50 Book Challenge 2019 Part Three

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the third thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2019, 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 and the second one here.

What are you reading?

17. A Hat Full of Sky - Terry Pratchett

The second of the Discworld YA Tiffany Aching series. The young witch begins her training and faces the threat of an indestructible possessing entity, all with the help of the pugnacious Nac Mac Feegle (six-inch-tall red-haired Gaelic fairies, although probably best not to call them that) and the indomitable Granny Weatherwax.

Fantastic for its characterisation of Granny Weatherwax as a witch who has achieved her power through her intense psychological understanding of people, and for the way Tiffany is being developed as her natural successor. One of my standouts of the year so far.

I couldn't finish We Need to Talk About Kevin thankfully o don't think you can be done for murdering a fictional character but his mother, I couldn't finish the film either.

Museum of Ham - I look forward to seeing what you make of it. I'm still thinking about it and trying to work out my feelings!

13. Wolves of the Calla: Dark Tower V by Stephen King

Hmmmm. Not sure about this one. After the first Dark Tower novel I think I've enjoyed each one more, but I definitely preferred Wizard and Glass to this. I liked probably the first 75% but after that it just started to get too meta for me. Some of the references just completely stuffed up my suspension of disbelief. Also, I'm not sure I like where things are going with the only significant female character. I really hope the next one isn't going to put me off entirely!

I meant to add, I thought We Need to Talk About Kevin was brilliant, so what do I know...

Welsh - I really like Wolves. I think it's probably my second favourite of the series. A lot of Song of Susannah annoys me, and your comment about her makes me suspect that you won't be very taken with that either!

I loathed Kevin.

I loved We Need to Talk about Kevin. In a horrific way obviously but I remember finding it unputdownable and thinking every parent and teacher should read it.

I have just romped through 14 Lisa Jewell Watching You thingummy. Just what I needed after Ruiz Bonkers Conkers Zafon. Unrealistic, far-fetched coincidences and an overuse of the word "inoccuous" aside, I enjoyed it.

The film of Kevin is brilliant. Lynne Ramsay directed : Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller. So good.

Just noticed five didn't like it. Sorry!

Rather surprisingly:

13. A Buyer’s Market - Anthony Powell

This is the second in A Dance to the Music of Time series and I was a bit meh about the first. However, like Pepe I found this one easier to engage with. I don’t know whether it was greater familiarity with the characters, more fast-paced or what but, for me, definitely an easier read - and I’m almost looking forward to Book 3.

Onto Georgette Heyer next.

I probably mean 'innocuous' don't I?

Haventgotallday - I love that Carlos Ruiz Zafon series even if I can’t always explain what’s going on! I think it’s the writing.

That's exactly it! Love the writing, the words, the descriptions then at the end think "what on earth was that about?"

I thought Kevin was brilliant and the characterisation of his mother (have forgotten her name, sorry) so so clever - the pinpointing of that slightly snide, rather superior holding of oneself separate from mainstream society. I had met so many people like that! I was a bit disillusioned to read another of hers (the awful one with the snooker) and find that the narrative voice was very similar while the characterisation was nowhere near as good - it made me wonder whether what she did in Kevin was quite as clever as I had thought.

Sorry, my reviews aren't very well written tonight, I've read some great books over half term and I wish I had the brain power to do them justice!

16. Force of Nature, Jane Harper

Follow up to The Dry, this is also set in the Australian bush and features the same detective. Five women, an odd assortment of colleagues, go into the wilderness for a corporate bonding trip. Only four come back. What happened during the trip, and where is Alice?

This was a good page turning thriller with a well-described setting - worth the 99p I paid for it.

17. One True Thing, Anna Quindlen

This was great, my first read from this author. Ellen has escaped her small town upbringing and overbearing father to forge a new life as a successful journalist in New York. On a trip home, she discovers that her mother is dying of cancer, and gives up her newly forged adult life to return home and care for her mother. When the book opens, Ellen has just been arrested on suspicion of hastening her mother's death, and the book covers both the period in which Ellen is nursing her mother, and what happens to Ellen after she is arrested.

The wonderfully written story traces, gently but precisely, the lines of love, guilt, frustration running between mother and daughter, and tells of caring for a dying loved one with a beautifully painful accuracy. Ellen tries to fit into her mother's homely small-town life, and deal with her narcissistic father (not to mention a wonderfully awful boyfriend), and as Ellen learns more about her mother's life, the book delicately probes complex issues of family dynamics, feminism, intellectual snobbery, and the moral issues around death and assisted dying. And it does this while being readable, and funny, and not Jodi Picoult-ish. Quindlen is reminiscent of Anne Tyler or Elizabeth Strout in her ability to tell a simple story well, and at the same time open up a whole world.

18. Child of All Nations, Irmgard Keun

This was a recommendation from this thread (from the lovely Dottie Richardson). The narrator is ten-year-old Kully, and her father has been exiled from 1930s Germany for publishing criticisms of the government (this is based on the real life experiences of Keun and her fellow writer Joseph Roth, with whom she was in a relationship). Kully's parents are well-known and well-connected but have no money and no right to stay or live anywhere, so they travel from one European city to another, borrowing money from acquaintances and trying to keep up appearances. On the surface their life is rackety and kind of fun - Kully's father takes her to the grandest places and orders champagne, then leaves her in the care of the waiters while he tries to find someone to lend him the money to pay the bill - but underneath there is fear and despair, and Kully is half aware of the increasingly bad situation in Europe. Funny, sad, and terrifying, all at the same time.

19. His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnett

Final one in a run of good books! I'd seen this praised here and hadn't fancied picking it up, which is a shame as it was a great read.

I hadn't realised that this is historic fiction - set in the 1860s in remote highland Scotland - or that it is a sort of whodunnit/courtroom novel with a compelling story.

What i thought was so clever about this is that, by using a series of documents with no authoritative narrator's voice, Burnett leaves all kinds of ambiguities in the story unresolved. This would be a great book group read as there are so many things you pick up on and want to know more about, but they aren't fully explained - which you think would be annoying but actually it makes the book so much richer and more interesting.

I loved both the movie and book of We Need to Talk About Kevin, but I think it's definitely Marmite (which I actually don't like).

I found We Need to Talk About Kevin utterly compelling. It’s a very disturbing story of course, but I thought the book was well written.

Me too- I couldn’t put it down! Film not so good IMO.

I was also gripped by Kevin. Haven’t seen the film.

I think the thing about the film is that it is very well made : my sixth form loved stydying it. It's very Lynne Ramsay : all her films have this distinctive colour palette and very troubling narratives. I did like the way the violence was menacingly understated.

I just can't get in to Kevin at all and haven't even got to my usual 100 page point. I feel like I have the attention span of a gnat at the moment and no reading discipline. Even Circe is taking me ages. I won't take Kevin back to the library just yet, but I don't hold out hope for it.

To go back to Nigel Slater and Toast my mum lent me her copy to read a few years ago. I think she'd picked up cheap somewhere. She told me she didn't want it back and that "it was very interesting but it goes a bit strange after a while". I think she probably meant his sneaking up the lanes to watch people having sex in their cars. It is, of course, only his point of view and I do wonder whether other family members would remember things quite the same way.

Miles Jupp's Radio 4 comedy lampoons Slater's style of cookery programme/writing. I can't remember the name of it but it's funny.

14. The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis I read this book when it was first published back in the 80s. Coming back to it again I was struck by how much drink driving they all do. Welsh writer Alun and his wife Rhiannon have lived in London for many years but return to live in Wales. Alun is a serial shagger and at least two of the male characters have romantic feelings for Rhiannon. The book is written from the point of view of several of the different characters. Some very good writing, stuff about growing old, trying to shut up the bore at a party, remembering things from the past and how something that is very significant for one character has no meaning for another. Enjoyed it - it has a very funny death scene in it, quite a dark humour.

Keith Did you know there's a film of One True Thing that stars Meryl Streep and Renée Zellweger? It's very good. Haven't read the book but will add it to my TBR now.

28 Neuromancer by William Gibson

I don’t recall how this ended up on my shelf, but I was inspired to pick it up after a reference to it in a list of “influential sci-fi” books I came across recently. It’s a strange and oddly beautiful book which tells the story of Case, a hard-boiled hacker, who is going back into the matrix (essentially, the internet) for one last job. It is hugely influential and prescient – it’s more than 30 years old, but is visionary in its themes around AI, immersive technology and body modification.

I found the plot really confusing, because a lot of it is delivered through dialogue which is often fragmented and hard to follow. I was frustrated initially, and tried hard to keep track, but after a while I concluded this wasn’t really about plot as much as it was about creating an atmosphere of a world shaped and transformed by technology, at which point I fell in love with it. It really calls to mind Blade Runner, which isn’t surprising, and The Matrix was also inspired by the novel.

It’s a love story, a warning about technology, and a lot of it is reads like poetry. This was well outside my comfort zone – I read for plot, not beautiful evocative language, for the most part - but highly recommended.

Oh yes Cedar - 'In and Out of the Kitchen'. It makes me snort, in a good way (as Miles Jupp generally does).

As it happens there's a fair amount of food and cooking in my next book - 15: A Ghost at the Table - Suzanne Berne

Berne won the Orange Prize in 1999 with A Crime in the Neighbourhood, which I remember enjoying, so I had high hopes for this. Writer Cynthia is persuaded by her sister Frances to go and spend Thanksgiving with her & her family at their home in Concord (freighted with history for all fans of Thoreau, the Alcotts etc ). Complicating matters is their father, stricken by a stroke, and assorted tensions from childhood.

Actually this was a bit disappointing unfortunately - I love this kind of American family under the microscope-type thing, but the parallels were too clunky - Cynthia writes cheery books for girls about 'sisters in history' and her forthcoming book is about Mark Twain's daughters....three girls, father given to rages, dysfunctional family, mother who was ill for most of their childhoods and then died. All these things are (surprise) replicated in Cynthia and Frances's lives, right down to the ailing/dying mother.

However, despite the fact that it wasn't as subtle as Berne was clearly trying to make it, I did enjoy this as a quick, though not outstanding, read.

Thanks Terpsichore I couldn't remember the name earlier.