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?

22. Winter Holiday - Arthur Ransome
Classic Swallows and Amazon fun in a beautiful winter Lake District. Much skating over frozen lakes, sledging and a handy dose of mumps with a leisurely quarantine allows the children to travel to the 'North Pole' and spend time on an iced-in houseboat. Best winter holiday ever!

23. Closely Watched Trains - Bohumil Hrabal
Amusing AND tragic, this novella covers one day in the life of a Czech railway worker in 1945 in a village dealing with the effects of the Nazi occupation and the end days of the war. This was very well written, if not a little odd. I can't wait to read more Hrabal and have only just discovered him. Apparently he died falling out of a window attempting to feed pigeons! I think someone else read this but I can't remember who, sorry.

24. Book of Clouds - Chloe Aridjis
A Mexican girl is adrift in Berlin and like the central character, the novel is rather unsettled and unfocused too. The central character basically wanders around Berlin for most of the novel. However, if you like Berlin and know a lot of the places and history of the city then this might work well for you. Despite having never been to Berlin and there not being much of a plot, I did enjoy this and have already downloaded another of her books.

13. The Martian by Andy Weir. I'm sure everyone is familiar with this story of an astronaut, accidentally left for dead on Mars by his fellow crew members, who has to work out (using a mind boggling amount of skim read science) how to survive in such an inhospitable environment. Some people who have reviewed this book haven't liked the cheeky chappie persona of the protagonist, Mark Watney, but actually I did warm to him (Yay! As my mate Mark would say) but what I didn't warm to was all the scientific information. I get the author had done his research and wanted us to know that the things he was describing were technically possible but for me it was unnecessarily complex and not terribly interesting, (And I'm sure any passing NASA scientist would have found gaping holes in the science anyway.) I'm prepared to suspend a certain amount of disbelief with a novel like this and I would have preferred a shorter book that wasn't so caught up with formulae and chemistry. (On the other hand I'm sure there are a lot of people who lapped it up so horses for courses.) The story of his fight for survival was well done and I was definitely cheering him on but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I'd not seen the film first.

10. Extraordinary Powers by Joseph Finder

Ex-CIA recruit now-lawyer finds himself in the middle of a power struggle within CIA that involves Russian gold. This was quite OK, just what I needed the Baroque music book that I just finished and Moby Dick which I'm about 20% though.

43. Four Past Midnight, Stephen King.

Found a bunch of Stephen King books under DS's bed and have spent a happy weekend. 4 novellas written in the late 80s, with some very different themes. The Library Policeman is probably my favourite as I was a child who constantly forgot to return books on time, but I liked the return to Castle Rock in The Sun Dog. Between that and the introduction to Secret Window, Secret Garden I suddenly realised that I haven't actually ever read The Dark Half, so I promptly downloaded that. Which brings me to:

44. The Dark Half, Stephen King.

Stephen King wrote in his introduction to Secret Window, Secret Garden that he had written endlessly on the perils and the general weirdness of writing fiction. The Dark Half is the story of an author who invents a pseudonym to get him through a period of writer's block, and then that pseudonym, his dark half, arrives in the real world and starts killing people. This started off a bit slowly (after the beautifully gruesome introduction to George Stark) but hit its stride after a while. I loved the sparrow imagery and the exploration of psychopomps. Books about twins tend to annoy me (as a twin) because they attribute a lot of spooky bullshit to twins that I've never personally experienced, but although there was spooky bullshit aplenty, it was handled well. I think King just threw any form of restraint to the wind and went let's pile up the twinnery and it worked because he was so unabashed. Lots of detail about Alan Pangborn from Needful Things as well.

Think I might have to give up on Perdido Street Station which is excruciatingly slow.

Whippet - Death by pigeon - when truth is stranger than fiction. What a way to go!

22. Their Eyes Were Watching God : Zora Neale Hurston

I read this because I was aware of how influential this book was on great writers such as Toni Morrison. But give me Beloved any day. I really struggled with the dialogue in this and I think I therefore skimmed nearly every conversation : and there were many!!

Oh well - one to tick off the dutiful list.

Fatherland next. It's in DS1's room because he made a lame attempt to read a book. He did 17 pages.

I ordered Killers of the Flower Moon from the library ages ago, must chase it up- thanks Shake!

28. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge. A very interesting (and demanding) read for a white person, am glad I read this. I live in a very very white rural area (when I read the chapter on immigrants I had to keep self correcting as this area is so white that immigrant (especially when used perjotatively) refers to white Eastern Europeans), and I found the chapter on feminism particularly interesting. I am very glad she kept talking to white people about race.

Just found my review of Perdido Street Station from 2015 Remus - I did like lots of things about it, but my main comment was that it needed to be 400 pages long, not 900 . . .

12. Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves Second Vera mystery, in which she re-investigates an old case of a school girl's murder after new evidence emerges, and the usual complex wrong web of family and community secrets is slowly revealed. Of all the Ann Cleeves I've read, the reveal of who dunnit and their motivation was the least satisfactory and plausible, but the journey there was as skilfully done and enjoyable as ever.

13. Murder on the Riviera Express by TP Fielden 1950s pastiche cosy crime caper. A few flashes of wit and charm, but badly over-described, over-written and over-long. Improved (as suggested by a previous poster) by listening to at 1.5x on audio.

Next audio book is Station Eleven

Where did wrong come from?

Complex wrong webs of family and community secrets are invariably the best sort of webs ime Ham

To be fair, as webs go, it was a wrongun.

But don’t you find that right webs are terribly déclassé in crime fiction these days?
Wrong webs are the new twist.

I love your description of your most recent read as "quite OK" cote.
I think it describes very well a lot of books I've read. And probably also a lot of other things that have happened to me!

20. Haunting Christmas Tales

Collection of 9 ghost stories set around Christmas. Children’s book so light reading and nothing scary enough to keep me up at night.

I'm way behind but will try and catch up.

1. Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders
2. Class Trip - Emmanuele Carrere
3. A God in Ruins - Kate Atkinson
4. What I Didn't See - Karen Joy Fowler
5. Will in the World - Stephen Greenblatt
6. River of Consciousness - Oliver Sachs
7. And The Mountains Echoed - Khaled Hosseini

Will probably read The Secret River by Kate Grenville next as DS is doing it for GCSE and it'll help him revise if we can chat about it.

Hound - Yeah, well, it was

"Next audio book is Station Eleven "

OK I'll try to check this thread more often. I'm interested in what you will think of it

I'll stop grinning like an idiot now.

at Cote. I'm going to have to read Station Eleven now too!

Me too. I have it and had forgotten I'd bought it. But better read Secret chuffing River first.

27. The Ringmaster's Tale by Helen Wallace-Iles I got this as it's currently free on Amazon. And is a kind of memoir/blog style parent of children with autism book which I'm sure there are probably thousands of these out there but it's the only one I've read. It started off badly with some weird criticism of political correctness which was just bizarre. But was quite good afterwards with little anecdotes and bits of advice. Unfortunately through it all she says she will list tips and hints she's found that help and when you get there its a list of therapy programmes she offers online, so it felt a bit like a book long sales pitch you didn't know you were part of which ruined it quite a bit.

I am now an hour into Station Eleven and have been doing a lot of eye rolling and eyebrow raising. I think this book will give me a full facial workout. I don't hate it, it just seems to be standard issue tick box apocalyptic plotline so far, with added shallow not very bright people.

I thought we'd banned further discussion of Station Eleven!

Sadik - I was interested in the ideas/characters/world of Perdido St but just couldn't be bothered to fight my way through so much repetition/waffle.

Someone call me when we’re at Station 12 and discussion of Station Eleven is in the rear view