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?

58. The House of Hidden Mothers by Meera Syal Shyama is 48 with a teenage daughter, but desperately wants a baby with her new partner Toby. She turns to India for the solution, where her parents also have unfinished business. This is a good quick read with a balance between serious issues and the humour you would expect from Meera Syal.

Thank you for those suggestions June. I know of Sue Grafton, but not the others. I will look out for them. I'm in the mood for some easy reading at the moment.

Fortuna now I'm worried you won't like them
They are all 'easy reading' and though some of the murder victims are women they are most definitely not the violence porn that some authors constantly resort to

Just raced through Morton Rhue's YA The Wave which I am sure I read as a teenager. It's trite and the dialogue is poorly written but I have an interest in it, as I teach a German film based on it.

The film is vastly vastly superior to the book and made many very effective changes which take it way form the 'truth' of the original Ron Jones experiment. The film also benefits form its German setting and a more thoughtful and nuanced approach to the subject matter ... and a more developed and credible representation of teenagers.

75. Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas - Adam Kay

Brief festive money-spinning follow-up from the doctor-turned-comedian. Entertaining enough if you enjoyed This is Going to Hurt, but pretty insubstantial.

I just finished Kestrel for a Knave and I'm pleased to say the author's writing has much improved since I first read it at school and hated it

Particulardom I thought the same about Twas the Nightshift before Christmas, a good enough read but not much too it.

On the kindle deals I've bought Little girl missing, our little lies, a beginner's guide to free fall (the free book for December) and then thse with a £10 customer service voucher I got from Amazon Move along please, and Penelope Lively's A house unlocked

I have a Goodreads question if any one can help?

Is there a way to categorise the books on my 'want to read' list into different groups? I have a lot of books on my kindle and lots in hard copy, is there a way to flag them as such?

@mogthesleepycat on the app if you go to my books and the ‘+’ in the top right corner and choose ‘ create new shelf’ so I have a bunch like a BorrowBox one, books I own etc.

I'm pleased to say the author's writing has much improved since I first read it at school and hated it. space

I have two copies of Kes including one my brother 'borrowed' from school circa 1989. My class never read it and I made it to last year when someone 'spoilered' it for me. I'm cross as I've been threatening to read it for years.

June I'm sure they'll be fine. I'm fairly easily pleased and there's no pressure as I've only got three you suggested. I just need a bit of a brain break and this sort of thing fits the bill.

@palegreenstars Aha! Thank you

Finished 136. Gotta Get Through This, by Louis Theroux
I thought it was fine, although I found myself muttering about unexamined privilege - a family background which ensures an elite education, name recognition starting out, and the opportunity to move around and live in expensive places doing internships to build up your own network of contacts. He is honest about his imposter syndrome and anxieties about being good enough, which does add a more interesting dimension.

Well, I'm not going to make it to 50! And I'm agog at some of your numbers. But I got halfway there, so I should make it next year I think. New additions:

20. The Confession by Jessie Burton. A woman searches for information on the mother who abandoned her as a child, by befriending the woman who was her lover at the time she disappeared. The story is set in the present day, and in the year prior to the disappearance of the mother. I liked this. I don't usually like books about writers (the mother's ex-lover is an author), as they can be a bit too self-conscious, but actually this was fine. The characters were well-drawn, for the most part, and I liked the way the two timelines unfolded simultaneously. Recommended.

21. Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry. Two ex-gangsters wait in a port in Spain, looking for the estranged daughter of one of them, who is rumoured to be on said boat. I liked this, but I like Kevin Barry's work in general. Quite literary, and clear nods here to Beckett, especially, but other literary heavy-weights too. Barry's writing is graphic and coarse, and there was a bit too much 'angry fucking' here, but he writes excellent vernacular. Maybe a bit too familiar - lots of his work draws from his established literary world, and sometimes there's direct repetition of anecdotes etc.

22. The Shadow in the North by Philip Pullman. This is the second book in the Sally Lockheart series, and I haven't read any of the others, but it stands alone. I liked it - I enjoy that time period, and Pullman writes excellent dialogue. It was rattling along for ages as a kind of detective romp, and then got VERY dark quickly - which I gather is typical Pullman (I haven't read much of his work), but was very unsettling. I am thinking of reading the other books in the series now.

23. Don’t Make a Sound by David Jackson. I listened to this (hope it's not cheating to include it). It was part of a BOGOF on Audible. It's a crime thriller, about a couple who snatch three young girls and hold them prisoner in a twisted attempt to create a family. It's part of a series of books with the same group of detectives. I won't be rushing out to buy the others, tbh - the story was alright, but the writing was poor, and so full of cliches: the lone male detective who pushes everyone away because he's so damaged and so afraid that he will hurt anyone who tries to get close to him yadda yadda.

24. The Wych Elm by Tana French. A body is found buried inside the trunk of a wych elm, in the garden of a patrician family home. Who put the body in the tree? I love Tana French, and I really liked this one. Her books are ostensibly crime fiction, but are much more wide-ranging - she writes brilliantly about human emotion, relationships, intimicies etc (case in point - I think we are almost 200 pages into this before the body shows up). It's maybe a touch too long (her books usually are), and it has about four different endings, but I enjoyed reading it.

25. The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood. This has been discussed at length everywhere, but yeah - meh. I had to speed-read the end, because I like Atwood a lot and my feeling for her as a writer was rapidly diminishing.

I'm not sure I'll get my current book - A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne - done by New Year, not least because it's awful.

My Sister the Serial Killer is 99p on Amazon today

90 Why Mummy Swears by Gill Sims

I realised they had the whole series on the library app, so figured I'd go for the next one as I'm still feeling deeply uninspired by Fierce Bad Rabbits & Neurotribes. I liked this just as much as no. 1. Ellen - the titular Mummy - has a full time job in this one, & her DC are a little older. Funny, but also depressingly accurate about lots of things, and left me very glad that these days I'm the self-employed divorced mother of a teenager.

I'm actually thinking of a re-read of Letters from a Faint-hearted Feminist next - there's a lot of resonances between the two, which I imagine are intentional (Jane, the dd in Why Mummy... is very much a younger version of Martha's teenage Jane in F-h-F).

Bad Blood is on kindle deal for 99p today - I'd recommend it, definitely one of my books of the year

Again I'm being lazy and assuming these are well known enough.

166. Educated - Tara Westover
     This book made me so angry for her. I recently read The Great Alone which deals with similar themes, but knowing this was real made it so much more hard hitting. A brilliant read if anyone has not got to it yet.

167. Fierce Bad Rabbits - Clare Pollard
     I enjoyed this and found it really interesting as well as a trip down memory lane.

168. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
     Blimey this was a bit good! I don't read a lot of Shakespeare, but enjoy it when I do. I hated it at school (Midsummer and Macbeth) but came back to it on my own terms in my 20s and fell in love with the language. I spent so much of this going Ahh, that's where that came from as so much is entrenched in common phrases and quotes.

Med - The Sally L series is really good. I recommend reading them in order.

52. State of the Union by Nick Hornby. I picked this up as a bit of light relief from Ulysses and it fitted the bill perfectly. It is the story of a marriage in trouble, told as a series of conversations between Louise and Tom while they go for a drink before their weekly counselling sessions. Short, easy to read and gently funny.

tara, did you watch the BBC series? I thought it was very well done. I’m not sure if I knew there was a book - I may seek that out. Also as light relief from Ulysses, although I’m pottering along happily with that. Slowly, but happily...

Pepe yes I am enjoying Ulysses more than I expected! Slow progress though. I haven't seen the BBC series of State of the Union - I will track it down.

Campion at Christmas by Margery Allingham - really quite dreadful, I'm afraid. I thought it would be cosy Christmas crimes but it was actually two crappy Christmas crimes and two stories that were just crap.

Glad I made you smile @FortunaMajor

Having finished Kestrel for a knave I'm reading Are you the fking doctor? Tales from the bleeding edge of medicine by LIam Farrell, an Irish GP. It's interesting enough so far, nothing to explain the expletive in the title as yet (the ** are in the title, not my addition)

84: Travellers in the Third Reich - Julia Boyd

Read by quite a few of us on here, I think. A really absorbing and sobering book gathering together contemporary testimony of people who lived, studied, travelled and holidayed in Germany from the end of WW1 right up to the end of WW2.

It's incredible - and utterly chilling - to read the words of so many of those visitors - especially the upper-class English - praising the Nazis and acclaiming Hitler as a paragon of goodness and peace, while the warning signs, becoming ever more overt, were stubbornly ignored. A book with crucial lessons for our own times, you can't help feeling.

I fell off the thread. There’s been a lot going on and I just couldn’t get my mind to settle to a book or even an audiobook. Kept starting things then abandoning them, so in an effort to reset my brain back to reading I turned to Austen, and so my number 56 was Persuasion which I adore.

231. The Confession by Jessie Burton

A dual timeline novel. In the early 1980s young woman Elise meets older woman Connie and falls under her spell. In the present day, Rose is trying to find out what happened to her mum Elise, who disappeared when Rose was a baby. I found this hard to get into, but I quite liked it when I did. The ending disappointed me though.