50 Book Challenge 2019 Part Six

[southeastdweller]

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

Yeah, I didn’t like her much either Remus and I wasn’t keen on the ending either but overall found it enjoyable enough.

Finished The Conviction of Cora Burns, yet another one of those Victorian style books with a female name in the title!

This is much better written than quite a lot of the fodder but has the usual themes of female insanity, male oppression and social class and the trope of experimentation which is used in quite a few books. The book does feel a bit Creative Writing course, with its interludes in different voices and some of the plot is overly convoluted. But I did think it was a decent enough read.

Taking DS off to uni tomorrow ,so lots of packing to do. Not much time for reading !

Good luck to your DS, Piggy!

Old Baggage
I didn't like this much. I found the central character irritating and rather stupid, despite her cleverness. Chunks of it were boring (pages of the character's autobiography) and most of the characters were rather two dimensional. We had sexism, lesbianism, suicide, domestic abuse, fascism, teenage pregnancy, class issues, as if there was a checklist of ,Issues I must shovel into my novel by the shovel full.

I kept thinking it was finished and then she'd shove yet another issue or plot twist in. The ending, when it finally arrived, was silly and mawkish - very Tiny Tim.

It wasn't awful, but it could easily have been substantially better. It was definitely more whimper than bang.

Best - the ending was so silly.

I thought the idea with Old Baggage was exactly that she wasn’t very likeable (hence the wordplay in the title); she achieved some things but was very blind to the needs of other people and her own faults, and is stuck in the past (her baggage and her backstory) It didn’t really bother me that she didn’t come over well as I didn’t expect her to. It ends the way it does as a nod to her previous book Crooked Heart which this one comes prior to chronologically - Mattie has a brief role in that book but it isn’t about her - and it made sense to me. No one is likeable in Crooked Heart.

None of this is to try and change your opinion remus, but just for the gallery in case anyone has it on the bedside table - I liked it.

My updates

60. The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Vol. 13 (in progress) I'm sloooooowly getting through this. I enjoyed sci fi anthologies as a teenager but I don't seem to enjoy them so much any more. I'm not sure which one of us has changed!

61. H is for Homicide by Sue Grafton. I'm a big Kinsey fan and re-read them constantly

62. Lowborn by Kelly Hudson
    Interesting autobiography of a child born into a chaotic family/ single mother household on benefits. It's easy to say people should get a job but it's so hard to mitigate the physical and mental effects of constant consistent poverty. I recommend as it is so important to see the other side of the benefits argument

63. I is for Innocent by Sue Grafton. Another Kinsey book

64. Altered Carbon#1 by Richard Morgan
    One of the best books I've read this year. Futuristic dystopian detective sci fi. Brilliant world creation. Very intelligent. Almost a bit too intelligent for me, I need to re-read it to make sure I understood all the nuances

Dnf: Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
I thought it would be too sad so I couldn't give it the emotional energy I'm sure it deserves

65. Don't Even Breathe (Maggie Novak#1) by Keith Houghton
    Run of the mill thriller with a twist from the Kindle store. I'd read the sequel

66. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
    Still reading. A teenage favourite then I reread and was disappointed. Trying it for a third time. So far so good. A delusional narcissistic abusive preacher brings his wife and daughters to the Congo as the revolution takes place. The story is told by the five women.

67. The Vicarage (Monica Noble#1) by Faith Martin. I really like the Hillary Greene novels but I finished the series so this is by the same author. Only ok murder mystery.

68. The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan
    Loved it. I've bought the second one already. Detective novel set in Galway with deep themes. Very very good. Debut novel. Nice to have a novel where the victim is not a female. I try to avoid these. I definitely recommend.

99 The World I Fell Out Of by Melanie Reid
Someone upthread reviewed this very well. Melanie Reid broke her spine riding her horse and this is the account of her rehabilitation and return to her new normal. It’s brutal and funny and she doesn’t spare us any details or pretend it is anything other than a completely horrible situation. Her message is not a new one - don’t take what you have for granted because it can vanish in an instant - but it was told with an honesty that sticks.

Satsuki - I thought her 'baggage' was one of the most interesting things about the novel, but it just didn't work for me in terms of justifying the Inez stuff.

Yes I agree it was clunky there and in the plotting a a bit generally. I mostly liked reading a book set in that time period and about the lives of the women of that era, as I don’t feel it’s a perspective I’ve encountered it too much in historical fiction, so forgave it for covering so many of the issues it did because it was interesting to think about them from that angle and it felt fresh in that way.

I can’t quite remember where I am so hope I haven’t already reviewed these:

The Truants by Kate Weinberg

A debut novel set in a university this looked like a very promising mystery, with shades of Donna Tartt, but was actually not very mysterious and not as well written as I’d hoped. It was absolutely fine if you’re expecting an easy holiday read and don’t want much, but it hits a lot of cliches and the characters are 2d. Young woman starts university, is in thrall to her best friend, her best friend’s boyfriend and her charismatic female tutor. She tells us they are all charismatic and attractive and clever so that is how we know. It’s all a bit teen angsty and pretty low stakes with everyone getting entangled in exactly the ways you might predict; readable enough to keep me jogging along with it though.

Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

I really enjoyed this and found it very funny in places and touching in others. It follows a family from the perspective of Graham, whose current wife Audra is gregarious and whose conversational adventures do not take into account normal social boundaries. Graham himself is an introvert as was his ex-wife Elspeth with whom he maintains and on and off friendship. His son with Audra is on the autism spectrum and has social difficulties, and his parents’ attempts to navigate his issues actually highlights their own deviation from the norm - and, well, everybody’s. It explores the idea that we are all weird in our own way, but we have love, friendship, or at least our imperfect forays into them.

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

I had high hopes for this and found it quite compelling for the first third as it unfolded. A young woman in New York at the turn of the century (millennium) meets a young man and they fall in love. However Kate experiences strange, vivid dreams of a past time, which permeate her waking life and give her the feeling she has work to do of some significance. The dreams and the odd sense of purpose they give her increasingly intrude on reality, and she spends more time in her past life where she is the mistress of a nobleman in Elizabethan England, trying to avoid the plague. Her relationships are strained by her dual life - those around her see only a sad and frustrating decline in her mental health, meanwhile, she begins to realise that the more she acts in, and alters the past, the more she alters the present. This part of the novel is cleverly and intriguingly done, at first the changes are subtle and unsettling to note. However, there is a point in each of the past and present narratives where I thought I could see where she was going with it and was disappointed to find I was right. The final explanation for the time-travel dreaming was ludicrous and unsatisfying and the other characters often had strange narratives going on that I couldn’t quite see the point of and didn’t care about. The main conceit was used to examine the chaotic post 9-11 world in the new century through the prism of past centuries, but I don’t think it quite pulled it off, and the ending felt unearned.

Which leads me on to My Year of Rest and Relaxtion by Otessa Mosfegh I found this meditation on the way people sleepwalk through the bright lights and busy-ness of modern life well-written and the voice of the narrator is wry and witty, but it is set in the same early-2000s era as The Heavens so maybe I was overloaded by this particular sensibility when I came to it, as I tired of it quickly and was disappointed with where it was headed, also obvious from early on. It was perceptive about the varying ways we try to medicate ourselves against the pain of living, but did feel rather like it would have been an excellent short story.

I have also been finding some solace in reading some graphic novels I ostensibly got for my son and have gobbled up Miles Morales - Straight Out of Brooklyn and Stranger Things - The Other Side. I am part way through several books at the moment and having trouble finding time to read so have been making use of a audible trial which has been great.

I seem to have got back into a reading groove (trying to distract myself from the nightmare that is everyday life, I think), so another couple to report:

61: A Florentine Revenge - Christobel Kent

I thought I'd read all the Sandro Cellini novels but discovered to my surprise and pleasure that somehow I'd managed to miss this - the first of Christobel Kent's enjoyably literary whodunnits set in Florence (which she evokes wonderfully) and featuring Cellini and his wife Luisa. They couldn't be more different to Donna Leon's well-heeled Brunetti and Paola - here we're talking an ordinary, childless middle-aged couple in a marriage that's settled into a sort of stunned nothingness. Sandro is still in uniform (in the later novels he becomes a private detective) and in this, his final case as a policeman, both he and Luisa are caught up in the terrible consequences of an old tragedy that comes back to haunt them, involving English expat Celia along the way.
I really enjoyed this and would recommend the series to anyone looking for intelligent, well-written fiction with a crime slant. Kent also doesn't have any truck with the tiresome trope of page after breathless page of graphic/gratuitous violence in crime novels, which is a plus.

62: The Husband's Secret - Liane Moriarty

Coincidentally a very different sort of book that's also about marriage and how it can disappoint. I can't say what the secret is without revealing the whole plot but it centres on super-mum and model wife Cecilia, whose discovery of a shattering fact about her husband affects not just her but several other people in her community. As so often with Moriarty, there's some heavy stuff going on in this book, but it was also very funny and thought-provoking in places. A quick and easy read, but not as light-hearted as you might expect.

Reading this thread and busily clicking on my library's reservation page.

Currently bogged down in the fens in The Way, the Truth and the Dead, by Francis Pryor
It's crime fiction by the Time Team archaeologist, and in truth it's not very good. Very clunky writing - he has a knack for the wrong sort of detail, so our hero's brother is struggling with slugs in his potatoes (he's a farmer, so this is his crop rather than his plate) and the hero pops out one lunchtime to get a hearing aid. Neither has any relevance to the plot, but proves curiously distracting. Hero is pals with a local police detective, who invites him round for lunch on numerous occasions to update him on the murders and to gaze admiringly at him while he cogitates, although so far to little effect (and I'm coming up to the final pages of the book). I considered abandoning it, but there's a certain quiet interest in the insider picture of running a dig with TV cameras present. Not recommended, but I feel I've got this far, so I might as well finish.

The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain Interesting and well written novel about the lifelong friendship of two boys, Gustav and Anton, growing up in Switzerland after the Second World War. The lives of Gustav's parents also provide a narrative thread. Very readable and compassionate.

Joan by Simon Fenwick Biography of Joan Eyres Monsell, who went on to become Joan Leigh Fermor. I love Patrick Leigh Fermor's books and had hoped that this would prove and interesting companion piece. However, at the risk of sounding like Mrs Merton, I couldn't understand what attracted so many influential men to fall in love with the beautiful and rich Joan. Lots of travel, parties, affairs, famous friends (eg John Betjeman, Cyril Connolly) but I never really got a sense of Joan as a person, never mind one who apparently attracted so much devotion.

At best I would say it was quite an interesting description of the lives of the rich in the twentieth century.

76. The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey

Crime. A man queuing for a popular musical is stabbed in the back, and Inspector Alan Grant tries to solve the case.

I enjoyed the plot for the most part, especially the Scottish interlude, although the ending didn’t impress me.
The way the final solution was presented was very contrived.

I was also taken aback by the casual racism running through the book.
Grant concludes almost immediately that the killer can’t be an Englishman because no decent Englishman would stab someone in the back with a fancy knife and decides that the killer is probably a “dago”, a term repeatedly used by Grant throughout the book when he’s thinking about the murderer.
There’s even a bit where Grant gets drawn into a discussion about whether a mixture of race in a person - right down to different stocks of white, as Tey clarifies - is a good thing or not! This is not a discussion that adds anything to the plot either. All very jarring.

77. A Storm of Swords by George R R Martin

I think most people are familiar with A Game of Thrones by now.
It seems to be getting more violent with every instalment, but it’s a complex and absorbing series.

51. Flyers by Vonda McIntyre. Barely a novella, but I like McIntyre and was pleased to see this on Overdrive - reread it in the hope it would encourage them to get more! Standard Deviation sounds good Satsuki, I will look out for it.

I have ordered Standard Deviation from the library immediately on reading that review. Damn this thread

I loved Standard Deviation too. I just wish Katherine Heiny would hurry up and write more books.

Finished A New History of Life (Stuart Sutherland), a Great Courses lecture series on Audible, but I'm not going to include it on my total because I didn't listen with due care and attention. I thought it would be a biology series, but actually it was a lot more focused on the way life has been shaped by the geological history of the earth. As my brain has an automatic off switch whenever different types of rocks are mentioned, this didn't really work for me, although I did not really listen to the end.

Hope you like it tanaqui and museum.

I know terpsichore was disappointed to find no other novels by her yet. I did find an interview with her and it mentioned one of her own favourite books is The Accidental Tourist which I’m coincidentally reading at the moment.

30. The Secret Keeper - Kate Morton
Wonderfully absorbing family saga.

My one criticism would be the dialogue between Laurel, one of the main protagonists, and her younger brother Gerry. They were supposed to be incredibly close but all their dialogue felt forced and clunky. Which is odd because the rest of the dialogue didn't suffer from this at all.

Just got a message to say that Ali Smith's Autumn is waiting for me at the library. Really looking forward to that!

I also really enjoyed Standard Deviation.

Reason no. 113 to have a good editor - very unfortunately typo in the Francis Pryor book, a propos of the multitude of cooking shows on the BBC: "Lord Reith would be turning in his gravy".

InMyOwnParticularIdiom

Can I join in at this late stage please? I've read about 65 books this year - should I list them and then start adding new ones with my reviews as I finish them?