50 Book Challenge 2019 Part Four

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fourth 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, the second one here and the third one here.

How're you getting on so far?

Piggy I think Cat Among the Pigeons is fun for teenagers although it is set in a girls' school which may put him off! Otherwise Murder on the Orient Express or maybe Murder in Mesopotamia which has added exoticism.

13. The Scapegoat by Daphne Du Maurier

An Englishman and a Frenchman meet in a railway cafe in France and find they are doubles of each other. The Frenchman steals the Englishman's identity so the Englishman decides to do the same. Then goes off to run his chateau.

An interesting book. I felt my poor french held me back. It took awhile to get going. There were some lovely thoughts included about children and destiny. I'm not sure I'll rush to read another of hers. Unusual introduction by another writer that seemed to imply the author was trans.

Ooh, or Death on the Nile - set in Egypt, plenty of Boy's Own type stuff and a cracking plot to boot.

Thanks for the Christie recommendations. I thought about Orient Express and Death On The Nile , too. I remember liking Ten Little Indians. I imagine it has once more been renamed?

Piggy it's And Then There Were None now. It was Ten Little Indians when I read it too! I remember reading it when I was about 11 and 12 and being utterly terrified by it (the only Christie I can say that about!). So I don't recommend it for young teenagers but your son is probably made of tougher stuff than me, and is that bit older.

I think it’s now And Then There Were None, piggywaspushed, at least it was a decade ago when I read it! I really like that one too.

I really enjoyed Deep Sea and Foreign Going so I've added The Big Necessity to my list, thank you Terpsichore

If you like travel books that are a bit different then I can highly recommend Travels through the Paintbox by Victoria FInlay.

At the moment I'm just finishing off the excellent The bookshop that floated away by Sarah Henshaw, it's going to get 4 stars instead of my default 3 stars for a book that was worth reading but not exceptional.

Crosspost welshwabbit!
My most recent read, Sick Notes by Tony Copperfield,seriously wound me up. I thought I might enjoy it after This Is Going to Hurt, but this is like an unfunny imitation full of misogyny, ageism and snobbery. The GP who has written this comes across incredibly badly, arrogant and dismissive of the inconvenience of seeing his lowly patients. The Dickens joke ran thin too, with the practice being Bleak House and patients given pseudonyms like Mr Cratchit. I’d avoid it!

Ah, that's it! Will look a few up now on Amazon! Thanks all!

Yes to Murder on the Orient Express and the Branagh film is pretty good too.

Agree with Remus. I have now seen the Branagh film 3 times!

27 - Bookworm by Lucy Mangan
Much reviewed on here, enjoyed it and liked her style of writing. I'd read most of the books but will be seeking out some of the ones I hadn't. A couple of irritating editorial mistakes which annoyed me a bit.
Couldn't sleep last night so also:
28 - First Term at Trebizon, Anne Digby
29 - Second Term at Trebizon, Anne Digby

I also remember being terrified by "And then there were none". I was given all Christie's books as a child by someone whose elderly relative had died and who knew I liked reading. That one was the only one which really scared me.

30. The Arab of the Future 3: A Childhood in the Middle East 1985 -1987 by Riad Sattouf. Translated by Sam Taylor.

The third volume in this graphic memoir series in which Sattouf, looks back at his childhood growing up predominantly in Syria with occasional lengthy trips back to France with his French mother. I have really enjoyed this series, Sattouf's has a comprehensive skill of depicting the humorous everyday situations that occur within all families, against the backdrop of poverty and corruption of 1980s Syria. Without the humour these volumes would be unrelentingly grim and stressful to read. The treatment of the boys in the school Riad attends is horrific. The violence meted out by the teachers is sickening - in one scene the teacher breaks the stick he uses to beat the students with and for homework sets the class the task with finding him a new better weapon with which he will beat them with the following day. The insidious breaking down of his mother's spirit is also tough to read. When they return to France (depicted in blue) you breathe a sigh of relief and will her to stand up to his vain, proud and ridiculous father and refuse to return, but you can see that the red frames of Syria dominate the book and know she always relents and goes back.
I loved the section when Riad and his cousins watch Conan the Barbarian for the first time. The expressions on their faces are fantastic and the rest of the book is peppered with Conan references as the boys try to imitate their hero in their everyday lives.
I enjoyed this less than the previous volumes as it felt like more of the same from volume 2. This book ends on such a horrific cliff hanger I know I'll be getting volume 4 when it comes out.

31 Only Ever Yours by Louise O'Neill

Oh boy, what a doozy.

Book club choice summarised as “A YA Handmaid's Tale”. YA it is (read Fraught Level 11), The Handmaid's Tale it is not.

Some sort of apocalypse, women are no longer able to give birth to girls. Men are in charge. Girls are genetically designed and manufactured with the sole purpose of being beautiful (no details of how this happens bar eye, skin and hair colour being picked like an avatar) and then housed in a slightly shitty futuristic boarding school (you get your clothes, hair and makeup done everyday by a robot but the exercise bikes are rusty). For 16 years the girls are in constant competition with each other to be the most beautiful. Lots and lots and lots (OMG please make it stop you’ve made your point O'Neill) of the girls taking selfies, posting online and bitchily comparing themselves to each other. Naturally eating and anxiety disorders abound so out come the mood altering drugs.
At the end of 16 years a competition occurs where 10 (just 10, what happens to all the other male teenagers??) get to pick the 10 prettiest girls to become their companions (to make more male babies with), almost all the other not quite so pretty girls get to become concubines and the remaining reject uglies get to become bald nuns in the beauty pageant school of horrors.

It made no sense.

Women perform 3 functions in this society: baby boy manufacturer, whore and creepy nun. Yeah OK right, good luck with that.

10 couples per year to carry on the population of EUROPE? I started doing the maths but gave up and it was all so stupid,
Who is growing all the tofu they eat endlessly?
Who is manufacturing all the designer clothes and makeup and handbags the girls wear?
Who is picking up and washing all their stuff?
Who is making all the drugs they take?
Who is driving the trains? (They have trains)

I could go on.

I ended up giving it two stars because I couldn’t put it down yesterday but I should have DNFd it after 20 pages.

Just finished The Chalk Man by CJ Tudor , a debut novel of the thriller mystery horror genre. Silly, vacuous nonsense. Entirely stretches credibility in terms of some characterisation. Part of it is set in 1986 and I swear it feels like the author has looked up the 80s rather than lived them. How many people had computers for work, let alone a home printer in 86? Did British kids wear Converse? And were C of E vicars all anti abortion protesting Evangelists?I did see an awful lot of things coming. At the beginning of the book there is at least one punch to the head which the recipient did not see coming per chapter . People say ' Noooooo!' Etc....
However. It was a diverting enough read and in many ways better than the entirely overrated Snap.

And Then There Were None seems to be out if print at present, which is odd!

18. The Collector by John Fowles Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. He is obsessed with a beautiful stranger, art student Miranda. Coming into unexpected money, he buys a remote Sussex house and calmly abducts Miranda, believing she will grow to love him in time.

Alone and desperate, Miranda must struggle to understand her captor if she is to gain her freedom…

This is told from Fredericks POV, then his captor, Miranda's, then in the third part of the book from Fredericks again. It's quite interesting to see the same events described in part one from Miranda's POV, often my assumptions about her motivations proved to be quite different to those Fowles ascribes.
However overall I felt the book started well but became less gripping in the second part as Miranda obsessed over her life and relationships prior to being 'Collected', although I'm sure such introspection would happen if one were held captive in a cellar for week after week it just wasn't very interesting to read about imho.

19. The Cut Out Girl by Bart Van Ess, I listened to this on Audible. Unfortunately read by the author who gave the story a monotone, characterless quality so much so that despite the subject matter it became, at times, a list of people and places for me. Many photographs are described but for the listener obviously unseen. I don't want to be negative as it's an important story but I can't recommend the audible version.

Now onto David Copperfield on Audible, (I may be some time!) and who knows what on Kindle/book. Reading is taking a back seat to a binge rewatch of Game Of Thrones and gardening in the lovely weather we've been having.

Those of you who like Robert MacFarlene's books might like this, I read it not so long ago and loved it. It's now come down to £1 on the kindle.

21st-Century Yokel is not quite nature writing, not quite a family memoir, not quite a book about walking, not quite a collection of humorous essays, but a bit of all five.

Thick with owls and badgers, oak trees and wood piles, scarecrows and ghosts, and Tom Cox's loud and excitable dad, this book is full of the folklore of several counties – the ancient kind and the everyday variety – as well as wild places, mystical spots and curious objects. Emerging from this focus on the detail are themes that are broader and bigger and more important than ever.

Tom's writing treads a new path, one that has a lot in common with a rambling country walk; it's bewitched by fresh air and big skies, intrepid in minor ways, haunted by weather and old stories and the spooky edges of the outdoors, restless and prone to a few detours, but it always reaches its destination in the end.

Brizzle, I'm glad you enjoyed 21st Century Yokel. I read it last year and loved it. I think the gentle humour would appeal to those who enjoy David Sedaris and James Herriot.

14. Paradise Lodge by Nina Stibbe
It's the late 1970s, Lizzie is 15, and should be getting ready to sit her O-levels. Instead she bunks off to take more and more shifts at Paradise Lodge, the local residential home for older people, where she prefers spending time chatting to the staff and residents.

Didn't like this one. It is apparently a sequel of sorts, but the blurb didn't mention this, and TBH I'm not sure how much better it would be if I'd read Stibbe's first novel. Name dropping Linco Beer, Maxwell House, and Marc Bolan stands in for a proper stab at evoking a sense of the period. The older people at Paradise Lodge are universally charming and seem only to have minimal support needs, so the staff get to treat it more as a social club than a place of work. The teenage love triangle (or maybe pentagon?) was half-baked to the extent that I just wasn't bothered who ended up with whom.

TheTurnofthescrew I was interested to read your review of Paradise Lodge because I have had Love Nina on my kindle for years and have never been able to get into it despite it looking promising from the blurb.

I've added David Sedaris to my list of authors to look out for, I haven't read any James Herriot for years so I might well revisit him.

Been away from the thread for a while, enjoying the sunshine and trying to stay off social. Got a few reads on.
49. The Cutting Season- Attica Locke
This one is similar in vein to The Dry. Set in Louisiana, a Mexican worker is found murder on the cane field that surround an old planation. Lots of focus on underlying racial tensions and people reconciling themselves with the past. Well written and absorbing . Enjoyed this.
50. My sister the serial killer Outstanding pick from the Women's Prize List. Full of black humour, and an interesting take in nature / nurture and the impact of our upbringing.
51. Bottled Goods - Sophie van Llewyn Another Women's Prize List. Another great book. Clever use of magic realism and again black humour, this focuses on communist Romania of the 1960's
52. Lost children archive - Valeria Luiselli This was quite intense. A family that is fragmented are making one final road trip in search of the Apaches and Mexican child immigrants. The parents are self absorbed and treat their children as mini adults in all the wrong ways. The scene in which they are trying to choose a suitable audiobook is hilarious. Finally they settle on Lord of the Flies(!) not sure I agree this is suitable listening for 5 and 10 year olds but heigh-ho! A worthy book, lots to discuss but in truth I found it hard going, dull in places and was glad to get to the end.
53. Picking up the pieces - Jo Worgan Story of a single mum with an autistic son. Struck a cord both professionally and personally.

21. A spool of blue thread by Anne Tyler A tale of an American family who rally round to look after their ageing parents. The story winds through the past and present, revealing the characters' pasts and secrets. There's no big twists or dramatics, but the beauty and torture of everyday life is captured perfectly.

I really enjoyed this. I loved how she builds the characters, how every gesture and look they share adds depth to their character until it feels like you really know them.

Can anyone else recommend any others by her they've enjoyed?

I'm another who was terrified by And Then They Were None when I first read it. In fact it is one of only two books I can think of that gave me nightmares as a child!

The other one was The Secret Garden btw. I was young when I read it, and the bit at the beginning when everyone dies of cholera was too much for me. I remember waking up and screaming and screaming! For years I re-read it and left out the first two chapters. Perhaps it's lucky I never read any Stephen King

stripyeyes You can't go wrong with any Anne Tyler IMO, but my favourite is Back When We Were Grown Ups.

It's been a rather slow reading month for me, but I have a few to add to my list:

18. Bitch in a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen From the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps by Robert Rodi. This is the second volume, covering Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. I read the first volume (covering Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park) a couple of years ago, and this is more of the same. It's not a biography because it is focused very much on the books, with only passing mentions of the author. I'm not sure Rodi's sense of humour would appeal to everyone (subtle he is not), but I find him very amusing and this was a pleasant nostalgic stroll through Austen without actually re-reading her.

19. The Wife by Meg Wolitzer. I picked this up at the airport because my kindle was playing up (it seems to have sorted itself out now, touch wood) so I risked being bookless on holiday, and I have read and enjoyed two other books of Wolitzer's (The Interestings and The Position). This one is narrated by Joan Castleman, who is in her 60s and accompanying her husband to Helsinki where he has won a literary prize. She reflects over her life, her marriage and her own early dreams of becoming an author. I really like Wolitzer's style of writing and have added another of hers to my kindle.

20. Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. This is the story of a mixed marriage between a Chinese man and an American woman. Deep down, James struggles to believe that Marilyn really wants to be married to him, while Marilyn sometimes finds it hard to understand why her life turned out so differently from how she pictured it. She never realised her dream of becoming a doctor, but perhaps her eldest daughter Lydia can do it for her. I enjoyed this, but I think that reading it straight after The Wife was to its detriment. There are some similarities between the two books (both are family dramas set in America in the second half of the 20th century and featuring a woman who did not fulfill her career potential), but Wolitzer is a better writer than Ng in my opinion. She lets her characters and plot develop naturally without having to explain them to you.