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?

24.) End of Watch, by Stephen King -- Last book in the Bill Hodges trilogy, which started with Mr Mercedes. I enjoyed this, although the plot was just the tiniest bit silly.

25.) Brave, by Rose McGowan -- part memoir about sexual assault, part expose of the endemic sexism and misogyny in Hollywood. It's pretty brutal at times, and parts of it are repellent, but what I think will stick with me is the indifference to her sexual assault, which is chilling, like her co-star's reaction: "Goddamn it. I told him to stop doing that." What. The. Fuck. Sincerely, fuck NAMALT. Fuck it to hell and back and fuck it off some more. Maybe not a lot of men are like that, but it's starting to become clear to me that a whole fucking lot of them are willing to look the other way when it does happen (mind you, women are indicted in this as well). And Tarantino. Such a creepy piece of shit. Christ.

Anyway, now reading The Blackest Streets, the Life and Death of a Victorian Slum, by Sarah Wise. That'll cheer me right up.

I read The Blackest Streets at the beginning of the year, Corvus (review somewhere back on one of the earlier threads). It was dismaying, but fascinating.

11. The Last London - Iain Sinclair

The psychogeographer, and finest writer about London (or most things really), takes a last series of walks around and out of the city as he is on the verge of leaving for the south coast after more than 40 years ; to look at how the city has changed, and what's been lost (perhaps forever), in the name of progress and unstoppable development. His prose style won't be everyone's cup of tea but if you like him (and I do) then this is very, very good.

50. The Vanishing Of Audrey Wilde by Eve Chase

One of those books set in an old manor, with a story set in the past linked to one set in the present. I enjoyed this although it’s not the best I’ve read from that genre, and not as good as the author’s debut Black Rabbit Hall.

Scribbly thought you might appreciate this audio link to Kamila Shamsie talking about 'Up Lit' and it's limitations.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09w32bq?nsmchannel=social&nsscampaign=bbcradioo4&nssource=facebook&nsslinkname=radioanddmusic

Interesting review of Upmost Happiness. Still staring at me on the bedside table , think I am going for it next just to get it out the way!!?!

I'm halfway through the 50 book challenge!

25: The Pedant in the Kitchen - Julian Barnes

Another non-fiction book, I'm afraid, but a good 'un. Basically a series of essays about the joys and (more often) frustrations of cooking, written by a master stylist. It's a slim volume and I read most of it on a long train journey, laughing inwardly, a lot, as J.B. vented his rage on assorted cookbook writers and food stylists. He does write so beautifully but he's also very funny. If you've ever despaired of a recipe or felt guilty about that kitchen drawer full of obscure gadgets, this is the book for you.

Tanaqui, I've read quite a few by Daniel Silva, but they're all in a series featuring an Israeli spy-cum-fine art restorer called Gabriel Allen who is très heroic. Does he feature in House of Spies?

10. Second Life - SJ Watson That difficult second album book by the author Before I Go To Sleep, which I quite enjoyed, but wasn't overly enamoured by. This, I've done in just over a day and was actually quite gripped by. It's the story of Julia, whose sister is murdered at the beginning of the book and starts off with her struggling to come to terms with her grief while also managing, as a recovering alcoholic, to stay off the booze. It pretty quickly starts twisting and turning with some pretty nasty secrets revealed. Julia's behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and you begin to wonder where it's all going to end. Towards the end I did begin to feel like the author was throwing in more and more plot twists just for the hell of it, but if you're looking for a well-paced, easy-to-read thriller to while away a couple of evenings then it's definitely worth a go.

Scribbly, if you are finding it tedious I would say it isn’t great writing- I mean, there is room for personal taste (I don’t particularly enjoy Dickens, but I wouldn’t claim he was a bad writer!)- but in general, if I am looking at the writing and not involved in the story, I don’t think it’s a great novel. A beautiful sentence isn’t enough (although possibly it is in poetry? Will have to think about that!).

Sorry Hound, I wasn’t ignoring you- I took too long to type! Yes, Gabriel Silva was in it- maybe if he is an established character that would explain why he didn’t feel fully fleshed out. It wasn’t a bad book, just not for me.

Hello, 50 Book chums! I fell off a previous thread and have been trying to be more conscious of my time online, but I missed this conversation. I've read 15 books so far, some rereads, but I won't bore you with my list.

Currently, I'm reading The Party by Elizabeth Day and Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit.

13, The Woods - Harlen Coben. Really hated it. Only ploughed through it as I was on a long train journey. I loved 'Tell No One' but this was irritating and stupid - all the women were babes who just lurved being sexually harassed by their male colleagues as it made them feel so sexy and noticed. Vomit.

14. Just started Reservoir 13 - John MacGregor, which is really promising so far.

Mine so far, I'll start with the ones I've loved, and would urge everyone to read:

1. The Explorer by Katherine Rundell
2. The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gower
3. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
4. The Call by Peader O'Guilin
5. Brother in the Land by Robert Swindell

Also read

6. Fatherland by Robert Harris
7. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
8. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
9. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
10. Eleanor Oliphant is Absolutely Fine by Gail Honeyman
11. The End of Mr Y
12. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
13. Persuasion by Jane Austen
14. When the Adults Change by Paul Dix
15. How to Survive a Plague (fascinating science journalism about the spread of AIDS)
16. The Alice Network by Kate Quinn
17. The End We Start From by Megan Hunter
18. Flawed by Cecelia Ahern (aptly named)
19. Soviet Bus Stops

Do you ever get fed up of books because they are so big and heavy they are physically uncomfortable to read? Reading Lord of Shadows by Cassandra Clare, which is a large paperback and very thick and I keep having to rest it on something to read and it's pissing me off. The plot is pissing me off too, mind, so perhaps it wouldn't matter so much with a better book!

17. The Gender Games - Juno Dawson. This is partly a memoir from a writer who was biologically male but now identifies with being a woman, and partly thoughts on gender, it's an easy read, and best for people with no other knowledge of gender - perhaps this is a book only for readers in their late teens. The author comes across as quite short-sighted and bitchy and not someone I'd ever want to meet. A few British booktubers have raved about this, which is mainly why I read it, but God knows why.

18. The Good Immigrant - various. Anthology of essays, some interesting, some very dull on the BAME experience in Britain. A better editor should have excluded the boring essays and cut passages of some of the submissions that were published. This was crowdfunded and I'm now wondering if bad editing is typical in books published on this platform and I also found the lack of diversity of the writers annoying (oh the irony) which results in a lot of repetition. However it's given me some food for thought about the marginalization in the U.K of East Asian people, people I clumsily used to refer to as 'Oriental' before reading this.

Terpsichore I LOVE The Pedant in the Kitchen. It's one of my regular re-reads and one of the funniest books I own.

TheTurnOfTheScrew it's a real joy, isn't it? I especially guffawed over the chapter on the pork chops and endive not fitting into the pan, and having to 'boil the shit out of' the over-copious juices . We've all been there (albeit not necessarily with that recipe - not a great endive fan myself).

Love pedant too. A handful - what does it mean? A giant’s hand? A toddler’s? I love when he gets enraged at the chef who changes his mind over the best way to cook risotto. Such a funny book.

Terpsichore - I thought you might like to know that I've been working on a piece by Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer called Terpsichore. It is one of the 9 suites for harpsichord/piano each named after one of the Muses.

Here is my feeble attempt at the first piece ("Tastada") from the Terpsichore suite on the harpsichord.

I love your nn in any case

More love for Pedant over here :)

I liked Lord of Shadows TooExtra but I listened to it on Audible, so no heavy book issues. . . .

That's wonderful, Cote - such a grand prelude. I've never come across 'tastada' as a name for the first movement in a Baroque dance suite, what's its derivation, do you know? .....also, is that your instrument? 😍

Good to 'see' you, VG.

Book 35
Larkinland by Jonathan Tulloch
I enjoyed this – found it on a random Kindle offer. It’s based on Philip Larkin and his poem “Mr Bleaney”. Larkin becomes the bumbling Arthur Merryweather, who’s moved to an unnamed Northern town which stinks of fish in order to become the chief librarian. So far, so Hull. He has a lady friend he treats like shite and an assistant librarian who he’s determined to get into the pants of. So far, so biographical. Where it departs from Larkin is that Merryweather ends up obsessed by Bleaney (the man who used to lodge in the dire rented room Merryweather is now in) and attempts to track him down in a fruitless quest to a woeful seaside town. If you know nothing about Larkin, don’t read this book. If you do and don’t mind a fair few clunky shoe-ins about toads and so on, you might enjoy it. It also has some Smiths lyrics slipped in, which is always a good thing. Very silly but my kind of silly.

splother thanks for the Kamila Shamsie link. Completely agreed with what she said. Love that last line “the best fiction makes us look at, not away from the world.”

30. Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig.

Another Women's Prize longlister. Follows the lives of Benny and Khin and their daughter Louisa during the tumultuous twentieth century period of Burmese history. The book starts during the second World War with the invasion of the Japanese and then progresses with end of British rule and into one of the longest modern day and brutal civil wars, between the majority Burmese and other minority ethnic populations, namely the Karen of which Khin is a member.

This was just OK. Emboldened by Tanaqui I'm going to admit to finding it tedious quite a lot of the time with yet again lumpen info dumps, preposterous high brow conversations that would never happen in real life, and two (TWO!) cases of insta-love that gave me the oh please eyebrow.
In its favour is Craig does a good job of covering a lot of historical ground (on a subject that I knew nothing about) with only a handful of characters and powerfully conveys the horror of ethnic cleansing supported in the shadows by western democracies.

Another book on the list with an This Is An Important Subject agenda though, at the expense I think good quality writing.

Hi vanderley - always interested in your list

Hi, Satsuki and Remus! My list is rather odd, but here it is:

1. River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey: an alt-history romp that imagines what could have happened if the US followed up on a proposed, cockamamie scheme to start hippo ranches.
2. 300 Arguments: Essays, by Sarah Mancuso: well-reviewed, short pieces. I liked it, but can't remember much.
3. New People, by Danzy Senna: follows an engaged, mixed race couple in Brooklyn who represent the "new people" of the 21st century during a summer when things slowly begin to implode.
4. Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson: reread for book club.
5. Bury Your Dead (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #6), by Louise Penney: the Inspector, recovering in Quebec City after a serious injury, is drawn into the Anglo community after the murder of a Quebecois historian at the English Literary and History society. I liked this one mostly because I LOVE QC.
6. If Looks Could Kill (Bailey Wiggins Mystery #1), by Kate White: the nanny of the editor-in-chief of a Cosmo-like magazine dies after eating poisoned chocolate. Bailey, an investigative reporter, investigates.
7. Sourdough, by Robin Sloane: a young woman heads to San Francisco for a tech job and ends up in the literal underworld of a techie farmers' market. Loved it.
8. The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty, by Amanda Filipacchi: a modern, satiric fairy tale on beauty, love, and aural magic.
9. The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery: one of Montgomery's few books solely for adults, The Blue Castle follows Valancey, a young woman with out much access to a life, who finds her backbone, freedom, and love. It's set in Muskoka, a beautiful area north of Toronto, and has been argued to be both a romance and a natural idyll. Not my favourite, though many, many readers adore it.

10. How to Buy a Love of Reading, by Tanya Egan Gibson: a Gatsby-esque tale set among the teen set of an exclusive Long Island school. 11. The Monk of Mokha, by Dave Eggers: tells the true story Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a Yemeni-American who has reintroduced Yemeni coffee to the world market. The story is quite contemporary, but uneven in places. Honestly, you can get the gist of the story from the Port of Mokha website. 12. Son of Trickster, by Eden Robinson: first of a triology, focusing on a 16-year-old First Nations young man and incorporating the Trickster mythology. Excellent book, particularly in its representation of First Nations experience and issues. 13. Rich and Pretty, by Rumaan Alam: not much "there" there. 14. Our Little Racket, by Angelica Baker: follows the lives of 5 women directly impacted by the 2008 US banking collapse. 15. The Weekend Effect: The Life Changing Benefits of Taking Time Off and Challenging the Cult of Overwork, by Katrina Onstad: the title pretty much says it all. Read as I very much like her fiction.

And that's it!