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?

Not sure about that Toomuch I bought my Mother The Year Of Magical Thinking after my father died and she thought it was a bit shit! I also read it and didn't dislike it as much as she did, I thought the 'life can change in an instant' message was sobering and has stuck with me, but overall it didn't chime with me even in my grieving state.

I'm not much of a football fan, but I agree Fever Pitch is great.

I'm sad to see several DNFs for Possession by AS Byatt (going back a couple of pages - I've just been catching up), as it's an old favourite of mine. I also love The Children's Book by the same author.

26. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. This is written from the perspective of 17-year-old Cadence Sinclair Eastman, who spends every summer with the rest of the Sinclair family on the island owned by her very wealthy grandfather. She is looking back on a traumatic event, involving her and her cousins, that took place during the summer two years previously and that she only has patchy recollections of. I didn't realise before starting this that it is YA. It's okay.

That happened to me tarahumara. I didn’t realise that my local trendy bookstore had a YA stripe right in the run of their bookshelves. It was okay, wasn’t it!

Yes, Yes!

Sorry, that was me forgetting to name change!

About two thirds in and starting to find The Silent Conpanions incredibly irritating. Did the author bother to do any research at all?

Scribbly, the sweaty labour scene is Melly giving birth to Beau. In blazing heat as Atlanta burns.

34 I Did It For Us - Alison Bruce
Psychological thriller following a woman who accuses her husband’s best friend of rape. Her life falls apart, and she gets involved/over involved in a new friend’s relationship. The first section on the accusation was every victim blaming cliche you can imagine - she was dressed provocatively, she didn’t report soon enough, she’d known him for years. The main character’s best friend even tells her “it’s not like you were dragged into an alley by a stranger was it?” Every single person tells her or strongly hints that even if it did happen she should have kept her mouth shut, and there’s nothing in the way of a sensible counterpoint. Plus, it was inconsistent or at least badly edited. There’s one section where the Emily and her new friend go punting in the river and she makes a point of saying how they didn’t talk. As soon as they’re off the punt, her friend “carried on talking about what they’d been chatting about on the punt.” The new best friend is described as having amazing blue eyes, until the end when they’ve magically changed to brown. Some may argue that it’s the writer trying to show us our narrator can’t be trusted, but that doesn’t work when it makes it look like the book hasn’t been proofread. Apart from the shitty first section, the plot isn’t awful, but there’s not much to recommend.

86. The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell

Others on this thread haven’t rated this but I enjoyed it! Yes it got a bit ridiculous at times but I still wanted to keep reading to find out what happened.

87. The Betrayals by Fiona Neill

Didn’t enjoy this. The cover design and blurb led me to expect a psychological thriller, but it’s not - it’s the story of a family breakdown told from the different points of view of the Mum, the dad, and the two children. I kept waiting for the twist so was disappointed when nothing happened and it just ended with no real resolution for the main characters.

Had a look at the football books for DF who is a fan of sporting books, but nothing obscure enough for him there. I’ve just bought him the biography of some 1940s Man U manager which he was delighted with.

I loved Posession too though I skipped the poetry.

Given up Gone With The Wind Scarlett was just too irritating.

Marge: Eugh! Homer, where did you get that ugly thing?
Homer: From that little shop right over there—(Points to an empty lot, where sand devils whirl. He gasps in disbelief, then corrects himself.) Oh, no, wait, it was right over there.
Shop Vendor: (waving) You'll be sorrrrrrry!

50.) The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell -- Oh dear. At least someone enjoyed it, Chessie. I do agree that I wanted to finish it to find out what happened, but overall I found this hugely disappointing.

A creepy premise, and I so wanted to enjoy it, but it never really got going for me. And a rare example of the trope of the disappearing shop of mysterious mysteries (tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheLittleShopThatWasntThereYesterday), which tends not to be used with a straight face these days because of how utterly silly it is. Here it came across as clunky and a little too convenient rather than creepy. Also a little confusing in retrospect, given the ending.

The 17 century diary bits were written in almost exactly the same voice and with the same language as the 19th century sections with the occasional 'mayhap' thrown in for good measure, and I kept snagging on what felt to me like historical inaccuracies (when did names start appearing on shop fronts? Would a wealthy woman really have said 'I'll deal with it' in 1636?). If I'd been more immersed I might have been able to skim over them, but I had a real sense that the author just did not know her stuff, particularly in the 17th century sections.

I kept telling myself I was being unfair, and then, about two thirds of the way in I hit a massive glaring error that strongly suggested whatever research the author had done was surface level at best: in England, witches were hanged, not burned. It's a common misconception, but one that's fairly well-known about, and even the skimpiest bit of Google research about witch trials should have thrown that up. The references to this are brief, so it would have been easily fixed if caught, and there's really no excuse.

Well, this book club is going to be interesting.

Back to This Thing of Darkness now. Am just the tiniest bit pissy that I bumped it from the number 50 spot.

(shrugs) Clearly I’m easily pleased! 😀

I really wish I could have relaxed and enjoyed it more. I have been second guessing myself a bit, wondering if it was all an elaborate case of unreliable narrator and the 17C diary segments were all in Elsie’s head... but somehow I doubt it.

I enjoyed Gone With the Wind when I read it (years ago, so probably not terribly alert to the racism beyond slavery= bad!), but things like that labour scene were quite atypical of romance at the time; and Scarlett is so believable- selfish, conniving, unkind and tough- in a way that family saga heroines usually are not (in fact they are usually the opposite!). Which I think is why the appeal. Football books- the crappy ones I have had to read/listen to that are published for reluctant primary school boys to read- no doubt put them off reading even more!

Oddly (some might say randomly!) my random number generator threw up both the How..To books one after the other. So having finished the Robert Webb, the weekend's read was Matt Haig's How To Stop Time. I think others on this thread have read this. It's a good concept but skates around everything. It reminded me of the 100 Year Old Man who Climbed Out... without the detail, knowledge, or humour. The whole thing was a bit po faced. Apparently a Scotsman reviewer said it felt like Haig was writing his pitch for being a Doctor Who writer and it did feel that way. Some awful dialogue, too, and endless irritating verbiage about the wonders of being a teacher. Don't think Haig has ever taught! Although I did not like the Witchfinder's daughter, its passage about witch drownings was so much better. Everything in this book feels rushed.

It wasn't as woeful as The Fourteenth Letter but some patches were. Benedict Cumberbatch has rights to a film , I hear.

Burial Rites next : I have high hopes!

Should I really read mermaid . Its been a week and I can't be bothered to pick it up but feel I must persevere. Considering a light flirtation with some Daphne du Maurier short stories.

Tanaqui isn’t that something that happens to all of us? We encounter books that present ideas that are ‘below the radar’ that we see quite differently at other points in our lives? I remember being quite shocked that the Narnia books were Christian allegory, for example. I certainly wouldn’t want a relationship of the kind presented to me in the romance books I read as a teenager.! But at the time they seemed quite mainstream representations.
Also, with books like GTTW wasn’t the novel form a way to circulate ideas that would not have seemed so charming in non-fiction form? I wonder how popular it would have been, beyond a restricted market, as a factual book that used a family of plantation owners to eulogise and excuse the rise of the KKK etc. Certainly, I doubt that any of us would have read it, other than for academic purposes. I often think that GTTW is crying out for its Wide Sargasso Sea, a re-versioning of the book told from the point of view of Mammy or Prissy’s experience would look rather different and expose the insidiousness of the ideas the original text promotes.

27. To Sir With Love ER Braithwaite Fictionalised account of Braithwaite's first year as a black teacher in an East End secondary school in the late 40s/early 50s. The basic plot is a familiar one - inspirational teacher changes lives! By caring so much! I found the account of the kids' lives and the racism Braithwaite experiences interesting. And it's very well-written. Braithwaite himself annoyed me though by being so superior - he may suffer extreme racism (he ends up teaching because no one will give him a job as an engineer despite his excellent qualifications), but he's snobbish, sexist (the descriptions of the other teachers were straight out of the 'describe yourself as a male writer would describe you' meme that went round Twitter) and homophobic (the lesbian teachers are 'unnatural and not good for the children', apparently.)
28. And Then There Were None Agatha Christie (though I read a holiday cottage edition with the original title/rhyme) Ten people are invited to a remote island. A record accuses each of them of causing a death, in a way which would be impossible to prosecute in court. One by one they begin to die ... Christie's best-selling novel. Enjoyable, though probably the most batshit one I've read yet.

(Sorry, nine people are invited. One person does the inviting and the murders.)

In Therapy by Susie Orbach
Recommended by SouthEast upthread, this is a series of scripts for fictional psychotherapy sessions (from a Radio 4 series), with commentary between from the author. I found this interesting, though perhaps inevitably, some of the sessions spoke more to me than others. I'll definitely go back and re-read some parts.

Book 63
March Violets – Philip Kerr

A re-read of the first Bernie Gunther book, set in Berlin in the run up to the 36 Olympic Games. I like Gunther, flaws and all, and this is quite a good intro to the series. I did think the ending was an anti-climax though. I bought this and the next two for 99p each, and this time I’ll be reading them in the right order. I doubt I’ll bother re-reading any of the others in the series though, after these three.

I can't remember if I've read And Then There Were None or not.

28 Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing by Lara Feigel - I have decided that it’s never a good idea to look forward to a book. I think that an Eeyore stance may have to be my go-to in future. I enjoyed Feigel’s previous works:-the one on writers in the Blitz (despite bits reading like thesis material) and the second one on Germany at the end of the war which was even more interesting. They were intelligent, accessible cultural/literary history, which I love to read. So, when I heard she was doing something on Lessing I was keen, especially as I recently read Lessing’s autobiography. However, in this ‘study’ Feigel is trying to depart from her previous style and interweave her personal experiences, sex, marriage, motherhood, with Lessing’s work and life. It’s a common approach I think, at the moment, relating life to key novels (Andy Miller, Rebecca Mead) but this time it doesn’t come off very well. Although, I feel as if I’m being a bit mean because she’s trying to think through important issues about (certain) women’s life choices.
I found the opening sections weak (almost naïve) and the references to Lessing very basic. She seemed surer of her ground in later sections where she reverts to an analytical, literary studies’ approach - I enjoyed her discussion of De Beauvoir versus Lessing, for example. Although this made the analogies from her own life seem incongruous- I just couldn’t stir up any enthusiasm for the juxtaposition of certain elements such as the lengthy discussion of her orgasms versus Lessing’s fictional ones. Overall, it’s a well-written and researched work and quite brave in its frank detailing of Feigel’s life but it wasn’t for me. I felt it lacked the sophistication of Rebecca Solnit or the accessibility of Tracks or Wild. It’s possible/probable that I am just the wrong reader for this, maybe if I were struggling with the same issues as Feigel, or hadn’t read a lot of feminist texts, I would have found it more engaging or illuminating.

30. The Woman In Cabin 10 - Ruth Ware

Easy reading enjoyable thriller about a woman who thinks she's witnessed a murder on a cruise ship, but nobody believes that the supposed victim ever existed. Had enough twists to keep me going, even if was a bit unbelievable at times - but then aren't all these sorts of books?

And then there were none is one of my favourite Christie’s.

Which is the one set on Burgh Island? That was a favourite of mine.