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?

Bringing my list across:

1. The Hunting Party - Lucy Foley
2. Men without Women - Huraki Murakami

3. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Schaffer

1. How Hard Can It Be? - Allison Pearson
2. Christmas Pudding - Nancy Mitford
3. Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton
4. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

8. Any Human Heart - William Boyd 9. A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles 10. Testament of Youth - Vera Brittain 11. The Mysterious Affair at Styles - Agatha Christie 12. Harriet - Jilly Cooper 13. A Buyer’s Market - Anthony Powell 14. Charity Girl - Georgette Heyer 15. New Boy - Tracy Chevalier 16. The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell 17. Our Man in Havana - Graham Greene

My latest reads are:

18. Here Be Dragons - Sharon Penman - very long hence my absence from the thread but excellent and highly recommended. It’s the first in a trilogy and starts in the reign of Henry II and the main focus of the book is Joanna, the bastard daughter of John (later to be King). Whilst the book focuses on the personal relationships it is all set against the backdrop of the various powers struggles and conflicts of the period. At the age of 14 Joanna is married to the Welsh Prince, Llywelen, who is 18 years older than her, and moves from court of her father, the King, to North Wales. The Welsh hate the English and continually fight against their rule as well as amongst themselves. Joanna tries to broker peace (and some of the time succeeds) between her father and husband. Her biggest struggle is trying to reconcile the loving father she sees with the monstrous acts perpetrated by John against others. Fabulous!

19. Venetia - Georgette Heyer - I read lots of these and enjoy them. This turned out to be one of my favourites with a great heroine and a bit of an unforeseen (by me at least) twist towards the end.

Need to read the thread to see what I have missed .....

28 Europe at Dawn by Dave Hutchinson
Final book in the series. More of the same - spy thriller antics across a near future post-pandemic Balkanised Europe, with added SFF overlay. Overall an enjoyable read, and more-or-less neatly winds up all the various threads of the books.

Throughout the series I've found the non-SF part of the setting by far the most interesting part of the books, and in many ways I think it's a shame the author didn't just stick to writing thrillers set in a post-EU post-Schengen Europe.

Satsuki just listed to the Last Train to Memphis / Careless Love Backlisted Podcast. Very very good. I find myself wishing I could join in the discussion. They are just what I hope by book club would be but never seems to be.

10. Y: The Last Man, Book One - by Brian K. Vaughan

Yorick Brown and his capuchin monkey Ampersand are the only survivors of a world-wide plague that immediately kills all mammals with a Y chromosome. Yorick embarks on a quest to reunite with his girlfriend on the other side of the world and along the way gets caught up with a secret agent and an experimental geneticist to find a cure.

This was my first foray into graphic novels and whilst the subject matter wasn’t exactly to my taste, it was an easy read. The artwork and layouts were very well done, but the dialog was clunky at times. I’m not particularly interested in continuing to read the other books in this series, but will look into some other writers.

toomuch I love Kate Atkinson but didn’t like Emotionally Weird. It’s the only one of hers I haven’t kept. I agree with whoever said upthread that Museum is her best, with the Jackson Brodie books next. Life after Life and A God In Ruins are also fabulous.

I’m another who didn’t enjoy Brooklyn. I just found it dull. It’s the only Toibin I have read and it hasn’t encouraged me to pick up another!

I didn't like Emotionally Weird much either. It's years since I've read it but I remember being disappointed and finding it strange.

21 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
The narrator arrives back in London from a stay abroad to discover that he is being evicted. This triggers a set of surreal and funny adventures in both London and Paris. There are some very funny set pieces in this novel, including one where he and a friend attempt to steal a dog and hold it to ransom. This was her first novel and it is very accomplished.

grimupnorthLondon thanks for the Mailer recommendations. I very nearly bought In Cold Blood this week from Waterstones but didn’t because It was the wrong size of paperback. It was a stunted paperback.

Murine whilst reading Swan Song I had a tab open for each of the characters and one for Lauren Bacall. My goodness they were beautiful women. The husbands not so much.

I love the expression "stunted paperback"
You certainly don't want to buy any stunters, mark my words.

I too enjoyed in Cold Blood but would hesitate over a shrunken edition. What were the dimensions?

The dimensions were maybe 1-2 cm shorter certainly lengthways and possibly widthways than a standard paperback. I didn’t handle it for that long. It was unnecessarily and deviantly smaller.

@ScribblyGum yuck! What kind of twisted mind can have thought that was a good idea?

I’m another who doesn’t like books shaped differently than the standard. They make my bookshelves look untidy! I especially hate it when an author whose books I’m collecting changes publisher so the series changes size/design. I like books from the same series to look the same!! And yes, I know I am very -anal- odd.

Aargh, strikethrough fail

I didn't realise I was precious about book sizes... but now I think about it... the stuntedness would have put me off too.

Chessie that also irrationally angers me when the series does not match on the shelf!

I also like books to be the same size on the shelves. That's so you can lay extra books on the top when the book buying habit gets out of control (again)!

I'm another who gets twitchy about books in odd sizes. I don't mind variation on the shelves at such, but I loathe books in a series or by an author being mismatched size wise.

DS gave very specific instructions that he did NOT want the latest Wimpy Kid book for Christmas, as it was only out in hardback and he is collecting them in paperback. He is autistic though.

@ all the sizing angst. I am pretty weird about some things but I don’t think this bothers me, I have more of a problem with oversized paperbacks. I don’t like a swollen volume.

museum we have very similar children - my ds is the same except they have to be the —expensive— hardback Wimpy Kids. He has had the paperbacks but is gradually on a mission to swap them out when he finds them secondhand.

Love the sizing angst. I would say that I don't care, but... I was about to post about my disappointment with my latest purchase, this edition of Songs of Innocence and Experience

I've wanted a facsimile edition with the engravings ever since someone got one in as a special order in the bookshop where I worked as a teenager. But this Tate version is tiny :(

Stupidly I didn't look at the book dimensions, assuming it'd be the same size as the edition I saw years ago (and hardback - even better). Still lovely, but no way the same impact as a larger version, and the reproduction isn't great either.

I don't like books being smaller than usual, unless they are part of a series or a particular publisher's unique selling point, in which case I quite like them and often end up with collections, e.g. I seem somehow to have acquired quite a few of the Pushkin Press editions of novels in translation, which are small but perfectly formed and printed on very good quality paper.

sadik I have the Oxford edition with the black cover and that is fully illustrated and a normal size.

Quick break from the rereads to squeeze in a small but goodie:

15. The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way - The KLF

More of a pamphlet than a book, I suppose, but definitely worth including as one of the best books about the music business I've ever read (I'm saying that as someone who spent years working in the biz). Using the Timelords' Doctorin The Tardis as a template, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty explain how anyone can use the Golden Rules to have a Number One chart record. This is a fascinating insight into the industry in its pre-internet age, when getting on Top Of The Pops was the be all and end all of chart success - and indeed where being Number One was a key to at least temporary fame, if not fortune.

My Robin Hobb collection gives me the daily mild heebyjeeby. BIL gave dh the first trilogy as a loving present so obviously we have to keep those [eye roll] then follows the next two trilogies which match each other but not the loving trilogy and then there is the final trilogy which is semi- matches trilogies 2&3 but the books are bigger, and are only two because dh couldn’t wait and bought the last one on kindle.
The whole shelf is an absolute dog's dinner. I sometimes dream of binning the whole lot and starting over.

Also huge snort at swollen volume