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 watched Nosferatu yesterday and now Dracula has come up on my random number generator! Spoooooky!

hello!
joining as I set myself this challenge at the start of the year, although only on book 21, so not as far along as most...

book 20 was The Pact, by Jodi Picoult. I haven't read a lot of her books, and didn't really get on with A Spark of Light, which I read earlier, and I liked the idea of better

But with The Pact I really enjoyed the book more than the idea - teenage girl found dead from a gunshot, with her boyfriend injured beside her, and it's not clear if it's a murder or a suicide pact gone wrong.

Found this really well written and I really got under the skin of the characters

46. Death’s End (Bk 3 of The Three Body Project) by Cixin Liu.

This took me months to read, in 10% parcels with multiple breaks till the last 30%. So many ideas and speculative science packed into one book, I found it quite overwhelming. Completely bonkers sci-fi.

47. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.

Prompted by my enjoyment of the Jackson Brodie books, I chose this as my monthly Audible selection. Narrated very well, this tells the story of Ursula, middle child in a middle to upper class family, and her family. Born in 1910 in London, she dies several times and lives different lives depending on her, and other people’s, choices. I liked it, didn’t love it though. Still, I think KA is a very good writer and will continue to read the rest of her books.

Emgee, I’m reading The Overstory too. Got that and The Patient Assassin in the Kindle Sale.

Pepe, War in Women was excellent - harrowing and important. Just like Beloved, one of my favourite books of all time. And I, too, was sad to hear of the death of Toni Morrison, a great writer.

51. Bookworm by Lucy Mangan

Much reviewed and loved on here, I am no exception to the general consensus. It is probably fair to say that I was predisposed to like this given that (a) my best friend and I once had a falling out solely because I spent all my time when at her house reading her books and (b) I, like Ms Mangan, used to read the cornflakes packet at breakfast if there wasn't anything more interesting to peruse. I finished this book (kindly bought for me as a present, whilst I was forcing myself to wait til the Kindle version came on a 99p offer) reading-whilst-walking into work, just as I used to read whilst walking down the road as a child. So many happy book memories, including some I'd almost forgotten, like Come Away from the Water Shirley (a work of towering genius), and Running Scared by Bernard Ashley. Apart from Trebizon, I missed the whole school stories thing, but other than that, our reading habits were very similar (down to our mutual loathing for Tolkien) - thus I have bought Antonia Forest's Autumn Term off the back of this, and have every expectation of loving it as much as Mangan did. For me, Bookworm was the ultimate comfort read.

DD had a sleepover at our house at the weekend, so I was able to spend a goodly section of it lurking in my bedroom, emerging only to throw food at the gaping maws. So got through:

97. Things in Jars, Jess Kidd
Victorian woman investigates abduction of mysterious child, complete with a ghost, a circus, body-snatchers and threatened vivisection. It feels that it belongs to a new genre that has emerged in recent years (or possibly just re-emerged) - Victorian Gothic with elements of detection and of the supernatural, complete with feisty heroine. On the whole I liked it, but I felt that I'd tread similar ground before.

98. The Twelve, Justin Cronin
The first book jumped from present-day ill-advised military experiments creating monstrous vampiric predators to nearly a century hence when said predators had ravished the North American continent. This second book went back and filled in the gaps, with lots and lots of new characters trying to survive, before returning us to the characters we followed in book 1 and their attempts to overthrow the monsters. Lots of heroic stands against desperate odds, self-sacrifice, emotional reunions etc. I spent a few hours absorbed in that whole world.

35. The Flower Girls by Alice Clark-Platts. A five-year-old girl goes missing from a hotel. During the search, one of the guests recognises that another guest is one of the infamous Flower Girls, a pair of child murderers, who escaped trial for the crime her sister is still imprisoned for due to her young age at the time. Does she have anything to do with the current situation? A mediocre thriller.

92. Milkman - Anna Burns Set during The Troubles this looks at the lives of a community specifically the women.

I loved this and she had the Irish mammy down perfect. I thought it was beautifully written and interesting to see it from a more everyday, non political perspective.

93. My Sister, the Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite What it says on the tin. A beleaguered nurse gets drawn in to clean up after her sister makes a habit of murdering her boyfriends.

I thought this was a great idea but not as well executed as it could have been. I'm not convinced it's worthy of a Booker nomination.

94. Melmoth - Sarah Perry I don't have the energy to try to explain this.

A lot of very pretty words that ultimately didn't amount to very much.

These are the books I’ve read over the past week, while recovering from my operation (I chose nothing very demanding!):

142. My World in Motion- Jo Whiley I haven’t listened to Jo Whiley since the days of the Evening Session, but I found this on BorrowBox and thought I’d give it a whirl. It isn’t particularly well written, but her love of music is infectious. The chapters are themed, which means that the chronology is all over the place and some things are unnecessarily explained several times. There are also some factual inaccuracies about certain bands. It was interesting to discover Jo’s relationship with her sister Frances, who has severe learning disabilities, and to learn a little bit about Jo’s husband and their four children. It was lovely to read about her deep respect for John Peel- with whom she used to present the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage- and how she used to ask him for parenting advice. At one point, there is an unfortunate reference to Jo’s admiration for Rolf Harris!

143. Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck I last read this over 30 years ago, so I was pleased that it was available recently on a Kindle Deal. I enjoyed revisiting it. I had somehow managed to misremember the ending, so that took me slightly by surprise and was very moving.

144. Bonkers- Jennifer Saunders This was another Kindle Deal. On television, I like Saunders’ sense of humour: in print, not so much. I enjoyed the bits about Ade Edmondson (her husband), The Comic Strip, French and Saunders and Ab Fab, but other parts were less exciting.

145. The Boy at the Back of the Class- Onjali Q. Rauf This is a children’s book which all adults should read. Told from the point of view of a nine year old classmate, it is the story of an asylum seeking boy who who arrives in a school and the children’s attempts to help him settle in and to reunite him with his parents. I really thought this was very well done.

146. Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland- Sarah Moss Previously recommended on one of these threads, it documents a family’s year living in Iceland. Moss describes the landscape exceptionally well and- coupled with an Icelandic playlist I’d made (Sigur Ros, Olafur Arnalds etc.)- the book made me desperate to visit this beautiful country as soon as possible. I also enjoyed the parts describing how Moss’s two little boys Max and Tobias settled into their new country. The sections about elves left me slightly nonplussed.

147. The Slap- Christos Tsiolkas I had a feeling I wouldn't like this but I’m quite keen on Australian literature so I gave it a try. You probably all know the basic premise, so I won’t rehash it. I didn’t enjoy this novel. I’m unshockable, but there are too many gratuitous sex scenes which didn’t advance the plot, too much casual drug use, and endless masturbation. Most of the characters are vile: actually, the nicest one is a teenage boy, which is quite refreshing. I didn’t enjoy the sexism or the endless ‘ironic’ references to ‘wogs’ and ‘Mussies’. There are several spelling mistakes- ‘Gwen Stafani’, ‘Snoop Dog’, ‘Sugarbabes’, which makes the pop culture references rather unconvincing. I’m glad to have read the book, so I can now have an opinion on it, but I won’t be seeking out Tsiolkas’ other novels any time soon.

26. Chanson Douce - Leïla Slimani
Short sentences and simple phrasing mean that you devour this book at speed. After the first few lines where you learn that two small children have been murdered you feel the need to discover exactly what happened. Terrifying, fascinating, the story relates the lives of a troubled nanny and a young couple who were delighted to find her…until they weren’t.

46 Hearing Secret Harmonies by Anthony Powell
Final instalment of a Dance to the Music of Time. There's a dodgy guru type, some characters end well, others not so well. I felt sorry for Widmerpool by the end and found the guru grotesque rather than funny.
As it's a while since I've read them I've gone back to read the first two books again.

47 Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien
A complete change of pace and world view from Anthony Powell. Marie is 10 and lives in Canada. In the year of the Tiananmen Square protests, her Chinese father abandons the family and moves to Hong Kong where he then kills himself. Not long afterwards the teenage daughter of a friend of her father's comes to live with them. Ai Ming has escaped from China after the crack down following the massacres. The book tells the story of Ai Ming's parents and grandparents and Marie's father living in China in the 20th century as Marie tries to discover who they were. Lives lived through music until certain types of music become politically unacceptable. Enjoyed reading it and although it is heartbreaking in places it wasn't as hard to read as I was afraid it might be. Also seems particularly relevant as protests go on in Hong Kong - the stakes when speaking out against the state are still so high.

48 Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
Someone is phoning up old people and telling them 'Remember you must die', upsetting them. The police don't know who is doing it. The vile Mrs Pettigrew is rumoured to be trying to get her hands on other people's money. Dark and funny.

52: The Comforts of Home - Susan Hill

No. 9 in the Simon Serrailler series. Tall, sensitive, enigmatic Simon of the wheat-blond hair grapples (unsatisfactorily) with two cases while recovering from serious injury.

Saintly sister Cat prepares to jettison her commitment to the NHS, which Hill clearly has a low opinion of, by going to work for a 'bespoke' private GP outfit (whose founder airily waves away any concerns about emergency treatment by explaining that they'd just direct their patients back to.....the hard-pressed NHS ). Apparently the monthly cost of this tailored GP offering would only be 'the same as a good dinner or some decent wine', so that's OK then.

I've read all the previous books but have felt since about halfway through that I've had enough - for some reason I keep reading, though. Perhaps I enjoy feeling mildly enraged?

Anyway, as ever this teeters on the verge of the ludicrous/hilarious (Simon, the world's most middle-class policeman ever, with a parallel career as an artist, insists on referring to himself as 'a cop' as though on the mean streets of NYC instead of naice Lafferton), and move over Boobwatch, here comes Boozewatch - everyone is constantly hoisting large G & Ts, glasses of Sauvignon Blanc, and not-so-wee drams. And that's not to mention the lovingly-detailed and huge meals.

Sorry but I should probably stay away from the next in the series (which is imminent) when it appears....

Enjoyed the review, Terp - I have a similar hate-read element to the Serrailler books. Simon strikes me as dour and ungracious, and I can't work out what makes him so so attractive to women. Also, Susan Hill has some clunking political beliefs she likes to wedge into the stories, including a complete failure to understand why someone with a fatal degenerative illness might choose to end things in their own time. (But I will read the next one in due course).

99. The To-Do List and Other Debacles, Amy Jones
Along the lines of Bryony Gordon's Mad Girl - a young woman gives us a tour of her mental health, specifically anxiety and depression. I read this kind of thing because I do genuinely want to develop my empathy, and I feel sorry for her with what she's doing to herself with all the negative self-talk. But part of me is still going "Well, of course your weekend isn't an endless stream of Instagram-ready moments, and you seriously need some perspective about minor workplace irritations". It seems to be a semi-fictionalised memoir - a bit unfair on friends and family. I think it could be quite comforting for someone who finds themselves in a similar mental state. You might also find it whiny and self-obsessed, but I suppose that's the way poor mental health sometimes does manifest itself.

I've read most of the Simon Serrailler books and enjoy the writing but I'm not sure I like him as a character - I think my sympathy for him has waned over the series. I think it's the way he genuinely can't understand why his sister could do with some help with her kids after [spoiler alert] the death of her husband. He's supposed to be 'sensitive' but he doesn't get why a young boy might need some extra support and like to see his uncle. But I'll probably read them just to find out what happens next

Dumplin by Julie Murphy
Still doing badly reading wise. Have read very little and struggling to find anything I'm even vaguely interested in. The film of this was recommended to me and I loved it, so then bought the book just to keep me busy whilst feeling pretty ill. It's YA and very lightweight - nowhere near as good as the film, but I'd have liked it as a teenager.

53. The Darkening Age - Catherine Nixey

Genuinely shocking account of the destruction wrought by Christians on the art, literature and culture of the ancient world following the conversation of Emperor Constantine in 312AD. This is a journalistic rather than scholarly work; I would have liked a little more critical engagement with the sources, and it is openly polemical (team pagan all the way). However, this is an important story of vandalism, book burning, forced conversion and even murder that has rarely been told from the perspective of the losers (and only about 10% of the empire was Christian at the time of the conversion, so this affected many millions). The parallels with the recent desecrations by ISIS, often in the same parts of the world, are chilling.

*conversion of Constantine, obviously.

Although he probably did have some conversations in 312AD too, I imagine.

Slow on the thread and slow reading this year. If I counted all the books I've read half of I'd be a lot further on. I hate that I'm so flaky this year but I do love the books I've read. I AM going to finish the five half read books I've got on the go.

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

31. My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
The beautiful, charismatic Ayoola has a unfortunate habit of dispatching her boyfriends. Her older sister Korede, a practical senior nurse, has to clean up after her, both literally and metaphorically.

I know this has had plenty of lukewarm reviews upthread, but I enjoyed it. It was a fresh and darkly funny look at the nature of the sibling bond, which is tested further when Ayoola makes a move on one of Korede's close colleagues.

DS is on his first day at high school. I've sat and had a little cry, and now I can finally catch up with reviews.

38. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Non-fiction telling the story of a poor young black American woman who died of an aggressive form of ovarian cancer in 1951, and whose cells were taken after her death, with only the shakiest of consent and understanding from her husband, and became the HeLa culture widely distributed and used in medical research etc. The author wanted to tell the story of the family and surviving children, illustrating how they had never benefitted. However, she is no great writer, and unfortunately her insistence on reporting their words and her interactions with them verbatim (I notice she doesn't feel the need to do this with the medical professionals etc that she interviewed) tends to turn their poorness and blackness into a bit of a sideshow. I don't think that's what she set out to do. This book was interesting but only a partial success for me.

39. Notes From an Exhibition by Patrick Gale When temperamental artist Rachel Kelly dies, her surviving family is brought back together in Cornwall. Each chapter is a snapshot of a defining moment in the family's history, jumping backwards and forwards in time, and from different characters' perspectives. There was a bit of dramatic twist that didn't feel necessary. What this excelled at was being a sensitive, sad and thoughtful look at love and family relationships.

40. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie This is the sort of sci-fi that should tick all my boxes. A great concept (the main character was a space ship, which could operate through many ancillary bodies, but is now reduced to one human body), thoroughly thought out world building with complex social constructs, interesting use of pronouns denoting how gender is perceived (or not). That's why I persisted with this second book after I didn't greatly enjoy the first one. Unfortunately the main race portrayed, the Raadch, are pompous and boring, and I can't separate that out from making the books themselves pompous and boring, so I'm out now.

41. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole What an oddity. I can't quite put my finger on why this works, but it does. Peopled by larger than life missfits, bumbling from one cringeworthy situation to the next, this is all tied together with great storytelling. He gets away with my absolute pet hate, phonetic dialogue to emphasise a character's race, background or level of education, but this book just wouldn't work or be funny without this. Some of the elements of farce were taken too far - this author, who sadly took his own life before this was published, could weave a great image with words alone, without relying on the slapstick visuals. A quirky gem.

Good luck to your DS Museum - I hope his first day goes really well! I also have a DD starting secondary next month.

I also have a DD starting secondary next month.

Snap, Tara.

Idiom, I've had that book on my Kindle for a while - I like the sound of it from your review, so will bump it up the list.

Aw thanks Tara - good luck to your DD too. DS has additional needs, which exploded in a big way last year, causing him to miss big chunks of the last year of primary, and me having to take a career break to care for him. So him going to mainstream secondary is A Big Thing - he skipped in there all excited this morning, I however am completely wrung out. If it does all work out, I'm going to get considerably more reading time!

Good luck to the DCs in their new school ventures. We await A Level results...

I have got to my ripe old age never having read Dracula. Not sure why : I think I thought Gothic fiction was a bit formulaic and silly when I was an earnest Hardy reading teenager. Anyway , I just finished it. It was longer than I thought it would be but an easy read. And, yes, really rather silly. But quite entertaining. I enjoyed the madman collecting flies and spiders and the set piece scenes were memorably described. This is a simple read really compared with Frankenstein, so I am uncertain as to why Frankenstein appears on GCSE syllabuses and Dracula sometimes at A Level. Perhaps it's the subtexts.

Good luck for tomorrow Piggy - where is your DC hoping to go?

He has an unconditional for Lincoln but he is very unenthusiastic about everything. Not looking forward to tomorrow !