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?

27: Lonely Courage - Rick Stroud
The French Resistance began almost as soon as France surrendered to Adolf Hitler’s troops. At first it was made up of small, disorganized groups of men and women working in isolation. But by the time of the liberation of France in 1944 around 400,000 French citizens (nearly 2% of the population) were involved. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) set up by Winston Churchill in 1941 saw its role in France as recruiting and organising guerilla fighters; supplying and training them; and disrupting the invaders by any means, including sabotage, the collection of intelligence and the dissemination of black propaganda designed to demoralise the Germans. The aim of this work was the eventual invasion of Europe by the Allied forces and the liberation of France.

As described in Sebastian Faulks’ bestselling book Charlotte Gray, women would play a major role in SOE activities over the coming years of the war, and those in charge of SOE in London believed it necessary and vital to deploy operatives who could speak French and were adept at espionage. The basic SOE unit was a team of three: a leader, a wireless operator and a courier. These teams operated in Resistance circuits and the agents were given random codenames. Now, for the first time, we shed light on what life was really like for these brave women who infiltrated France by moonlight to help bring the downfall of the Nazis. From their selection and training; dropping into Occupied France, their attempts to survive on a day-to-day basis whilst being hunted by the dreaded German Gestapo; to the actions and ultimate achievements of these key women. Some survived by luck through the war, whilst others would be captured, tortured and executed before the Nazis final capitulation.

There were 39 women recruited by SOE and this book follows the better known ones, eg Nancy Wake, Noor Inayat Khan, Violette Szabo, Pearl Witherington. Having read other books about the women of SOE, (The women who lived for danger. Vera Atkins: A life in secrets. Spy Princess: The life of Noor Inayat Khan) I was expecting great things from this book.

Unfortunately, got me, it fell short. As Stroud has written their stories across a timeline, the narrative never seems to flow - so whilst you get an overview of what was happening at a particular time, the snippets of information you get about the women is fragmented. I suppose this mirrors how London would have received information but I found it frustrating and feel there are better accounts out there.

Every time I read about the SOE, I feel myself becoming angry about the incompetence of Maurice Buckmaster who was probably responsible for many deaths as he will fully ignored protocol and continued to instruct messages to be sent when to all around him it was obvious that the agents had been captured. In my opinion he didn't deserve an OBE - a court martial would have been more appropriate.

Anyhow, I'll get off my soapbox......in summary, not all bad, but better as an introduction for those who've not read any of the better books about the SOE.

badb I have just added You Think It, I'll Say It to my list! It sounds similar to Florida by Lauren Groff which i read and loved last year.

BellBook That sounds so annoying, I've read about Violette Szabo, after seeing the film 'Carve Her Name with Pride' and had the book you reviewed was on my 'possibles' list but will cross it off now. The only other book I've read that's vaguely related is Caroline Moorhead's A Train in Winter about women of the French resistance, which I thought was excellent.

Or even 'on my 'possibles' list', grr.

59 Motherhood by Sheila Heti – published 2018. Although this is represented as a novel it’s quite unconventional in its style and structure. It’s episodic and often more reminiscent of an essay than a fictional piece, it’s also peppered with aphorisms. The unnamed narrator is in a settled relationship with her partner Miles, they’re in their late thirties. Miles is a successful professional, the narrator is a writer slowly becoming established in her career. Over the course of the book she struggles with the idea of motherhood, the politics of motherhood for women and the possibility of becoming a mother. In order to explore the questions raised by this dilemma she draws on a range of tools: from her dreams to having Tarot readings to posing questions which she answers using the I Ching method of flipping coins for ‘yes’ or ‘no’. She does this not because she’s dedicated to these systems but because they create pathways that redirect her own immediate responses. She is further challenged by her background; her family are descended from Holocaust survivors and have a culture of commitment to sustaining the familial line. In addition, her female friends are slowly disappearing into motherhood and seemingly everyone around her is preoccupied with her continued childlessness.
I thought that this was a very interesting, complex piece. It contained some wonderful passages both stylistically and, in the way Heti reflects on how motherhood impacts on women’s lives and especially their time. She presents a sensitive exploration of how ‘motherhood’ divides women into mothers and non-mothers: so childless women are often ‘othered outsiders’. Although her subject is ostensibly motherhood, Heti also works through ideas about creativity in a broader sense, here her writing, but her ideas could apply to women engaged in other forms of artistic creation. In that sense the novel reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and of the famous Cyril Connelly quote ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’ However, there were times when I found the style too mannered, the content repetitive and sometimes overly superficial. It may be that that was deliberate, some reviewers have suggested the structure mimics the passing of time and how questions occur and recur over periods of our lives. Since the idea of motherhood is so bound to time (the biological clock) this makes sense as a take on the novel. Overall, I had mixed feelings about this and I think that the book has equally divided reviewers. I wouldn’t heartily recommend this but I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from trying it either.

Dottie the Vera Atkins book is very good. A bit hard to get into at first, but well worth it when you do.

Whilst I think Buckmaster was an incompetent idiot, Vera really seemed to care for the "girls". She makes it her mission to find out what happened to them. It's harrowing in places, but inspirational too. People look up to footballers and pop groups as hero's, but these women (and men) along with the resistance fighters are true hero's.

I'd recommend that book.

Bell thanks! Btw is your name after the Kim Novak film?

TimeforaGandT - the ones you've listed are the school stories (although you didn't quite remember the names correctly!) which are the most well-known ones. She did write other books about the Marlow family outside school.

Thanks for your review Dottie - although you don't recommend it unreservedly, it sounds interesting. I've added Motherhood to my list.

Bell added the Vera Atkins to my list, didn't realise it was by Sarah Helm, I thought her book on Ravensbruck was excellent.

Tara think the Heti is worth trying but was one of those novels where people seem to either rave about it or think it's tedious. I found some sections irritating but others were really astute and thought it was worth it for those passages.

Thank you Cedar,Tara and Dottie - I definitely only read the Antonia Forest school ones (and misremembered the titles!) and missed out all the holiday ones although it didn’t feel like I had missed chunks of plot IIRC. Will be digging out my school ones and seeing if I can track down the holiday ones.

33. Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge. Younge chose a day (23 Nov 2013) and wrote about the children and teens killed by guns in the US on that day. There's no central record of this, so he had to track them down from local news stories, social media etc (and acknowledges that he may have missed one or two). The stories go into different levels of detail because he was able to talk to friends and relatives in some of the cases, while others refused to be interviewed so only the bare bones of the narrative are known.

This book successfully combines the personal touch (as you would expect, some of the stories are very distressing) with interesting discussions of the wider issues (race, poverty, gun control).

My only minor criticism is that he says "Every day, on average, seven children and teens are killed by guns... On a typical day, of the seven children and teens who die... three would be black, three white, one Hispanic... But precisely because the day was random, it was not typical. Of the ten who died during the time frame of this book... seven were black, two Hispanic and one white." In other words he chose a day when the non-white body count was significantly higher than average (90% rather than 57%). Maybe this was unintentional and he genuinely did pick a day completely at random which happened to be characterised in this way. But I find that slightly hard to believe, given that he is black himself and that there is a lot about race in this book. Maybe I'm being a bit cynical!

Anyway. He has a lot of interesting stuff to say about how gun violence affects the (mainly) black community. This is a good book with a powerful message.

Remus, I also very much enjoyed reading The Alienist a few years back. I hope you enjoy it.

Really liking it so far, Shake. Some really interesting characters and dynamics and I really like the two detective brothers.

Hi everyone, haven’t been here in awhile, here’s my latest list:

📚50 book challenge

1. Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
2. Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders
3. Fingers in the Sparkle jar - Chris Packham
4. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
5. The little book of self-care - Mel Noakes
6. Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie
7. This is going to hurt - Adam Kay
8. The watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
9. My Cousin Rachel - Daphne du Maurier

10. Frankenstein- Mary Shelley 11. Black Swan Green - David Mitchell 12. Winter - Ali Smith 13. I am, I am,I am - Maggie O’Farrell 14. The tent, the bucket & me - Emma Kennedy 15. What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty 16. The Night Watch - Sarah Waters 17. A history of Britain in 21 Women - Jenni Murray 18. The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern 19. Bookworm: A memoir of childhood reading - Lucy Mangan 20. The seven deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton 21. I am Malala - Malala Yousafzai 22. Being Mortal, Medicine & what matters in the end - Atul Gawande 23. The little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery 24. Carpe Jugulum - Terry Pratchett 25. The Immortalists - Chloe Benjamin 26. Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine - Gail Honeyman 27. Big little lies - Liane Moriarty 28. Hag-Seed - Margaret Atwood

So not sure where to go next ...’This Thing of Darkness’ given the quote following on from Hag-seed, or ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ ???

Argh! Distracted by the telly or hopefully would have noticed the repetitive use of ‘enjoy’.. Sigh..

Remus, it must be about 8 years ago that I read it, may be time for a re-read..

Plus3 both great options!

61. Charlaine Harris - Sweet and Deadly

It appears my library trip on Saturday hasn't been the best selection so far - the Kim Newman wasn't up to his usual standard and neither Charlaine Harris here. Although it turns out this was her first novel so I suppose she can be allowed some leeway.

Catherine Linton returns to her home town of Lowfield, Mississippi after the deaths of her parents in a car wreck which was most likely murder. Her suspicions seem confirmed when she stumbles on the body of the long-time nurse at her father's medical practice, but what was it they both knew?

The third in the set of Saturday's borrowings is Ordeal by Fire by Sarah Hawkswood - I hope it's better than these last two.

Pushkin Press has added a short series of Japanese novellas to their imprint. I found it hard not to buy all of them, they have beautiful candy-coloured covers and I’m drawn to them like a magpie. I don’t know if anyone else is seduced by book design but I think there are some wonderful covers around at the moment, much more visually pleasing than those bland photographic covers that were the dominant for quite a while.

60. Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki trans. by Polly Barton 2017 – Taro lives in Tokyo, mourning his father’s death and isolated after his divorce, he has a small apartment in a block that’s earmarked for demolition. As the building empties Taro becomes aware of one of his neighbours, she has a mystifying obsession with a neighbouring ‘sky-blue’ house. For a while he watches her watching it, until one day they meet. Nishi’s an artist who has a story to tell about the blue house and its once elegant garden. After Nishi shares the story with Taro, he joins her in her quest to uncover more of the house’s secrets. I thought this was a gentle, atmospheric, beautifully-observed story. Although the mystery of the blue house drives the (slight) plot it’s as much about the nature of life in fast-changing urban spaces. Spaces in which our neighbours are often unknown or at most glimpsed through windows, and where demolished buildings represent the slow erasure of our personal histories, consigning the spaces of our past to spaces of memory. Shibasaki’s narrative is both elegiac and optimistic, reflecting on how where we live impacts on how we live and how we feel about our everyday existence. I really enjoyed this but I think it’s not going to be to everyone’s taste.

Just saying hello as I am a bit behind with this thread and with reading as am heading off to teach abroad in a few days time! Was enjoying the mermaid and mrs Hancock and didn’t quite finish it in time so it pinged back to the library and I am on a wait list! But is there any chance that anyone else read The Moon and the Sun by Vonda MacIntyre around 20 years ago, because IMO opinion there is a really strong resemblence?

Dottie, Justified is totally worth watching on TV, and stars the lovely Timothy Olyphant.

I didn’t realise there were later Tales of the City, so thank you to whoever mentioned them (can’t check as on stupid phone!). I read them all in the late 80s so will have a reread.

The Grand Sophie is possibly my favourite Heyer Pepe (hope it was Pepe!), hope you enjoy it!

31. Meadowland: The Private Life of a British Field John Lewis-Semple Faced with the horror of a bookless journey, I picked this up on a secondhand bookstall, remembering it had been reviewed here. The writer describes a year in the life of the flora and fauna in a meadow on his farm. I'm not a naturalist, but I have a passing acquaintance with the British countryside (as a walker and holidaymaker). I was fascinated by how much life there was in this small space (insects literally measured in tons, over fifty birds etc). Lewis-Semple swings between lyrical prose and clear-eyed descriptions of life and death. I'd have liked a bit more about his life as a farmer and some more background about intensive farming and its effect on the countryside. Occasionally it was repetitive. But when everything I read about the countryside is doom and gloom, it's lovely to hear about somewhere so full of life and success. A farmer friend pointed out on Facebook recently that vegans kill more animals than meat-eaters, because the chemicals used in modern arable farming kill so much wildlife. Reading this, I think she has a point.

47. Zoo by James Patterson

Animals are starting to turn on humanity, and biologist Jackson Oz is trying to, firstly, make everyone understand the danger, and then secondly, find a cure.

A so so thriller containing a fair amount of gory animal attacks. Also some very dubious decision making, most notably in Oz’s choice of pet.
He’s a biologist who fervently believes that something is causing all animals to develop hyperagressive behaviour towards humans, and then, it’s revealed that he has chosen to share his small New York City apartment with.... a chimpanzee.
Not exactly a safe pet at the best of times. It really doesn’t take much imagination to see what might go wrong here.

48. And The Rest is History by Jodi Taylor

More time travelling adventures with St Mary’s. And my, this was a gloomy installment. It’s almost as if Taylor thought “Things are going really well for my key character. What sort of things would mess her life up? Let’s do that all at once!”

49. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Nick’s wife disappears on the morning of their 5th wedding anniversary, under circumstances that make Nick look very guilty. He swears he isn’t.

I found it difficult to believe in the character of Amy, but overall I enjoyed reading this.

50. The Six Sacred Stones by Matthew Reilly

Action packed thriller. Jack West Jr and friends embark on another quest to save the world. As with the previous book Seven Ancient Wonders, there’s a lot of archeological / tomb raider / mythical stuff, and there’s a bit of a high stakes Indiana Jones theme going on. Good fun overall.

24. The Crysalids by John Wyndham

This was a bit teenagey, not too much, but still quite good because it was constructed in very much an adult way, especially at the end.

Many generations, perhaps centuries after a nuclear war that decimated human civilization and scorched much of the Earth, humans live in small towns and constantly watch out for & destroy mutations. This includes humans who are castrated & cast out for even the smallest deformity/abnormality/peculiarity. Then a couple of teenagers realise that they can communicate with each other via telepathy. They keep this talent hidden to survive until one day the can't.

I enjoyed this book and I think DD will, too.