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.

54 How to Marry a Werewolf by Gail Carriger

At the end of the 19thC, Faith follows a well worn path across the Atlantic to join other rich American girls on the hunt for a husband in London society - but with the strict instruction from her parents that she is to catch herself a werewolf. To British eyes this is unusual but not overly surprising - the packs are rich, socially well connected and have political influence. For conservative and religious Americans, it is rather different - and her parents' agenda is not all about Faith's best interests.

This was on Audible - I've read it before but got a free code in an author giveaway. It worked well as an easy fun listen while I was working.

55. The Heartland: finding and losing schizophrenia by Nathan Filer Short but exceptional both in content and writing. Nathan Filer explores 'schizophrenia' and other forms of mental distress and disorder through the experiences of a number of individuals, and in the context of changing models of diagnosis, medication & other therapies offered and wider society. I imagine most of us will have known people - friends, family or wider acquaintance - who have suffered psychotic episodes and/or had a diagnosis of schizophrenia, but even if they haven't I am sure that any reader would get helpful insight from this book about their own and others' mental wellbeing.

I really enjoyed Bloody Brilliant Women . Still here reading and following thread just drowning under family stuff, work stuff and a tiny bit of blogging. 50 Bookers are keeping me quietly sane. Roll on end of term

Scribbly, if you enjoy Tememaire, I strongly recommend spreading them out- i found they got a bit repetitive and ended up giving up, which was a shame as I had enjoyed them.

113. The Life Changing Magic Of Numbers by Bobby Seagull

This is meant to be an accessible look at maths in real world situations (understanding bank interest, gambling, online dating algorithms). Mostly it was,but there were a few occasions it went over my head!

114. Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

Listened to this on Audible. Love the book (a childhood favourite) but didn’t like the narrator which affected my enjoyment.

115. Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story by Leah Hazard

Latest in the medical memoirs genre and I really enjoyed this. There are some heart breaking moments but also some amusing ones. If you enjoyed The Language Of Kindness by Christie Watson then you would also enjoy this. However - if you’re pregnant/TTC and you’re the sort of person who worries about things you read, then DON’T read this as it is quite graphic in places about things that can go wrong in labour!

116. Annelies by David Gilham

This is based on the premise that Anne Frank didn’t die in Belsen, and imagines the life she might have had afterwards. It’s an interesting idea but I didn’t like the execution. None of the characters were likeable in this book and for me this tarnishes Anne’s memory. I wish I hadn’t read this.

Pressed post too soon!

117. Believe Me by J P Delaney

Another completely bonkers thriller. Claire works as a honey trapper, but gets involved with a man whose wife has been murdered. She is asked to try and trap him into a confession. It all gets completely ridiculous from that point onwards. Not recommended!

118. Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

This, on the other hand, is very much recommended! I love Kate Atkinson and the Jackson Brodie books and this didn’t disappoint. I listened to this on Audible read by Jason Isaacs, who played Brodie in the TV adaptations. This brings back a character I liked from one of the earlier books and I enjoyed seeing where that character is now. I was pleased to see from the interview linked upthread that Atkinson is working on another Brodie book.

39 The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell
Continuing the series in this one someone dies, someone's marriage breaks up, someone else gets locked in the lavatory and war is declared. This made me laugh but also felt sad at the funeral (won't say more than that as spoilers) where even family members couldn't be bothered to turn up. Powell is very good at describing the judgements we all make on each other's lives.

I am now reading the next one which is also good so far.

18. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, John McWhorter

A slightly alternative look at the history of the English language, the slightly alternative part being the influence of Celtic languages on English. Most historical linguists thought that Celtic was mostly lost in English, place names aside. McWhorter shows how Celtic grammar has in fact shaped English grammar, how vikings bashed English even more out of shape and so on. If you’re into the history of English, you’ll probably enjoy this.

19) Revenge, Yoko Ogawa
Short story collection translated from Japanese. The stories are all linked in some way, some more obviously than others. All the stories are quite dark or unsettling on some way, so it feels wrong to say I enjoyed it, but I really did DH read the original Japanese version and says the phrasing is beautiful in Japanese. That doesn’t come across so much in English - it can be a bit staccato, and is light on description but I actually think that’s a positive. With some stories you wouldn’t know if the narrator was male or female until halfway through, and even then because of a throwaway comment. I much prefer that to the “she brushed her long flaxen locks and blinked her green, almond shaped eyes as she appreciated her curves poured into the I don’t care just get on with the bloody story...” style.

And god yes, Philip K Dick is atrocious. For all his imagination with settings and worlds, he had no imagination with women. I think he thought women could only express emotions through their breasts. Scared women’s breasts will wobble. Excited women’s breasts will vibrate. Sad women’s breasts will shudder.

Odd man.

A very busy week - no time for reading, let alone finding anything I'm actually wanting to read, so just a quick pop in to skim what I've missed.

I enjoyed the breast talk and am going to be trying to keep an eye on what my breasts might be telling me about my emotional state. Currently mine are rather sweaty and hoping for bra removal - any ideas what that might reveal?

Stewart Marconie cba to check if I'm spelling chat correctly. I read and disliked Pies and Prejudice years ago and just didn't understand why he was so popular.

Is that the first Big Sky review? Mine has obediently entered the random.number generator.

One of the things that annoyed me about Daisy Jones was the fixation in describing her bosom and what it represented - her personality was 90 per cent breast tissue. I thought I could escape it in a book written by a woman but pert nipples and see through fabric get everywhere.

52. Bad Apple by Zoje Stage

7 year old Hanna has never spoken a word.
She’s a perfect little angel for her daddy (Alex), but not her mommy (Suzette). She wants her mommy out of the way so she can have her daddy all to herself. And she wants to kill her mommy to get her way.

This focuses mainly on the increasingly toxic relationship between Hanna and Suzette. Alex spends most of the book pretending that everything is absolutely fine with Hanna, despite warnings to the contrary. It seemed strongly slanted towards portraying Hanna as born bad.

It’s an unsettling read, but not one that really worked for me.

Fanfare please - finished This Thing of Darkness, by Harry Thompson.

For anyone who hasn't read it, it's a lightly fictionalised account of the voyage of The Beagle and its aftermath, with a focus on Captain FitzRoy rather than Darwin. It pulls no punches about the naked greed underlying the 19th century colonial enterprise, along with the harm done by the muddled good intentions of spreading Christianity.

The seafaring adventures of the first half are reminiscent of Patrick O'Brian, but the second half goes to some darker places. If O'Brian's hero is Lucky Jack, Thompson's is Unlucky Robert, whose heroic efforts are stymied at every turn by the malice of lesser men. The whole novel left me seething at the injustice undergone both by individuals and by whole populations.

After following the main character for nearly forty years, I felt very emotionally invested in him. It's additionally poignant because the author died the year the book was published, at the age of 45. I hope he at least knew he had achieved something before he died.

Disappointingly though, there were only passing references to breasts, and all fully justified in context.

I’m going to have to read TTOD and stop worrying about whether I will like it or not. Did anyone in the second wave so far not enjoy it??

69 The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

Eek. This was totally terrifying, and the real stuff of nightmares. An account of the early stirrings of Ebola, tracing its emergence from the jungle and into a monkey research facility in the US. My aunt nursed people with Marburg and used to tell me stories about it which scared the living daylights out of me as a child, and it turns out that monkey-to-human viruses are still the thing I’m most scared of.

This read like an exceptionally alarming thriller with no happy ending. The author builds up the tension through semi-fictionalised portraits of the leading figures going about their lives before they come up against the virus. It felt a little like an episode of Casualty in that regard. I didn’t need the pages of exposition about what a researcher’s children had for dinner before I got to the point, but I can see how it all added up to something more than a standard non-fiction book.

I would really have liked an update looking at the outbreak in Sierra Leone and Liberia a few years ago exploring what we have (and haven’t) learned, but that isn’t the fault of the book.

No breasts, except when covered by many layers of biohazard suits.

Well done biblio!

Slightly shorter is Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. A short and downright odd little book. Whimsical and quirky would be kind adjectives. But really, it's just weird!

37. My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite.

Thumbs up for this modern black comedy. I’ve had a run of interesting likeable reads this year.

Currently half way through listening to/reading Vanity Fair and loving it so far. The only breasts here are suitably, discretely covered up and set to great advantage.

Biblio - so glad you liked Darkness. It would have been a real shame to lose you from the threads.

I have also just read Convenience Store Woman and agree that it's a very odd little book.

Also 70. Cartwheel by Jennifer duBois

American study abroad student returns to her apartment in Buenos Aires to find her roommate brutally murdered. She is arrested the next day. There are rumours both girls were in a love triangle with the next door neighbour. The time frame shifts back and forth from before and after the murder and is told from the POVs of the student, her father, the next door neighbour and the public prosecutor

This is supposed to be loosely inspired by the Amanda Knox case in Italy but apparently is an exact rip off of events according to many outraged people on Goodreads. I only vaguely remember it in the news but if you know a lot of the details then it allegedly spoils the book. The author is slammed for using pretentious vocab, but I can't say this stood out in the audio version. It wasn't very fast moving but quite compelling.

Remus

I’m reading Words Best Sung and oh god the perkiness! Perkiness on every page. It’s too late for me but save yourselves. I’ve just read this “leaving the image of her breasts trembling like two perfectly set jellies hanging in the uncomfortable silence”. Send help!!!!!!

Oh heavens satsuki!!! Sending you, or rather the author, a cold shower... and possibly registering him on a writing course!!?? That's a bloody awful sentence. I'm assuming there are other redeeming elements of the book...

18. Can You Ever Forgive Me? - Lee Israel. I loved the film of this author's life when I saw it at the cinema earlier this year but the book feels slight in comparison (it's 144 pages). I enjoyed reading it though to 'hear' the author's deadpan and sardonic voice, I just wish it had been longer.

I'm starting to feel a bit left out on the breast front - they never seem to get a mention in any of the books I read

Anyway...... 42: The Flight of the Maidens - Jane Gardam

Coming-of-age novel set in 1946. Hetty, Una, and German refugee Liselotte have all won scholarship places at university and in their last summer at home in their small Northern town, they grapple with family, relationships and the changes that lie ahead.

I like Jane Gardam's books and read this with pleasure for its flashes of comic brilliance and some beautiful descriptive writing. I suspect a lot of it was very autobiographical (she was the same age, in the same place, at the same time), but ultimately it's a bit meandering and in places becomes weirdly dream-like, especially in a passage where Lieselotte, the German refugee, goes to America at the invitation of a long-lost aunt. I would have liked her story to be more developed, but frustratingly it rather peters out at the end, whereas the other two girls are brought more sharply into focus.
Still, I liked this overall. A pleasant but not outstanding addition to the list.

Sounds reminiscent of Bilgewater, also by Jane Gardam, which was one of my favourite books as a teenager, Terp

I had no idea your love was so contingent, Remus

Speaking of which, Satsuki, ding, ding, ding, we have a new contender, straight to the top of the Breast Obsessed leaderboard. That is a deeply disturbing image.

Gobbled up Hard Pushed: A Midwife's Tale, by Leah Hazard. It's the latest addition to the recent crop of healthcare memoirs, and the standard across the board has been very high - there's a strong sense of integrity about them, as the authors have passionately-held views. I've always rather fancied the idea of myself as a doctor or nurse (or indeed midwife), swooping in with calm competence to deal with an emergency. The author lays bare what it feels like behind that professional mask, the sick feeling of anxiety you feel walking into the hospital. I knew things were in a bad way, but was still shocked that most of the midwives she knows are reliant on ADs/beta blockers to get them through. So unfair for dedicated, hard-working people to be put in impossible situations (knowing they stand to be blamed personally if things go wrong). Definitely worth the read.

Yes, Bilgewater is a great book Biblio - and better than this one, I have to say. As is A Long Way From Verona.