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?

Frogletmamma I love Frenchman's Creek too! It's unashamedly, suspend your disbelief romantic isn't it? And the Frenchman himself is just too good to be true (in a massively enjoyable way). Love it!

Ooh I got Frenchman's Creek for my birthday. Really looking forward to reading it now.

34. Lee Child - The Midnight Line

Jack Reacher sees a small West Point graduation ring in a pawn shop window, on a rest stop on his bus journey to nowhere specific. It's a woman's ring and he knows what she went through to get it. So why would she give it up? Reacher sets out to find her and see if she's okay. If she is, then he'll walk away; if she isn't, then someone's in trouble.

18. Conclave by Robert Harris
On the death of the Pope, the senior cardinals gather to elect his successor, under the watchful eye of the not entirely neutral Cardinal Lomeli.

This simple premise is played out with far more tension and intrigue than I'd imagined possible. One by one the various contenders for the Papacy fall by the wayside as secrets and scandals are gradually uncovered. I did think the ending was perhaps a shocking secret too far, and revealing it over a couple of pages felt rushed, but still a good read. Hadn't read any Robert Harris prior to this, but I think my H has a few on the bookshelves, so will rummage around to see what else of his I can find.

I read the sample of Bookworm and was finding her 'humour' irritating. Does it abate? Lovely cover though.

45: A Clutch of Constables – Ngaio Marsh – One of Marsh’s best, imho. Troy, Inspector Alleyn’s wife, decides to book herself last minute onto a canal boat holiday. Rather than a relaxing break, it’s soon loaded with racism towards a fellow passenger, attempts at flirtation from another fellow passenger, irritation coupled with guilt and sympathy towards another fellow passenger, weirdness relating to several fellow passengers, and then a body turns up too. I thought this was really tightly structured and that there were some moments of really lovely tension, and feel that Marsh really had some fun writing it too. Her books with Troy in are so much better than the ones without.

40. The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Selin is an undergraduate studying linguistics and languages at Harvard. She spends a year having thoughts about brief interactions with various people at university, becomes infatuated with a mathematician called Ivan and then spends the summer teaching English to children in a Hungarian village. That’s pretty much it for 400+ pages.
I DNFd this twice as is was such a pile of boring crap but then anally couldn’t cope with reading 95.83% of the Women's Prize longlist so resentfully continued reading it to the bitter end.
Selin is basically a folorn intellectual Mork, constantly miserably baffled by complicated social norms like why people drink beer or play volleyball. This book has no point, hardly anything happens and Selin learns sweet fuck all during her intellectual year of moping about. I have highlighted eleven passages on my kindle and five of them I’ve notated with “Bullshit” (and one confusingly with “tuna laughs”)
Awful.

Scribbly just started it!!

Booktuber Simon Savidge also hated The Idiot (and he usually likes everything he reads!).

Remus No, not really. If you don't like the sample, I wouldn't bother with the rest.

I wasn’t keen enough on the sample of Bookworm to proceed any further. Maybe I’m a tad too old, born in the 60s not 70s, for some of the authors mentioned.

I might give that one a miss Scribbly!

Well some literary folk obviously loved it as it was a runner up for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year

Maybe you have to have read Dostoevsky's The Idiot first to get it.

I've been distracted, yet again, from my quest to read the Women's Prize list:
32. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty well written, thought provoking account of the cremation industry. The author is passionate about changing the death industry and has very interesting ideas.
33. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt A reread for me, I love this! So darkly funny and moving, the dialogue between the murderous brothers is wonderful. Charlie and Eli Sisters are killers sent on a job to kill a prospector, Herman Warm, a journey which does not run at all smoothly. Charlie has by far the greater appetite for whisky and killing, and dominates his younger brother, while Eli begins to doubt his career as executioner and who he is working for.

22. Chimamanda Ngozi Adicie - Americanah Basically a love story set in Nigeria, London and New York. I did enjoy the writing style but found the story line a bit twee?

Finally getting round to reading The Scarlet Letter next

29. Autism and the Stress Effect by Theresa Hamlin

A guide to reducing stress and anxiety in children with autism. Split into environmental regulation, eating & nutrition regulation, emotional self-regulation and energy regulation.
Well researched and densely packed with information and tips, ranging from useful to completely bizarre.

The suggestion that cooking food in a dishwasher is a good place to start learning about healthy cooking, for instance
I just don’t understand why anyone with a functioning cooker would choose to cook their salmon and vegetables in a dishwasher. Aside from anything else, even a quick washing cycle in our dishwasher takes a lot longer than cooking salmon and vegetables by conventional means would.

Just a heads up that Why I am No Longer Taking to White people about Race is £2.19 on Kindle Daily deals today.

Why I am...” is excellent, would recommend at that price. Queen*, I loved The Scarlet Letter, hope you do too!

Clara, I do like podcasts so I will look for it, thank you.

Toomuch I just came on here to say that too! I have bought it.

Updating again with my recent reads added at the bottom and recommended reads highlighted:

1. A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
2. Alone in Berlin - Hans Fallada
3. Belgravia Julian Fellowes
4. Bel Canto - Ann Patchett
5. Curtain Call - Anthony Quinn
6. Life after Life - Kate Atkinson
7. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
8. Ghost Moth - Michele Forbes
9. I See You - Clare Mackintosh

10. The Book Thief - Markus Zusak 11. The Cuckoo's Calling - Robert Galbraith 12. The Silkworm - Robert Galbraith 13. Career of Evil - Robert Galbraith 14. The Wonder - Emma Donoghue

Just read:

15. Morland Dynasty 24 - The Homecoming - Cynthia Harrod-Eagles - I started at the beginning of this series a couple of years ago and intersperse them with my other reading. This book is mainly set in Victorian London (Book 1 started in medieval times if I recall correctly) and I enjoy getting a bit of history against the familiar characters in the family saga. Very readable - some are better than others.

16. Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie - had to read this to see how different it was from the BBC adaptation. A long time since I read any Agatha Christie but enjoyable and characters a little more subtle than the BBC version

Off to read some Daphne du Maurier I think next given the rave reviews above.

38. A Bientot, Roger Moore
The publishers were scraping the barrel here - last banal musings recorded shortly before he died. Genial enough, but very little substance.

39. The Dig, John Preston
Fictionalised account of the Sutton Hoo archaeological dig in the 1930s. Understated and perhaps a bit too subtle for me - I think I wanted another A Month in the Country by J L Carr, which also features interwar archaeology, but it is a sunnier affair. I admired this without loving it.

40. The Risk of Darkness, Susan Hill
One of the earlier Simon Seraillier books. The author plays with the genre without playing fair - there is very little crime detection going on here. One of the weaker ones in the series.

As Chaucer pointed out, in April "Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages" so I've been thinking about going places and writing some travel books, so:

41. Eastern Horizons, Levison Wood
His account of travelling overland through Russia, Georgia, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan to India in his early twenties. He's not a bad writer. He has a young man's snobbery about real travel being more than a middle-aged hobby, and rather sheepishly admits to fits of pique when he encounters other tourists, which explodes his fantasy of being a Great White (Male) Explorer from Victorian times.

42. France: The Soul of a Journey, R J O'Donnell
An account of a three week visit to various tourist spots in France with three other friends - travel as the middle-aged hobby from which Levison recoils. I can't judge this one objectively, as the author is Irish, and something about her authorial voice is so familiar that it was like having an auntie read me sections of a guidebook then fix me with a gimlet eye and utter some completely deflating comment. I gulped it down and laughed on loud several times, but I don't know how wide its appeal would be.

43. The Stranger in the Mirror, Helen Shilling
Reflections (no pun intended) on midlife - the author looks back at the choices she made in the past and the choices still open to her in future. I loved this memoir - the author is a few years older, but I identified with a lot of what she said, almost painfully so sometimes. Beautifully written and honest.

Need edit function. A Month in the Country is sunnier than the Dig, and I've been reading travel books, not writing them.

Thanks for the heads up re Why I Am.. on Kindle. Just purchased.

23. A Mennonite In A Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen. Memoir of an academic who returns to live with her Mennonite family as a woman in her 40s after her husband leaves her for a man and she has a terrible car accident. I found it an interesting read (especially in comparison to Educated) and some of the descriptions of her family, in particular her mother, are warm and lovely. It didn't grab me in the quite the way Educated did, however that is a totally different kind of story. There is nothing nasty in this book (bar the husband's behaviour) rather, Janzen gently pokes fun at her religious upbringing and remains very close to her family despite 'escaping' to a secular life.

14. Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

I was a bit dubious about this as I've previously found Gaiman overrated (aside from the magnificent Good Omens, but I'd put that mostly down to Pratchett) and remember the TV series being disappointing - but was pleasantly surprised and really enjoyed this. An ordinary young man gets sucked into the mysterious world of London Below, where the Black Friars and the Angel Islington are real people, and a girl called Door (who can open any door) is on a dangerous quest to find out who murdered her family. It's lots of fun and packed with great characters.

15. The River At Night - Erica Ferencik

Win joins three of her friends for their annual trip - this time, white water rafting, much against her better judgement. They soon find that surviving the remote location will require more than good rafting skills...

Grabbed this from a stand at the library without really reading the premise. It's written as if it wants to be a film, and in fairness, it would make a decent horror film - teenagers lost in the middle of nowhere kind of thing. But as a book, it felt a bit over dramatic. Easy mindless read though.

I've been MIA from this thread for all of about it a week because of real life stuff and now I have about 400 posts to catch up on!

*14. Last Night At Chateau Marmont - Lauren Weisberger
*
A bit of mindless nonsense from the author of The Devil Wears Prada.
This explores what it is like if your husband becomes a rock star and all of a sudden your life changes, almost overnight. The general upshot is that it's bad and that being the subject of gossip magazines isn't nearly as much fun as reading them.
This was okay. It would have been better if our heroine, Brooke, hadn't been quite such a wet blanket. Several times I wanted to climb inside the book and give her a good shake.