50 Book Challenge 2018 Part Seven

[southeastdweller]

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

I remember Sarah Green(e?) in Swish of The Curtain on the telly feeling old

panda I’ve ordered the Shel Silverstein as my son loves funny poems thank you.

I absolutely love Shel Silverstein's poems and the drawings that go with them . Fun fact of the day - he also wrote the songs A Boy Named Sue and the Ballad of Lucy Jordan :)

Remus pleased to hear you're enjoying Lonesome Dove so far. Have just started another promising Western In the Distance by Hernan Diaz. I'm about 75 pages in and it's already got me hooked. Very recently published and a Pulitzer finalist.

sadik that is extraordinary - I have just looked him up and discovered I listened to a song he wrote in the car yesterday (on an album I own) and realised I’m actually very well acquainted with many of his songs having grown up with them (country music household). I had no idea the Sue writer was also the 24 minutes to Go and One’s on the way writer. It has also solved a years long mystery of a song I heard once at an extended family party as a child called “Never Bite a Married Woman on the Thigh” which I never heard of again and was just a bizarre memory. How odd but great to find out in this roundabout way finally

I'm so glad the Shel Silverstein has bought up so many links! My husband heard me reading A Boy Named Sue to the kids and came rushing in and then played them the song. I didn't know about the others, later on I will find out a bit more about old Shel....

In an effort to increase my pace I decided to download a book onto my phone. In honour of this thread, I chose one if the first recommendations I noted. It was perfect for this - cheap, short, and I couldn’t put it down

27 Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan.

Manny runs the last night at a chain restaurant in a mall car park during a snowstorm. What’s the same and what’s different about the job and the team on the last night? Will the snowstorm sway his feelings about the company, the staff, and his relationships? I loved this - having just read Andrew Marr’s book about painting and how it increases our enjoyment of looking at the world, I just felt that the author was treating me to detail after detail of deep looking.

Just finished 43. H is for hawk by Helen Macdonald . While it was very well written I found myself wanting to scream at the author to go get some anti-depressants after about three chapters. Found it all a bit too emotionally involving for me so now reading some Ngaio Marsh . Apart from the casual racism this is progressing well.

Right, here are my last few reads:

80. Heartburn - Nora Ephron
Yup, another person who read and enjoyed. I am so following the crowd here.

81. Blood and Guts in High School - Kathy Acker
10 year old Janey is rejected by her father (who is also her lover) and ends up moving to NY, being kidnapped and forced into prositution. There are drawings, there is poetry, there is other stuff. I really hated this and only gave it two stars instead of one because I feel (hope) there's something I was missing. It was written in the late 1970s and does have a punk/breaking all the rules feel to it so might have been quite radical at the time. I don't know! Anyway, most of it was nonsense and ridiculous but I suspect a lot of it has gone over my head.
Or, it's just genuinely pants.

82. Everything Under - Daisy Johnson* I found this a slog but it has quite a few positive reviews. Gretel is searching for the mother she lost and in doing so has to return to the river on which she was raised. This book is all about exiles, changelings and river-dwellers living on the fringes of society and not wanting to connect with the authorities. It is about mother/daughter relationships and dark, muddy secrets. She's called Gretel for a reason folks. Sadly, the choppy, disjoined narrative ended up annoying me. As did the similarly structured sentences. But what annoyed me most was the prose. For example, every time someone ate, they blistered/burned/scorched the roof of their mouth by gulping, bolting, slurping their food. It drove me mad. It's on the Booker Long list but my feeling is that it won't make the short list. And if it does then I guess I know nothing!

Piggy, she had better be an excellent friend in other respects! I don’t remember Swish being on telly, but I wasn’t a huge TV watcher as a child.

Shel Silverstein- I had a record as a child of a song “there were green alligators, and long legged geese, some humpty back camels and some chimpanzees, some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as your born, you’re never gonna see no unicorn” which just zipped into my head- am sure it is by him but don’t want to google in case it blurs my memory!

Which Marsh are you reading Froglet?

tanaqui you’re right - a much better song to have a childhood memory of than the one I was stuck with

She is tanaqui so I have let her off.

I think I remember that song, Tanaqui.

Isn’t that the one where the unicorns are too busy playing to get on Noah’s ark?

What are you people talking about?

Has anyone looked at Amazon's September monthly Kindle deals yet?

I've just bought The man who mistook his wife for a hat which is 99p in the in the September kindle deals list.

Cote nothing in the deals that took my fancy. Although was rather cross to see Elif Shafak's Forty Rules of Love for 99p that I bought last month for 8.99......

I have just finished 27. Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine - Gail Honeyman during my lunch break which was clearly a very daft idea as I now have to attend a meeting with very red eyes!!
Much reviewed on here. I thought it was a great book and look forward to the author's next offering, whatever that may be.

EmGee, would you recommend 40 rules of love?

Monthly deals - those I’ve read and would recommend (but not necessarily to you cote as you’ve read them and only liked one ) are HHhH and Middlesex.

Also The Magus by John Fowles is there and it was a good read iirc though perhaps it didn’t add up to much ultimately.

Those I haven’t read that I was interested in - Lonesome Dove and The Cider House Rules

I am possibly also going to get Adrian Mole The Prostrate Years for myself my husband

There was a book about Shackleton and leadership I thought I saw too but I’ve already got Endurance to read so didn’t look further at it.

Lots to do today but checking in to share my summer reading with you all!

46. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby. Amusing tale by Newby (who left his job in the women's fashion industry) to go and climb Mir Samir, an unclimbed peak in the Nursitan mountains of NE Afghanistan in 1956.

47. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. Another enjoyable read from Patchett set in the world of pharmaceutical companies and researchers in the jungle of deepest, darkest Amazon.

48. One true thing by Anna Quindlen. Can't remember anything at all about this but I like her books!

49. The Good Father by Noah Hawley. Thought-provoking story of a doctor whose troubled teenage son from a previous marriage is put on trial for the attempted assassination of a popular contender for the US Presidency.

50. The Piano Teacher by Janice YK Lee. Well-written story set in a dual timeline in Hong Kong during WW2 and the post-war 50s.

51. Brother and Sister by Joanna Trollope. I enjoyed this but was obviously forgettable as I can't remember much about it!

52. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. Modern-day retelling of Antigone set in London and narrated by three siblings whose father was a Jihadist in Aghanistan. Interesting especially as told from a Muslim perspective. Chilling account too of the recruitment by jihadists.

53.Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Bit repetitive at times. How many times could Prior Philip's faith be tested?!? Could be tempted by the second volume if it comes up cheap in Kindle deals.

54. Do No Harm by Henry Marsh. I read some negative reviews about this which said Marsh was incredibly pompous. I didn't find that so much but I was struck by how much neurology has changed since he trained to be a surgeon, and also at how irritating it must be to have to deal with red tape bureaucracy in the NHS (computers not working, records of patients' bowel movements being kept for years, lack of beds etc).

55. The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak. Not sure about this. I really enjoyed the parts set in the C12th and was intrigued to read about Sufism. But it wasn't a story that bewitched me and I found it all a bit forgettable.

56. Slow Horses by Mick Herron. Not my kind of book at all but borrowed it from DH. It's about MI5 spies that have made mistakes (or not) and are banished to the hinterworld of Slough House.

57. Harry Potter and the Philospoher's Stone by JK Rowling. Enjoyed reading this to the DC.

58. The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters. Typical Sarah Waters-style book. Set in post-WW1 London, Frances and her elderly mother take in a married couple as lodgers into their home to make ends meet. It's not long before everything goes pear-shaped and a nightmare begins. Sarah Waters writes about this era really beautifully - you feel for Frances, who is like a square peg pushed into the round hole that society dictates.

59. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson. Brilliant! Loved this. Set in a small English village, Major Pettigrew and Mrs Ali, who runs the village shop, are brought together by similar circumstances (both are widowed) and their friendship develops, much to the horror of villagers who do not approve of mixed-race relationships.

60. The Dig by John Preston. This is based on the discovery of archeological remains at Sutton Hoo House. A really good little story - much preferred it to A Very English Scandal.

61. The Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I have fond memories of reading these books as a child. This is the prequel. Just finished reading it to the DC.

62. Benediction by Kent Haruf. Brilliant. I love this writer. He manages to write about daily life and trials in such a sensitive way. It's the third in the 'loose' trilogy of Plainsong and Eventide but this book, still set in Holt, Colorado, focuses on the family and friends of Dad Lewis, who is dying and has a month to live.

Not sure what to read now.....

62: Whiteout - Ragnar Jónasson

Icelandic whodunnit. Not very gripping and not much of a plot. Rather disappointed after reading some gushing reviews of this author - also somewhat regretting having bought 3 other books by the same person when they were 99p on Kindle, without having taken the precaution of reading any first.

Ah well. At least it bumps up the total! Onwards.....

Lonesome Dove update:

Still loving it. Several lots of shit have hit several fans and the body count has just risen substantially.

Cote -dare I say that on what I've read so far, I think you might like it! There are a few feeeeelings but they're mostly man feelings or man not wanting to talk about said feeeelings or man wishing he didn't have said feeeeeelings, and there's plenty of action and violence, and a fair bit of humour as well as the nasty stuff.

72. Eleanor Oliphant
    Re-read for book club (occuring shortly in a hot tub , better go and shave my armpits). Enjoyed this more second time round by ignoring the improbable stuff and laughing at the observational scenes such as dancing to YMCA and the cat pissing while maintaining aggressive eye contact.

73. The Night Manager by John Le Carré

Audiobook narrated by Michael Jayston

One of the very few occasions where I have preferred the film, or in this case tv production to the book. God I was bored in parts, particularly by what seemed to be the majority of female characters having some sort of assessment of fuckability attached to their physical and job descriptions. Wish I could find the quote for the airhostess with a hair lip who also had grave and robust sexuality or some such monumental eyerolling male gaze bullshit.
The narrator was good though, and I suppose it kept my mind off both my little toenails working themselves loose from my feet during a three day bank holiday trek, so that was something in its favour.

Stitches, just to say, yes, it is about the unicorns being too silly to get on the ark!

Mad busy with work, please all review really crap books for a while so I don’t feel I’m missing out!

Have finished Vanity Fair (and have ssen your thoughts on the TV version on Telly Addicts scribbly.

I did enjoy it but am afraid think it doesn't sit well alongside Bleak House.

Becky , though, is a besom of a lass! She has a real brass neck on her, and I love Thackeray's asides to undermine people's apparent intentions. I did love Dobbin, of course, and Miss Crawley (I rather like Frances de la Tour's turn on ITV). I was rather fond of Amelia , even though she is a drip.

My favourite bits are when the marvellously named Glorvina sings Irish songs repeatedly at Dobbin to woo him and stomps up and down in front of him singing them, and Thackeray's transcriptions of Jos's attempts at French, which tickled me.

It is nice to read some Victorian humour and I do think Thackeray does have some good insights to offer about social class, social climbing and the lot of women in all things matrimonial. I preferred it to Austen by a long way but don't want to start an Austen Bath bunfight