50 Book Challenge 2020 Part Six

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the sixth 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, the fourth one here and the fifth one here.

So, we're now almost half way through the year - how's the first half of the year gone for you, reading-wise?

satsuki - I agree that it jars with us as modern readers but was indicative of the times. My grandmother left her young child with extended family to go and live (and work) overseas in the 1930s with her husband. It was more important for her to be with her husband than with her child.

I agree it was more common but extended family is a little different to old man you’ve just met on holiday

I was making light of the woman with exhaustion, it was a hugely awful and punishing situation, nevertheless her reactions and the things he had her say still didn’t ring true to me.

I agree it’s not the same at all but I don’t think there was anything like the same level of attachment to children historically - but the random old man is perhaps a step too far....

I wonder if it is a class thing too. Sending children away to school or having employed help was much more usual and you were more likely to find yourself abroad with work etc.

Although the best example of off-hand parenting in literature (intentionally) is surely in Handful of Dust. Won’t say what in case of spoilers. Honourable mention of course for “better drowned than duffers”

I was on that first thread Cote (under the username tumbletumble)

I lurked from early on but didn’t really dive in until 14/15

I was an early lurker too but joined in 2014. Seems an age ago now.

My new Audible is about Churchill, I am still on his early life and he seems to have seen his mother a bare handful of times a year and was removed from one boarding school because the lacerations on his arse from repeated beatings were so severe. He was 9 at the time and had been there 2 years.

He is also quoted as having said : "I loved her, but always at a distance"

Similarly in Anne Glenconners book she thought nothing of leaving their children with the nanny and spending months on end in Mustique believing her first duty was to her husband.

Handful Of Dust has one of the weirdest fucking endings of any book.

I have lurked since 2016 or so.

23. We are Michael Field, Emma Donoghue – Short biography of prolific playwrights/poets Michael Field, the pseudonym of Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper. I knew virtually nothing about them before picking this up. They were a decidedly eccentric pair, working in the late Victoria/early Edwardian period, friends with Havelock Ellis, Robert Browning, and moving in literary circles shared by writers like Oscar Wilde. Katherine was 14 years older than Edith, and when Edith was 16, they became a couple, a pairing that lasted a lifetime. Their devotion was only rivalled by a mutual attachment to the ‘full-furred loveliness’ of their dog Wymm Chow – the hideously spoilt, killer of Rudyard Kipling’s pet rabbit. Their executor left their papers and diaries stored in the British Library for a less ‘shockable’ age – but hard not to imagine what a meal AIBU would make out of a contemporary couple with an age difference who’re also closely related! Although they’d probably get some sympathy for being driven to distraction by their Chopin-playing neighbour. Definitely not the most scintillating biography I’ve read but fascinating for unearthing a relatively obscure slice of literary, lesbian history.

24. Afropean, Johny Pitts – Johny Pitts’s exploration of black communities across Europe. It’s possible this could be slated for not covering the whole of Europe or not being rigorously analytical about the places covered. But I think viewing Pitts’s book in that way would miss the point: it’s essentially a memoir/travel book about a highly personal journey, as much about Pitts’s own identity – mixed heritage, black European - as anything else; as he puts it, “ I was sort of English, almost British, kind of European …I started to seek out answers about my European identity in relation to my black experience.” It’s true the list of countries he visited is a limited one but I didn’t find that lessened the force of his writing - it took him ten years to save up the money for this, and could still only afford to backpack round cheap hotels and hostels. Starting out from his family’s home in Sheffield, his travels include a meal with literary heroes Caryl Philips and Linton Kwesi Johnson; a birds-eye view of racism in the French suburbs; visiting sites central to the lives of Claude McKay, James Baldwin and Franz Fanon. A satisfying mix of the autobiographical, literary, historical and political; well-written, accessible and thought-provoking. I found the opening a little dry but other than that really relished this one.

Second Keith on the Petry rec. Am planning to read this soon, although a battered green Virago picked up in charity shop...

Interesting review of Afropean, thanks Eliot. It's been on my radar since it won the Jhalak Prize recently. Oh and I realise that autocorrect mangled Ann Petry's name in my post above - hopefully didn't stop anyone from finding the bargain.

I used to look at this thread title and wish I could join in but I thought you wouldn't let me in unless I joined the thread on 1st January . I think this is maybe my fourth year. I can't tell you how thankful I am for this lovely corner of the internet.

Re the abandoning baby thing - if a mother thinks their child has a better chance of survival without them, then sometimes it's possible to see why they might do it - see, for example, documented cases of some Jewish families in Nazi Germany asking people (even relative strangers) to take their children.

remus I completely understand her giving the baby up for survival in that instance, but it was the way she was presented so matter of factly despite the extreme circumstances that didn’t feel realistic to me.

I mean extreme life or death situations are not the same as the benign neglect of the upper classes.

I'm sure I read once that several times a year Boris and Rachel Johnson, secondary school age but young used to have to travel alone from Belgium toting all their belongings for the school year on a ferry. And of course they weren't even headed to the same school. The mind boggles.

In the 21 books of the Famous Five series, as well as being at boarding school throughout, Julian, Dick and Anne spend every holiday away from their parents (who live in London). I'm amazed the parents could pick their offspring out of a crowd.

I’ve just finished reading The Railway Children to dc and it makes me laugh to think how we’ve been juggling work and schooling when we could just tell them to play on the Railway lines and make friends with as many strange adults as step in their path. Mind you the children in the book do also enjoy housework so it’s pure fantasy land.

18. Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman

Feldman grew up in the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg, but realises early on that she feels lonely, uncomfortable and unfulfilled by the life choices available to her.

This was such a fascinating insight into a closed community. I live near enough to the local Hasidic community for my house to be within the eruv, but as a purposefully separate community I knew little about their way of life. Feldman talks about how limited girls' education is, with the tiny amount of permitted secular reading material heavily censored. Her marriage, at 17, to a man she's men only once before appears to be a very public matter, and she is made to feel a failure as all and sundry become aware of the difficulties in the couple's sexual relationship.

There were some truly shocking moments when the community refused to involve police when serious crimes took place, believing that only God is fit to pass judgement, yet no-one fails to judge the women for having too much hair on view from under their wigs.

I LOVE A Handful of Dust - Waugh didn't like people very much, did he?!

I love it too. But it is not a warm hug

Handful Of Dust

If you are a man, it will always be your fault

Brideshead

If you are a Catholic, it will always be your fault, but at least you have the luxury of blaming the church

Those are the two I've read, I've got Vile Bodies somewhere.

@SatsukiKusakabe

I’ve had Shadow tbr for ages.

Yes cote hates On the Beach because they keep planning their next Ocado shop and forgetting it’s supposed to be the end of the world or something like that.

But how can they get a delivery slot, there is no mention of them being on the vulnerable list!

85. The Lost Art Of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice

Penelope Wallace and Charlotte Ferris meet at a bus stop. A friendship blooms

I mean, this is all very Jolly Ho! and Toodle Pip! Dinner at The Ritz, big house, selling off the silverware genteel poverty thing.

The two girls are only 18 and its the 50s so its a bit What Malory Towers Leavers Did Next.

Early on I did slightly cringe when Charlotte us described as "the sort of girl you only read about in novels"

But

American Dirt, Long Walk To Freedom & My Dark Vanessa were all really brutal books I read recently, so I did need a fluffy, round for tea at Auntie Clare's sort of book and this fit the bill.

Forgettable, though

127. Mansfield Revisited by Joan Aiken

Following Sadik’s review on Wednesday night I’ve also been reading this and I agree with Sadik’s ‘short but fun’ conclusion. This is one of the better sequels of classics that I’ve read. I didn’t realise she had done other Austen sequels as well so I’ll seek those out.

I'll be interested to know what you think of them Chessie - it's a long time since I read them, but I don't remember liking the others so much.

39 Hamlet:Globe to Globe Dominic Dromgoole The author was the artistic director of the Globe theatre when he decided to form a company to take Hamlet to every country in the world over two years. The stories about the company's experiences of travelling and performing were fascinating and witty, Dromgoole's exposition of all aspects of the text and performance of Hamlet was interesting and thought provoking : his anecdotes about himself ,including one about being part of a radio programme when he was drunk, I could have done without. The book meanders along to the point where I was losing interest,so I think would have benefitted from more stringent editing .

TurnoftheScrew thanks for Unorthodox review, really rated the adaptation on Netflix, partly because of the central performance – was drawn to it by the actress’s earlier appearance in Shtisel which was also wonderful.

25. Saturday Lunch with the Brownings and Other Stories, Penelope Mortimer – A collection of Mortimer’s stories from the early 60s. These are small, often intimate canvases: an incident between an exasperated mother and her small son, a Saturday lunch that doesn’t live up to the fantasy of middle-class family life, scenes in a maternity hospital – events that bring into focus the difficulties, tensions and emotions tied up in domestic realms, particularly for women. Found this sometimes painful, sometimes comical, sometimes slightly mysterious – what lies behind certain characters’ actions? Currently out of print I picked this up second-hand after reading Lucy Schole’s article about it in the Paris Review - it’s due to be republished next month with an intro by Scholes.

www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/04/17/re-visited-saturday-lunch-with-the-brownings/