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.

Pleased to see I wasn't the only one underwhelmed by Hagseed. I reviewed recently saying may be it was the wrong book at the wrong time but maybe it was just the wrong book.

It's just a bit like it was writing by numbers (which ti be fair it was, as it is a commission, after all!) and could have been written by a much lesser author.

Anna Bentinck, if it's the same one, appears to be Tim Bentinck's sister (for any fellow Archers fans out there )

I just popped on to second the recommendations for The Observations - it's a great book. I really must read Gillespie and I ; there's no excuse....it's been on the tbr shelf for ages

I've bought nothing in the Kindle sale - they seem to be getting worse. I've read Crocodile and quite enjoyed it. In fact, I should give some more of hers a go at some point. They're fluff, but fun fluff!

I’ve only bought the Henry Blofeld for my DF’s Kindle and Nicholas Cranes’s The Making Of The British Landscape which was recommended on here a while back.

Hi indigo yes, I was really looking forward to Sugar Money but although it's an important and interesting subject, it wasn't in the same class as The Underground Railroad or The Long Song for example.

And the strong individual narrative voice so present in Gillespie and I and The Observations didn't work in quite the same way. I'm hoping she reverts to her usual style in her next book.

I bought How to Break Up With Your Phone. A few people here have recommended the Maggie O'Farrell memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am which is also in the Kindle sale.

Book 89: Sprig Muslin – Georgette Heyer

I thought I’d read this years ago, but, if I had, I’d forgotten every word, so think it’s actually one of hers that I’ve been missing out on. Loved it. Really silly, and very funny, with japes and capers galore and a thoroughly satisfying ending. Heyer at her hilarious best.

Snap, Best, I also bought "The Making of the English Landscape.* I saw Neil Oliver's "Ancient History of Britain" was in the Kindle sale too - I didn't buy it as I'd read it previously, but I thought he did a good job. Not everybody loves him as a presenter (I'm quite fond of him shaking his pretty locks) but he has a decent writing style. I also bought an Ann Cleeves book.

31 The Midnight Line Lee Child.

More absurdly large landscapes for Jack Reacher to traverse. In this one, he does some old-school map reading in a university library to assist. Slightly underwhelming final battle - I was just explaining the ‘final battle set up’ schema to DH when this one resolved pretty quickly.

32 Territorial Rights by Muriel Spark
33 Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

Both ideas picked up from the thread. The Muriel Spark characters are just as way out as the crazy rich Asians, but the writing is, obviously, a lot better. And the action starts earlier - I waited a long time for anyone to do anything crazy in the Kwan book.

I agree the Kindle deals are rubbish at the moment. It all looks rubbish. That said I did get the Grayson Perry book and Miller’s Crossing by Anna Quindlen for 99p o

I give up. Can’t use MN on phone

The kindle deals all year have been very disappointing ☹️

Today I got Cass Greens latest- don't you cry, and the Alice network by Kate Quinn.

I bought So many ways to begin by Jon McGregor yesterday and burial of Ghosts a stand alone by Ann Cleeves and also no Hayders the treatment.

Just to add to my 3000 TBR

I have completely lost my place on the thread and no idea where I'm up to with my books, so I'm just going to list the last 'few' I've read.

71.) The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain, by Ian Mortimer -- Much the same as the last couple of books. I was goggling a bit at some of the extracts of the Samuel Pepys diaries though. Good Lord, man, keep it in your bloody pants.

72.) On Editing, Helen Corner-Bryant & Kathryn Price - Meh. Nothing new here.

73.) Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy -- Beautifully written, brutal western. Very violent, and some of the descriptions of scenery are stunning.

74.) Rotherweird, Book 1: Andrew Caldecott -- I wanted to like this more. The town of Rotherweird has been isolated from the rest of the country since Elizabethan times, with strictures in place to forbid the study of the town's history. It's all a bit New Weird, with strange contraptions and unusual character names, but something about the writing just didn't quite gibe with me. Still I quite liked some of the characters and I've bought the sequel and will probably reread at some point. Hopefully it'll stick a bit better the second time around.

75.) We Go Around in the Night and are Consumed by Fire, by Jules Grant - Crime novel about an all-female street gang in Manchester.

76.) Ladder of Years, Anne Tyler -- During a family holiday, put-upon mother-of-three Delia leaves her family on the beach and keeps going, running away to a small town where she finds a room to stay and a job and reinvents herself as a single woman. The first Anne Tyler I've read, and thoroughly enjoyed it, with a couple of brilliantly funny moments.

77.) Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, Lucy Mangan Not much more I can say about this, except it was delightful and I loved it. Our reading tastes didn't overlap much I lean much more heavily towards horror and SF -- but there were a couple of touchstones, Enid Blyton and Sweet Valley High. I also appreciated the potted history of children's books, as well as all the musing on what reading can mean for children. I only have one minor quibble, which is that there was an awful lot of description of illustrations, particularly in the early chapters, and some pictures wouldn't have gone amiss.

~~

And finally, I'm currently reading Vox by Christina Dalcher. It's horribly unnerving.

*30. Ask An Astronaut - Tim Peake
*
DS got this out of the library a couple of weeks ago and when he returned it, I took it out.
And I really enjoyed it. Peake covers all aspects of his experience as an astronaut from selection and training, through his journey to space, to his return and his thoughts on the future of manned space exploration. Everything is presented in a Q&A format.
It's just simple/accessible enough to engage older children/teens (DS is 10), yet there is enough content to keep an adult enthused. Peake's passion for exploration and science and his gentle sense of humour make this a joy to read. I found it fascinating and would thoroughly recommend it.

Neil Oliver's History of Ancient Britain as featured in the mostly woeful monthly deals is really engaging and interesting. By contrast his History of Scotland was a yawnfest of 'and this king this, and then that king that'.

51. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman Like previous reviewers I found the comedic theme of Eleanor's ignorance of popular culture and social norms slightly unbelievable, overdone and at odds with the tragic story of her childhood. The parts where the comedy was played down were better written and provided the more satisfying bits of the story. Overall, I liked it.

Tim Peake was reading the bedtime story on CBeebies FROM THE FRICKING ISS last week hound - I was beyond excited. Literally the coolest thing ever.

Ahem...

In other news:

34. "A History of the World in 21 Women" by Jenni Murray. Quite a slim book and annoying in that it was offering tantalising glimpses into the lives of some remarkable women from history but then jumping to the next one just as it was getting interesting! But the book would have been too long otherwise and I guess it served its primary purpose of making me want to read more about them! I have already reserved Jung Chang's bibliography of Dowager Empress Cixi from the library.

48. These Broken Stars - Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner

So this was for the popsugar/goodreads challenge I’m doing - the prompt was a book set on another planet. I could have been sensible and chosen The Martian but I saw this in the library and the cover was pretty. It’s a YA action/survival/romance story set in space and none of those things appealed to me in the slightest so I was putting it off and kind of dreading it but what do you know it wasn’t horrible, I read it in 2 days - couple of hours bedtime reading over both night S and it was actually pretty fun, got really quite nonsensical towards the end but I didn’t mind overly.

biblio, thanks. Will add The Life of Stuff to my want to read list.

Just got the sample of Vox which sounds interesting.

I'm currently reading The Illumination of Ursula Flight - 99p at the moment.

76.) Vox, by Christina Dalcher -- I just finished this tonight. It's dystopian SF in the vein of The Handmaid's Tale (and with heavy overtones of 1984), set in an America run by a right-wing religious government. Almost overnight, all women lose their jobs, have their bank accounts frozen and are ultimately fitted with counters that tally the number of words they speak each day to a maximum of 100, with electric shocks as punishment if they go over. Told from the point of view of Jean, a former neurolinguist, who before losing her job, was working on a serum to treat aphasia.

The first half of this was chilling. The family dynamics in particular I found deeply uncomfortable; her husband's cowardice and the way her eldest son was groomed and indoctrinated in the belief system, and his attitude to women is very possibly one of the worst fears of mothers of boys. I found the set-up horribly believable, how easily it happened.

And then the second half happened, and it started to fall apart a bit. Without giving too much away, I wasn't convinced by the science. Maybe it's realistic, but to me as a layman it didn't seem realistic at all, the timeframe particularly. Nor was I convinced by the way all the characters seemed to come together at the end.

And it felt a bit like a Victorian moralistic tale -- every so often I'd be banged over the head by Jean lamenting that she hadn't taken the time to attend more feminist marches, or wail 'Oh woe, if only I had voted!'

Worth a read, certainly, but while the first half is an unnerving dystopia, it's let down by a not entirely convincing thriller of a second half.

I'm interested to see what others think though.

~~

Now onto A Conspiracy of Violence, by Susannah Gregory, the first in the Thomas Chaloner Adventures.

106 Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott
This is up there with Circe as my best read of the year. It’s the story of Truman Capote’s friendship and feud with his six female best friends, and how they fell in love with him before he betrayed them when he published their stories in Esquire. It’s a mesmerising blend of fiction and fact, and the narrative is complex and multi layered, and swoops around the timeline while still making sense. I loved the way she told the women’s stories, the period detail and the way Truman’s own work and story were layered in. It is one of those books you don’t want to end, and has catapulted In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s back up my re-read list. And more importantly it’s been a huge relief to have something so entertaining to lose myself in at the moment.

66. Blacklands by Belinda Bauer I whizzed through this! Steven spends his spare time digging on bleak Exmoor, trying to find where notorious serial killer Arnold Avery hid his uncle’s body before Steven was born. He decides to contact the imprisoned murderer to beg for help, putting himself in danger by doing so. The portrayal of the fractured family left behind by Avery’s evil is heart rending, there was more depth than expected in this thriller.
67. The Lives of Stella Bain by Anita Shreve A young American woman wakes up injured in a WWI French field hospital, unable to remember much except her name (and she isn’t confident of this) and that she knows how to drive an ambulance. She eventually makes her way to London where, on the verge of collapse, she is taken in by a kind couple. The husband is a cranial surgeon with an interest in psychiatry who is keen to help Stella discover who she is and how she ended up in France. Enjoyable, very readable and absorbing character focused historical fiction.

pepe I’m waiting for that from the library, great review.