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.

@ShakeItOff2000 I felt the same way about Gilead I thought I was going to be bored at the beginning but it swept me into it.

palegreenstars a lot of the time we watch sitcoms on weekday evenings as we fall asleep during films a lot of the time. I have started watching Fosse/Verdon on iplayer. The episodes are under an hour and it’s very good.

I saw Gilead in the shops today but I am trying to get through shorter books at the moment. Might give it a go in the future though!

To those who enjoyed Gilead, I can also thoroughly recommend Home and Lila which tell the stories of Jack Boughton and Lila (John Ames's wife) respectively. Beautiful, beautiful writing.

@SatsukiKusakabe thanks will add that to the list of stuff to try not to fall asleep too!

Think I might try and watch 50 films next year and see if a target helps.

boiledegg I’ve had Home on my shelf for a while. I’m going to try in January to get through my book shelf before I pick up any new ones as have a habit of saving books for best (this resolution will lapse like free gym membership trial by Feb)

roz I don’t feel as if Gilead was a long book but I read it on the Kindle so not sure. Home for eg is only around 300 pages but I know you’re up against it numbers-wise!

@Palegreenstars I think the second episode was 40 min but it felt very layered. There are lots of tunes and jazz hands to keep you awake and Michelle Williams’s performance is 👌🏻. You can do this!

SatsukiKusakabe My husband liked Home best of all. Good luck with your resolution!

54. Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny. Recommended by Satsuki and others earlier this thread, I had forgotten the details by the time I got to the top of the waiting list and was expecting a book on statistics! I really enjoyed this story, just about ordinary life, and loss, and autism - nothing really happens but I was just fully engrossed all the way through. Some moments were heart twisting, but they are the real heart twisting moments I think we feel every day, and I thought it was really well done.

Is it good or bad that as a 50 booker, my first image when reading that poem was him shagging the page of his book, not his poor (or possibly delighted!) Page!

Tanqui I agree about Standard Deviation. Just a nice book.

Olive Again by Elizabeth Strout
Olive Again. Hurray!! This book is fantastic, I just never wanted it to end. Elizabeth Strout is a master of observational writing that makes me laugh and sometimes shed a tear and it was great to spend time in Olive's company again. The book revists Olive where we left her in Olive KItteridge, Henry has died and Olive may have a nascent relationship with Jack Kerrison, a curmudgeonly ex Harvard lecturer. The narrative follows Olive as she negotiates the last decades of her life and we meet lots of her fellow Crosby town residents, each with a heartbreaking, poignant or hopeful story to be revealed. Characters from other Strout novels are revisited such as Isabelle (from Amy and Isabelle) and the family from the Burgess boys. and we also find out how Christopher, Olive's son is faring.. It's really great to see how things are panning out for them all.
Oh Godfrey! as Olive would say, I was so pleased to read this book, just so well written and observed. Fabulous.

Haven't posted for ages so here's some of my recent reads, will come back tomorrow to post the rest:

31. Our Stop - Laura Jane Williams. Chick-lit book about two people finding true love through a post in a newspaper set in contemporary London. The characterisation was pretty good but the book is overlong and there weren't enough twists.

32. State of the Union - Nick Hornby. I loved the recent TV show and this is virtually a book of the scripts about two people trying to find a way forward after one of them cheats on the other. I preferred the TV series but this is a return to form for the author after his previous book, Funny Girl.

33. Inside Out - Demi Moore. Memoir from the Hollywood actress, the pacing was great and she's lived a very interesting life so this was very much a page turner but she came across as lacking responsibility for her adult decisions and she held back on a lot (such as why exactly her daughters stopped talking to her).

I gave up last night on Lethal White as I couldn't follow it so it's now heading to a charity shop.

Tanaqui

tanaqui glad you enjoyed Standard Deviation despite the lack of statistics. I read an interview with Katherine Heiny where she said her favourite book was The Accidental Tourist which is why I read it and you can see the influence quite clearly.

40. Expectation by Anna Hope

This follows three best friends in their mid thirties and considers the paths that led them to their different points in life, contrasting the women they became with the expectations of their youth. This is not a bad read as such and if you are of that generation that grew up in the 90s and 2000s there is a lot to recognise, however it all got a bit blah for me (though I did keep reading) and somewhat ironically, hit all the notes and issues I have come to expect of modern novels. Things I learned from this book include: having a baby is stressful and tiring and changes your life, not having a baby is stressful and tiring and changes your life, being a lesbian environmental activist in Brighton is more fun and less stressful and tiring than being a housewife with a newborn in Canterbury, but actually it’s easier to switch from being one to the other than you might think, establishing a career as an actress is hard if you are not that talented, trying to have a career as an actress is more fun than trying to have a baby, relationships are hard if people cheat, best friends are actually pretty annoying and not that fun, best friends secretly find you pretty annoying too, all dads may as well not exist, all mums are difficult including you and we all die.

41. The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman

Powerful graphic novel of the Holocaust, with the Jewish people drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats. This is the account of the author’s father and his experiences in Poland after the Nazi invasion and of his time in Auschwitz; his telling of the story in the present is related alongside the past narrative. I have encountered many representations of the holocaust in print and on film, and this one really impressed on me the sense of the individual caught in history. Auschwitz was a shared experience of horror, but it was also a profoundly individual one; each person survived in a different way, were variously resourceful, determined, resigned, passive, knowing all the time survival was dependent on none of those things. Death was random, and unavoidable through any personal agency, and yet each person still asserted themselves against its inevitability. The Nazis tried to dehumanise their victims by making them an indistinguishable, homogenous group, and they failed, and stories like this are the proof of that failure. Vladek Spiegelman’s story is particular, and personal and unlike any other; only the heartbreak is universal. I can’t possibly do it justice so will stop trying.

Satsuki That was exactly what I thought about Expectation too. Great review.

42. Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

This was an exquisitely written, charming and witty little book about houseboat community on the Thames in the 60s. The darkness of life never far from the convivial surface. There is a lot of detail about the hardships of life afloat, but it is seamlessly part of the story and not weighed down by it, and it is at heart it is a tale of people, what connects us to others, what we have to endure to live contented lives, what stops us from coming adrift and being carried away on the tide. It is quite funny and full of characters and character. It is my second Penelope Fitzgerald and I am growing to like her style very much indeed.

@SapatSea quite relieved to hear that as had only really seen a lot of rave reviews when I thought it was really only ok and in its attempts at injecting a bit of clumsy diversity it only succeeded in underlining how it was really only about one type of person, split into 3. Although one of them did have salad cream instead of olive oil on her lettuce growing up. Gritty stuff.

Too many reallys in that and my review of Offshore almost unintelligible. Should never review on an empty stomach.

@Satsukikusakabe This is why I am trying not to be influenced so much by other people's reviews. I did not care for Offshore at all. I thought it was fairly pointless. I do get it is a little vignette of canal boat life but I just didn't appreciate it, I suppose.

I am still plodding on with a room with a view. It's good but a bit difficult to follow sometimes and I've been drinking lots of red wine the last couple of days...

There’s a wide range of books read on here @RozHuntleysStump and you get to know after a while who shares similar tastes to you.

SatsukiKusakabe I read The Complete Maus some years ago and thought it was terrific and, as you say, powerful. Your review has prompted me to dig out my copy for a re-read. Briefly flicking through it reminded me in particular of how arresting and poignant it was to see his father's photograph on the penultimate page.

1. The Girls by Emma Cline
2. Coming Home by Rosamunde Pilcher
3. Becoming by Michelle Obama

4. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemann 5. Chernobyl by Sergio Plokhy

1. Smut by Alan Bennett

7. The body keeps the score by Bessel van der kolk

1. Convenience store woman by Sayata Murata
2. Calypso by David Sedaris

10. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 11. Broadsword calling Danny Boy by Geoff Dyer. 12. The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Attwood 13. In the Days of Rain by Rebecca Stott 14. Us by David Nicholls 15. Five Days by Douglas Kennedy 16 Will You Love Me? by Cathy Glass 17 Breaking the Silence by Casey Watson 18 Gideon's Vote by J J Marric 19 Milkman by Anna Burns 20 Educated by Tara Westover 21 The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker 22. Home Fires by Kamile Shamsie

23. Diana Mosley: A Life by Jan Dalley This was in fact a re-read. It's a bit of a limited biography without any access to private papers so there's not a huge amount that is new to any Mitford reader (I'm not going to call myself a Mitford fan though realistically I probably am). What is nice is that Bryan Guinness has some reality in this book, and the sheer nastiness of Oswald Mosley as well as his appeal are not minimised. Diana Mosley remains as opaque in this book as she always is. The fact is that it's possibly best just to take her at face value - a aristocrat who cared deeply about surface appearances and had an attraction to anything that was regarded as unacceptable by her peers, because she wanted to be above or apart from the mainstream and thought it was a positive virtue to serve an authoritarian husband. This unfortunately led her to become an antisemitic fascist. If she hadn't been so extraordinarily rich and beautiful, she would never have been written about and would deservedly have been forgotten.

24. Stories of Your Life And Others by Ted Chiang Oh my God. This is so incredible. I have been completely absorbed by this book. It's not that I can't put it down, it's that I've had to put it down sometimes because it's so overwhelming. Given that I hate short stories and mostly hate sci fi, for me to find a book of sci fi short stories so good is quite something. Makes other writers look rather as if they are kind of throwing words into a pot and stirring them into a forgiving soup, while he constructs an extraordinary three dimensional model of the future out of mercury.

Temporary the Ted Ciang book looks really good. On my tbr list now. Thanks

Just marking place. Have dropped off this thread of late though still reading.

Also place marking. I am reading A Place of Greater Safety - it's good but is taking me ages to get through!

Tara I found A Place of Greater Safety a complete slog until about half way through when I started to realise I was finally enjoying it. It required a lot of concentration IIRC.