I feel like I haven't checked in here for ages. Hoping to get a chance for a long leisurely read of the thread later.
Terp, I thought that book sounded excellent and perfect for some of the hard-to-buy-for relatives that people post about sometimes on here. I do love A Good Read :)
Here are my updates:
96. The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, Oliver Burkeman
One from the book swap group. An interesting look at how positive thinking may actually be bad for us and how different strands of philosophical thought have actually argued that contemplating, preparing for, practising and ultimately accepting painful or frightening events can actually lead to peace of mind and happiness. It's ultimately a light-weight self-help book, but the chapters on the Stoics and on Zen Buddhism were thought provoking and the whole book is written in a breezy, anecdotal style, ideal if you're not familiar with these schools of thought.
97. Autumn, Ali Smith
I like Ali Smith - I know not everyone does. This is one of a quartet of complementary books and on its own feels a little sparse, a series of sparkling fragments that don't quite make up a whole. It's less exuberant in its linguistic fireworks than some of her other books but that's not a bad thing - it felt quieter, less substantial. I look forward to reading the next book in the group and seeing how they work together.
98. Inside the O'Briens, Lisa Genova
By the author of Still Alice, this tells the story of a working class, Irish-American Boston family who find out that they have Huntingdon's, a hereditary degenerative illness. That is to say that one of them, the Dad, a cop nearing retirement, discovers that he has it in the early chapters, and the rest of the book deal both with the impact of his diagnosis and the dilemma of his four adult children, who have to decide whether to get tested to find out whether they have inherited the faulty gene that causes the disease.
This was a good premise, sensitively handled (Genova is a neuroscientist and knows her stuff) but let down by the characters - none of them came off the page enough to feel like a real person.
99. Votes For Women!: The Pioneers and Heroines of Female Suffrage, Jenni Murray
A pocket sized book in lovely green and purple suffragette colours, telling the story of six of the key early players in the fight for women's rights, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Nancy Astor, the first female MP to take her seat. I wanted to love this - the topic was interesting and I love Jenni Murray but, I don't know, it didn't capture me. These were fascinating stories of fascinating women and I wish she had managed to bring them to life a little more.
100. A Week in December, Sebastian Faulks
The first of my winter reading titles. The week in question is in 2007, the setting is London, and the coming 2008 financial crisis hangs over the book and its characters, of whom there are many. Faulks uses the clunky device of having one of his characters plan a dinner party in the opening chapters, and from her list of planned guests we are introduced to the major characters. They're all deliberately cliches - this is a satire and the characters are designed to be rather grotesque examples of certain types - the immoral banker, the cynical literary journalist, the impressionable Muslim teenager who gets in with a religious crowd who are a bit too influential.....
I feel like I'm criticising all of these books, and I didn't think this was awful, but it was all a bit smuggy-smuggy-whit-middle-class-bloke for me. State education, and women with eating disorders, and people who haven't read many books seem like easy targets and I wasn't comfortable with Faulks taking pot shots at them in the way he did. The best character, I thought, was the awful journalist, who is apparently based on a real character - you could tell that Faulks was writing what he knows here. Unlike the women, and the working class characters, who felt like cardboard cut-outs.
101. Christmas with the Savages, Mary Clive
Lovely trip down memory lane for me as I loved this when i was about 10 :) This is a children's book about a rather spoiled little Edwardian girl who is sent to spent Christmas in a large country house. Her fellow guests are an unruly collection of other children (Evelyn is rather more used to the company of grown-ups_, their nannies, and an assortment of grand adults. The book was apparently based on Mary Clive's own childhood memories, and I was thrilled to find that it is still funny and vivid. You might remember me saying how awful a book by Julian Fellowes was that I read last month - well, this is like the perfect antidote. A book about a snobbish, rich little girl in a posh house full of rich idle people, which is funny and likeable and entirely human. And just the best description of what it's like to wake in the dark early on christmas morning and put your hand out and feel a stocking full of presents....