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?

41. The Cobra by Frederick Forsyth

Another good book by this author.

What would happen if US stopped playing by the rules and properly took on the drug cartel? This book is about a man given Presidential authority and unlimited funds to set up a military and counterintelligence operation against the Colombian drug cartels. As usual in Forsyth books, it is full of in-depth analysis about the drug trade and offers a plausible scenario for dismantling it.

Someone chose The Remains of the Day for our local book group and I have to say it left me fairly cold too. I kept very quiet while various people raved about it....

My latest item for the list is resolutely non-literary:

72: Run Away - Harlan Coben

Simon Greene seems to have the perfect life - he's happily married, plenty of money, lives in New York City with his wife and three children. But one of those children, Paige, has inexplicably taken to drugs and gone missing. Simon tracks her down to Central Park, where she's busking, but when he approaches, she runs. Cue an increasingly twisty plot as Simon tries to work out why his once-happy, contented daughter has sunk so low, and how to find her as danger looms and murders are uncovered.

As I say, not great literature, but Coben knows his stuff, and is the master of interweaving strands that keep you hanging at the end of a chapter, and thus impatient to read on. Consequently I finished this inside a day.

42. Absolute Power by David Baldacci

As in the film by the same name, this was a good story about the jewelers thief who ends up having to watch a woman's brutal murder from where he is hiding, then has to run & fight back when he is framed for it.

The Remains of the Day is the best example I can think of when the film is far better than the book. Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson are amazing in it.

I love The Remains of the Day. Makes me cry. Love the film too.

65. Natives by Akala

A discussion of race and class (principally in the UK but also elsewhere) through the prism of the author's unusual life story, this was a really interesting read. Particularly interesting for me living in Brixton, which Akala describes as currently being gentrified by the white middle class (guilty!), but where the school my sons attend is still 90% BAME, primarily black African and Caribbean. I agree with a lot of what he says and learned quite a bit too (e.g. about Cuba's role in ending apartheid). Where I thought the book fell down a little was towards the end, in the section on Brexit, Trump et al. In criticising the "left behind" narrative for why people voted for Brexit and Trump, Akala quite rightly points out that BAME voters in the UK and US, who are generally amongst the poorest in society, did not vote for Trump or for Brexit in numbers. He concludes from this that Brexit/Trump weren't really about poverty, or people feeling left behind, and in so doing I think entirely misses the importance of people's perception of losing the place they feel they previously occupied in society. But that is a relatively minor criticism of a coruscating polemic that nevertheless manages to make some measured and thought provoking points.

Yes I’d seen the film before reading the book, which I found a bit of a plod. I feel those central performances make the story, his writing is very spare and I don’t know if the repressed emotion comes across quite as strongly.

@Welshwabbit thanks for the review of Natives my husband hasn’t read a book in about a decade (I know) and is currently half way through this so I’m really looking forward to getting to it when he’s done!

I’m another one who finished Remains of the Day and wondered what on earth all the fuss was about. However, I also didn’t enjoy the film!

46. Station 11 by Emily St John Mandel. Another of those books that has proved to be a bit marmite on the 50 Book threads. This is a post apocalyptic novel but it leaps backwards and forwards in time linking its main protagonists to an actor who died on stage on the day the Georgia flu pandemic took hold and swiftly wiped out over 99% of the worlds population. The Station 11 of the title is a space station featured in a hand written comic drawn by the actors first wife and has little relevance to the plot, although the comics find their way into some of the survivors hands and become treasured possessions. It's all a bit random! For me this book was most successful when dealing with the post apocalyptic society and the immediate effects of the pandemic (Always a terrifying scenario as it seems so much more realistic than a zombie/vampire/alien 'end of the world as we know it'.) The sections dealing with the actors life seemed fairly irrelevant and unimportant, I get that he is seen as the link between the characters we follow post apocalypse, but his life story was pretty boring and supremely unimportant compared to what's going on in the rest of the book. I get the actor is used as a device to link the characters and this works to a degree particularly towards the end when unseen links are revealed (although these are somewhat telegraphed) but I really didn't need his full biography and this often felt like two books one far inferior to the other.

Ah, there you all are.

I have been a very bad 50-booker for the past few months (life getting in the way). I have been reading, but haven't written a review for ages, and there are now too many unreviewed books for me to catch up. Anyway, here is my current list, and I will try to keep up a bit better for the rest of the year.

1. The Anxiety Solution - Chloe Brotheridge
2. Me - Tomoyuki Hoshino
3. Arlington Park - Rachel Cusk
4. The Beast - Alexander Starritt
5. A Sense of Direction - Gideon Lewis-Kraus
6. To Throw Away Unopened - Viv Albertine
7. The Lady and the Little Fox Fur - Violette Leduc
8. The Dead Ladies Project - Jessa Crispin
9. Cassandra Darke - Posy Simmonds

10. Tokyo Ueno Station - Yu Miri 11. 84 Charing Cross Road - Helene Hanff 12. I am, I am, I am - Maggie O'Farrell 13. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace 14. Our Game - John Le Carre 15. Old Baggage - Lissa Evans 16. Tepper Isn't Going Out - Calvin Trillin 17. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - Jon McGregor 18. The Night Guest - Fiona McFarlane 19. My Falling Down House - Jayne Joso 20. The Little Breton Bistro - Nina George 21. Clever Girl - Tessa Hadley 22. Le Chien de Madame Halberstadt - Stephane Carlier 23. The Muse - Jessie Burton 24. Princes on the Land - Joanna Cannan 25. Astonishing Splashes of Colour - Clare Morrall 26. The Position - Meg Wolitzer 27. The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd 28. Midlife: A Philosophical Guide - Kieran Setiya 29. Alone Time - Stephanie Rosenbloom 30. Pachinko - Min Jin Lee 31. In Praise of Shadows - Junichiro Tanizaki 32. Go Went Gone - Jenny Erpenbeck 33. How to Live - Vincent Deary 34. Vertigo - Joanna Walsh 35. The Fair Fight - Anna Freeman 36. Ways to Disappear - Idra Novey 37. Apple Tree Yard - Louise Doughty 38. The Evenings - Gerard Reve 39. Life Reimagined - Barbara Bradley Hagerty 40. South of the River - Blake Morrison 41. The Peppered Moth - Margaret Drabble 42. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows - Balli Kaur Jaswal 43. Pull Me Under - Kelly Luce 44. New Finnish Grammar - Diego Marani 45. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - Rachel Joyce 46. The Great Passage - Shion Miura 47. Reasons to be Cheerful - Nina Stibbe 48. The Bookish Life of Nina Hill - Abbi Waxman 49. The Sound of the Mountain - Yasunari Kawabata 50. The Haunting of Henry Twist - Rebecca F John 51. Various Miracles - Carol Shields 52. The Little House - Kyoko Nakajima 53. Diary of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell 54. The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock - Imogen Hermes Gowar 55. Wine of Angels - Phil Rickman 56. Embers - Sandor Marai 57. The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler 58. The Hours of the Night - Sue Gee 59. A Line Made by Walking - Sara Baume

Thanks South

87 Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing by Gretchen McCulloch

Linguistic survey of the ways language is changing in response to the rise of internet/text based casual communication (reviewed by Noodle upthread).

I found this an enjoyable read overall, but it didn't feel tremendously ground-breaking. Perhaps as an Old Internet Person (in McCulloch's terms) possessed of a deeply geeky 17 y/o (who also follows McCulloch's blog) a lot of the things she describes are things we tend to talk about anyways over the dinner table. (Also perhaps because I'm the sort of person who is irritated when MN, just for example, turns my asteriskWordasterisk into Word which is clearly a different thing entirely. Or when Messenger turns my punctuation emoticons into emojis when that is not at all what I was trying to say.)

I did like the chapter on emoji / emoticons and their relationship to gesture - it would have been nice to see more in the way of analysis of the similarities & differences between online & offline development of language. But still, well worth £1.99 as a Kindle deal, so not complaining :) (Also, I'm now scrolling back through all my WhatsApp/Messenger threads to figure out the age cut-off for no caps vs regular punctuation on casual messages. I'd always figured the former was a teenage thing, but actually amongst my contacts it would appear to be somewhere in the late 20s/early 30s.)

Sadik, glad you enjoyed it! Agree it wasn't ground-breaking but I did really appreciate seeing all the theory and examples gathered together like that and I must have liked it because I ripped through it a lot faster than my other recent reads

This month’s Kindle sale may be the worst one to date!

I got The Immortalists, Our Endless Numbered Days and Hag-Seed. But I agree it was generally rubbish. Not even tempted by any of the others.

On the other hand, The Haunting of Hill House is on the Daily Deal.

I got Stories of Your Life and Others, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, which I've been price-watching for a while and also picked up The Outcasts of Time on a whim. All of which are now added to all the other unread books on my Kindle. And there are A LOT of unread books on my Kindle. And in my house. Lots in my house actually. Oh dear

Yes laughably awful this month though I’m quite pleased because I want to stop purchasing on Kindle for a little while until I’m caught up a bit. I’ve got a huge amount from the library recently so need to work through some of my lists. The only one that stood out I would recommend is Stories of Your Life and Others. I also quite enjoyed Hagseed.

The only thing that vaguely appealed to me was the Gunpowder recipe book, but it looks very meaty, so I'm not going to bother.

I bought Wilding (about the rewilding of the Knepp) as it's been on my radar for a while, semi-tempted by The Gendered Brain.

The Knepp estate*, that should be. I'm so tired - damn you daylight savings and your lack of impact on toddler wake-up times!

Just finished The wolf and the Watchman by the splendidly named Niklas Natt och Dag (as he proudly tells us, his is the oldest Swedish family and the name means Night And Day!). As his name suggests, this is a novel translated from Swedish, where it was a huge bestseller.

It's an interesting confection- historical Scandi Noir with slightly Shardlake/ Da Vinci code tones(better written than the latter!!). It is overly complex and I couldn't keep up with some names and characters. Its ending drags. But I did keep reading and quite enjoyed the Tale of Two Cities allusions ( I assume they were deliberate). Not for the faint of heart, this has garnered disapproving reviews on Amazon for its gruesome detail but that didn't concern me.

I have read a looooot of books recently based in the eighteenth century , many of which are rather frothy, sometimes bawdy, and ultimately superficial. I enjoyed the macabre nature of this one. I suspect Natt och Dag (are there any British surnames as cool as this?) may be penning a sequel of this, his debut novel.

I got a £30 kindle voucher for my birthday and I was excited to see the deals today although the last thing I need is more books. I purchased one called Seven Days that was on my wishlist. Disappointing but as someone said it may give me time to get through some

Have done some research and Natt Och Dag has written a second book with the same 'investigators' (Winge and Cardell). Not sure how he is managing this as Winge was dying of consumption throughout the first book!

48. The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. One hot summer in a fading Mississippi town, 12 year old Harriet sets out to avenge her brother's death which happened when she was a baby.

I don't think this is quite as good as The Goldfinch (and it's so long since I read The Secret History that I don't think I can make a fair comparison), but I would still rate it as excellent. Dark and compelling, with an unusual and fascinating central character.

It hasn't been well-liked on here but Sally Rooney's Normal People is on Kindle daily deal today and my favourite novel of last year.