50 Book Challenge 2018 Part Five

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fifth 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, the third one here and the fourth one here.

How're you getting on so far?

Funny, I was thinking about The Once and Future King for the first time in ages, just before the thread chat about it started up. DS asked me if I was a bird what bird would I be, and without hesitation or stopping for thought I said goose. On asking myself why I said that, I realised it was due to the goose passages in that book. The animal bits are my favourite, and the goose ones my favourite of those. Very strange books by a very strange man.

Yes, the bit with the geese was my favourite too, and showed what a tremendous writer he was capable of being. Anyone read The Goshawk?

Maybe a bit late, but Cheddar I wanted to say I 100% agree with Sadik re Mercedes Lackey. I would also say applies somewhat to Marion Zimmer Bradley (reading the early ones only and remembering the time they were written!).

40. The Woman Who Stoke My Life by Marion Keyes. I couldn’t remember if I had read this before, until I began it, and then I was trundling along, really enjoying it, and then, bang! It just stops! And there’s are quick flash forward and done! So disappointing and no doubt why I had forgotten to remember it. Don’t recommend (but do still love Keyes!)

Tanaqui, is that the one that starts with the woman falling into a coma? I'm not normally a Keyes fan but (sorry if it's not from the same book) I often quote to people the bit where her teenage daughter visits her in hospital to say something along the lines of "Mum, I know you're in a coma but I was just wondering if you knew where my blue skirt is".

43. Born a Crime, Trevor Noah
Recommended from here, thank you. Lively and compelling read about growing up in South Africa as apartheid was collapsing. At times the jokey tone seemed painfully at odds with what he was describing - a real eye opener to what life in SA was like within my lifetime and probably still is.

Would love recommendations for other books set in modern SA if anyone has any? One that I enjoyed a few years ago was Red Dust by Gillian Slovo.

Yes it is Keith! It is really very funny and clever, but it only feels like half a book!

I can’t think of anything from SA, sorry.

Disgrace by J.M Coetzee (won the Booker) is set in modern-day SA but it's not a 'fun' read - inappropriate sexual behaviour, rape and dog death all feature. Saying that, it is very well written! A lot of his novels never actually specify where they are set, such as Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K but I picture them all set in SA.

Keith, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller is a memoir set in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia as it was then) it was published in 2002 and the narrative starts in 1975. I read it so long ago I can't remember too much about it!

Disgrace is the Coetzee I referenced in my Atwood review - it is a very short, very good read but bleak.

Nadine Gordimer writes about Apartheid era SA - may be earlier than you want? The Conservationist won the Booker but I really liked, in that I think about it often, A Guest of Honour

21. The Colour Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute To His White Mother by James McBride. This was sent to me as an audio book by a friend who was much enamoured of it. It concerns the true story of a rabbi's daughter, born in Poland, who fled with her family to Harlem, married a black man, (and was therefore rejected by her birth family, who sat Shiva for her as though she had died!) founded a Baptist church, and put twelve children through college despite living in abject poverty and squalor. Both the Mother and her writer/musician son, James McBride, recount their life stories in alternate chapters. I found the mother's story (as told to her son) to be by far the more interesting of the two. It's an inspiring story of triumphing against the odds. However overall this didn't grab me and I found it to be very repetitive and in need of sharper editing. In the epilogue McBride recounts his amazement that the story has captured the imagination of so many, and that the book was in the New York Times best seller list for over two years. I share his amazement.

A much better 'read', although again this was an Audible book, was:
22. Educated by Tara Westover. Intelligently and beautifully written this clocks in at over 12 hours listening time but I finished it in two days, which gives some indication of how gripped I was. Normally audio books are what I listen to whilst doing other things, this was an audio book that I stopped doing other things to listen to. I won't recount the story as it's been well covered by other reviewers, but it is a highly recommended story of, as above, triumphing against all the odds. (It reminded me very much of Jeanette Wall's, in turns funny and harrowing memoir, The Glass Castle with its reckless, feckless parents and I would recommend that book to anyone who enjoyed this one.)
Many thanks to Sadik for bringing this book to my attention and making it her pick of the year so far, and Toomuchsplother and Emgee whose subsequent glowing reviews made me bring it to the top of my TBR list. Got to love this thread!
I can also recommend the Audible version of this book, the narrator has a soft American burr which is appealing and added rather than distracted from the story. (Although I did think her male family 'voices' sounded a bit like Nelson from The Simpson's )

#Possible Spoiler#
I did wonder how this book, with all its raw emotion and honesty, will affect the authors stated hope to one day reconcile with her family, and was left anxious that no one seemed to be protecting Shawn's immediate family from a man who is clearly a psychopath if Westover's recollections are to be believed.

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is a rewarding read. Quite difficult, in that Alexandra Fuller had a pretty tough childhood - her parents were both difficult, spiky, nonconformist types, they hacked out a living from the land, and two siblings died as very young children. The impact of one of those deaths in particular was profound on young Alexandra. The writing is great, though, and she summons up her love for Africa so vividly. There are a couple of sequels, of which I’ve read the last - weirdly, it was a book club choice and I thought I ought to at least read the first book. I was really glad I did because the last one doesn’t come anywhere close and the discussion made no sense at all if you hadn’t read the first book - DH and I spent the whole evening having to explain the reasons for things she was making glancing references to. A frustrating evening!

I think I read Disgrace when it first came out but don't remember it very clearly - sounds like it's worth a re-read.

Did Nadine Gordimer write a children's book - or more than one? I feel like I've known her name for ever but not sure I have ever read any of her writing. It's not the time period I was thinking of but I have heard so many good things about her I should really try one of her books.

48. The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer Audiobook narrated by Rebecca Lowman

Greer Kadetsky is a quiet bookish student at a second rate college in the States. Shortly after starting she is sexually assaulted at a party. Greer is so outraged by the event and the lack of punishment of the perpetrator she with encouragment from her roommate Zee attends a lecture by a famous second wave Feminist, Faith Frank.
An encounter with Faith following the talk ignites the feminist in Greer and sets her on a path where Faith will eventually become her mentor and women’s rights will be the inspiration for her future career.
The book predominantly focuses on Greer but there are also pov chapters by Zee, Faith and Greer's boyfriend Cory.

I really enjoyed this book. The characters are believable, nuanced and solidly written, you care about all of them from early on in the book and continue wanting the best for them despite their character flaws and bad decisions. I have never read Wolitzer before but her style feels effortless and accomplished. Its a book about more than just feminism. Betrayal, loss, love, sex, education, family, friendship are woven throughout the stories of their lives.

This book is unapologetically about white middle class feminism, and more particularly about how a relationship between a second and third wave feminist develops. Wolitzer is aware of this though and at several points in the book has characters point out that the work that is happening is predominantly by and for white women. I think if I hadn’t recently read Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race I would have been less aware of this. It doesn’t detract from the book, it is what it is, but I can see it will be criticised because of its lack of intersectionality.

The is one bum note in the whole book (a pov chapter by a white male billionare) that stops this being a standout book for me. He is such a one dimensional sexist arsehole, the point of him being there so crass that I'm really cross with the author. You spoilt it a bit for me Meg! I don’t want to think or care about this colossal dickhead.

It was still a very enjoyable listen. I will miss these characters. The audiobook narration was excellent, five stars for Rebecca Lowman.

39. Naomi Novik - Crucible of Gold

Book 7 in the series about the dragon Temeraire and his captain Will Laurence, who start the book in Australia, from where they are summoned to assist the war against France by travelling to South America to enter negotiations with the Tswana, dragons from Africa in search of their humans who have been enslaved by the Portuguese. But an enforced stop in the Incan Empire leads to potential disaster.

I'm still enjoying the series, but finding the books in the library is proving a slow business so it will take me a while to finish.

It’s my birthday today and I have received the following:

Bookworm by Lucy Mangan
The Time Traveller’s Guide To Restoration Britain by Ian Mortimer
An Argument Of Historians by Jodi Taylor
The Girl Before by J P Delaney
He Said She Said by Erin Kelly
Sunday Morning Coming Down by Nicci French
An Almond For A Parrot by Wray Delaney
Isabella Of Angouleme: The Tangled Queen Part 2 by Erica Laine

I am already part way through the first two - couldn’t decide which to read first so have both on the go!

Happy birthday Chessie! That's an impressive haul!

Happy Birthday Chessie 🎂 Good present haul there.

How lovely to be given so many books!

Happy Days!

Tsotsi is an Apartheid era book by Athol Fugard. Was made into an very affecting post Apartheid film in 2004 ish.

Happy birthday chessie

Cry, the Beloved Country is my favourite South Africa novel (about a black minister whose son shoots the local rich white man's son and kills him, and everything that happens next). It is very aparteid era though.

I hope you had a good birthday Chessie, great book haul! Keep you out of trouble for a while....

Excellent birthday haul, Chessie - many (belated) happy returns.

I've finally finished one of my seemingly never-ending books - 36: The Story of Alice - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

A very absorbing (but did I say long?!) book examining the phenomenon of the 'Alice' books, how they came to be written, how they stimulated the popular imagination in the years after their publication, and also the life and character of C. L. Dodgson and his alter ego Lewis Carroll. There's also a fair bit of attention given to Alice Liddell, his inspiration for the books.

Douglas-Fairhurst is an academic but this is a very readable work and the tracing of the impact of the Alice books is fascinating. He deals quite fairly, I feel, with the legitimate questions surrounding Dodgson's motivations in forming his 'child-friendships', which by his account did reach the point of obsession. However, I can't help feeling that, however much you argue that the Victorians had different attitudes to childhood and nudity, Dodgson's mania for photographing little girls without their clothes on would have so many red flags waving nowadays you'd be able to see them from outer space. Just because he was a 'respectable' clergyman is no guarantee of his 'pure' (a word he was very keen on) motives - although I'm sure absolutely nothing improper went on and all his child-friends remembered him with huge affection and warmth. But it's clear that several Victorian mammas were very uneasy indeed about his dogged insistence on pursuing what he wanted to do (ie photograph their children naked - girls, that is; he didn't seem interested in boys), and I could well imagine parents being driven to silent rage and despair by this polite but implacably insistent man - probably OCD, possibly on the spectrum, certainly very 'odd' and socially-inept with adults - who just wouldn't take no for an answer. It doesn't detract from my admiration for the Alice books, which are extraordinary.....but I finished it with distinctly uneasy feelings nonetheless.

Happy post birthday reading Chessie

Following all the TH White chat, H is for Hawk kind of jumped out at me at the library yesterday, even though I'd never put it on my TBR list when it's crossed my radar before. Will see how I get on with it.

24. Dead Water by Ann Cleeves Shetland #5. This was originally meant to be a quartet, and book four ended in such a way that I wondered how she was going to pick it up and carry on. Very skilfully is the answer. Great plotting, characters and setting. This is the first Ann Cleeves book I've read where I've guessed the killer and motive early on, so I was a tiny bit sad not to be able to invest wholeheartedly in the well crafted red herrings, but did not detract from being a very enjoyable read. Top quality crime fiction.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes! Am already two thirds of the way through Bookworm and love it!

Great review terpsichore. Always been fascinated by Alice and the whole strange background to the books. I saw a film once that walked a fine line with its depiction of Dodgson, uneasiness is right. I have made a note of this but may kick it into the long grass for a bit if it’s a big ‘un.