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?

Fortuna if you want to read more about Mary Shelley and her equally amazing mother, I highly recommend Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon.

Fortuna Also on Mary Shelley, I would thoroughly recommend Footsteps by Richard Holmes (as originally recommended on here by Terpsichore). It's not solely concerned with Mary Shelley, but it is a terrific read and includes other connected figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft (her mother) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (her husband).

Thank you for the recommendation Tara. I've also got Vindication lined up so that would tie it all in together really well.

And for that one too Boiledegg I like to read groups of books on a theme.

I second Romantic Outlaws.

I read a strange little book about Mary Shelley that I have now completely forgotten both the title and writer of. Will try to search.

The Monsters we Deserve by Marcus Sedgwick
It was odd but interesting, if I remember correctly but can't find my review. He usually writes YA, but I'm not sure what brackets I'd put this in - more just a writer thinking about writing, and writers, and monsters.

I feel a project coming on. Thanks for all the homework

101. Vox by Christina Dalcher

Dystopian novel set in a near-future USA. The premise is that women are only allowed to speak 100 words a day, with each word over that limit earning them an electric shock.

It’s a chilling premise and I thought that the book started well. And then, it sort of shifts into a sort of thriller where our heroine must use her scientific skills to save the day. The ending was all rather too rushed and improbable.

102. Long Story Short by Jodi Taylor

A collection of St Mary’s short stories. If you’ve enjoyed the St Mary’s novels, you’ll probably enjoy these.
It did, however, have a rather lengthy short story included which was all about characters from another of Taylor’s novels, The Nothing Girl - I’ve never read this, so that short story did nothing at all for me.

I felt the same about Melmoth , doesn't get any better IMO. Very pretty descriptions and a promising story which just doesn't deliver. So much potential so very disappointing..

Following on with the disappointing .... I am 25% into Do not say we have nothing and really struggling. Have no idea who anyone is. Worth persevering or not?

Nazi Wives by James Wyllie.
This was cheap on kindle and got a good review in The Guardian. What I found particularly interesting was how various top ranking Nazis met their wives, and then later how the wives defended or denied what their husband's had done, as did some of their adult children many years later. The book was a bit frustrating because it jumped around so much and there were so many wives that I sometimes forgot who was married to which maniac. Using surnames would have helped. Overall a really interesting, albeit sickening, read.

Bookwitch I struggled through Do not say but wish I hadn't. There was a good book trying to get out. I found it depressing.

Passion by Jude Morgan is a good semi fictionalised account of Mary Shelley and the Romantic poets (Byron, Shelley and Keats) focusing on the women they are involved with IIRC.

Bookwitch if you are 25% into Do Not Say We Have Nothing you will have waded through the earlier 20th century family history which is written in the style of a Brechtian folk tale, which is probably the hardest bit of the book to get to grips with. The style changes with the times they were living through and whose point of view is being reflected, which is one of the things I loved about it. Then again, I loved the whole book, so if you're not feeling it at 25% you are allowed to give it up!

217. The Dark Tourist- Dom Joly This was in the recent Audible sale. In it, Dom Joly visits unlikely holiday destinations including Iran, North Korea, Chernobyl and his birthplace Beirut. He describes his experiences with humour but is also respectful when necessary e.g. at Ground Zero in New York. The only thing which annoyed me was his constant need to describe the attractiveness of the women he met on his travels.

218. Face It- Debbie Harry This isn’t particularly well-written, but I learnt many interesting facts about Debbie Harry from this, her new autobiography. She was adopted at three months old, she loves watching wrestling on TV, and she dated Penn from Penn & Teller for several years. She has appeared in a large number of films and was offered a part in Blade Runner but her record company put the kibosh on it. She even had a Barbie doll made in her honour.

219. Scary Monsters and Super Creeps- Dom Joly In this sequel to 217 above, Joly becomes a ‘monster hunter’ and goes off in search of Bigfoot, Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster and other fabled creatures. As you can imagine, he doesn’t have much success: although he meets some interesting characters, it isn’t as successful as The Dark Tourist.

220. The Amber Spyglass- Philip Pullman I am pleased to have finished the trilogy but I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the previous two books. The scenes involving Lyra and/or Will- particularly the darker ones- were satisfying, but some of the other sections seemed unnecessarily long-winded.

221. The Great Passage- Shion Miura Free on the Kindle earlier in the year, this tells the story of a sexually inexperienced dictionary compiler and his colleagues. As so much of it related to subtle definitions of Japanese words, it may have lost a little bit in translation. It was similar in style to Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, the other Japanese novel I’ve read this year.

BookWitch I really enjoyed Do Not Say We Have Nothing (unusually, as I rarely read modern literary fiction), but I suspect if you're not liking it at 25% that's unlikely to change.

Just got Fierce Bad Rabbits out of the library, as well as Neurotribes on library ebook, so need to get some reading time in :) In the meantime

88. Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang SFF short stories reviewed by Satsuki & others upthread. As always with short stories I liked some more than others (I thought the longer stories worked better), but overall a good collection with some thought-provoking ideas.

Oops, failed to bold the Ted Chiang stories.

61. A history of loneliness; John Boyne

Another good read from John Boyne. This one centres around an Irish priest and is about the power and corruption in the church. It makes uncomfortable reading, but it's gripping.

63. Olive, again – Elizabeth Strout

I loved Olive Kitteridge last year and this was as good, if not better imho. Although this felt like reading a novel, like its predecessor this is a series of interconnected short stories about the fictional town of Crosby, Maine. Olive appears in every story, sometimes fleetingly and sometimes the story focuses completely on her. Olive, with all her imperfections and rough edges, is one of my favourite fictional characters of all time. Inevitably, the stories she dominates were the ones I preferred, although I have to say I thought each story was brilliant.

This is at times not an easy read. Strout doesn’t shy away from difficult topics and as Olive grows older, she explores the themes of mortality and aging in a way which is so unflinching and honest that at times I had to stop reading and give myself a chance to try and process it. Did I mention it’s also funny? It’s a dark, dry humour but it’s definitely there. In summary, a really satisfying and thought provoking read – recommended.

116 Fierce Bad Rabbits by Claire Pollard
I know lots of you loved this. I didn’t, compared to, say, The Child That Books Built or Bookworm. I can’t explain why as lots of the books she writes about are ones that I and my children have and do love. I'd have liked more pictures and perhaps I mourned the books that she didn't cover. On the other hand I shall be eternally grateful to her for reminding me of Hilda Boswell's Treasury of Poetry. I dug it out of my parents' cellar at the weekend and was delighted to be reunited with it, as I loved it as a child.

117 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
This was one of those books I picked off my Kindle list without much enthusiasm and a vague sense of duty, and ended up racing through. Henrietta Lacks was a poor black woman treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s. After she died, cells from her tumour removed without her or her family's consent were used by researchers around the world in countless experiments, enabling enormous medical and scientific advances. This is a tribute to Henrietta, who was almost erased from this story (her cells were anonymised and known as the HeLa line) and her family and their journey to accepting, or not, what happened to their mother. What made this so unusual was the role the author's research and relationship with family members played in the story. It's deeply personal and also thoroughly researched. An extraordinary story that deserved the prizes it won.

118 The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller
I read this a few years ago and remember it being a bit "so what". But I like Andy Miller on Backlisted so went back to the list of what he read out of curiosity and found that over the last couple of years I had read a lot from his list as I too have attempted to read dangerously. So I reread it over the weekend and enjoyed it much more. It's not without its rambling passages but is very good on how and why we read and what we may seek to get from reading.

I'm also reading Fierce Bad Rabbits & not loving it anywhere near as much as Bookworm, Pepe. I think as you say it really suffers from a lack of pictures.

Thanks for the review of Olive, again, indigosalt. I read Olive Kitteridge earlier this year and absolutely adored it so I can now look forward to reading more about Olive. Great news!

25. A Morbid Taste For Bones – Ellis Peters

Brother Cadfael has come late to the Benedictine order after a colourful life involving crusades, sea voyages and women. He joins a party of his brethren to claim the remains of a Welsh saint for their monastery from a small village who are reluctant to give her up. A prominent villager is murdered and an investigation ensues with all the essential ingredients of intrigue, rivalry, greed and unrequited love.

This is the first instalment of the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael which I picked up after enjoying other historical crime fiction. Whilst it was an easy enough read, I didn't find it particularly gripping and am unlikely to continue with the series.

This completes my 2019 reading challenge of 25 books and is the first year I have ever managed to do it!

Congrats on reaching your target, Mog

Sorry you didn't love Fierce Bad Rabbits, Pepe and Sadik. The point made by Pepe that "perhaps I mourned the books that she didn't cover" explains why I didn't love Bookworm the way I expected to. Just that pesky eternal gap between expectations and reality.

Finished Lowborn, by Kerry Hudson, an account of her childhood and adolescence and the damage wrought by growing up in poverty. I thought it was a very good read, but I have a few quibbles - she tends to conflate the problems caused by poverty with those caused by poor parenting and poor mental health in the wider family. I know poverty exacerbates mental health problems and poor mental health keeps people entrenched in poverty, but not all poor people are bad parents. It sounds like their mother's mental health issues would have still led the author to experience to a chaotic childhood, even if her mother had had a trust fund behind her.

Also, the author revisits the places she grew up and attempts to report on the current living conditions there. It works as a peg to hang her memories on, but it's not very convincing as reportage on the people living there now, as she is so overpowered by her own past experiences that she doesn't do any real investigation.

These points don't detract from the overall power of the book - there is something very compelling about someone trying to tell the truth about their own life and she shows very clearly how the "choices" people make about their lives are

I'm now on something quite different, which is speculative fiction set in Nigeria: Rosewater, by Tade Thompson (the blurb says he lives and works in Southampton where he is battling a book addiction - favourite blurb ever). An alience life-force has landed, in the form of a vast biodome that sits in the ground, occasionally sending out healing blasts. The author is less interested in the alien and more in the human response, and the story is set in the new human neighbourhood that has sprung up around the biodome. Our hero can read minds and find lost things. I'm enjoying the portrayal of the near-future Nigeria.

Congratulations Mog on completing your challenge!

108. Stories of Your Life and Others – Ted Chiang
I’m another one who has read this. I thought the ideas behind the stories were excellent but were let down by the execution and the flat prose. However, I am fond of the The Story of Your Life, which is such a moving premise but agree with others that the film is actually better than the fiction in this case. A better example of this kind of writing is Tenth of December by George Saunders where both ideas and great writing meet to create an outstanding collection.

109. Great Granny Webster – Caroline Blackwood
I loved this! I heard this book discussed on A Good Read on Radio 4 a while back. Such a short work of fiction (though partly autobiographical) but so well written, describing the (on the whole, completely mad) female relatives of a young woman. The eponymous Great Granny Webster is a rigid and terrifying woman and she is described so vividly in wonderfully descriptive prose. This just missed out on the Booker in 1977 apparently. I recommend!

110. Kitchen – Banana Yoshimoto
A sweet and sad tale of life, death, loneliness and food in Japan. A coming of age story that didn’t seem to lose too much in translation (as far as I could tell) focusing on the relationship between two young people and a transgender parent. Sounds crazy and is a little, but very touching too.

111. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont – Elizabeth Taylor
Another book I loved, reviewed on here before. In turns amusing and deeply tragic, the story focuses on the elderly Mrs Palfrey who comes to live in the Claremont Hotel and befriends a young man. The relationship between the two, and the other elderly residents of the hotel is so well written. I can’t wait to read more Elizabeth Taylor.

112. Big Sky – Kate Atkinson
I’ve had a good run. This is classic Kate Atkinson and her turn of phrase and her writing of believable and witty characters with excellent inner monologues cannot be beaten. I am a big Jackson Brodie fan and this latest excursion did not disappoint me at all. I hope there are more.

113. The Various Haunts of Men – Susan Hill
All I can say about this is there was a lot of breaking out in cold sweats in this page turner. I myself have never broken out in a cold sweat and I am starting to think it only happens in novels. If anyone has actually broken out in a cold sweat I would be very interested to hear about it.

I’ve not read Bookworm but I had the impression that it was a different kind of book to Fierce - more of a memoir of books loved and their impact on the author? Fierce has its personal connections but is more about the history of well loved picture books and the personal history of their writers is that the same? The pictures thing didn’t occur to me at all I have to say, I did go and look up ones I didn’t know that I was interested in though so yes it might have added to it but I didn’t feel it missing. I really loved all the Victorian age stuff and the things I found out about some of the more obscure writers which I wouldn’t otherwise have known about.