50 Book Challenge 2018 Part Eight

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the eighth (and probably final) 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 and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.The lurkers among you are also very welcome to come out of the woodwork and share with us 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, the sixth one here and the seventh one here.

How have you got on this year?

scribbly I am actually studying Frankenstein with year 10 atm. I am ambivalent to the book but -whilst they do get confused- they do seem to rather like it and feel sorry for the 8ft very good at hiding and learning creature. I did a silly cartoon version of that particular episode for them which kept me entertained anyway...

I think it is more its literary influence and legacy than its artistry that has rendered it a classic?

I doubt it remus : I think I would know. Our side of the family has very much stuck to the correct spelling... where was Francis from? That could be a clue.

I am related to a witch though!

Ah just looked him up... those are the Irish Croziers. With a Z. We Geordie Crosiers don't like to talk about them.

I really enjoyed Frankenstein when I read it as a teenager, I can see why it would be quite popular as a school text.
I feel like I need to reread it now so I can defend it properly!

Yes agree - I think with some classics you need to think about it in terms of what has gone before. Original and groundbreaking in terms of subject (especially for a woman novelist) and influential beyond calculation. I enjoyed it a lot as a child and when studying it later on, but due a reread. I think your views on things change depending on what other reading you have done too - I’m harsher looking back on things now than I was as a teen, having read a great deal more. It accounts for the great affection for To Kill a Mockingbird (which I share!) but which is really probably out of proportion to its artistic merits; it is often the first serious, “adult” book a lot of teenagers are introduced to. Also I’ve found it with movies - films which I had considered favourites have sometimes seemed slight and superficial when rewatched after the long, gradually unfurling tv shows I’ve got used to watching.

Remus, Haig and I are parting ways after this last book. How to Stop Time was an exercise in mediocrity but this one was just infuriating. The structure is the antithesis of the message. It was so odd and yes, as you say, dumbing down of the reader.

Will be interested to read your review of the monsters book. Have you tried to work out who the famous anonymous author is?

Ive read three gothic/horror classics over the past 12 months. Jekyll and Hyde last Halloween, Dracula a few months ago and Frankenstein this Halloween. Of the three I by far enjoyed Jekyll and Hyde the most (probably helped by Richard Armitage's narration). It felt properly dark and atmospheric and creepy. Some of the scenes in Dracula were excellent too, loved that first scene of him crawling down the walls of the castle like a lizard, but there was an awful lot of odd Victorian sexy-not sexy blood donation happening, and blimey it did go on.
Frankenstein just felt daft, and he was constantly being very dangerously ill and lying about in a swoon. That didn’t happen in the play, which was very, ahem, muscular. I take your point though Satsuki that it was ground breaking, particularly for a young woman at that time.

Oh, sorry, Piggy you made that point too.

You can’t read ahead in BH! You'll deprive yourself of a whole 10 months more of pleasure of not remembering who half the characters are and what’s going on

I am not sure I would call that pleasure scribbly but I am nothing if not a slave to routine!

Piggy you and your slavish duty to your randomiser I'm surprised that a bit more bookish asceticism isn’t right up your street.

@ChessieFL, thank you so much for the Goddard recs, that should keep me occupied for a while! I'm in the US (although my kindle is still on my UK amazon account) otherwise I'd be snapping up the Book People offer, that sounds like a bargain.

I agree Richard Armitage should read everything. What were we talking about

scribbly

Mr Armitage (and Amelia Fox) are currently reading Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber to me as I drive about at work. It’s very good but a little distracting at times.

He's also narrated David Copperfield which I will get when Bleak House is finished.

Funnily enough Scribbly I also have the Armitage narration of David Copperfield in my Audible library, picked up in the two for one deal. I'm leaving it for a while after my Bleak House overdose though.

38. Lethal White, by Robert Galbraith Much reviewed on here, I really enjoyed this. I know it's enormous, but it didn't lag and there wasn't really anything that I would have taken out. The best of the series so far, for me.

54. A Spark of Light - Jodi Picoult

A gunman walks into an abortion clinic in Mississippi and holds all within hostage. Some are there for abortions, to help with them and others for completely different reasons as this book tells how they ended up there on a day that would change their lives.

This book I was really looking forward to but I just felt it left me a little deflated. The backwards timeline didn’t work every well for me and I felt it was more a discussion on the ethics and morals of abortion and that I didn’t get the full story of all the characters and some were just left hanging completely! Normally a fan of Jodi Picoult but this one, although it had good discussion of the myths and ethics, was not my favourite.

Piggy that's so funny about the same surname as one of the Erebus crew because I've now got obsessively interested in the story, dived into an internet pothole, and discovered that I also share a name with one of the crew (won't say which though as I don't want to out myself).

I got as far as going onto Ancestry to try and find him and see if our trees connected somewhere but alas! I can't see any trace of his birth, even. Which is odd as it's a name I would have thought might be quite distinctive, and I do know that said name is found in basically two areas of the country and not really anywhere else. Oh well.

What I did find on someone's a fellow obsessive's blog is that the daguerreotypes taken of the officers before the trip have been examined and some bright spark realised that the shiny brims of their hats 🎩 actually reflected the rigging of the ships - so they must have been photographed at the docks before they sailed....one of them is clearly sitting on deck as well. And in one of them you can see the reflection of Franklin standing looking on as the photographs were being taken. How amazing is that? (Apparently daguerreotypes don't have a grain like modern photos so can be magnified enormously with no loss of picture quality).

Fascinating blog if you dare risk losing several hours/days

I remember reading Frankenstein when I was a teenager (probably around year 10 / year 11 age) and really enjoying it then. I felt terribly sorry for the poor monster.

Although the monster did lose the moral high ground when he started murdering people.

Michael Palin is on the Penguin Podcast this week I think, talking to David Baddiel about Erebus.

It's difficult to read the old horror classics with our modern jaundice eye, they're 'Big Concept' novels but now the plot twists have been so enshrined in the group consciousness that there's no surprises, to the extent that the short cut for Jekyll and Hyde is anybody in a lab coat at a lab bench drinking a test tube of frothing liquid, you just know they're going to grab their throat, roll their eyes, disappear below the bench and reappear in monster form. It's been done in every children's show and comedy sketch show since I can remember. As a result I was quite bored reading Jekyll and Hyde because the big reveal of the two men being (shock, horror) 'one and the same' was a given from the outset, but what a plot twist that must have been for the Victorian reader! The idea of a reanimated corpse is genius and was probably enough to keep the reader interested but I agree the the novel Frankenstein jumps the shark quite early and by the time they're all running round the North Pole its faintly ridiculous.

I now feel as if I need to re-read Frankenstein, although I haven't enjoyed it much on any of the three occasions I've read it before. I actually really like the idea of them chasing each other around in the snow (I think Francis Golden Hill whatshisname has a section on this in his Ice and the English Imagination if I remember correctly), and I love the description of the 'monster's birth' but Victor pisses me right off and I fast lose patience with him and all his angst.

With this in mind:
97: The Monsters We Deserve – Marcus Sedgewick

Cheap on Kindle and recommended by the Grauniad. I liked the idea – a writer holes himself up in an isolated cottage in order to write his next book, but seems more bothered by how dreadful a book “Frankenstein” is and his jealousy that Shelley’s work is so acclaimed compared to his own. He’s had one success, but there’s a guilty secret associated with that, and that’s bothering him too.

There’s a really good section on what the central themes of the novel are, and which one might be the most important, and a nice sense of how much the ‘monster’ is betrayed by that pillock Victor (hence the title – Victor gets the monster he deserves).

So far, so good, although I did wonder about his target audience. It’s a YA book but it would make little sense to anybody who didn’t know “Frankenstein” and Shelley’s biography, at least reasonably well. Ultimately though, I thought this was very flawed. The writer’s descent into some kind of supernaturally evoked disturbance/semi-madness felt a bit clumsy (and was very repetitive) and I thought he’d stolen/borrowed rather a lot from “Coraline” and “Marianne Dreams” in terms of his environment. Worse though, I thought the revelation about the guilty secret was stupidly predictable and also insufficiently developed, and that the ending was a complete anti-climax.

Like several of Sedgewick’s books, I just didn’t think it lived up to its initial promise. I can see some English teachers thinking it might be good to teach, but not me!

Speed read The Elephant In The Staffroom : How to reduce teacher stress and wellbeing

Not sure this did what it said on the tin. It had some useful tips but was more aimed at individuals and was thoughtful, arther than a 'how to' guide for school , so I learnt nothing.

Some of it irritated me, too. Chris Eyre pointed out the plague of presenteeism but in the same book suggested taking 'one day off at the weekend' (ermmmm... how about both?) , getting in to work early (hhahaha! Spot the male!) and thinks leaving at 6 pm is also sustainable, sensible and normal. He genuinely suggests taking one night off a week. I guess he thinks he is being realistic.

It si quite unususal for these books to be written by secondary teachers but my supsicions were raised when he kept mentioning A Level. I glanced at the back of the book and found that he teaches ina 6th form college. Yes, I know it has its pressures, but still....

Anyhoo, there were some useful 'leadership tips' scattered around : but I felt more stressed when I had finished it. Somewhat ironically. But then I am that person who finds pliates and yoga and exercise stress inducing

On a side note, the government gatehrs self reports on working hours every so often (and frequently fails to report back). It also measures % of wor done 'out of hours'. I was astonished that they measure 'out of hours' as hours worked before 8 am and after 6 pm!! Bloody Hell : don't tell SLT that!

I also read about some worthy schools that have a 'wellbeing bell' to tell teachers to get out and go home. Great. But the example he gives is rung at 6pm ... a full 3 hours after the end of the school day

I think I am one of the few remaining teachers who really really does not judge a teacher who leaves on, or soon after the bell. Good for me them.

Sorry to non teachers. I am sure you found this review whiny and dull! I shall get back to my out of hours marking (not).