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?

10. The Sealwoman's Gift by Sally Magnusson
Picked this up on my last trip to the library before it closed and it was a great read.
"1627. In a notorious historical event, pirates raided the coast of Iceland and abducted 400 people into slavery in Algiers. Among them a pastor, his wife and their children."
The novel centres particularly on the wife, Ásta, as she gives birth aboard the pirate ship and copes with a life held captive and separation from family members. The longer she is held, the more conflicted she feels about what she wants for her future, a future which she can influence but not always control.
I found it tricky to follow the first section of the book as it flitted through memories, story telling, different locations and a huge cast of characters with Icelandic names. Once the ship docked in Algiers it drew me in and held my attention and I really enjoyed it. It's one of those novels that might even benefit from a reread as I think there was depth to some of the telling of sagas that went over my head - I suspect it may work on more levels than I was tuned into but it didn't seem to matter!
Reading it during lockdown, l was really grateful that although I can't see my family I can communicate with them easily compared to the years it took for news to travel between Algiers and Iceland!

I have her new book on my tbr. Its cover is a beauty.

CluelessMama Thank you for that review, I have it on the kindle but haven't felt inspired to read it yet, that may now change soon.

At the moment I'm reading a Felix Francis book, Pulse which is about a doctor who has mental health issues and is struggling after the death of a man who was found at a race course. She ends up in danger as a result of her involvement. It's easily as good as his father's (or were they his mothers?) books, it follows the same formula and it's not a literary great but I particularly enjoy them.

@CluelessMama, I loved The Sealwoman's Gift. It was the kind of book I probably wouldn't normally have read - don't normally go for historical fiction, it sounded really bleak - but it's really involving and fascinating.

Hard Pushed: A Midwife's Story by Leah Hazard from my viewpoint was an excellent antidote to Adam Kay's faintly misogynistic bestseller. This is an insight into the work of a still practising midwife ; it feels less contrived, plays less for laughs, is more sincere and -well- just more respectful of women than Kay's book. It also acknowledges the tough lives of NHS staff, which we all have such a heightened awareness of at the moment (the chapter on a flu patient made me think) but is altogether just less me me me, sensationalist and whiny than Kay.

It made me wince and cross my legs a few times! Otherwise, highly recommended.

betty I hope you enjoy it :)
thereplycamefromanchorage I wasn't at all sure what to expect but totally agree with "involving and fascinating".
piggy I've just looked up Sally Magnusson's new one, the cover is indeed a beauty!

The Sealwoman's Gift was the most satisfying book I read last year. l felt Sally Magnusson had followed her own path . I also hope you enjoy it '@bettybattenburg and anyone else inspired to read it.

16. Motherwell by Deborah Orr A memoir of growing up in Lanarkshire in the 60s and 70s when it was a town dominated by heavy industry, and prosperous because of that. The story of journalist Deborah Orr's parents and their life together and the impact they had on her.

I really enjoyed it and thought it was a fantastic, intimate portrait of a time and place which will remain historically valuable. But I found DO's emphasis on narcissism very annoying. She seemed to regard it as an explanation for everything- whatever a person's flaws it was because they were narcissistic. I think relying on a single psychological concept to explain so many different people and personalities doesn't work. And although I think she does give a warm portrait of both her father and her mother, discussing how she is having to work hard to do that, she still seems to me to favour her father, who sounds pretty awful. The idea that being married to him might have caused or worsened some of the things she found hard in her mother doesn't seem to break through.

Will Self is a shadowy presence over the book, occasional glancing references which aren't flattering but aren't the excoriating tell-all I feared. (Take home message; don't marry a heroin addict, past or present, or at least be mentally prepared to walk away at any point). DO is clearly suffering as she writes, so close to her own death, but manages to draw such a clear picture of a lost community and culture.

That sounds like a good book Piggy . I agree Adam Kay’s book was fairly misogynistic and dismissive of midwives and women wanting control of their own bodies. My favourite childbirth related book was by Ina May Gaskin which I read when I was expecting DC2.

25. The Darkest Goodbye by Alex Gray

Police procedural set in Glasgow. This was OK; not great. The central idea is the unexplained early deaths of people who are already ill in hospital wards or nursing homes. Is someone helping them on their way and being paid for doing so? So far so good thematically, but ..

Some of the writing is a bit clunky. "She assuaged her thirst" is just one example that jarred.

Writing in dialect is hard to pull off and I don't think this author achieved it. She uses it to depict the working class characters' speech and it's rather patronisingly done IMO.

There are incidents, particularly with the young female detective's older (grumpy) mentor which raise questions that are not properly answered by the end.

Have just checked and I'm amazed that this is the 13th book in a series. It feels like the debut novel of a writer who could improve in time.

Not really recommended as you can probably tell ..

Moving on to This Thing of Darkness, much recommended here, and have very much enjoyed the first thirty pages. It's long, and not going to help me reach my target of 100 books this year, however I can see it's going to be an engrossing read.

For those who wish to take the plunge (not sure I'm one!) Infinite Jest is 99p on Kindle today.

22. My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. Reviewed many times already on these threads, I really enjoyed this novel about a mother / daughter relationship.

Next up is The Stand by Stephen King, as recommended by Remus and Pepe at the end of the last thread. A fictional pandemic somehow seems appealing right now!

Just downloaded Infinite Jest, Welsh. Think it may be a bit ambitious. Apart from the length, I'm not a big fan of footnotes in Kindle books as I find them a bit fiddly, and I understand there are bazillions in IJ. For 99p I'm willing to give it a go, though.

Harlan, welcome to team Infinite Jest. I read it last year, and so (I think) did a couple of other people on the thread.

There are indeed a trillion footnotes. And they are quite important to the plot (if it can be called a plot...there is a plot, it’s just not very linear) and the whole experience.

I will be very interested to know what you think. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it all but bits of it were very funny. And it’s certainly clever. And it does tend to stick around in your head afterwards.

Tara, I hope you love The Stand. The pandemic section at the start is tough at the best of times but it soon becomes a book about being human and relationships and doing what you can against bad forces in the world. I love it for those reasons.

Harlan, Infinite Jest was one of my favourite books last year. I listened to it on Audible so did not read the footnotes (as they're not available on the Audible version). I'm sure that meant I missed out to some extent, but I still loved this book. It's so original and, as Pepe says, bits of it really stick with you afterwards.

Hi, Tara and Pepe. I'm going to tackle IJ, or at least start it, on one of the Bank Holiday weekends. It's been on my wishlist for ages but I wanted to have plenty of head-space so that I could immerse myself in it. I've certainly got that now, and really looking forward to it.

Having read one book on walking the West Highland Way, the finger of destiny, or at least Amazon algorithms, pointed me to two more, Walk Sleep Repeat, by Stephen Reynolds and The Wrong Way, by Bart Stevens.. Neither has any particular literary merits - they read like very long blog posts, but they do convey a sense of the experience.

36. The Chalk Man, by C J Tudor
In 1986 our 12-year old narrator and his friends encounter murder. Thirty years later, it comes back to haunt them. Everyone has secrets. A decent example of the genre, although thinking back over it, there is at least one major plot hole.

Currently finishing, at the urging of DD(12), I am Number Four, by Pittacus Lore. Our hero may appear to be a normal teenager, but he is really an alien with superpowers on the run from other aliens with murderous intent. Pleasurable wish fulfilment for tweens, but there's not a lot for the adult reader - doing it for the pleasure of bonding with DD over a book.

I just finished This is Going to Hurt and didn't pick up on the misogyny. Mind you I'm am not feeling too good at the moment so will revisit when I'm feeling better.

So envious of those who have not read The Stand before, I read it again last year and it is just brilliant.

For those of you who like the St Mary's books there's a free short story to download: www.hachette.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/St-Mary’s-and-the-Great-Toilet-Roll-Crisis-FINAL.pdf

22. Fast800 by Michael Mosley Diet book updating the blood sugar diet and the 5:2. Interesting stuff but I have read a lot of it before in articles (and also on mumsnet!). Did have to skip reading some of the recipes because I was so hungry after the first ones!

I'm bookless yet again. What the hell can I read?

Pulse by Felix Francis? I've just finished it, it was enough to entertain without being demanding.

I found an app called 'Dear Reader' earlier, it's for the ipad but might be on Android as well, it's a game all about books which involves reading the books so I've been spending time on that.

I may also have bought a very long book for 99p this morning.

Jeez, I bought Infinite Jest. Well, I won't get to it for ages, so that will be a nice surprise for my future self.

25. An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris Fictionalised account of the Dreyfus affair, from the point of view of the newly appointed head of the Intelligence Service, who was the first to raise official concerns that Dreyfus was innocent of spying. My knowledge of the affair was very sketchy indeed, so I followed this without prior knowledge of what was going to happen and who the main players were, which added to my enjoyment of the tale. Well written and suspenseful, this had me bristling with the injustice, anti-Semitism and incompetence of the old boys' network in the French military at the end of the 19th century. A good one.