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?

Scribbly -
Another book on the list with an This Is An Important Subject agenda though, at the expense I think good quality writing.
*
Insert Literary Pun Here has just today released a booktube review of Miss Burma*

She was scathing about it!! Said the writing was awful and reflected exactly what you said above. She felt it was on the list to educate at the expense of good writing.

Dark Money: how a secretive group of billionaires is trying to buy political control in the US by Jane Mayer (listened to on Audible)

This could equally well be subtitled 'The Road to Trump'. It's definitely not a snappy, fast moving book, nor an uplifting one, but I'm very glad to have listened to it. The author starts in the 1970s, and examines step by step how a network of extremely wealthy men (and the occasional woman) have influenced the political climate in the US from behind the scenes. There are many, many lessons here for British politics too, and I really hope that politicians (from all parties) have read it.

Just checked and Dark Money was no. 21 on my list. Now reading the Prisoner of Zenda for a bit of light relief

Interesting list there, Vanderley. Adding New People to my TBR.

Please post more regularly

splother ooh at her review I don’t think I hated it as much as she did though (gave it three stars), maybe because it hits the middle ground between A Boy in Winter (too short and clinical) and Ministry (too dense and chaotic) while all three are based on very similar subject matters. It’s my preferred book of the three I think, although I can’t say I enjoyed the experience of reading any of them.

I've had to read a shite thriller today to distance myself from miserable war novels.

31. He Said, She Said by Erin Kelly A shite thriller. Absolute bunkum.

Terpsichore - No, not mine, sadly. It's one of the lovely harpsichords at the Conservatory I am a student at.

I had never heard of "Tastada" as a Baroque movement either, and can't find it defined anywhere, either. The suite continues with and Allemande, which is a regular Baroque dance of course, and the rest of the Musical Parnassus is full of Sarabandes, Chaconnes, even the odd Passacaglia. This Tastada piece is quite mysterious, though. There is another one in another suite of Fischer's, which is also about banging a lot of chords one after the other.

Thanks, southeast. My list is so odd, but I'm ok with it. I'm looking forward to your review of New People.

Black Money is on my list; glad to hear your positive review, Sadik. A similar book that I want to read is Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar, also a New Yorker writer. It focuses on hedge funds and specifically Steve Cohen's SAC Capital, which had unbelievableliterallyreturns. The book is the inspiration for the TV show Billions, which I'm into.

Huh, maybe my reading does have a theme...

23. Impact by Adam Baker

The world has been overrun by zombies. In Las Vegas, a military outpost has one last mission - send an antique B-52 bomber out to a secret desert compound and drop a nuclear bomb on it.
But when the plane crashes, the crew are left stranded in an inhospitable desert, with no hope of rescue, and death lurking under the sands....

So so. Lots of focus on desert survival, with the zombies in the background for most of the book. Odd ending.

Just dropping by to say that NeuroTribes is £1.29 on the Kindle just for today.

You beat me to it Cote. Have just purchased, had my eye on it for a while. Have you read it?

Will catch up on the thread in a minute, but first my update:

32. A Spoonful of Murder, Robin Stevens
DD(10) read it and passed it to me. Golden Age crime set for the younger set, with two schoolgirls investigating murder and kidnapping in 1930s Hong Kong. The target audience means that the author has to avoid being too graphic (the narrator's mother has bound feet, and it's portrayed here as meaning she can't walk very fast), but it's reasonably atmospheric and there's a degree of edge derived from the narrator's ambivalence towards her mother.

33. The Reading Cure, by Laura Freeman
Another reading memoir, with the author, a recovering anorexic, slowly rediscovering pleasure in food thanks to authors that she loves. I loved this, largely because the author has excellent taste in books (ie. taste that overlaps with mine) and writes well. Lovely.

34. The Wild Other, by Clover Stroud
Another memoir: the author's mother acquires a catastrophic brain injury when the author is 16. She lives for another 22 years, but the woman she was has been lost. The author acts out her trauma in various ways. There's a lot of self-mythologizing here - she claims to run off with Irish gypsies. Irish Travellers are not the same as gypsies, and in any case, she just spends a few months hanging around with English New Age Travellers in Ireland, before taking up her place at Oxford University. There's an extended gap year on various Texan ranches afterwards, before she returns to Oxford to make an ill-advised marriage with someone she believes to be a romantic Irish musician, who is really a layabout from Hereford with a fake Dublin accent and a drink problem. This doesn't go well, so then she portrays herself an impoverished single mother, notwithstanding the rent-free house in Oxford bought by her father, the au pairs and the children's pony. There are a few misguided trips to the Caucasus to visit a married man, before she settles down with an Oxford contemporary and has more children. Oh, and there's a lot about horses.

Now, I don't think self-mythologizing is necessarily a bad thing in a memoir, so I thought it was worth the read. I don't think she was living on the edge as much as she likes to think, but I appreciate her wanting to grab at life as she witnesses her mother's living death.

Vanderley I’ve downloaded the sample of Sourdough - it is only 99p on the Kindle at the moment so will get if I enjoy it.

Was quite intrigued by Larkinland remus as I’m a Larkin lover but quite expensive now.

I feel like something a bit silly and fun, winter has been one long virus.

Another quick alert if anyone's interested.....Maggie O'Farrell's I Am, I Am, I Am is £1.99 on Kindle today. I've been watching it for a while and this is the first time it's dropped in price.

biblio exactly what I thought about the Wild Other. It was a good read and had a lot in it relating to life and trauma that was interesting and moving, but on the adventure side of things, she had a huge safety net that allowed her to be reckless without too many consequences in terms of her future. She was very well connected - her dad was a film and tv director, her family friend founded Private Eye, her sister is Emma Bridgewater, she was always going to land on her feet when she was ready to so I couldn’t quite buy in to that element of the story, but understand she was finding the common thread of risk-taking as a way of making a cohesive narrative and to make sense of her response to the tragedy. It’s all relative though, and it was heartfelt and affecting in many places.

Thanks Terpsichore - I am...has been on my wish list for ages

Neurotribes is EXCELLENT. For that price grab it if you have any interest at all in autism.

TooMuch - I just bought it, too.

Satsuki, sometimes I think we share a brain...

splother and Murine a quick heads up about H(A)PPY from the long list, you either need to read a print copy, or read the kindle version on a tablet or phone. It won’t work as an audio book or in black and white. The text is frequently coloured which although it’s rather gimmicky is actually quite important to understand what the blithering heck the book is on about.

Oh thankyou Scribbly, that looks interesting! I've reserved in at the library so hopefully will soon be reading a paper version!
I just bought I Am,I Am, I Am too, I'd been looking out for it, thanks Terpischore. I spotted Educated by Tara Westover is £1.99 too, I've borrowed this from the library so resisted that one!

Thanks Murine and Terpsichore just added those two to my pile !! I wish you could set up alerts on Amazon for these deals as I would never have found them other wise.

Thanks for the heads up Scribbly. A bit behind on my Women's Prize Reading. Currently ploughing through something so bizarre for book club and have just today got a full time job starting after Easter. Delighted but my reading in going to nose dive.

Once again, can I say how brilliant this thread is and how much I love it? The reviews and recommendations are top-notch and an endless source of interest and entertainment.

I'm also firmly back in the reading saddle and have just finished
26: Mother Country - Jeremy Harding

What a sad, funny, wise, enthralling book this is. Jeremy Harding knew from an early age that he was adopted, but didn't decide to try and trace his birth mother until he was in his late 40's. This is the story of his attempts, but is also about his adoptive parents, his rackety upbringing with them, and his complicated feelings about them as he learns more about their stories. He writes with compassion, but unsparingly - his adoptive father, in particular, comes across as a snobbish, controlling chancer with delusions of grandeur. To all of the above is added the lure (for me, anyway) of someone trying to trace their family history through public records, a quest that has him haring all over London to uncover fragments of information that may or may not help him fit together the jigsaw of which he has only a few meagre, tantalising pieces. No spoilers here as to what he finds out, but I really recommend this.

Thanks for the heads up about Neurotribes being reduced on kindle today, I’ve just bought it

Congrats on the job, splother!

@toomuchsplother do you use uk.ereaderiq.com/? It can be a bit laborious because you have to enter all the books you're watching, but it will then send you an alert when there are any price drops. I used to use it a lot and it does work.