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?

74 Hag-Seed - Margaret Atwood

One of the Hogarth series of novels based on Shakespeare plays commissioned by Penguin/Vintage, along with Jo Nesbo's Macbeth, Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl and several others. This is based on The Tempest. An ageing theatre director, mourning the loss of his daughter, uses a prison production of The Tempest to wreak revenge on the people who stitched him up and ended his career.

Margaret Atwood clearly had fun writing this, with lots of tricks to draw parallels between the novel's characters and the Shakespeare originals, but still managed to make it work as a standalone novel (it does help to be reasonably familiar with the Tempest first).

75 Ladder of Years - Anne Tyler

Classic Anne Tyler - it's one of her earlier ones, but already has all the hallmarks of overlooked middle-aged people in small-town America revealing hidden depths to their characters and facing challenges in life. A middle-aged woman picks up her beach bag and walks off, leaving her family behind on their summer holiday, with no plan in mind. She starts a new life from scratch in a nearby town, and over a year starts to discover who she really is and what she wants from life. Quite good, but I found the ending disappointing.

76 A Life of My Own - Claire Tomalin

Reviewed by a few of you further up-thread, I think. One of Britain's best literary biographers writes her own life, which is certainly eventful enough (and stocked with enough encounters with well-known people) to deserve it. This was a thought-provoking read, particularly since I share several significant life-points with Tomalin. At times I got a little fed up with the lists of people she met through work and social life, but it did illustrate how closely linked so much of literary/political/journalistic London is (or was - I'm not sure if it still quite as concentrated as it was in the 1960s-80s). I have already read a lot of Michael Frayn (her second husband), and am now wondering if I should read 'Love, Nina' for the nanny's view of the same social group, or Human Relations and Other Difficulties, by Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the LRB, former neighbour of Tomalin's and employer of Nina, I think.

77 Junk - Melvin Burgess
Award-winning young adult novel focused on teenage runaways living in squats and taking heroin in 1980s Bristol. Gritty, to say the least, but with a (possibly unrealistically) positive ending for most of the characters.

78 The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning - Margareta Magnusson

Basically, Kondo-style decluttering as advocated by an elderly Swedish woman who has had to clear houses after the death of others, and doesn't want her family to be left with the same burden when she goes.

She is very cheerful about it, and this is a very easy read, though really it isn't long enough to count as a proper book and you could say pretty much everything she has to say in a single magazine article: you can't take everything with you when you go, you don't even need most of it now, you will feel much better letting go of a lot of junk or passing things on to people who would like or could use them, and your family will thank you for having done so once you are dead.

I bought this as inspiration to keep on with my own decluttering, including dealing with the last few boxes of my late husband's stuff, before I get landed with clearing out my parents' decades and decades of accumulated possessions (they haven't moved in nearly 50 years) sometime in the not-too-distant future. Really I wish I could have given them a copy of this, but they needed it about 15 or 20 years ago and are now too frail to deal with all the stuff themselves.

79 The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver
I am a big Kingsolver fan, and have read all her fiction from Poisonwood Bible onwards, plus quite a bit of her non-fiction, but I realised I still hadn't read her early works. This was a fun read, and showed signs of all the themes she deals with in later novels in greater depth.

80 Lolly Willowes - Sylvia Townsend Warner
An impulse Kindle purchase after a mention by someone else up-thread, and it fits with a certain theme I seem to be following in my reading this year to do with single women of a certain age and how they find a way to live and a place in a society generally hostile to them (previous books on similar themes I have read this year: Miss Mole, The Odd Women, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, The Dark Flood Rises and others). Witchcraft and cosy chats with the devil is a bit of novel take on the options available, and seemed slightly at odds with the more humdrum, reality-based first half of the novel, but you can see how she gets there.

Have bought a collection of Roald Dahl's creepy stories on deal of the day, and another Celia F.

100: The Long Shadow – Celia Fremlin

Reviewed in Saturday’s Guardian in its new crime section, as it’s just been reissued. I’d never heard of her but am so glad I’ve now ‘met’ her as this was great fun. It wasn’t so much a crime novel as a half-hilarious, half rather sad mystery. No, scrap that – it was mostly hilarious. Loved it. It reminded me of Mary Stewart when she’s being particularly droll. Will definitely read more of hers.

Ah MegBusset, I read The Songlines as I was backpacking up the East Coast of Australia - brings back lovely memories. Shame I had to continually swap books along my travels as I couldn't carry home all the ones I loved!! That's definitely one I would rather have held on to.

Any other fans of Sally Field around? The price of her recent memoir just dropped to 99p on Kindle.

50. (yay!) Ancient Light by John Banville

Been away for a while (too much work!) but finally got round to finishing my 50th book. I spotted this for a reasonable price (£2.99) on Kindle and decided to give it a go. I am so internally divided about John Banville. The Untouchable is one of my favourite books ever (for those of you who haven't read it, it's a roman a clef about the Cambridge spy ring and it is fantastic). But I couldn't get along with his Booker-winning The Sea at all and gave up half way through. I swung between the two reactions reading Ancient Light but in the end I'm really glad I read it.

From my perspective, the problem Banville has is that his plots are a bit rubbish. They aren't really plots as such, more a sort of stream of consciousness thing. Which is fine if that's your bag, but on the whole it's not really mine. The Untouchable works for me because Real Life has kindly donated the plot and Banville can just get on with doing what he does best, which is crafting prose. I know some find his books vastly over-written and I have some sympathy with that, particularly when he's trying to move events on, but his descriptions of settings and atmosphere can be breathtaking. I lost count of the passages in Ancient Light where I thought "that's just perfect". Anyway, the plot, such as it is, involves recurring Banville character Alexander Cleave. I didn't realise when buying it, but Cleave is in 2 other Banville books, Eclipse and Shroud and this book forms a sort of loose triptych with the others, looking at some of the same events from different angles. The main focus of Ancient Light is Cleave's adolescent affair with his best friend's mother, Mrs Gray, but it is told by him at a much later point in his life, when he is making a film with a very famous but vulnerable actress about an individual who, it emerges, may have been involved in his daughter's suicide. Following so far? The descriptions of the affair are visceral and immediate, albeit edged around with Cleave's fading memory about the events he recounts. The "present day" stuff is rather less substantive and dream-like. It is a hard book to describe and at times I got frustrated with the very detailed, overlaid prose, but it has a real feeling of grief and loss and time passing, and also an unsettling (and true!) sense that nothing is quite as you see it at the time. It will stay with me and I recommend it.

Now to read some complete nonsense in the form of The Girl In The Spider's Web.

Also meant to say, I think there are some Ann Patchett fans on this thread and her State of Wonder is on the Kindle Daily Deal today for £1.29.

Many thanks welshwabbit I've just bought State of Wonder

Hello! Read Nearly infallible history of Christianity by Nick Page no 47 . Lots of splinter groups and bad popes but heigh-ho the thing still survives. Also read A Christmas carol by Charles Dickens no 48. I have read it before but as it was over 20 years ago I am counting. It got me in the mood for more Dickens, an author I have previously struggled with as a bit too...wordy.

76: The Accident on the A35 - Graeme Macrae Burnet

This has been a kindle deal recently but I'd picked up a cheap copy at some point so it's been my commute read this week. Following on from The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (review somewhere miles upthread), this is GMB playing more tricks with a supposedly-translated French novel by reclusive author Raymond Brunet. It's set in the small, anonymous town of Saint-Louis, near Strasbourg, and again features world-weary Inspector Gorski.
This can be read as a straightforward policier in the style of Simenon but, as with the previous book, GMB experiments with themes of alienation, despair and failure. Both Gorski and Raymond, the teenage boy whose father is killed in the accident of the title, are classic outsiders, never quite fitting in with the world around them. All these themes are interwoven throughout the action but, despite this, the story itself is notably lacking in incident - nothing very much actually happens, just as nothing much happens in Saint-Louis.

It's clever and operates on several levels but....hmmm. I'm not entirely sure it worked satisfactorily for me. Having said all this, there's talk of a third book and if so I probably will read it!

I haven't updated for a while, but have read and (on the whole enjoyed) the following:
104. Melmoth, which I much preferred to The Essex Serpent for its wintery, atmospheric spookiness - slightly lost it in the latter part but still very engaging.
105. The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey, a realistically claustrophobic novel set in a medieval village in England from the point of view of the local cleric.
106. The Wood by John Lewis-Stempel. I am very fond of nature writing and he's one of the best, although his interaction with some of the animals in the wood is from the often practical point of view of a farmer, not merely that of an admirer. Squirrels and Canada geese od not fare well.
107. The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer, which was a good, solid novel following a leading female figure of the feminist movement in the USA (think Germaine Greer essentially) and a young female college student/graduate, who essentially becomes her mentee.
108. Mad Girl by Bryony Gordon. This has sat lurked on my kindle forever so I wanted to read it and am glad I did. An honestly told account of living with, at times, quite severe mental illnesses and disorders including depression, OCD and bulimia.

I'm reading The Silence of the Girls at the moment and it's really good so far.

Terp, thanks for the tip-off about Celia Fremlin books on Kindle. I have stocked up.

Sorry about my typos and lack of bolds above! Should preview before I post...

101: The Butchering Art – Lindsey Fitzharris

Very interesting account of Joseph Lister’s work to take the horror of infection out of surgical procedures. What’s astonishing is just how much resistance there was to the idea of trying to reduce the chance for germs to take hold. Recommended to anybody interested in blood, guts and medical history.

75. Mythos - Stephen Fry

What a clever soul Stephen Fry is. Learned, entertaining and witty, he retells the Greek myths and revived my memory of half forgotten tales , and introduced me to new ones (I liked the doplhin best).

Actually a really useful book, too , like Gaiman's Norse Mythology. I preferred Fry's writing, though, as it was clearer and more direct.

Have been on a one-woman crime spree:

136) Breakdown, Sara Paretsky
Have somehow never read the VI Warshawski books, focusing on a female PI in Chicago. It was fine, and I liked the political references (local media with a rightwing agenda issuing fake news) although the plotting was complicated - couldn't summarise it if I tried. I'm not particularly thrilled by Chicago as a setting, so I'm not dashing off to read the rest of the series, although I might read a couple of the others at some point.

137) The Dark Vineyard, Martin Walker
Crime fiction set in France, featuring local cop Bruno, who makes a wonderful omelette with truffles in his downtime. I'd rather read about the Dordogne than Chicago, even if they're not necessarily better than Sara Paretsky's efforts.

138) Wildfire, Ann Cleeves
Last of the Shetland books. Cleeves knows what she is doing, and Shetland is a great setting, so I enjoyed this best out of the three.

Tired of crime, have turned to history, and nearly at the end of:
139) Becoming Queen, by Kate Williams
The first third is about Queen Charlotte, daughter of the Prince Regent and his hated wife, Caroline. Worst marriage and parenting ever: hard to avert your eyes from the trainwreck. The rest of the book is about Queen Victoria, taking her into early adulthood. It's not fair of me to read multiple books on the same subject and then sniff about them covering the same territory, so I won't. It's still a lively read.

87. George Mann - The Affinity Bridge

Another re-read, this one a steampunk novel. Sir Maurice Newbury is an Agent of the Crown and used to assisting the police with their stranger investigations. Miss Veronica Hobbes is a relatively new assistant of his, largely intended to help with his work at the British Museum. Initially they are drawn into the investigation of a series of murders in Whitechapel, where a ghostly policeman is said to haunt the foggy alleyways and where a terrifying plague is turning its victims into zombie-like monsters in search of human flesh. But when an airship piloted by an automaton supposedly incapable of malfunctioning crashes, killing all 50 or so passengers, Queen Victoria orders Newbury to investigate the accident.

This is a good series with an alternate history angle in the well-constructed differences in technological advancement. It has been a few years since I read them, so I'm on to the sequel now.

39. The Cuckoo's Calling Robert Galbraith I've enjoyed every JK Rowling book I've ever read (well, except for the expanded universe stuff around Harry Potter), but for some reason I've never read these. The synopsis put me off, I think. (I have limited interest in supermodels with silly names and haunted veteran is such a cliché.) Anyway, more fool me, because I thought this was great. I enjoyed Strike and Robin and their relationship, and of course Rowling was always going to be good at a mystery. I know Rowling's a fan of Golden Age mysteries, and this felt like a deliberate updating of one of those. Strike wandering around interviewing all the suspects reminded me very much of a Detective Alleyn novel. Him being the illegitimate son of a rock star is a nice modern analogy to all the detectives who are youngest sons of earls (Wimsey, Alleyn, Campion etc) Afghanistan for WW1, A List celebrities for aristocrats etc. It was fun seeing all the bits of Rowling's life that had found their way in there - casual knowledge of Pinewood Studies, drivers and the responsibility that came with unexpected wealth, for example. As ever, she's not great at working-class people, there are a few clichés and moments that made me go hmm, and I wasn't sure if all the descriptions of female bodies were there to try and convince us she's a male writer or not, but they sat a bit uncomfortably. But overall I really liked this, and I've put the next couple on my Christmas list.

*35. View from a shed - Michael Wale
*
This was a delightful little book. Probably only of interest if you are an allotment gardener (which I am) or are considering getting an allotment. Gentle, funny observations on the highs and lows of allotment life.

41. Our Endless Numbered Days - Claire Fuller
Totally absorbing story about a young girl and her father who's obsessed about the end of the world which is imminent, according to him. Loved it.

134. Becoming - Michelle Obama - really enjoyed this. Well written and engaging, interesting and eloquent. Recommend.

whippet,I want to read The Weatern Wind but it always shows as unavailable on Amazon!

...and it's not because I keep searching for Weatern... I hope

120 Milkman by Anna Burns
I listened to the audiobook, which was beautifully narrated and immersive. The narrator’s other-worldly conjuring up of Northern Ireland during the Troubles is done very skilfully, and the menace and anxiety of living in such a place. Humorous and dark; I thought this was wonderful.

121 Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves
Stunningly good account of the poet’s experiences in the trenches, book ended by accounts of his school days and the aftermath of WWI. It’s written with a humour that makes it all the more shocking.

122 Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
I so wanted to like this. I loved the premise - son of Satan gets swapped for another baby in the maternity unit, the end of the world is nigh, and there were some truly clever set pieces. But it was all a little chaotic and random for me. I’d score it high for style and low for substance.

58. The Library Book, by Susan Orlean: after she moved to Los Angeles, Susan Orlean was given a tour of the LA library's main downtown branch. Her guide picked up a book, held it to his nose, and inhaled deeply, commenting that you could still smell the smoke in some of the books. Did people use to smoke in the library, Orlean asked. No, he replied, smoke from the fire. What fire? You know, the fire that nearly destroyed this library.

And thus began Orlean's journey into the LA library. While the fire and its investigation is the book's centrepiece, she gracefully traces the library's beginnings and evolution, the actual building and its architecture, its wonderfully colourful head librarians, its fantastic collections and current librarians, and its mission. Oh, and there are great parts about the science of fire and how 700,000 waterlogged books were saved.

I LOVED this book, esp. as I'm library people (current slogan for my local library's foundation). I was lucky enough to see Orlean speak at my library last week about the book, which was delightful and perhaps one of the most Vandy things ever.

And, um, hi. I've missed you all.