50 Book Challenge 2018 Part Six

[southeastdweller]

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

How're you getting on so far?

90. The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood.

This is my third Atwood after The Handmaid's Tale and Hagseed. It chronicles the experiences of three women as their men are stolen by the beautiful and mysterious Zenia, and their reactions to this and to her eventual return. First of all, I think Zenia did them all a massive favour as all three men were arseholes. I read it as Atwood making a point about agency - the women are focussed on Zenia taking their men (starting to sing 'Jolene' now) while ignoring or forgiving the men for their behaviour. Looking at Goodreads reviews though not many people seem to agree with me! Zenia herself is a very opaque character - it is telling that she is always the subject of a story or a memory related by Tony, Charis or Roz rather than the reader seeing her actions directly. That automatically brings in the issue of the unreliable narrator (Tony, for instance, suppresses part of her story when relating it to the others). It adds to Zenia's mysterious allure, as do her multitude of origin stories. I think Atwood is trying to say that the femme fatale of popular legend is entirely fictional, and that it is just an excuse for bad male behaviour. This is also a novel about women's place and learned behaviour/coping mechanisms for dealing with men's actions. I enjoyed it and I'll definitely read more of her work!

I went to see Caitlin Moran in Edinburgh last night and got a free copy of her new book, How To Be Famous! She was being interviewed by Lucy Mangan, and the two of them were very funny together. This has now made me want to buy Bookworm, which I know lots of people on this thread have read.

Not updated for a while:

22: Even Dogs in the Wild - Ian Rankin. I used to love Rebus but it's really starting to feel that he&s just churning them out now to pay the mortgage. I find the relationship between Rebus and Big Ger unrealistic. Malcolm Fox annoys me too - he is a non character. Sadly, Siobhan seems to be sidelined more in his favour. Only really for the die hard fans.

23: The Girl who Got Revenge - Marnie Riches. 5th in the series about a Dutch Detective and a British criminologist (who just happens to be his girlfriend). A twelve-year-old girl is found dead at the Amsterdam port. An old man dies mysteriously in a doctors’ waiting room. Two seemingly unconnected cases, but Inspector Van den Bergen doesn’t think so…
Criminologist George McKenzie is called in to help crack the case before it’s too late. But the truth is far more deadly than anyone can imagine… Can George get justice for the dead before she ends up six-feet under too?

Obvious twists and turns and a very unrealistic fight scene which involves blister plasters - silly and far fetched. Still I enjoyed it - but not as much as the first two.

24: Keeping Faith - Jodie Picoult: Somewhere between belief and doubt lies faith. For the second time in her marriage, Mariah White catches her husband with another woman and Faith, their seven year old daughter, witnesses every painful minute. In the aftermath of a sudden divorce, Mariah struggles with depression and Faith seeks solace in a new friend… a friend who may or may not be imaginary.
Interesting take on God being female, but apart from that it's a typical Jodi Picioult book. Keeping Faith explores a family plagued by the media, the medical profession, and organized religion in a world where everyone has an opinion but no one knows the truth - is the mother a charlatan or is there something which we can't explain? To be honest, I didn't care by the end. I thought it went on for about 60pages too many.

25: How to build a Girl - Caitlin Moran. It’s 1990. Johanna Morrigan, fourteen, has shamed herself so badly on local TV that she decides that there’s no point in being Johanna anymore and reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde—fast-talking, hard-drinking Gothic hero and full-time Lady Sex Adventurer. She will save her poverty-stricken Bohemian family by becoming a writer—like Jo in Little Women, or the Bröntes—but without the dying young bit.

By sixteen, she’s smoking cigarettes, getting drunk and working for a music paper. She’s writing pornographic letters to rock-stars, having all the kinds of sex with all kinds of men, and eviscerating bands in reviews of 600 words or less.

But what happens when Johanna realizes she’s built Dolly with a fatal flaw? Is a box full of records, a wall full of posters, and a head full of paperbacks, enough to build a girl after all?

Seemed repetitive after reading Moran's other books. However that is to be expected as Johanna/Dolly is Moran in disguise. I really enjoyed it though. An easy read that tackles (gently) class, sexuality and finding yourself. I had to read this before "How to be famous" (I like books in order) which I got on Sunday when I saw Caitlin live at Nottingham -reading extracts from the book and engaging her audience brilliantly. Looking forward to finishing book 26 - am enjoying it thus far . Particular highlight for me is the "angry wings"

1. Mythos - Stephen Fry
2. Origin - Dan Brown
3. The Mitford Murders - Jessica Fellowes

4.Paris - Edward Rutherford

1. The Four Quartets- TS Eliot *
2. The Magus of Hay - Phil Rickman
3. Innocent Traitor - Alison Weir
4. The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood (audio) *
5. 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 G 1.Mythos - Stephen Fry

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

4.Paris - Edward Rutherford

1. The Four Quartets- TS Eliot
2. The Magus of Hay - Phil Rickman
3. Innocent Traitor - Alison Weir
4. The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood (audio)
5. 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 20. Fools and Mortals - Bernard Cornwell 21. A Very English Scandal - John Preston *

Yule, yes, the Bryony Gordon is a light read. It's like an extended magazine article as much as anything.

a very unrealistic fight scene which involves blister plasters
Straining every mental muscle to try to picture this one, Bell !

I'm in awe of the heroine Biblio. Despite being beaten up and drugged she manages to extract two blister plasters and stick them to her assailants eyes. I can't get the bloody things on my feet never mind using them as self defence!!!

69: In Pursuit: The Men and Women Who Hunted the Nazis - Andrew Nagorski
Enjoyed this Kindle cheapie which did exactly what it says on the tin – and I learned a few things I didn’t know about too, which is always useful!

55. Ragnar Jónasson - The Darkness

Icelandic crime thriller. Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir is coming up for retirement, but is forced into it rather more swiftly than she anticipated. She is given a final two weeks and her boss suggests looking at one of the cold cases, not expecting her to actually do so. Hulda chooses the death of a Russian woman asylum seeker, found with a head injury in the water of a bay a year previously. The original investigation was lacklustre and Hulda discovers that a second Russian woman had gone missing around the same time. As the clock runs down, Hulda finds her approach to retirement is far from restful and puts her in real danger.

27. The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah. This reminded me of Burial Rites - a young woman has been found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, and the story of the events surrounding the murder emerges gradually over the course of the book. This one is set in modern day Zimbabwe rather than 19th century Iceland. Well written and moving.

28. The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar (listened to on Audible). Already much discussed on this thread. While I agree with some of the criticism (such as the disappearing plot line of Polly), I basically come down on the side of the fans - I really enjoyed this.

29. The Story of a Marriage by Geir Gulliksen. For some reason, I seem to like reading about marriage breakdowns and have in the past loved The Heart-Shaped Bullet by Kathryn Flett, Heartburn by Nora Ephron and Aftermath by Rachel Cusk. This one (written from the man's perspective) doesn't hold a candle to any of the above. Slow moving and dull.

30. Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. Clay is a young man in his 20s who starts working the night shift at a very unusual book shop after responding to an ad in the window. The customers seem to be members of some kind of cult, while the books themselves are even weirder! Clay gets his colourful array of friends involved to solve the mystery. Good fun.

47 All the Devils are Here by David Seabrook – Recommended by MegBusset Seabrook moves through the ‘seamier’ areas of Kent (before property prices made them attractive to artists and gentrification inevitably followed) mapping out a singular cultural landscape that ranges from the literary - T.S. Eliot in Margate, Dickens in Rochester – to the more salacious – the tragic decline of ‘Carry-On’s’ Charles Hawtrey, local murder, fascist movements. His observations mingle with personal anecdotes, digressions and musings so that the book becomes as much a portrait of the writer as the region. A fascinating experience.

Since my sad dnf with the book my DH gave me, I’ve read

18 The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch. To some extent like Dawson’s Creek, and to some extent like Our Exploits at West Poley. It was OK.

Now I’m starting Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour Trilogy with Men at Arms. I considered it from all angles trying to work out if I’d read it before as it seemed a bit familiar, but i haven’t. This is the sort of thing I read as a teen/young adult and I feel my reading habits falling into the rhythm they had then.

103. All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

So glad I finally read this. Fabulous book. Everybody should read it. It’s so descriptive of real life in the trenches.

Book People are currently selling a collection of A.A. Milne’s books for adults, four novels and a book of short stories for around ten pounds (including delivery costs) so I thought I’d try them.

48 Four Day’s Wonder by A.A. Milne – Published in 1933 this is Milne’s gentle send-up of Golden Age crime fiction. To give a sense of Milne’s style here’s how the story opens:

'Jenny Windell let herself in with her latch-key at Auburn Lodge , and…drifted upstairs to the drawing room, she was surprised to see the body of her Aunt Jane lying on a rug…It had been known for years, of course, that Aunt Jane would come to a bad end. Not only was her black hair cropped short like a boy’s, but she smoked cigarettes out of a long red holder, and knew the Sitwells.'

Jane’s body isn’t Jenny’s only problem, neither of them are supposed to be at Auburn Lodge, so her instinct is to flee. When the bumbling Inspector Marigold takes over the case Jenny quickly becomes his prime suspect. Can Jenny evade Marigold? Will the unexpected assistance of an acclaimed crime writer’s dashing brother help her solve the mystery of Jane’s death and prove her own innocence?

I enjoyed this immensely, it was a little bit ‘Mitford’, a dash ‘Wodehouse’ and generally the sort of delicate 1930s comedy that I find appealing.

16. Women by Chloe Caldwell

A young woman moves to the city and has a passionate affair with an older woman.

This was a gorgeous hardback edition of this little novella. I read it in two days. It was beautifully written and the author really made you understand what the narrator felt. I also loved how she worked in the library and mentioned lots of books. I will look for other work by this author.

That is truly an impressive use of blister plasters, Bell

Dottie, that AA Milne book sounds great. My library has another of his in stock (The Red House Mystery) so I've just ordered it.

Meanwhile, I've started The crossway, by Guy Stagg . It's the author's account of walking from Canterbury to Jerusalem, and I'm loving it. One of the reviewers has said it bears comparison to Patrick Leigh Fermor, and I think that's fair. He doesn't go in for Fine Writing, but what seems like simple prose somehow manages to be very effective.

I've been through such a slow spell and it's taken me ages to finish it but finally finished number 57. All Things Cease to Appear - Elizabeth Brundage.

This was so enthusiastically reviewed upthread but huge apologies to the lover of this novel, it nearly finished me off. Still, if we all like the same things it would be very dull.
I felt the writing to be slow and cumbersome with this one and had zero inclination to finish it off. It contained lines like this: "The sky a crumpled white, like an idea that can't be rescued."
However, it wasn't all bad, a slow, sad tale about the women caught in the life of a thoroughly unpleasant male academic in upstate New York in 1979. I did like the ending when I finally got there however. But I wouldn't recommend this.

Hoping to finish Circe this weekend and tempted to buy Cote's recommendation for a bargainous £1.99.

I'm so sorry for all those who have had a difficult couple of weeks. Dealing with hospital appointment and visits is so waring somehow.

Good to hear you enjoyed Evening in the Palace of Reason, Cote.

I've just finished a slim but powerful novel about one of Bach's greatest admirers, as it happens - 45: The Noise of Time - Julian Barnes

In 1936, after Stalin had attended a performance, Dmitri Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was denounced in Pravda as 'Muddle Instead of Music', a verdict that seemed to seal the fate of the 30-year-old composer. He expected to be killed at any moment. He wasn't - but spent the rest of his life in an agony of dread and apprehension, struggling with the impossibility of reconciling his life and beliefs as an artist with the compromises - and ultimate selling-out - needed to survive in the Soviet Union. Barnes explores Shostakovich's self-hatred and moral equivalence superbly (nobody really knows what he did think about the regime - which is a gift for any novelist - but I feel Barnes probably comes very close to nailing it).

I saw Armando Iannucci's film The Death of Stalin recently, and there were quite a few points at which it overlapped with this book in terms of portraying the sheer lunacy, banality, and terror of the Stalinist regime. I also love Shostakovich's music, so felt I got a lot out of this one.

Disaster has struck my random number generator approach.

My tbr list (and my read list) all numbered is saved on my laptop. Which is broken. And has been with IT 'for looking into' all week. I may actually have to pick a book myself! The horror!

Anyway, just finished book 47 (I think) The Teacher Gap a new book about the problems in teacher retention. Lots of evidence and research and case studies. Very interesting. The pages about 'research hermits' resonated with me and I feel like sending the book to my head , highlighted. He would either a) not read it b) not acknowledge it (this happened when I sent him a whole chapter about data from a book) or c) shout at me.

Or all three

Can you not pile them in a circle around your feet and then spin round and round with your eyes shut with an outstretched finger and then get a child/partner to shout “STOP” Piggy?

Ooo... good idea. Like Spin The Bottle. Spin the Piggy.

Actually, I could just drink a bottle of wine and then use that..

Have you done your Bleak House chapters yet? I started mine this afternoon and then promptly fell asleep in the garden.

I have. I read them last weekend. Forgotten them all again!!

31. A View of the World: Selected Journalism - I’ve been staying with my aunt in Spain as she recovers from colon surgery, bless her. Various hospital visits and nursing duties have meant I’ve not been able to raid her epic book collection, which is mostly travel writing as that was her career, as much as I usually like to. Did manage to read this absolute gem, selected journalism from Lewis’ travels from the late 50s to early 80s, all beautifully and insightfully written if not always easy to read - tackling subjects such as an interview with Castro’s executioner in the days following the Cuban revolution, painful accounts of bullfights, and most harrowing of all the genocide of the tribal Indian population of Brazil. Written in a clear, informative style and utterly fascinating if depressing.

Definitely need something light next.

One of my year 10 boys came running over to me at the end of a lesson today and proudly pulled This Thing Of Darkness out of his bag. So proud !

alias I hope your aunt feels better soon {smile]

or even

Biblio hope the Milne's good, haven't got that one in my haul. I like the sound of your pilgrimage book, I enjoy Patrick Leigh Fermor too, read a biography and then re-read his book on the Mani last year. I also enjoy books about walking in general, have you come across Gideon Lewis-Kraus's A Sense of Direction? I read it a while ago and really enjoyed it, he did the Camino pilgrimage, and then went on to do a pilgrim trail in Japan and then in Ukraine, thought it was a lovely book and really interesting.