QC. I thought this was extremely well done.

pepe I've been straight on my kindle to look for You don't know me based on your review. Thought I'd let everyone know its down to 99p in case anyone is interested.

Cote - I'm trying to remember, was it 5 stars that you gave Station Eleven or was it only 4?

19 Educated by Tara Westover

Autobiography. The author grew up the youngest of a large Mormon family in rural Idaho - she had no birth certificate, was never sent to school, and her family believed in the power of God for healing and didn't use doctors even for serious injury or illness. As she got older, her father became more radical, and the family spent more and more time preparing for the End of Days, while one of her older brothers became increasingly violent. At the age of 16, Tara decided to educate herself, eventually ending up with a PhD from Cambridge.

This is an incredible book, and one I will definitely read again. There are so many layers to it. There is an amazing sense of place, and the deep connection that the author has to her home & the mountain on which she grew up. She makes clear all the good things about growing up in a large, close family who see themselves as a refuge from outside evil - but also the also the struggle that she later has to disentangle her own sense of self from the family 'story' about who she is, and from what she has grown up internalising about religion, the place of women etc. Definitely the best book I've read so far this year.

Sadik, I am really looking forward to reading this! Friends have said much the same as you. I've got it ready and waiting when I've got through my by-the-bed TBR pile.

Oh sadik I read an article about this the other day and I wondered how much more the book would have to offer. Definitely going to look out for it now.

I'd absolutely recommend it Pepe and Satsuki. I was really lucky - I'd read a review, then I just happened to be doing a volunteer shift in our library & it had just come in amongst the new books (there have to be some perks to volunteering!).

Remus, I don't blame you for stopping the Mieville. Why is Perdido Street Station so long?? I'd be interested but honestly, that's too long for a book that purports to be "an imaginative fantasy thriller'. Men (and with a few notable exceptions it is mainly men), stop writing such unnecessarily weighty/worthy tomes! Is it something to do with proving their masculinity (I'm looking at you Paul Auster). Stop it, unnecessarily-long-novel-writing-men, you are making me cross.

And there ends my morning rant...

Remus - I blame you for starting another Mieville after the dull car crash that was City And The City

Lady - I think it was 0 Stars. Or maybe a collapsed black hole

"I am now an hour into Station Eleven and have been doing a lot of eye rolling and eyebrow raising"

I am shocked. SHOCKED, I tell you

cote dull car crash

Like the sound of Educated. Will recommend to my Book Club.

16. The Mysterious Affair at Styles - Agatha Christie. It's been a while since I read AC. This was one of her first books I believe. Not much to say about it but it would be interesting to re-read one of her more successful novels as a point of comparison.

17. The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Heather Morris. Based on a true story. Wonderful love story but I found this novel a bit too 'contemporary' (e.g. some of the dialogue) so for me as it just didn't ring true. That said, I was very moved by the 'real' story behind the novel.

I've also heard really good things about Educated. Definitely one I'd like to read.

LadyDepp, I did The Plague for the French Lit part of my degree. Imagine the brainhurtiness but in French!

I find written French brainhurty in the best of times. They try so hard to be circumspect, freakily polite, and pretend-clever.

En vous remerciant de votre obligeance, je vous prie de agréer, Cher Monsieur, mes salutations distinguées - Oh do fuck off. All that to say "Sincerely" at the end of a letter!

Hello everyone, could I join in? A bit late in the day but what a great idea to widen horizons

Well - I lost track of the thread for a few weeks days and come back to find you're already a couple of hundred posts into a new thread. I've just skim-read the thread so far, and added a few more books to my wish-list and downloaded one to my kindle. I blame you all.

Books read since I last updated:

18. Addlands by Tom Bullough
I read this (borrowed from my mother) as it is set in a small corner of mid-Wales which I happen to know very well due to family connections - I can picture the exact lanes and buildings and phone boxes mentioned in some places. This novel follows the life of one man and the farm he is born on, from his birth during WW2 to the 2010s, along with his family and the changing landscape and lives of the people who live in it. The writing is lyrical about nature but does not hide the brutality of rural life. There are lots of obscure words for plants, animals & natural phenomena, which you can either look up or guess from context.

19. Saplings by Noel Streatfeild
A Persephone book, recommended on one of the earlier threads this year. The book features a family of six who were living an idyllic life in 1930s London, then the war starts and everything changes for them. Noel Streatfeild is very good at writing from the child's perspective (she was best known as a children's author) but her adult characters are also mostly believable.

20. Butterflies in November - Audur Ava Olafsdottir
An Icelandic novel about a woman driving around Iceland with her best friend's deaf four-year-old son, sort of escaping from a collapsed marriage and assorted lovers (while picking up more along the way), and sort of seeking out and coming to terms with her past. The unnamed first-person narrator and her haphazard approach to life can be a bit irritatingly quirky at times - one review I read pointed out that this book was a big hit in France, and I can see it fits very well in the Amelie/Little Paris Bookshop/Elegance of the Hedgehog mould - but it was a fun light read, and interesting in showing how someone might adapt to the sudden imposition of a parenting role.