50 Book Challenge 2020 Part Five

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fifth 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, 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 and the fourth one here.

How're you getting on so far?

My thoughts exactly Remus.

I feel like I might be overposting a bit and annoying people but I am reading loads and it's easier to post as I go rather than build up a few, as I forget my initial take

So...

78. The Other Half Of Augusta Hope by Joanna Glen

Julia and Augusta Hope are twins born on 31 July/1st Aug. Julia takes the role of dutiful daughter, and Augusta the misfit, obsessed with languages and the country Burundi.

So many crimes here, where to start?

1. Excessive Whimsy, Whimsy and Twee to embarrassment levels
2. Annoying precocious child narrator for much of the book
3. Very distasteful portrayal of severely disabled neighbour, even allowing for kinds of stigma realistically experienced
4. Double usage of extremely offensive disability slur term
5. The name of the eventual "other half" being so unsubtle and on the nose as to be insides out cringe inducing.
6. Hitting you with such tragedy in the last third as to make you feel a prick for being about the book, but you also feel manipulated by it as opposed to naturally moved

And lastly, and I think, the biggest crime is, that some of the touches in that final third show that the writer is better than this.

Wont get over the love interests whimsical name for a while it is that level of For Fucksake

Not for me

Brilliant thread! Wish I had come across it earlier in lockdown...

On My Dark Vanessa, this comment is precisely what makes this book interesting:
as if the writer wrote the thoughts of the different ages of Vanessa separately and forgot to reference them.

For those who went through what she describes, this fragmentation is exactly what feels so well observed. Such a story can never really be defined or fully processed by its protagonists. Denial, love, abuse all coexist, interbreed and conspire to break the characters- both of them ultimately. Age and time don't help. The author brings out the toxicity but also the elusive nature of such an experience. What is the truth of it? Was it love? Was it abuse? Both? It's like a kaleidoscope of emotions and all are true at once. I thought the author was perhaps too careful to not romanticize the story and therefore downplayed Vanessa's own feelings somehow. In her interactions with Strane she feels strangely absent at times- a little too much like Nabokov's Lolita. I thought she should have given Vanessa more agency, including in intimate scenes. However, judging by various reviews of this book, the subject matter already makes most readers very uncomfortable so perhaps the author was right. She is a victim after all.
I found it personally gut wrenching. Took me a month to get over it.

It has really affected me.

Eine, keep going. Your reviews are wildly entertaining, even when I disagree.

Hello, Songsofexperience, and welcome. This has been one of my lockdown safe spaces, particularly at the beginning when lots of us had some kind of book paralysis and couldn’t focus on reading.

It’s interesting what you say about Vanessa and fragmentation. I was really conflicted about her as a character, a narrator and a victim and perhaps you are right that that is what makes it a much more clever book than it first appears. The more I think about it the more I find myself thinking that Strane is a more nuanced character than I first thought even though he’s clearly an out and out abuser. For me the sections that were strongest were those where Vanessa is being asked to speak out and her struggle against that. That conflict between responsibility and self preservation was very well done, I thought.

Absolutely pepe. Speaking out would mean killing that love and that would make her confront the ugliness when she is not yet ready. There is also an element of complicity in darkness. They both 'like dark things'. That line sums it all up. If she wants him, wants the same things, then she must be like him- and if he is a monster, what does that make her?

Eine - post away! For those of us struggling to actually read much, reading reviews is the next best thing!

Best - The more I think about tinned sardines, the more wtf I feel! And then they say things like, "Ooh, how scrumptious it is to eat a mouthful of sardines, followed by a mouthful of condensed milk, followed by a mouthful of anchovy paste and a gulp of ginger beer." I can think of many words to describe this, but scrumptious isn't even close.

Do the St Clare’s lot have lots of midnight feasts, then? They must have done as MT was woefully light on them and I remember as a school story obsessed tween wondering exactly how I’d feel about sardines and condensed milk at that time of night.

Does she, though, or does he just persuade her or that as part of the grooming process? I’m not convinced she is who he makes her think she is - he needs her to be different and alienated so it’s easier to persuade her to enter his orbit. It’s one of the dimensions that is so disquieting - that use of all the normal tropes of falling in love (“we have so much in common”, “I understand you like no one else does”) but here put to such malign use.

Popped in to announce that Love After Love is £1.09 on Kindle this morning.

Do i wake up and check the Kindle deals? Why yes, yes I do.

Really interest in all.of your Vanessa reviews. I was put off by an unfavourable review in The Sunday Times (www.thetimes.co.uk/article/my-dark-vanessa-by-kate-elizabeth-russell-review-tale-of-a-modern-lolilta-6jcz03x8m) - it's probably behind a catwalk so let me q uote a bit:

You know it’s only a matter of time before he foists Lolita on her, at which point Russell bombards us with pseudo-intellectual reflections on Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction. She wrote a PhD thesis on the Lolita trope in literature — and it shows. But surely the point of Lolita is that you are so seduced by the charming, loquacious narrator that it only slowly dawns on you that he is describing the rape and enslavement of an orphaned child, which in turn forces you to think about your own complicity as a reader. Russell doesn’t get much further than the heart-shaped sunglasses. At no point is the reader implicated.....

The best recent fiction about sexual harassment (Mary Gaitskill’s This Is Pleasure, James Lasdun’s Afternoon of a Faun and Anna Burns’s Milkman) revel in confusion and doubt. Sometimes they even plunge us into darkness so that we have to grope our way through uncertainty.

Despite its moody atmosphere, My Dark Vanessa feels as if the entire story has been placed under harsh UV lighting.

The review was enough to put me off reading as it sounded both disturbing and poorly done, but it's had (i think) entirely positive reviews here (as in it made people think, it affected people, no-one thought it was crap).

It is nothing like as good as Milkman in my view, Keith, although it’s a very different book. It’s interesting about Lolita; I thought it was an odd book for him to give a smart teenager he was trying to seduce. And I could have done with less sub-book group Nabokov reflections in the book, for sure. I don’t know if I think Vanessa is a great book. It’s certainly very disturbing and timely and raises interesting questions. I listened to it as an audiobook as I slogged my way through Couch to 5k so was quite immersed in it - I think that makes a difference and I wonder what I’d have thought if I’d read it instead.

Interesting about Dark Vanessa as I started reading Putney which sounds very similar and the harsh UV lighting is a great descriptor - it isn’t beguilingly, lyrically beautiful and complex like Lolita. The girl is 9 at the start, the man is abhorrent and I couldn’t stomach reading it further than the beginning. It was not badly written, and I can’t really judge a book I DNF, but I guess not well-written enough for the subject or for me for the subject. I think they are trying to tackle the “Lolita’s point of view” thing, but Nabokov did that, skilfully, in heartbreaking glimpses veiled by beautiful language.

Well, to conclude on this one, I would say that Vanessa is a good start in shedding a light on the psychological side of abuse. Too often that's confined to police reports and court cases and aimed at shocking audiences. That part is the tip of the iceberg. The really interesting part lies in the submerged 80% that are all in the head. However, I maintain that it didn't go quite far enough in highlighting why the relationship is so damaging to Vanessa: that the tropes work because he spots some truth about her that she isn't even aware of yet, that he sees her, that he gets her hooked on abuse like a crack addict on the next fix... It's sort of there but not quite. I had to laugh when at some point Vanessa says: "he wasn't 30 and handsome. It wasn't like in films" - as if somehow her falling deeply for him (and the reader understanding why she would) would lessen her experience. I thought "why not?". The book still doesn't fully embrace female desire. Vanessa could be utterly, genuinely in love with Strane, fully willing and it would still BE WRONG. That's my main criticism of the book. And that's part of the issues still plaguing our society I think.

Thanks for Love after Love tip that was quick they must be listening to us.

Oh and welcome songsofexperience and keep reviewing eine. I’m reading and enjoying reading reviews at the moment even if I don’t comment.

Now, a list of books read in confinement and others lined up for the summer:

1. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce (read at uni and loved it)
2. The Divine Comedy, Dante
3. Vanity Fair, Thackeray
4. A Clockwork Orange, Burgess
5. Excavation, Ortiz (came across it due to the controversy around My Dark Vanessa)
6. Secrets of the Flesh- A Life of Colette, Thurman
7. Life and Fate, Grossman
8. The Dwelling Place, Cookson (recommended for my 13 year old DD so I'm reading it as well)
9. Naughts & Crosses series, Blackman (same as 8.)

10. Mao, Chang (non fiction)

That's as far as I got for now!

On 6. A Life of Colette- I wanted a good biography of this fascinating writer after being somewhat disappointed by the Netflix biopic with Keira Knightley.

Satsuki I also DNF-ed Putney as the whole thing just made my skin crawl. I've read positive reviews though so I may try it again if I am feeling brave.

I actually like tinned sardines. And funnily enough this week I was suddenly overcome by a desire to buy fishpaste in Tesco. I hadn’t connected it with MT.

I thought the same. I may get go back to it - on the Backlisted pod about The Constant Nymph Alexandra Pringle talked about the lineage of these books written by women about these kinds of abusive or otherwise inappropriate relationships and related it to Putney in the present which made me feel I could put my feelings aside and try and read them from that perspective but uuiuuurrrrghhh.

Actually she didn’t focus on the relationships aspect I’ve been inaccurate, she called it something like “young girls loose in Bohemia” as a kind of genre and included I Capture the Castle in it. It was an interesting angle and I’m not conveying it well.

best before lockdown I got my husband to get some tinned sardines for the cupboard. Haven’t had them in years but everyone (luckily) quite likes them and think of the Omega 3.

Ha, amused by your fishpaste urges, Best!

Never apologize for too many reviews, Eine - I for one can't get enough.

Welcome, Songs!

I have a pile of books I want to read on Kindle, so I don't know why I'm dilly-dallying around with other things - someone's account of walking from land's end to John o'groats (lots and lots of blisters);and an introduction to anthropology (okay, but a bit textbooky). Have set them aside to read last library book, which is Neville Shute's Requiem for a Wren. Enjoying it so far.

18. The Inheritors - William Golding

Read ahead of the Backlisted episode on it, which I'm fascinated to listen to. This is an incredible work of literature, telling the story of a Neanderthal family group who come into sudden contact with a group of humans, with devastating effects - and its use of language is just stunning. However, it's a brutal and very bleak story so not sure I actually enjoyed it that much!