50 Book Challenge 2020 Part Two

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the second thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2020, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

The first thread of the year is here.

What are you reading?

nightmares, is your copy of the Andrew Miller falling apart? The binding on mine is awful. I am 80 pages in and all the pages are falling out!

Well done for giving blood today welshwabbit. I should do it but needles are my biggest fear

Nope, seems to be fine so far- I'm on p100ish- but I'm now nervous

Oh, maybe just mine then. It's a nice softback edition with, as you say, a nice cover. But fally out pages!

I just reread The Little Friend. I like it, but I do like books where nothing much happens!

Thanks @bettybattenburg although it isn't working for me. Maybe as I'm not an amazon Prime member. Never mind :(

14 Over The Top by Jonathan Van Ness

It has been a horribly complicated very-not-good week in various ways and the least of the issues has been a cough that will not go away. So I whizzed through this while awake the other night hoping for some gorgeous fun escapism from Queer Eye’s grooming expert. I am guilty of not paying attention the blurb as this was very much not fabulous and frothy, but rather a very raw and painful memoir about queerness, bigotry, bullying, sexual abuse, eating disorders, self harm, drug abuse...I have a lot of respect for his message and can see how this book would speak to a large number of people very strongly with a positive message. I don’t think I - a middle aged straight woman with a fairly clear view of my own failings and hang ups and a good understanding of my privilege - is who he is writing for. That said, dd loved this and it’s provoked some interesting conversations with her about sexuality, self respect and substance abuse, so that’s all good. And I am very fond of JVN and his approach to life, so I think “you go, gal!” seems the best response to this.

15 Rosewater by Tade Thompson

I’m trying really hard to read differently this year. I read essentially no books by people of colour last year to my shame and wanted to address that. And this had very good reviews. Rightly - it’s strong hard sci-fi that is brutal and beautiful. Kaaro is a “sensitive”, able to access the xenosphere where people’s thoughts are available to him. An alien entity has thrown up a dome in a remote part of Nigeria where people congregate to benefit from its healing properties. America has gone dark and no one has heard from them in decades. The secret police are trying to get Kaaro to use his talents to help them, but he has other priorities. It’s a hard read as the narrative loops everywhere and there are three timelines woven together. And I definitely had to push through in places where it went on a bit but I’ll go back to the next one in due course. I have to say reading it yesterday my heart broke slightly at the section where two characters discuss how the UK’s ability to withstand first contact was critically weakened by its decision to leave the EU. I have added “screwed in the event of alien invasion” to my list of Brexit concerns.

Reading that review of Over the Top back, what I should have added is that it is a book that anyone reading it with an open mind would get something valuable from, but could be particularly helpful to anyone struggling to be honest about who they are or facing discrimination. Rather than suggest I, in my fortunate position, have nothing to learn from him.

@nowanearlyNicemum L'Élégance du Hérisson is on my list for later in the year so I'm glad to read such a good review of it. It was recommended to me a while ago but I never got round to buying it until just before Christmas and I got Les Champs d'Honneur by Jean Rouaud at the same time.

I've also added Black Car Burning and The Quickening Maze to my TBR thanks to @Palegreenstarsand @Nuffaluff They both sound like my kind of books.

21: The Boy at the Back of the Class- Onjali Q. Rauf I reviewed the book last year, but then wanted to listen to the Audiobook (let me know if this gets tedious…). It is an excellent novel about a refugee child, which should be compulsory reading for all ages. The first half is almost flawless- it then gets slightly silly but is still very well done. The narration worked well.

22. Prison: A Survival Guide- Carl Cattermole I have no plans to go to prison any time soon, but this popped up on BorrowBox and looked fascinating. When it was my turn to read it, I made sure I did so very quickly in case someone else was in greater need! Although it isn’t particularly well written, this book is important, as prisoners and their families aren’t given much information about what to expect. It also contains some shocking statistics. The minimum wage for work done by prison inmates is £4 per week (for approx. 40 hrs) and the average is about £10 per week. Prison pay phones are eight times more expensive than on the outside (with 10 minutes the maximum call time allowed), while sentenced prisoners can only send two letters per week and have a maximum of four hours of visits per month (if on highest level of privileges). This is despite the fact that contact with family reduces rates of reoffending (and 200 000 children have a parent in prison). About half of the prison population has a reading age of approximately 11, but very little support is given to help them improve, or to help drug users quit, even though such support would help to stop them reoffending. One in five of the prisoners diagnosed with mental health problems receive no care from mental health staff while in prison. 70% of prison suicides had already been identified as having mental health issues. There are some interesting chapters in the book about women’s prisons, prisoners’ wives, LGTBQ+ prisoners, young offenders institutions and mother and baby units. I also learned how to make hooch in a cell and how to stash a mobile phone in a toilet U-bend or (eek!) on my person. Overall, this was an interesting and thought-provoking read.

Sorry Mog I don't know.

@PegHughes yay - interested to hear other perspectives on Black Car Burning.

@PepelePew great review of the JVN book. I thought it was all about hair styling but might actually check it out as what you’ve described sounds much more up my street.

I’ve seen Tana French books positively reviewed here recently and some hideous D&V in our household meant I was well up for a good thriller so picked up In The Woods does it get any better? The narrator is hideous. I read that it was very literary but not seeing it so far.

I raced through In The Woods desperate to find out what was going on, but the ending was a massive letdown and I wanted to throw the book across the room!

@ChessieFL argh I’m tempted to skip to the end in that case but It is pacey.

He’s doing that early 2000s thing of covering any amount of sexist thoughts with the fact that he ‘likes a girl with an appetite who doesn’t just order a salad’ it’s giving me the rage.

5. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas - Agatha Christie

A quick read (after the mammoth Tombland) and a traditional country house murder where all the assembled family has a motive. A slightly fantastical murder once the whodunnit is revealed by HP at the end but lots of good characters from the put upon to the objectionable and a good read. I had avoided reading this before as I thought it would be overtly Christmassy but actually it’s not at all Christmassy - that is just the reason the family is assembling at the family home.

Very little hairdressing, palegreen. Lots of ice skating, though!

I have two paperback copies of Mother Tongue. I have still just bought the Kindle one

12. Raven's Gate - Anthony Horowitz

YA sci fi, read this really quickly as I found it interesting (if very reminiscent of I Am Number Four!) and am on to the next one now. A teenage boy discovers that he has precognitive and other powers and that two different powers are trying to control him: one for good, one for evil.

13. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens - saw this reviewed very positively on here and definitely agree. I know nothing about the location this was set in (marshland, swamps etc) but enjoyed the descriptiveness. Felt it was perhaps a bit overlong but on the whole, a great read.

I'm also listening to Stephen Fry reading the Sherlock Holmes books. They are a joy!

23. The Children- Alice Meynell A short 1911 book of essays on childhood by a poet and mother of eight. One of the essays is, amusingly, rather like a Mumsnet thread about ‘Funny things your kids say’: a ‘thundred’ for a very large number, ‘letterature’ for literature, ‘backy-garden’ for back garden and a ‘cotton-wool story’ instead of a cock-and-bull story. There is a bizarre essay about the merits of dark-haired children vs blonde-haired children. Another enjoyable section discusses trips to the seaside.

[Off-topic] I’ve now watched the DVD of Ready Player One and Reise asked for my thoughts. The film bears little resemblance to the book but is quite fun in its own right. The film looks brilliant and is (perhaps excessively) action packed. I was disappointed at quite how much of the book is missing or vastly different. I thought the 80s references would be more subtle rather than King Kong and Godzilla lumbering about. I did love the homage to The Shining (with shades of Spaced, and Simon Pegg is in the film too!). On balance, I quite enjoyed it, even though it is hugely inferior to the book.

7. The Secret River by Kate Grenville Set in the early 19th Century, it's the story of William Thornhill, a hard-working bargeman on the Thames in London. Poverty drives him to theft and when he is caught, he escapes the gallows but is transported to the penal colony in New South Wales. His wife Sal choses to go with him.

Life in the penal colony is predictably harsh, but through hard work, Thornhill works though his sentence and is eventually emancipated. He and Sal (and his growing family) borrow money to buy a boat so William can work as a free man, with the view to earning enough money to return home to London. The dream of London starts to become distant as his children who have no memory of it grow, and they start to farm some land along the river.

I enjoyed it, I certainly rattled through it pretty quickly. I can't claim to know very much about Australian penal history and land acquisition from the Aborigines, but it seemed pretty authentic. For a while I thought it was going to go down the route of everyone being friends (or at least mutually respectful) but it was violent and gritty and uncomfortable to how our protagonists are behaving to the modern reader, so probably pretty close to how it would have been.

Decent read.

The Lover of the Grave by Andrew Taylor. Quite liked this until the ending, which I thought was very silly.

I very much enjoyed The Secret River, read it a few years ago but it has stayed in my mind as being quite unusual and informative as well as a ripping yarn.

Re The Secret River, I had no idea that convicts' families were sent out to Australia with them, or that the men could be released "on probation" under the care of their wives in those days. We already know that what the white settlers did to the indigenous people was dreadful; the legacy of their actions is evident in the streets and parks of Adelaide (and I imagine other cities) still, and it's well portrayed here.

Kate Grenville's other books are worth a read too. I enjoyed The Idea of Perfection , a story of the relationship between two middle-aged people who don't consider themselves attractive or worthy of love.

There's a follow-up to Secret River called Sarah Thornhill, the story of the youngest daughter in the family. It's on my TBR list.

@Frankatzenjammer

I thought Simon Pegg was so wrong for that role though, and as much as I love Mark Rylance he was utterly miscast also.

I didn't know The Secret River was a series, I'm adding the others to the TBR list now , thanks

Will update later but just reading through everyone's posts.
Totally agree about In to the Woods. Had a similar rage when I got to the end. It was the first Tana French book I had read and nothing will persuade me to pick up a second! Not often I get book rage but this one did. That and Lucy Mangan and her Narnia Faux pas!