50 Book Challenge 2020 Part Three

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the third 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 and the second one here.

What are you reading?

Coo I have Trollope, (Barchester Towers and Pallister), Cranford, North and South and The Mill on the Floss. I haven't read Mrs Gaskell or Trollope before and haven't read George Eliot since I was an undergraduate.

I also have some other very long books on my shelf which have been given to me as gifts and which I don't know whether I will ever read: Life and Fate. Capital. Peter Ackroyd's book about London. I have to admit that the 50-a-year thing is a bit of a disincentive to start on something really long and dense.

On the subject of classics...

57. Silas Marner - George Eliot A solitary miser shunned by society learns there is more to life than money.

I found this a bit meh. It was well written and ultimately heart warming and sweet but not really my kind of thing.

21. How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way - Tim Seldin

Luckily got this out of the library before lockdown, as it has loads of preschool activities to try out. The approach is a little over-prescriptive for my taste eg not mixing sets of toys together surely stifles creativity and precludes 'dinosaurs go to the doctors' / 'dinosaurs stay in duplo enclosures' / 'dinosaurs sail to Pacific islands' (been watching Moana) - all of which have been spotted in our house this week. Still, some good ideas for encouraging independence in DD, who has remarkable abilities to do things for herself at nursery which fail entirely once she steps through our front door...

Keith I've read a few Trollope; I remember The Eustace Diamonds and The Way We LIve Now from university days and enjoyed them both. He's very readable I think and writes in a more straightforward style than say Dickens or Thackeray. As does Mrs Gaskell. North and South is very good. I have Cranford in the TBR pile and now you've reminded me I might move onto it in a few days.

I agree with Fortuna that Silas Marner wouldn't be my first choice of George Eliot's novels. The Mill on the Floss is better but Middlemarch would be my all-time favourite of hers. A fantastic portrayal of the interwoven relationships in a small town, her acute observations about human nature are just as relevant today.

I hadn't heard of Life and Fate but it looks interesting .. if the translation is good. I'm a sucker for a big challenging book .. Magic Mountain anyone?

I detested The Age of Innocence.

I'd agree that both Mrs Gaskell and Trollope are very readable. Of Mrs Gaskell, Cranford is a bit more soapy IIRC, North and South great for social history as well as a good story (ditto Mary Barton and Ruth).

I haven't read the Barchester novels, but enjoyed the Palliser series when I read them years ago.

highlandcoo I love Wharton and enjoyed The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth and The Buccaneers. On 19th century stuff, I can't be doing with Trollope, but love Bleak House and also enjoyed Crime and Punishment and Vanity Fair. And Willie Collins if you like a mystery.

I always feel it's important to know what other people like when they make recommendations, so I love Muriel Spark, Ann Patchett, The Secret History, Tana French and I thought Never Let Me Go was fine actually.

*Wilkie....

I love Wilkie Collins but Willie sounds pretty good too.

Ann Patchett is one of my favourite modern writers Welshwabbit. I discovered her by chance at Hay-on-Wye when I went along to her author event because I had a gap in my schedule that day.

She is a really engaging speaker. It's also impressive that she opened a bookshop with her friend just because the last bookshop in her town closed and she couldn't contemplate her home town being without one.

keith I too have Trollope and Life and Fate waiting for me. Russian classics are reliably good - I also have The Gulag Archipelago which I picked up at the library before all this but don’t know if now is the time. Or maybe it is just the time.

Kindle Monthly deals - I picked up Clock Dance by Anne Tyler The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald and The Terror by Dan Simmons. All of which titles, now I look at them, seeming oddly pertinent.

Also This Thing of Darkness is on there, a perennial favourite on here, for anyone who hasn’t read it yet.

Just came on to mention This Thing of Darkness.

Lonesome Dove is on there too. I can't remember who originally recommended it, but I loved it.

War and Peace and Middlemarch are two of the best books I’ve ever read - both may take work in places but neither will disappoint. You can be judicious in what bits you don’t need to expend quite so much effort on but it is for main delightfully absorbing and aside and enjoyed coming back to it. I read it in about 2 weeks; it’s taken me longer to read shorter books I was less into. A whole month to crawl through the minuscule Hotel de Lac for example. I know what you mean in general about long books and the 50, it does hold you back a bit sometimes yet some of my most absorbing reads have been the meaty ones.

I also really loved Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities. Mill On The Floss I loved but 20 years since I read it and Tess is an all time favourite.

I first read North and South last year and enjoyed.

On volume 3 of War and Peace. It keeps going back in my tbr pile.

The long book I REALLY liked last years was A Suitable Boy which I thought was wonderful.

Yes Lonesome Dove too knew there was another one.

For me, 50 books is a good target as it encourages me to read a mixture of long and short books. In other words, if I only read short books I'd end up on more than 50 and if I only read long books I'd end up on less than 50, so 50 works really well.

This months Kindle monthly sale doesn't look too bad at all. It's been read by almost all of MN but I wanted to recommend The Heart's Invisible Furies.

Piggy I love Tess too but feel that Hardy would just be too awful at the moment.

Yes, that's true.
His jollier books leave me cold!

16. Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado.

A translation of a Portuguese book written in the 1950s and set in a growing town in Brazil in the 1920s. It’s the kind of slow character-based book that I enjoy, immersing the reader in small town politics and relationships. And the story is very nicely written but I struggled with the portrayal of women particularly Gabriela, the titular character, who was portrayed as the archetypal home-maker - great cook, kept the house spic and span but was also beautiful and a sex siren. Apparently she loved doing all these things and the only thing that made her unhappy was when her husband was unhappy. 🤨 And then there was the commonplace and accepted casual violence and sexual harassment of women- I know it’s appropriate for the time but still. Nicely written but with some reservations.

Now reading Chris Hadfield and his Astronaut Guide, which I think DS1 might enjoy, and listening to Black Wave - non-fiction about the Arab nations since the 1970’s.

I do love this thread and reading everyone’s reviews and thoughts. 😊

Other good kindle deals: Square Haunting by Francesca Wade is on offer (non-fiction look at five women in Bloomsbury between the wars, including Woolf, obviously and Dorothy L Sayers - it got great reviews when it came out earlier this year), and The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, which Robert MacFarlane is running a lockdown virtual book group on (via twitter etc).

Keith I love Gaskell; she is one of my top top top authors, along with Balzac.

I read a Chris Hadfield book, I seem to remember finding the religion aspects irritating (I'm an atheist and I thought he pushed it too much) but now I'm not sure if it was him or another astronaut.

I've picked up these from the sale - The Botanist's Daughter , The Living Mountain , The Dark Side of the Mind, How the earth shaped human history and The century girls

You lot on here will be the end of me with these deals 😭

I'd already bought Hearts Invisible Furies literally DAYS ago so thats annoying

I've read Lonesome Dove it's wonderful

Eyeing up Clock Dance and This Thing

Eine I nearly caved and bought Lonesome Dove then but >900 pages!