50 Book Challenge 2020 Part Four

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fourth 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, the second one here and the third one here.

What are you reading?

17. Transcription by Kate Atkinson
I mostly loved this but God it's bleak. An exercise in deliberately draining any meaning from life. Wonderful details though, delicious feast of recreating a world.

Juliet is a radio producer at the BBC in 1950 with a quietly sardonic inner life. She gets a threatening anonymous message, and her experiences in the war, which she thought were long and effectively buried slowly rise up to pursue her.

Aargh, ignore me @Sonnet - I'm thinking about The Greengage Summer. It's not just down to the current situation, I always get it confused with The Growing Summer, which is also on the shelf and which was also adapted for TV many moons ago, with Wendy Hiller as Great Aunt Dymphna.

Well worth a read though, you're quite right. I will do just that

Ah yes The Greengage Summer ! I definitely remember that name from my childhood Terpsichore

I also return to childhood classics in troubled times PepeLePew - the memories they evoke are a real comfort

Although on reflection I think I was older when I read Greengage Summer

Yes, it's more of an adult, or at least a YA book in today's terms, I'd say.

I'm putting this as my 13th book although not really sure as I had not been keeping a count.
Spring – Ali Smith
As I’m late to this thread I’m not sure if Spring or indeed, any of the Seasonal Quartet novels, have been reviewed. So please feel free to ignore if I’m revisiting old ground.

Spring is the third novel in the Seasonal Quartet, and it is the story of migration, place, and grief. It follows an ageing film producer, divorced, recently bereaved and estranged from his daughter, who manages to find a new purpose in life after meeting a young migrant girl and an employee of an immigration detention centre in a remote Scottish town. The sections in the UK’s Immigration Removal Centres were eye opening and troubling. I loved the character of the young girl.

I loved Autumn but for some reason didn’t get on with Winter. Spring is better than Winter but still not as enjoyable for me as Autumn. As with all the Seasonal Quartet novels so far some sections engrossed me far more than others.

I'm now up for a re-read of The Growing Summer.

27. The Shape We’re In by Sarah Boseley

Subtitled “How Junk Food and Diets are Shortening Our Lives.”
This looks at the obesity epidemic, and how our environmental is making it easier than ever before to gain weight.

24. The Reddening - Adam Nevill

Really disappointing folk-horror effort from the author of The Ritual (which I really 'enjoyed', if sleeping with the lights on counts as enjoyment). This had a brilliant concept which is right up my street - an ancient bloodthirsty cult with a prehistoric lineage stalks the remote Devon coastline - but the execution was dire. Too much about what the 'horror' entailed was revealed too early on, the writing was clunky and awkward, any scare factor had vanished by the halfway point, and the lead characters were basically bystanders in the muddled denouement. First stinker of the year

32: The Bells of Old Tokyo - Anna Sherman

I've been lucky enough to visit Japan several times and remain endlessly fascinated by Tokyo. One day, perhaps, I'll be able to go back there. This short, quiet, beautifully written book sees the American-born author, who lived in Tokyo for a number of years, try to trace the location of the ancient temple bells that once marked time in the city. Few remain, but she meditates on the nature of Japanese time-keeping (in the era of the shoguns, days had twelve hours, and traditional Japanese clocks didn't measure time in the way modern Western ones do), and on the passage of time. There was a lot here that spoke eloquently to our current situation. A sad but piercingly evocative read for me.

Book 14: The Growing Summer by Noel Streatfeild

What a delightful read - magical, remote, wild, lyrical - such a pleasure to read in a hammock in the sunshine.

Saplings by Noel Streatfeild As mentioned above, the story of a happy upper-middle class family with four children as it spirals into unhappiness due to the effects of WW2. I understand that it was written in 1945 when the impact of trauma and instability on children was relatively new. However, although the idea of focusing on the children's perspective was interesting, I didn't really feel she carried it off: none of the characters was particularly engaging and the psychological insight seemed rather superficial. I quite liked the old fashioned writing style (and the somewhat incongruous references to the mother's fondness for sex), but overall slightly disappointing.

I should have said the idea of the impact of trauma and instability on children was relatively new.

19. A Thousand Moons - Sebastian Barry

I loved Days Without End so was really looking forward to this sequel. Unfortunately it didn't really live up to my expectations.

There's no question that Barry can put together the most wonderfully lyrical prose and the way he captures the relationships between the great cast of characters in both novels is tender and moving However...

We see Winona Cole, the adopted daughter of Thomas and John takes centre stage for this follow-up. Unfortunately her personality isn't big or interesting enough to fill this role. The plot was promising but simply didn't take off. I was looking forward to something epic, sweeping and action packed to take me away from the monotony of life in lockdown, but this was pedestrian and a bit muddled. I found myself pushing through chapters to try and get to the action.

Overall not a bad book. It certainly has its moments but they were too few and it wasn't the immersive experience I craved. Ultimately I found this a rather frustrating reading experience.

18. Black Wave by Kim Ghattas.

Non-fiction written by Kim Ghattas, a Dutch-Lebanese journalist, who has covered Middle Eastern politics for over twenty years and argues that three events in 1979 (the Iranian revolution, the attack of the Grand Mosque of Mecca and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) made it a pivotal year in Middle Eastern politics and helped lead to the current Islamic states/dictatorships. There is a focus on the Iran and Saudi Arabia rivalry but the narrative also includes Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon and Eqypt.

This is an informative, persuasive and well-researched book vividly depicting events with the main political and religious players but also telling the stories of everyday people, who are trying to live their best lives in difficult times. I thought her concluding chapter was a fitting end explaining her own stance, one of guarded hope for the future.

11. hagg-seed - Margaret Atwood

This is the first Atwood I’ve read that I’ve got liked. I just didn’t get it at all. And I found it quite dull towards the end.

Anyway, next (when it arrives) is into thin air which I think everyone on this thread has read already

42. The Gift Of Fear by Gavin de Becker

I can say, without question, that this is the WORST book I've read in the last 5 years hands DOWN.

It's hard to know where to start but I'll give it a try.

Within 50 pages you know that the author is a Grade A arsehole, relentlessly boasting of his successes and personal connections. A total ego trip, completely self aggrandising and tone-deaf as to how it comes across.

The very first concrete example he gives is an exercise in gobsmacking victim blaming

Man rapes woman
Second man (the author) tells woman why she particularly fell victim and what she should have done to prevent it... I mean, Christ.

At times it is so patronising it is embarrassing and it really really plays like the author instead of advising on how to use fear is deliberately trying to terrify women into questioning their every interaction. There is a lot of quite sinister scaremongering. It really does feel like he looks down on women as a lesser less intelligent sex.

There is this really cringey bit where a man had killed his first wife but his new girlfriend didn't take it as a sign he might be violent. Laughably simplistic examples like that.

There's a really long section that can basically be summarised as Everyone You Work With Is Probably A Murderer, which is designed to help you figure out which one of your colleagues is most likely to start a mass shooting. Obviously less relevant in the UK

Finally it is written in such a cheesy dated manner that it's quite nauseating eg

Bob, a neurosurgeon and his wife Linda

God it's so grim

As to instinct and intuition (the reason I bought the book) there is nothing in here that wasn't better expressed and explained by my Grandmother and she also taught me a lot more than appears in these pages.

Absolutely hideous. Would only recommend for sport, in a witness the shitness sense.

Sounds appaling Eine!

24. Call down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater. I absolutely loved this, and if I had read it as a young adult I think it might have been one of my favourite books ever. It had everything I like in a novel- angst, brothers, difficult relationships, magic- I am so glad @Sadik reviewed it! Am now on a waiting list for her earlier series.

That's on my Kindle, Eine, and you've made me want to read it. Witness the shitness, indeed.

Still ploughing with Drood, although nearly 800 pages feels excessive. I've got the point, let's wrap it up. I've got the latest St Mary's (out today) and Peter Grant books waiting for me. Not everyone's cup of tea, as discussed recently, but a cheering prospect for those of us who do like them.

I thought Drood began really well but was far too long and got sillier and sillier.

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
Well, this was a funny one. I really, really liked most of it but then the ending was a complete let down, as if he suddenly just got bored and stopped. It felt like a trick/like cheating, and was really disappointing.

Much of it is just lovely writing. Very little happens but it's done with a good eye for people and places, and there's a quiet gentleness about most of the writing. It reminded me a lot of Douglas Coupland, and it also kept making me think of that scene in American Beauty where they watch the bag fly around.

I expected this to be a rave review and am gutted that it isn't!

InMyOwnParticularIdiom "if sleeping with the lights on counts as enjoyment"

Glad you enjoyed Call Down the Hawk, Tanaqui. Is it the Raven Brothers series you're waiting for? I really enjoyed them, annoyingly only number 4 is on the e-library here, otherwise I'd go for a re-read.

Agreed, Remus.. A bit tired of crypts and opium dreams at this point.

Story of my life, obviously.

Morning all.
Eine I enjoyed your review very much. Love a hatchet-job. Sonnet, I've been reading the Ali Smith quartet, and found each better than the last. I think this is probably to do with being increasingly comfortable with the unusual style though.

Terpsichore I am envious of your trips to Japan. I should have been there for the first time right now, but hey-ho.

I'd bought 10.Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata as holiday reading for the now cancelled trip. Keiko is a quirky thirty something woman who has struggled socially since childhood. She gets a casual job in a convenience store, and the stores employee policies and manuals become her guide for life in general.

This was short, and I thought a little underdeveloped. Although I am the first to moan about bloated, under-edited books, there was much in this that I though could have been fleshed out, such as Keiko's childhood difficulties, and how her colleague Shiraha, another lost soul, ended up working there. But Keiko is an endearing character, with more than a touch of the Eleanor Oliphants, and the micro-world of the store was captivating.