50 Book Challenge 2019 Part Five

[southeastdweller]

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

InMyOwnParticularIdiom (keep meaning to say I love your username) thanks for your review of Under the Pendulum Sun.
Is it a series? Sounds right up my street. I've fallen into an easy and most pleasurably luxuriant fantasy read and listen binge atm (ASOIAF rereading and the Temeraire series for listening). Just what the reading funk doctor ordered.

50bookers who liked Mythos Stephen Fry doing it over three nights at the Liverpool Phil. Quite tempted despite not having read it.

Ha satsuki your post has got me wondering whether Darwin and Fitzroy would be Leave or Remain. I rather see Fitzroy as a Rory Stewart. Tory, obvs , but a gentle remainer. Darwin is hard to call. Doesn't like foreigners but not a fan of Tories. Oh , God, maybe he'd be a UKIPper!!

33. Educated by Tara Westover.

Best-selling memoir that says a lot about the state of America’s education, social and healthcare services as it tells the story (so far) of Tara Westover’s life. A rural upbringing with strenuous work for all the family, parental love obscured/transformed by mental illness, religion and isolation; it reminded me of Xiaolu Guo’s book of her upbringing in China, which I read earlier this year. Similar tone, experiences of casual violence and sequelae of education. Well written and giving lots to think about.

34. Destroying a Nation: The Civil War in Syria by Nikolaos Van Dam.

Informative analysis of the Syrian Civil War, which makes for rather depressing reading. I feel much more knowledgeable about the complicated conflict but have another book about Syria lined up that is more personal containing interviews with a range of Syrians experiencing the war.

It tells a lot about this book that that author finishes with “Miracles only happen if one keeps believing in them.”

Clunky phone. I was editing:

It tells a lot about this book and the conflict that the author finishes with “Miracles only happen if one keeps believing in them.”

Scribbly - thanks, it was that or HeTurnedMeIntoANewt...

Under the Pendulum Sun is Jeannette Ng's only book so far and I doubt it would become a series, although the ending is open enough to allow it. It does start slowly but I thought the resolution was absolutely outstanding, so would recommend sticking with it if you start it.

103. The Strawberry Thief by Joanne Harris

I loved this. It’s the fourth in the Chocolat series and I do think you need to have read the others because there’s not a lot of backstory in The Strawberry Thief so while still an enjoyable story you wouldn’t really understand the relationships between the various people, and there are references to characters from earlier books that aren’t explained. I just love her writing - for me it really evokes the scents and colours of the places she’s describing, and I love the magical elements even though I am a huge sceptic of that sort of thing IRL! I’m now very torn because I really want to go back and reread the rest of the series, but I’ve got so many new books waiting to be read - nice dilemma to have!

I have just finished Next Door by BLake Pierce Whilst this story was engaging and I was keen to find out what really happened it was also extremely implausible. I found it hard to believe that an FBI Intern would be allowed to be investigating a case which involved a member of their own family or that a qualified FBI agent and his senior would allow it. This got in the way of an otherwise good story. 2*s

Now onto The Strawberry Thief whilst thinking I need to tackle TTOD

27 Thus was Adonis Murdered Sarah Caudwell

This always appears on Top 50 type lists of detective stories, and I’ve had it on my ‘look for in second hand bookshops’ for a long time. It couldn’t quite live up to my expectations when I finally got hold of a copy...

A group of friends, barristers at Lincoln’s Inn, discuss Julia’s letters back from her Art Lovers holiday in Venice, and are alarmed to hear she has been detained for the murder of a fellow tourist. Are there sufficient clues in the letters to enable them to discover the true murderer? It starts out being all style and ends up being all plot. Funny, and satisfying in the end.

33. End of Days – Jenny Erpenbeck

The same concept as Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, but told from the other side, so to speak. This book focuses on the many different lives one twentieth century woman may have lived. This didn’t have the epic, sprawling feel of Kate Atkinson’s novel; it is smaller scale and more intimate, with a much reduced cast of characters, and in my opinion, all the better for it.

Jenny Erpenbeck has been one of my finds of the year. I love her understated and precise writing style, with not one word wasted. This was a relatively slim book, but it a still took me a while to read as I found it quite dense. It makes quite a lot of demands of the reader, but the investment is worth it.

34. The Doll Factory – Elizabeth Macneal

I picked this up after seeing a positive review on here – I think by Too Much Splother? In 1850’s London, Iris and her twin Rose experience a miserable existence working in Mrs Whittle’s Doll Emporium. Iris seizes her chance of freedom and the chance to pursue her own artistic ambitions when (fictious) Pre-Raphaelite painter Louis Frost persuades her to become his model and muse. Meanwhile, evil taxidermist Silas Reed has also started to admire Iris from afar, but not in a good way…

After a bit of a bumpy start I began to fear this was going to turn out to be like The Miniaturist which I loathed. However, it definitely picked up as it went along and by the half way point I was gripped. This novel has an authentic period feel which is completely immersive. Her descriptions of the filthy streets and ramshackle houses are vividly convincing; you really get a feel for Silas’s claustrophobic lair, inhabited by all the poor stuffed creatures he has ensnared over the years. This book is at its heart a thriller, and Macneal excels at building tension and pulling the reader in to find out what happens next.

She is less strong on characterisation, which was good but not amazing, and dialogue, which bordered on the clunky and at times almost broke the spell for me. For example, I thought the relationship between Rose and Iris was not properly developed and their animosity towards each other didn’t really make sense.

This is Elizabeth Macneal’s first novel and although not perfect, I found this a very entertaining read. I would be interested to see what she does next.

Indigosalt I'm so glad you enjoyed The End of Days and many thanks for your thoughts on how it compares with Life after Life. As mentioned up-thread, I can very much recommend Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation. I think part of the attraction of her books is the fantastic writing, but I also love how she captures the tremendous changes that Germany has undergone in the last century and how they have affected individual lives.

Boiledegg yes, she chronicles recent German history brilliantly by showing how it impacts ordinary folk. I have finally got Visitation from the library and am looking forward to it!

61. Becoming - Michelle Obama

Much reviewed here already. I don't usually read memoirs/ autobiographies but had a strange urge to read this. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think she handled her role with grace and class and came across as very likeable.

Satsuki there is a backstop plan in place to prevent problems for the supporters and objectors of TTOD

Have any of you read Telling the bees? It's dropped about 70% in price so I'm wondering whether it's worth getting.
thanks.

23. The Hours Before Dawn by Celia Fremlin
Louise is a home counties mother of three. Her younger child has never slept, and she is physically and emotionally shattered. Her husband is oblivious, and her neighbours despair of her and her unruly mob.

Into this chaos comes a lodger, Miss Vera Brandon. Miss Brandon is a cool, collected academic with whom Louise cannot help compare herself unfavourably. Louise feels uneasy around Miss Brandon, to the extend of starting to believe that Vera is getting on rather too well with her husband. Then more serious incidents start to occur.

A very Mumsnet domestic psychodrama on how difficult motherhood and subsequent loss of self can be, with a spot of classic crime chucked in for good measure. Sharply funny, but equally suspenseful, as we are kept dangling as to whether the strange goings-on are a symptom of poor Louise's utter exhaustion, or something genuinely sinister.

24. Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark
Fleur Talbot, an impoverished aspiring novelist, gains employment helping Sir Quentin and his slightly dim cronies write their memoirs. However, their lives soon being to imitate those of Fleur's fictional antihero Warrender Chase and his set.

Fleur is a great fun heroine with assorted friends and lovers whom she uses to further her own ends whenever necessary, refusing to be cowed by her olders and betters. Just the right amount of silliness to be enjoyable.

18. Tombland (Shardlake #7) by C. J. Sansom

I love this historical crime fiction series about a hunchback lawyer in Tudor England, and this book did not disappoint although it could have been a lot shorter than 880 pages.

This time, Shardlake is charged by 16-year-old Elizabeth to find out the truth about her distant relative Boleyn who is going to be tried for the murder of his first wife who had been missing for 9 years but is recently found dead on his property. Investigations lead to Shardlake and his companions getting caught up in Kett's rebellion.

It was an interesting in verbose story, with good suspense and vivid characters. I enjoyed learning about life in Tudor England and this rebellion. This was a worthy sequel to all the other Shardlake books. Recommended.

I have been off this thread so long it had fallen off my list... I have been reading, but there has so much other stuff going on that I haven't got round to doing reviews, so I will just do some brief catch-ups.

I'm happy to see other people also enjoying Jenny Erpenbeck. I just read Go, Went, Gone (see below), and also read The End of Days last year. I think I have The Old Child and The Book of Words on my shelf waiting to be read.

28 Midlife: a Philosophical Guide - Kieran Setiya
Brief guide to the midlife crisis, from a philosopher going through it. Basically ends up recommending something akin to mindfulness. Worth reading but not exactly revolutionary and life changing.

29 Alone Time - Stephanie Rosenbloom
Travel writer for the New York Times on the pleasures of solo travel, in particular spending time alone in four cities (Paris, Florence, Istanbul, New York). Also ended up being about a sort of mindfulness, in a way - 'savouring' and enjoying being in the moment.

30 Pachinko - Min Jin Lee
A multi-generational story of a Korean family in Japan, spanning most of the 20th century, written by a Korean American novelist, and touching on themes of prejudice, belonging, resilience. A very good book; my only frustration was that it covered so much time and so many people that often you had just got to know a character when they were killed off in a historically accurate but seemingly perfunctory way.

31 In Praise of Shadows - Junichiro Tanizaki
Classic short treatise on Japanese aesthetics by one of Japan's great literary figures of the 20th century.

32 Go, Went, Gone - Jenny Erpenbeck
Retired Berlin professor gets to know a group of African asylum seekers as actual people. He has lived through the end of WWII and the upheavals of the cold war and afterwards, so (oddly, unlike many of his compatriots) can empathise with them as not undeserving 'others' but complicated victims and survivors of events outside their control, like many Europeans in the 20th century. No one is perfect in this book, but everyone is human.

33 How To Live - Vincent Deary
Another sort of midlife-crisis book, this time by a psychotherapist. Its main theme is how most of the time we live 'automatically', almost literally creatures of habit, until change forces us to adopt new habits and patterns of life; he suggests taking conscious charge of that process and thinking more about what we want to become automatic in our lives.

34 Vertigo - Joanna Walsh
A book of short stories which reminded me why I rarely read short stories: I find them very unsatisfying. These were good in their way - sketches of unhappy women and restless marriages, playing with forms you could not sustain for a whole novel, such as starting every sentence with "Let..." - but always vague and inconclusive, leaving no coherent impression. Maybe I should not have read the whole book at once but tried doing it a story at a time, to give them space to sink in individually.

35. To Throw Away Unopened – Viv Albertine

Before I started reading and posting on this thread, I read very little non-fiction and never read memoirs. I’m happy to say I’ve discovered that I love a good memoir, and have picked up many great recommendations from my fellow 50 bookers. This is most definitely a brilliant example of the genre, and a book I would never even have considered reading if it weren’t for this thread.

The writer intersperses a moving and detailed account of the last moments of her Mother’s life with ruminations on her own life as a middle aged ex-punk and sections covering a childhood spent surviving the ugly and painful breakdown of her parents’ marriage from both her Mother and her father’s perspective, and how this has formed her own character and made her who she is. But it’s so much more than that. She’s so brutally honest about who she is, her own weaknesses and shortcomings, I finished the book liking her very much and admiring her for not only being able to take such brutal stock of herself, but to do so with such kindness and compassion.

This is also a very funny book. I particularly liked the section about the painstaking preparations she makes before a date, including meticulous hair removal, salon blow dry, new underwear. As a fellow hairy woman, she definitely struck a chord with me. Her determination to stand up for herself in public places also stood out, and I found myself nodding along to these bits. I find that as I head into middle age, I am no longer willing to surrender my right to space in the world and fade into the background, as society seems to expect. One of my favourite reads of the year so far – thanks to everyone who bought this one to my attention.

Am probably behind on book news compared to many on this thread, but did we all know Jessie Burton has a new book coming out in September?

My list so far this year

1.	Crash
2.	At the Wedding
3.	Bitter 
4.	Little Fires Everywhere 
5.	The Shut Eye
6.	A little life
7.	The Surrogate
8.	The Hunting Party
9.	Station 11
10.	The Facts about Life and Death
11.	Dear Mrs Bird
12.	Another Love
13.	Rubbernecker 
14.	Let me lie
15.	The seven deaths of Evelyn hardcastle
16.	The Silent Child

The last two are current and I just started a thread on Evelyn Hardcastle, anyone read it?

My faves in here have been the Belinda Bauer ones, so Snap, Rubber Necker, Facts about Life and Death.

I am also about the embark on all things Ian Rankin...

37: Ordinary People - Diana Evans

I wouldn't normally be fussed about reading anything on a prize list but I've been trying to use the library for ebooks recently - via BorrowBox - and their selection isn't great, so I fell on this as one of the few things that looked like a good read (as an aside, it's frustrating not being able to put in a request for things to be added, but hey ho).

Anyway....I really enjoyed this. Quite long and talky but this very denseness was what drew me in. I have a fatal weakness for this kind of person/relationship-centred novel anyway and I liked Diana Evans's writing and the slightly fantastical edge (has South London ever seemed so mysterious and grandiose?). And I loved Ria.

40. My Cousin Rachel. I have no idea why I haven't read this before : it is exactly the sort of book teenage me would have devoured. My gran had a shelf of books which I pilfered, thereby reading some strange oddities. The two Du Mauriers I read at 14 or so were the rather more obscure Glass Blowers and The House On The Strand.

I enjoyed Rachel although I thought it took a while to get used to Du Maurier's somewhat laboured style. The second half proved to be a proper page turner and its ambiguities are wonderful. I preferred it to Rebecca.

I want to ask a question about the last sentence but it's a mahoosive spoiler so I can't!!

35. Olive Kitteridge Elizabeth Strout - I’ve read a lot of Strout this year (well 4 books so maybe not a lot ). This one I think has been well liked by posters on this thread - I’m sorry I can’t remember who now. I was less keen on this, though the writing is once again beautiful. I think I just prefer a fuller/more traditional storyline rather than the ‘loosely connected vignettes’ style. My favourite by this author has definitely been Amy and Isabelle

26. Our House - Louise Candlish
Fiona comes home in a Friday afternoon to find a couple moving in. The only problem is that they’re moving into her house and she didn’t sell it.

This story is told from a few different angles with both characters giving their story of how things happened. It was written very well although I seen a few of the twists coming like we were being led to guess them. Overall a very good read and another off the TBR pile!