50 Book Challenge 2019 Part Seven

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the seventh, and possibly final, 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, the fifth one here and the sixth one here.

How've you got on this year?

Thanks Satsuki and Pepe, I know about the A.J. Finn backstory and have skim-read the New Yorker article before - but I was vainly hoping that being a compulsive liar wouldn't stop him writing a competent novel!

62. The Great Believers - Rebecca Makkai

Loved this one and raced through it in a couple of days. I think you know when a book really hits the spot when you're using every spare 5 minutes you have to squeeze a few paragraphs in.

Split between 1980's Chicago and 2015 Paris, the story focuses on the impact of the AIDS epidemic in Chicago on a group of gay men, their families and their friends. The pared down economical prose worked perfectly for me, complimenting the storyline and making it even more resonant. I sometimes find that where there are 2 stories running concurrently in a novel, I prefer one to the other. In this book the stories were well balanced and I was equally invested in both. There were plenty of twists, and I didn't see any of them coming. Moving and thoughtful, this is one of my favourite reads of the year so far. Recommended.

Yes that’s it pepe I knew it was one of those thriller writers, but didn’t know if that was the one. inmyparticularidiom sounds like you might enjoy the article more

40. Life, Death and Vanilla Slices by Jenny Eclair
Jean is in a coma, in Blackpool Victoria hospital, having been knocked over by a car. As drifts in and out of consciousness she reflects on significant family events. Her daughter Anne is the only one of her her children who has come to her bedside, and Anne takes the opportunity to disclose old secrets to her mother.

I really like Jenny Eclair as an easy quick read. I've read several of hers and enjoyed them all. This has the usual mix of dark comedy and touching moments. Cop-out ending though.

InMyOwnParticularIdiom I agree about The Woman in the Window - it was my biggest stinker of last year. Such a lazily written book.

128. The Long Call, by Ann Cleeves
A new crime series by the author of the "Vera" and "Shetland" books, this time set in Devon, introducing a promising new cast of characters. Good competent genre fiction, playing to contemporary concerns.

48. The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

I like Fitzgerald’s writing a bit more with every book, it feels like hers is a style you acquire over time rather than get straight away. Florence Green fulfils her dream of opening a bookshop in a small East Anglian town. She has to fight against, damp, derision, poltergeists and the political manuevrings of others. It is funny and sharp about people and their motivations. It is not happy; the waters are always threatening to swallow Florence like they drench the flat landscape around her, but she maintains a human dignity and kindness in the face of prospective failure that is the blinking light in the fog.

49. Over Sea and Under Stone by Susan Cooper

Childhood classic read along with my son.

I used to love The Dark is Rising sequence, they were some of my favourite childhood reads.

I haven’t updated for a while so will add a few short chunks of my recent reads.

101. Slow Horses – Mick Heron
This was fun and I enjoyed the premise of the agents consigned to Slough House for their various misdemeanours and the way they came together to solve a case against the odds. The character of Jackson Lamb made me laugh. Thanks to @Terspsichore (and my mum) for recommending this. DP read it too and also enjoyed it.

102. Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal – Jeanette Winterson
Much read on here. I thought this autobiography was extremely well written. What a time she had at the hands of her adopted mother. It’s distressing to think of a child being raised this way. The book does a great job at clarifying and extending the story of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The search for her birth mother is particularly moving and her sense of anxiety around it comes across clearly.

103. Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo
A well-deserved (joint) winner of the Booker, this examines the lives of different women of colour living predominately in the UK, and brings it all together rather nicely at the end. I loved all the individual sections on each woman, any one of which could have been expanded on to make an engaging book in its own right. A top quality read for me.

104. Wakenhyrst - Michelle Paver
Thought this might be a spooky read for the season but it wasn't really. It was fine though and I zipped through it. Engaging enough but nothing special. I did like the descriptions of the Fen though and having been raised in the Essex/Suffolk borders I liked the atmospheric marshy waters and isolated house, in which young Maud tries to work out if something really is coming from the Fen...

I’ve just started Jack Reacher #4, The Visitor. but he’s got a house and a girlfriend. Feeling disinclined to continue!

Another chunk of brief reviews:

105. The Friend – Sigrid Nunez
I quite liked this. A grieving woman muses on the death of her author friend. She also inherits his Great Dane. As you do. This is a strange book in that nothing really happens, it’s just a mixture of thinking about writing, teaching writing and the role of novels in society, with the added dimension of a Great Dane and therefore some more pondering about animals in people’s lives. Definitely niche.

106. Sabrina – Nick Drnaso
A graphic novel that taps into American paranoia and conspiracy theories and the impact this has on the lives of those around a young woman called Sabrina. It’s not what I expected and I can’t say I enjoyed this read. The drawings were too stark for me and the story was depressing, although the illustration was good at conveying the subject matter.

107. Rhine Journey – Ann Schlee
I loved this book. It’s set on a Rhine River cruise in 1850 and it just worked so well for me. Short, beautifully written, sparse on action but somehow very real and thought provoking. The heroine, Charlotte Morrison, is on a cruise with her brother’s family and sees a fellow passenger who closely resembles a man she once knew. This releases a train of thought (and a few small events) that brings about a change in Charlotte’s life.

Rhine Journey was on the Booker Prize shortlist in 1981 and I have found that books written around that time hold more appeal to me than a lot of modern literary fiction available now, especially a lot of historical fiction that seems rather similar, of the sort that comes out of the UEA Creative Writing course. This is not to denigrate this sort of fiction as some of it is very good indeed, and most of it is written by women who may not otherwise have had the opportunity to publish, but it can seem rather homogenous sometimes. Another book I have enjoyed this year was The White Hotel (despite the crazy Freudian sex in the first section) about the relationship between Sigmund Freud and one of his subjects. This was also a Booker Shortlisted novel for the same year as Rhine Journey. I am very much enjoying discovering these forgotten novels.

Apologies for boring on...

whippet I enjoyed Wakenhyrst for the same reason, I’m a sucker for the fens especially in Autumn. It was one of those that I wouldn’t say was especially good, yet I quite liked the experience of reading so feel I shouldn’t be too critical. I have just got Dark Matter out of the library.

stitches I’ve really enjoyed revisiting, especially as I didn’t really remember this first one that well. My son has been enjoying it too.

Michelle Paver's books always seem to promise more than they deliver, for me. I love her settings and what she's trying to do, but think they all lose something in the execution.

Indigosalt
62. The Great Believers - Rebecca Makkai

This sounds right up my street - added to my wish list!

141. The Great Alone - Kristin Hannah A Vietnam war veteran with deteriorating mental health moves his wife and daughter to a rundown cabin in the wilds of Alaska. Increasingly afraid of the outside world and influenced by other survivalists and conspiracy nuts he starts to shut them in to the compound, where the real danger for the women is what lies inside.

I really enjoyed this and it cracked along at a great pace. I found The Nightingale a bit clichéd and cry-bait-y, but this was a more interesting plot. The ending was a bit too neat after all the drama within, but didn't detract from the overall effect. The author gives a very good sense of time and place with well drawn characters.

142. The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli A treatise on power, politics and government written in 1513 Italy as a guide for princes on how to seize and hold a State. The expected pitfalls are discussed in detail with analysis of previous military triumphs and defeats, from the ancient world to contemporary leaders.

I've been planning world domination for a while so I'm surprised it's taken me this long to get round to reading this. It's such a famous book that for some reason I had always assumed was a novel. I found it fascinating and was really interested in the historical perspective it gave on why various leaders/ conquests failed. It was also surprising to see how much of it remains relevant in modern politics. A must read for any aspiring despot dictator. If anyone is looking for me, I'll be off annexing my neighbour's parking space.

143. A Capitol Death - Lindsey Davis (Flavia Albia #7)
     Another outing for Ancient Rome's private investigator. I still prefer Falco, but these are entertaining enough as a mindless read.

144. Mrs. Everything - Jennifer Weiner
     An exploration of modern womanhood from the 50s to present day told through the lives of 2 sisters. Can they have and be it all to those around them without compromising themselves? Great characterisation and sets the context well for the changing times in which they lived. Good solid writing, good pacing.

However this suffered from the very thing it was trying to highlight - trying to be everything and failing. I also found this in other books this year such as The Power and The Female Persuasion. It feels to me like the authors are on a quest to write The Great Feminist Novel and in their efforts to do this are shoehorning every single women's issue in to one book and barely paying lip service to them. They become a catalogue where the story is secondary and not particularly memorable. I don't think they will stand the test of time in the way that The Bell Jar / Handmaid's Tale have, by delivering a very strong message in a more subtle way.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did FranGoldsmith

54: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

This was my second attempt at reading this, I abandoned it a few years ago about a third of the way through as I really wasn't engaging with it. This time I listened on Audible, narrated by the wonderful Jenny Agutter, and got through it this time.

It's the story of the 17 year old Cassandra, through her journal, and her eccentric family of her writer father, her young stepmother Topaz her sister Rose and brother Thomas. The live in a rambling old castle, are becoming rapidly impoverished as her father has not written anything since his one best seller years ago. They haven't paid the rent for years and sell furniture and books to run the household.
When the estate who owns the castle (and to whom they owe rent) is inherited by an American family, Rose is determined to marry one of the handsome sons and all their problems will be solved.

I did enjoy it, but I wouldn't put it up there with the "must read" classics with which I see it listed. It was OK, wouldn't rush to re-read (I have seen reviews saying they re-read it every year as a comfort read) I thought it was very much of it's time, and hasn't dated well, very stereotypical about young women depending on marriage and male help to solve their problems. I know that is how it was, but I wouldn't put Cassandra up there with Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet as great literary heroines.

Love your review of The Prince, Fortuna!

Two very different books. First, from 1968, another Elizabeth Taylor: 76: The Wedding Group

Teenage Cressy lives at Quayne, the semi-religious, lentil-weaving artistic community ruled over by her grandfather, self-important painter Harry Bretton (a cross between Stanley Spencer and Eric Gill), but longs for escape, dreaming of Wimpy Bars and cocktails. She somehow contrives an exit and stumbles into the path of older journalist David, who's written an article about Quayne and who lives locally with his mother, Midge....and soon Midge is expertly manipulating the situation to ensure that her worst fear - being left alone by her son - doesn't come to pass. I enjoyed this though I didn't warm to any of the characters (the witless Cressy was particularly infuriating). Once again it was a classic Barbara Pym scenario, right down to the priests, and I was interested to see how differently Taylor handled her material.

77: French Exit - Patrick deWitt

Funny, chic, sad, brittle. Funnily enough it's only just occurred to me that it's about another adult mother and son living together - the story of Malcolm and his mother Frances, whose fabulous wealth has trickled away. Together - accompanied by Small Frank the cat, who's possessed by the spirit of Frances's dead husband - they go to Paris, where Frances promises to fix their situation. What happens there might not be what Malcolm expects, but it may turn his life around. There are some profound moments about life's sadnesses in what starts out as a seemingly frothy, light novel.

Anyone watching the Novels That Shaped Our World Series on BBC2/iPlayer?
I thought it might be a tie in to the 100 book list linked earlier in the thread but despite some crossover it doesn't seem to be.
Anyway I've just watched the first one on 'How women writers, women readers and women's lives have been central to the novel' which was pretty good and might float the boat of some of you fellow 50 Bookers.

Thanks for that Desdemona, it sounds really interesting. I'll have to head to my mum's to commandeer her catch up thingy.

Biblio The Prince has definitely changed my outlook on the world.

I get some many fab recs from this thread- I also thought The Prince was a novel and it does sound fascinating.

56. Civilizations by Mary Beard. Another rec from you guys, I would never have come across this without you (art isn't my thing and I haven't seen the TV show), I really enjoyed the first half of this, about how we see ourselves, and found the second half, about religious art, interesting - I will look out for more.

Olive Kitteridge is on the Kindle daily deal today.

My numbering has gone askew again - my notebook says I'm on:

130. Twas the Nightshift before Christmas
This is a fairly blatant attempt to cash in the success of his previous book. If you didn't like This is Going to Hurt, this will not change your mind. He has gone back to his diaries and extracted the entries written over the Christmasses when he was working on the wards. I did enjoy the original book, but this felt like reheated leftovers.

Nightshift before Christmas. I'll make sure I avoid that one then! I haven't read the original. I bought it a while back but after I read all the bad reviews on here and in other places I couldn't face it, so it remains unread.