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?

Yes shake His Dark materials is children’s/teen. She’s read the trilogy so should be ok with it if more of the same.

Also dnf Possession. Love, sex and poetry - how was it so incredibly dull?!

Ah, well it explains why I thought the story has no adult depth - it’s a children’s book! Still, Michael Sheen’s narration was worth it and it’ll be a good audiobook for long car journeys with my two boys.

I may try Possession again in the future. I often find you have to be in the right mood for certain books and if they catch you at the right time can turn into proper favourites.

44. JD Oswald - Dreamwalker

A young boy called Errol finds himself an outsider in his small village - he looks different from the other children and has no idea who his father is. What no one including Errol knows is that his mother was the heir to the throne of the Twin Kingdoms and his father a prince of an enemy country. He was born in secret as his mother died and hidden by Morgwm the Green, a great dragon mage. Morgwm's own son, Benfro, hatched on the same day and seems to take after his mother in his magical skills. And the future of life in the Twin Kingdoms rests in the hands of this pair of unlikely heroes.

Quickly bobbing on to say thank you to Sadik for curing my giant audiobook funk with The Secret Barrister. Really enjoying it so. Love all the bits of historical detail too.
Sadly An Almond for a Parrot went the same way as the previous six? seven audiobook DNFs. Not my cup of tea, although now at least I understand the maypole reference.

Wray Delaney has a new book due out next Feb for those of us who list Almond a one of our guilty pleasures!

Glad you're enjoying the Secret Barrister Scribbly - I keep recommending it to everyone I know!

Ooh, I've got The Secret Barrister on reserve from the library although there seemed to be a long queue ahead of me.

77. In the days of rain- Rebecca Stott
This was a recommendation from this thread. A brilliant memoir of a daughter's time in the Exclusive Brethren Cult in the 1960's and 70's. She wrote this to fulfil a promise to her father who was attempting to complete his memoirs before cancer took his life. It attempts to explain how a fringe religious order became a cult, how unlikely men were persuaded to carry out orders they would never normally consider, and also how hard it is to come to terms with life outside the Brethren. Recommend.

Taking a reluctant short break from This Thing of Darkness in order to read The Silent Companions for an unexpected book club I’ve decided to go along to.

Not all that impressed so far. On the very first page the author uses ‘leeched’ when she means ‘leached,’ and in the same scene uses ‘hello’ which I don’t think was in common use as a greeting at the time the novel is set. Writing is so-so.

Am I being picky? I’m being picky. And unfair. I’m judging it by This Thing of Darkness’s standards.

I've also got The Secret Barrister on reserve at the library.

I often find you have to be in the right mood for certain books and if they catch you at the right time can turn into proper favourites
Agree with this Shake, and I use it to rationalise abandoning books that I think I "should" like. Better to come back another time.

Currently finishing We'll always have Paris: trying and failing to be French, by Emma Beddington. Account by an English woman of marrying a Frenchman and moving first to Paris, then to Brussels. I was expecting one of those "And that's when our quaint peasant neighbour taught me to make the perfect cassoulet" accounts, but this is much more honest. Paris is hard - people are hostile, and she's struggling to take care of small children. Just because you fulfil a fantasy of moving to Paris doesn't mean you become the fantasy version of yourself that you pictured living there, swanning around all chic and soignee. Everyday life is just harder - back in London, she wanders around Marks & Spencers delighting in the sheer familiarity of everything. I recognise the Brussels she described - I live there for a while. People think of it as bland and bureaucratic, but there's a surreal edge to things, and beer with everything. Overall, a memoir of expat life that transcends the genre.

Hello everyone, I've not been around much as I was a bit slow reading the Cherry autobiography.

Here's my list so far (highlights in bold):

1. Biography of Queen Eliz II - Sally Beddell Smith
2. The Betrayal - Helen Dunmore
3. The Witches - Roald Dahl
4. 2nd in the Quartet but can't recall name - Elena Ferrante
5. Infinite Home - Kathleen Alcott
6. The Aviator's Wife - Melanie Benjamin
7. Ghosts of Everest - Hemlebb, Simonson
8. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
9. American Wife - Curtis Sittenfeld

10. Object Lessons - Anna Quindlen 11. Une Vie - Simone Veil 12. Incendiary - Chris Cleave 13. Into the Silence - Wade Davis 14. A Very British Scandal - John Preston 15. Before We Were Yours - Lisa Wingate 16. Mystery at Styles - Agatha Christie 17. The Tatooist of Auschwitz - Helen Moore 18. The Heart's Invisible Furies - John Boyne 19. Four Sisters: The lost lives of the Romanovs - Helen Rappaport 20. Educated - Tara Westover 21. Then she was gone - Lisa Jewell 22. A long, long way - Sebastian Barry 23. My name is Leon - Kit de Waal 24. Mennonite in a little black dress - Rhoda Janzen 25. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell 26. Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng 27. The Language of Others - Clare Morall 28. The Coincidence of Coconut Cake - Amy C. Reichart 29. Career of Evil - Robert Galbraith 30. The Girl who fell from the Sky - Simon Mawer 31. The Men and the Girls - Joanna Trollope 32. Valley of the Dolls - Jacqueline Susann 33. Sing, Unburied Sing - Jesmyn Ward 34. Cherry: the life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard - Sara Wheeler

I feel like such a slowcoach (and very lowbrow) compared to others. Here is my updated list - gems are highlighted!

1.Mythos - Stephen Fry

1. Origin - Dan Brown
2. The Mitford Murders - Jessica Fellowes

4.Paris - Edward Rutherford 5. The Four Quartets- TS Eliot

1. The Magus of Hay - Phil Rickman
2. Innocent Traitor - Alison Weir
3. The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood (audio)
4. Land Rover:The story of the car that conquered the world- Ben Fogle

10. The Good Terrorist - Doris Lessing (audio) 11. Station Eleven - Emily St John Manuel *12. American Gods - Neil Gaiman 13. Monarch of the Glen - Neil Gaiman* 14. Reservoir 13 - Jon MacGregor (audio) 15: The Management Style of the Supreme Beings - Tom Holt *16: Stone Mattress - Margaret Atwood 17. Burial Rites - Hannah Kent* 18: Animal - Sara Pascoe 19. Friends of the Dusk - Phil Rickman

Burial Rites is based on the true story of an Icelandic murderess, the last woman to be executed in the 1800's. It was a fascinating read.....and a beautiful book with it's black edged pages. It is reminiscent of Alias Grace in content but sufficiently different to still be interesting.

Animal - oh god, what a dire book. I wanted to like this, as I generally like Sara Pascoe, butI just couldn't. It was self indulgent and felt like it was written by a teenager. There were some highlights (few and far between) when she wrote well, but overall it was not good.

Friends of the Dusk - formulaic escapism set on the England/Wales border. Hereford has been through more Bishops than I've had hot dinners! Fun to read!

78. Reader, I married him. - Tracy Chevalier Stories inspired by Jane Eyre and reviewed here fairly recently I think. Not a huge fan of short stories and as usual this was a hit and miss collection. Some of the links to Jane Eyre were very slender. In the main it was more like stories inspired by marriage, or more specifically the line which was the title of the book.

84. The Mermaid And Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gower

I think if I had come to this before the discussion upthread I would have been disappointed due to all the hype. However I agree with the majority of posters upthread - it wants to be literary but isn’t really. Some of the sub storylines seemed to melt away - the storyline about Polly (the black girl) just stopped with no real resolution. I also didn’t really like any of the characters - they all felt quite flat and one-dimensional to me. There were also a few bits I found quite crude and unnecessary. However I did like the writing style and the sense of place and time. I would probably give something else by this author a go.

16. The Escape (John Puller #3) by David Baldacci

This was another solid thriller in the Puller series. Puller's brother escapes from prison under odd circumstances and he investigates what happened as well as what put him behind bars in the first place.

I still find this series far more interesting than Jack Reacher books. It is the perfect beach read.

Argh.. My ipad has eaten my list so I have no idea what number I'm up to, or which books I reviewed last. I'll just go randomly backwards until I catch up with myself!

(Wild guess at numbers)

25 The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick
26 The Well of Lost Plots - Jasper Fforde
27 A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding - Jackie Copleton
28 The Hanging Tree - Ben Aaronovitch
29 The Furthest Station - Ben Aaronovitch
30 Electric Dreams - Philip K Dick
31 The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
32 Sing, Unburied, Sing - Jesmyn Ward
33 Fen - Daisy Johnson

Despite loving Bladerunner and the recent Electric Dreams TV series, I'd never actually read any Philip K Dick. And now I have, I'm really conflicted about him. His ideas are amazing, but I could not get on with his style of writing. At all. One story in the Electric Dreams collection describes a woman (a wife, of course) as "her breasts quivering with excitement" and I have tried my hardest but my stubborn breasts will not quiver with excitement alone. Overall, great ideas, dated, slightly dodgy writing.

A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding A grandmother is grieving for the loss of her daughter and grandson in the Nagasaki atomic bomb, and blames a man from their past. When a mysterious man arrives on her doorstep claiming to be her thought-to-be-dead grandson, we learn more about what happened before the bombing and the reasons for family rifts. The parts about Japan were really evocative, although I did spend much of the book willing the grandmother to just bloody talk to this mystery man and stop leaving us in suspense!

The Bloody Chamber was ok. Fairytales retold with kick arse female leads, and all of the adjectives known to mankind. It did get quite repetitive after a few stories, though.

I think Sing, Unburied, Sing has been reviewed a lot on here and like most I.. can't say I enjoyed it, but it is a brilliantly written book. Parts of it were really harrowing, and the 'mother' was frustratingly shit but sadly probably very accurately drawn. Loved Jojo, Richie just about ripped me to shreds emotionally.

Fen was a complete random find. A short story collection based in the fens. Plenty of strong (and weird) female characters, beautiful writing and so creepy and unsettling. A bit from the blurb: "This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a, well, what?" That kind of book. I love the way Daisy Johnson writes, and thought the 1st half of the book was excellent, unlike anything I've read for a while, in a very good way.

Daphne similar issues re: Philip K. Dick, some interesting ideas but some attitudes hard to take. Although I remember enjoying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch that was ages ago.' I read The Man in the High Castle recently and thought it fell quite flat. Or maybe it's just that alternative history was a new concept when the book came out and now it's practically a genre, so didn't have the impact it might have had?.

Fen sounds brilliant see that the American reviews compare her to Kelly Link and Karen Russell (enjoyed their stories in the past) also loved the first para about the eels. So have added to wish-list.

Saw you had Jasper Fforde on your list but not highlighted. Is he not worth reading? I have The Eyre Affair on my wish-list, but wasn't certain about it. The description online sounded enticing, but I'm way over book-buying budget. Don't know if you know them but I liked Fowler's 'Bryant and May' series sounded as if it might be a similar kind of book?

@Dottierichardson - I love Jasper Fforde. The Thursday Next series (of which The Eyre Affair is the first) are a fun, escapist read. You definitely have to suspend disbelief, but once you do you'll soon find yourself wanting to book jump and work for SpecOps as a LiteraTec. The Nursery Crime series are also set in the Nextian world and are a good tongue in cheek read.

I'm waiting..........patiently for the next instalment in the Shades of Grey series...... which look like they are never coming. I've been waiting since 2009!and my patience is wearing thin, so Mr Fforde, or his literary agent, if you lurk on or around these reads.........please, please, please can we have the next instalment

39. My Not So Perfect Life by Sophie Kinsella

Katie is struggling to get by in her admin job at a London branding agency, and envious of her boss Demeter’s perfect life.
Katie’s dreams are shattered when she gets made redundant, and has to return home to Somerset to help her dad set up his new glamping business.
But when her old boss Demeter and her family book in for a holiday, Katie starts to realise that nobody’s life is as perfect as it seems from the outside and from looking at their Instagram.

A good holiday read, entertaining and quick to read, with a cast of mostly believable characters. This was so much better than the last Shopaholic book I opened (and abandoned unfinished).

31. The Serial Killer’s Daughter - Lesley Welsh

Suzanne barely knew her father. When she dies and she is given his diaries she begins to discover she didn’t know him at all.

Fairly okay book. I felt as if a lot of the “twists” were a little silly but was an easy enough read and I quite enjoy reading about serial killers and their motives etc according to the author!

32. Then She Was Gone - Lisa Jewell

Ellie Mack went missing when she was 15 and everyone believes she ran away. Her mum Laurel believes different and when she meets a new man and his daughter is the image of Ellie she sets out to discover exactly what happened to her daughter.

I was absolutely hooked on this one! One of the twists was fairly obvious but it was the unravelling of the past that made this book interesting!

85. The Greedy Queen:Eating With Victoria by Annie Gray

This is a sort-of biography of Victoria (it covers most of the main events of her life) but by looking at what and how she ate. There’s lots of detail about how food, cooking methods and presentation changed throughout her reign. I discovered she liked lamb chops and whisky! I think I learnt more about general food prep during that period than I did about Victoria herself though.

If the thinness of her evidence and the weakness of her analysis had me wanting to refute points that I fundamentally agree with, that's my issue rather than hers.

Biblio - you've absolutely hit the nail on the head here for me. I felt just the same when reading WINLTTWPAR. I found myself thinking "Yes, but..." and "Have you got any figures to back up that assertion?", even while I was nodding vigorously in agreement with the polemic.

Dottie, thanks for the review of the Imgard Keun - not an author I was familiar with but her books look well worth investigating.

I'm feeling quite well-read, having read 47 of the books on the Hay list. Agree with PP that's a quite a strange selection, although I like the inclusion of The Gruffalo - such a wonderful and classic children's book. There are a few there which I wish I hadn't bothered with, but The Gruffalo isn't one of those!

46. Untitled

I hope it's OK to count this as it is an actual book with covers and a couple of hundred pages long! My mum and her brother spent a couple of years collecting, translating, and privately publishing the letters sent between my grandparents and their families during WW2. They were refugees who came to London in the 30s and lived and worked there through the war. Absolutely wonderful letters including some written from air raid shelters during bombings and other such vivid insights into wartime life.

47. Reservoir 13, Jon McGregor

Much reviewed here. I think if I'd read it before the hype I would have found it more impressive - as it was, I knew that people had raved about it and perhaps expected a bit too much. Certainly an original and well-written book, but a bit low key for me.

48. Swimming Lessons, Claire Fuller

A rather gentler book than Our Endless Numbered Days. Flora is called home to Dorset to spend time with her father who has had a serious fall. Her mother disappeared twelve years previously and the book switches back and forth between Flora's narrative and a serious of old letters written by her mother, Ingrid, telling the story of her marriage and motherhood.

Fuller is good at doing clever, creative people behaving awfully to one another, but, while I did enjoy reading this, I found the characters to be overwritten. Do people in real life behave in such an eccentric, theatrical way? Not anyone that I've met, certainly. My sympathies lay firmly with the boring sister, Nan, who was left to clear up everyone's messes, both physical and emotional.

Bell thanks for the comments on Fforde, I've ordered The Eyre Affair and now hoping I won't like it, as if I do will then have to buy the rest and smuggle them in under cover of darkness!

14 The Party by Elizabeth Day
15 House of Names by Colm Toibin
16 First Catch: A study of a Spring Meal by Thom Eagle

Lots of people have been reading Circe and I found House of Names as a paperback with it in a display of books inspired by the classics. On this occasion, I went for the cheaper option and I enjoyed it very much. It is a story of Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. On any telling of it, they had a dysfunctional family. I don't think that the palace is the House of Names in the title, but it is the descriptions of the palace corridors at night, haunted by real ghosts and crazed insomniacs trying to remain undetected, that will stay with me.

First, Catch was a highlight for me. A professional chef writes his way through the planning and preparation of a single domestic meal. He is a good writer, with lots of interesting reflections on food generally as well as something to say about how to cook well. I used to read a lot of general musings in the food writing genre, and I hadn't for a while. This caught my eye though, and it must be one of the best, and also covered some areas that have more recently come into cooking fashion, notably the role of fermentation. Great stuff.

35. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Burrows.

I read this after watching the film and was glad I did. The book is entirely made up of letters between the protagonists - Juliet Ashton is a successful author who ends up corresponding with a reading group on Guernsey - created in desperate times during the Nazi Occupation of Guernsey in WW2. This friendship changes all of their lives for the better. Lovely stuff and very interesting from a historical perspective regarding the Occupation of Guernsey (which, ignoramus that I am, I knew nothing about!).