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.

I was aware that Regeneration was the start of a trilogy but am not quite sure where she could go with her story from here... I will probably give The Eye in the Door a go but not quite yet.

Hadn't heard of the Life Class Trilogy though...

63. Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey

I am very much enjoying my occasional forays into Josephine Tey, so much so that I think I'm going to spin them out as much as possible (this is in fact kind of mandated by my "read in order of purchase" rule this year). This one was a slow burning delight set in a girls' physical training college, apparently based on the one Tey herself attended. Lots of complex female relationships with potentially romantic undertones, guessed the twist at the end but to be honest I always like it better when that happens (makes me feel clever), so all good.

92. City of Dragons by Robin Hobb

Book 3 in the Rain Wild Chronicles. I thoroughly enjoyed this and have just got book 4 out from the library so I’ll be getting stuck into that next.

93. The Perfect Girlfriend by Karen Hamilton

Juliette’s not the perfect girlfriend. She’s actually an obsessed stalker prepared to go to great lengths to get the object of her affections.
The sort of psychological thriller where I kept reading mainly to see how far Juliette would go before someone stopped her.

94. Misogynation by Laura Bates

A collection of articles on sexism previously published elsewhere.

welshrabbit is Josephine Tey along the same lines at Georgette Heyer?

125. The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Heather Morris Much reviewed already this year. I agree with the general consensus that while it is an incredible story, it isn't that well written. It's a shame it wasn't put into the hands of a better author.

36. Slow Cooker - Martha Stewart
My neighbour has just lent me her slow cooker (and this book) to play with while she's away on holiday. As a complete slow cooker virgin (and cook-book freak) I have just read it cover to cover to prepare for a cooking frenzy as of tomorrow.
I'm also reading my first Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye but this may take a back seat as the kitchen heats up. Although, in theory, with a slow cooker I should have more time for reading, right?

nowanearlyNicemum I am ashamed to say that I've never read any Georgette Heyer but from what I've heard of her, her novels are predominantly romances, yes? Josephine Tey writes (slightly unusual) mystery/crime fiction. This is quite a good summary of her stuff:

www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/val-mcdermid-the-brillliant-unconventional-crime-novels-of-josephine-tey/

Sorry, should have said wrote (as she is dead) and also that she wrote other types of fiction under another name - but I've never read any of that!

Josephine Tey and Georgette Heyer not at all similar.

great link welshrabbit thank you

Just finished City of Sin by Catherine Arnold which is currently in the Kindle sale. A history of sex in London, I enjoyed it very much indeed.

64. A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne

Oh, and it started off so well...I was fascinated by the first segment of this book (the Ackermann part, for those who have read it) and also enjoyed the subsequent interlude and the first part of Edith's story. But after that I felt it toppled over into melodrama and just kept getting less and less believable. A shame as first segment Maurice was a great character and I wish Boyne had retained the initial subtlety.

welshrabbit I felt the same about the John Boyne I read, Hearts Invisible Furies so perhaps it’s a problem he has (or if you like his books, one of the things he’s great at )

44. Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

The man who wrote these stories has an extraordinary mind, both serious and playful. Each one takes an single idea and puts it centre stage, whilst theories of mind, mathematics, language and human emotion tap dance in the background. It’s hard to take it all in but at the end with your thoughts and heart racing you’ll feel like you’ve seen an amazing show even if you didn’t have time to examine it all that closely. I will definitely go back for a reread at some point.

64. La Belle Sauvage by Phillip Pullman Needs little explanation but this is set before the previous trilogy in the year after Lyra’s birth. It was great world building and I absolutely loved learning about baby daemons. For me it all got a bit Tom Bombadil mid adventure which just wasn’t pleasant for me. Should be getting The Secret Commonwealth from the library soon and look forward to grown up Lyra - it looks a bit of a mammoth one though.

Finished The Body in the Library . I have probably read it before or seen it on telly but don't really remember. It's your classic Agatha Christie fare , with a little meta moment when she namechecks herself!!

Not really much into Marple ; I prefer Poirot on the whole but Christie does capture voices well.

Ironically, the Random Number Generator has just thrown The Body at me!!

Dow e have a new thread yet?

I’ll do another thread shortly

54. Chernobyl : History of a Tragedy – Serhii Plokhy

Non-fiction. An account of the 1986 meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Not for the faint hearted. This book literally gave me nightmares!

A gripping and detailed account of the events leading up to the eventful Friday night when a routine test at the plant went horribly wrong, the events of the night itself, and the immediate aftermath for the population living around the plant and the world at large. Towards the end of the book, the writer considers how the Chernobyl explosion helped Ukraine along a path to independence and contributed to the decline of the Soviet Empire. A fascinating and scrupulously well researched account of a terrible event.

55. The Confessions of Frannie Langton – Sara Collins

This was a very strange book. I got the impression the writer was throwing everything she could at this one. The front cover carries a ringing endorsement from Margaret Atwood no less, describing the book as “Wide Sargasso Sea meets Beloved meets Alias Grace…” Undoubtedly, those are all fine novels, but would you want them all to meet each other in the space of 370 pages? I think you could probably throw Daphne du Maurier and Sarah Walters in for good measure. It was pretty noisy in there, and not in a good way.

This book needed to decide what it was trying to do/be and commit to that. There were too many big themes fighting with each other to be heard.

I think others have commented on her generous use of similes, and you weren’t joking! There are millions of them. At first, I didn’t mind so much; the flowery language made quite a pleasant change after the austere factual prose of Chernonyl. After a while however, I found them quite intrusive , and I was soon playing a mental game of "spot the incongruous metaphor" rather than following the plot.

Very ambitous but in my opinion, less than the sum of it’s parts. Having said that, the book is clearly marketed as gothic fiction, a genre which I've never really understood. As I prefer something a little more understated, this might just have been a poor choice on my part.

Indigosalt I felt the same about Frannie Langton when I read it a while back. It had a lot of potential but I felt Collins wanted to cram in everything she had researched, everything she knew about the 1820's and it felt a bit like "everything but the kitchen sink" had been thrown at it. Halfway through I wasn't rushing back to keep reading and I also felt it was a bit of a pastiche of other novels I'd read. The early part of the book set on a Jamaican plantation was very reminiscent of Andrea Levy's The Long Song and then the later part set in England was reminiscent of lots of Victorian gothic novels with opium addiction and some Sarah Waters type drama (Fingersmith) thrown in too. There was also Frankenstein type horror revealed over the course of the novel about the experiments that the master carried out in the coach house on his Jamaican plantation. It was all a bit too much and I feel if one or more story lines had been dropped in favour of really exploring one or two then it would have been a better novel.

Totally agree 're Frankie Langton. I won't be forgetting those horrendous similes in a hurry.

SapatSea Yes, Andrea Levy was definitely in there too! I think there was a good novel fighting to get out but it needed a more ruthless editor. Sometimes less is more.

Remus Yes, there were too many of them and some of them just didn't make sense.

The Truants by Kate Weinberg.
Jess Walker enrols at university in Norwich (rather than the Oxbridge route she could have taken) in order to study under the flamboyant and mysterious Lorna Clay (who has recently mysteriously left her tenured position at Cambridge). Jess is not given a place on the module she wants to study under Clay but on her other less prestigious one about Agatha Christie's novels and life. Jess has low self esteem so when Lorna notices her and singles her out in class it looks like all Jess's dreams about Clay are coming true. Clay encourages the idolisation, inviting Jess to her home , introducing Jess to her partner and giving her her personal mobile phone number. Clay also attends students parties and holds court among her admirers (I can't say that this chimed with any of my Uni experiences, surely it would be totally frowned upon?) Jess also becomes friends with Georgia, a wealthy , beautiful, sometimes self harming party girl who has just started dating a slightly older South African journalist who is a Reader at the uni and whom Jess falls in love with. despite dating a handsome IT sudent herself. There is a claustrophobic sense in the novel and things aren't always quite what they seem. I enjoyed the references to Agatha Christie novels (although I'm not a big fan) and certainly the plot follows a Christie pattern.

I enjoyed the first half of this book but then I felt it started to lose it's way a bit. The plot became a bit too overblown and therefore unbelievable for me. I still enjoyed it over all though. It even inspired me to look up the Agatha Christie books mentioned in the plot.

New thread here.

Hello readers. I've fallen behind a bit, so there is no way I'm going to make 50 books! Half that, maybe. List, with new additions:

1. The Cactus by Sarah Haywood
2. The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths
3. The Humans by Matt Haig
4. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
5. Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman
6. Now You See Her by Heidi Perks
7. When All is Said by Anne Griffin
8. My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher
9. The Taking of Annie Thorne by CJ Tudor

10. Milkman by Anna Burns 11. The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley 12. Normal People by Sally Rooney 13. Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield 14. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwate 15. Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls 16. City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert 17. Melmoth by Sarah Perry

18. In Pieces by Sally Field: I liked this memoir, though I will say I'm not generally a big memoir person. It was very honest: she was very open about her own faults and mistakes, as well as outlining some of the terrible, awful things that happened to her in her childhood and early career. It was interesting the choices she made in terms of what she gave space to in the book. There wasn't much on her later life, and I would have liked to hear more specifically about her experiences of motherhood in the light of what she outlines about her own mother and her upbringing in general. But despite the trauma, it was a gentle read.

19. The Familiars by Stacey Halls. The cover of this drew me in, as well my current passion for historical fiction. This is about the Pendle witches, but told from the perspective of Fleetwood Shuttleworth, the wealthy seventeen year old mistress of Gawthorpe, one of the largest estates in Lancashire. She is pregnant, and having suffered a number of miscarriages and losses, believes she is likely to die during this pregnancy; she takes on as her midwife a young local woman, Alice Gray, who is later accused of witchcraft, and Fleetwood battles to exonerate her. I thought this was only ok. Halls did a good job of the historical details, but I found Fleetwood an irritating narrator, and I would have preferred to know more about the women accused of witchcraft themselves. There was a little bit too much overt grandstanding about the ideological context for the witchhunts (changing position of women etc). She was also kind of going for ambivalence about the supernatural element, which didn't quite pay off. The ending was...spectacularly bad.