50 Book Challenge 2020 Part Seven

[southeastdweller]

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

What are you reading?

I reckon that's enough to keep you safe, Eine.

To keep Eine safe from the TTOD imps, I've never read it 🤫

Imp speaking here -
Eine - glad you liked it. Collect your medal from the table in the corner.
Betts - consider this a written warning for your mischief making.

41. Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

I have a patchy record with Ondaatje. The English Patient is probably my favourite film (it, and everyone in it, is so beautiful) and I saw it before I read the book which always ruins a book a bit for me. Particularly as the film has a more traditional structure and part of the point of the book is that it flows around all over the place. I did like it, though. I didn't really like Anil's Ghost, and I think I DNF In the Skin of a Lion. So I wasn't really sure what I'd make of this.

I liked it! I think maybe with age Ondaatje has become a little less experimental and a little more sentimental, and both of these suit me just fine. His central character, Nathaniel, is a teenage boy who is abandoned by his parents towards the end of WWII, and left in the care of a man he and his sister, Rachel, call the Moth. The initial assumption is that it is his father who is embarking on some shadowy unspecified role in the Far East, but the truth is less obvious (although perhaps not unexpected to those who read lots of recent wartime fiction). Nathaniel and Rachel are drawn into a strange underground world, richly described, including illicit journeys along the Thames in the warlight of the title. This comes to an abrupt end, and when we move to the second part of the novel, Nathaniel is an adult, working for the intelligence services, and we discover with him some of what was going on during his teenage years as he fills us in on other subsequent events.

Because this is Ondaatje the writing is beautiful, but I was also dragged in and pulled along by the plot. There is an elegiac tone to the second half of the book, but the first half (although written very much as memories) is filled with vivid characters and scenes. The Darter, in particular, is a wonderful creation.

Definitely worth a read.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie

Imp speaking here - Eine - glad you liked it. Collect your medal from the table in the corner. Betts - consider this a written warning for your mischief making.

Yes Miss, Sorry Miss

52: In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's - Marcel Proust, trans. Lydia Davis

This may be doomed to failure, but thanks to lockdown and to friends who suggested a staged read-along, I've plunged into Proust for the first time (simultaneously with David Copperfield, which has certainly given me plenty of reading homework). We've been reading the translation of the first volume by Lydia Davis, who renders the title slightly differently and in an interesting preface explains why she decided that the more customary Swann's Way didn't quite fit the bill, in her opinion.

Anyway, I completely loved this, much to my surprise - it was far funnier, racier and in every way different to my expectations. Yes, the prose demands intense concentration and many sentences were read over and over again, but it won me over. It did help massively that I was reading and then discussing with friends, I'm sure. And while I'm only on the nursery slopes with Vol 1, I've already bought Vol 2...

Terp, I'm currently reading the diary of Alec Guinness where he says he first read Proust during his WWII service:

"Proust calls for a hammock in a garden, plenty of cushions and a long summer drink at your side.....He didn't go so well with the smell of diesel oil, with the smacking of waves against the ship's side, nor with the strident bell sounding off the watch".

I'm definitely all for the hammock and summer drink as Proust accompaniments, biblio!

Betts

Eine congratulations on your TTOD medal. However, I notice you got through a whole review without mentioning Darwin or FitzRoy. I think you have to declare whether you are Team FitzRoy, Team Darwin or neither before the committee can decide whether it's a gold, silver or bronze medal for you.

53. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari This was the popular science / history book I actually wanted to read when I accidentally picked up The Silk Road earlier this month. Whether or not I agreed with what the author was saying, it was written in an engaging and entertaining way. He is unafraid to say 'we just don't know' about many events in the early rise to dominance of homo sapiens, and then he is also unafraid to speculate the hell out of every scenario (with follow up reminder caveat that actually we don't know) which is part of what makes this book fun. As he moves towards the modern era the overambitious scope of this book means that it lacks nuance, so almost every subject he tackles, you're thinking to yourself actually it's a bit more complicated than that - but as a starting point to thinking around these subjects, at least he's thrown down a marker. I liked the way he set out how almost everything we take as a given in human society is actually a human construct. This book was written in 2014, and towards the end as we bumped up against the modern era, it was quite alarming to see the degree to which those constructs (and the intervention of something which is definitely not a construct) have shifted since he wrote it. For that reason, and because I didn't like where he was going at the end, and I don't want to read a book which will be wholly his speculations - there was quite enough of that in this - I'm not going to read his follow up Deus, but I did very much enjoy this for what it was.

@Terpsichore

I'm definitely all for the hammock and summer drink as Proust accompaniments, biblio!

Me too, though I saw a picture of a place yesterday with the hammock strung over a hot tub and could only foresee disaster on a Mr Bean scale.

betts 🦞 (that's a boiled lobster, in case it's a bit too small to see properly )

Ham - good point, well made.

I'm glad your dh is doing okay Chessie.

48. Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. Listened to on audio book, and thought it was very well done. Topical at the moment, as the wrap around story involves a white policeman arresting a black woman, with a tragic outcome. However this book is not black and white, it tackles some of the grey areas that happen when we communicate with others from our own pov, and how tragedy can occur just because of the (positive) human trait to "default to truth". I thought there were a lot of good issues raised here, although I would have liked a deeper look at some of them - this was kind of like an introduction to something you might go on to study.

The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird have just arrived, and wow they are cute

Yes ham is right eine you can’t just sidle out without picking a side!

Unless you throw a curve ball and go for #TeamBoatMemory

Love the hammock and summer drink with Proust - and Madeleines of course - I’ve only read Swan’s Way and really enjoyed it but never got around to the others and now don’t know whether I’d have to read it again. Sounds like a good way to do it terpischore. I still think about passages from it, there was one about love being like cholera that often comes to mind.

@Terpsichore

betts 🦞 (that's a boiled lobster, in case it's a bit too small to see properly )

Ah, glad you explained as I originally thought you'd seen a photo of me on the beach

Welshwabbit - I read warlight for my book group at the beginning of the year, it was just my sort of thing and I really liked it. Felt the same way about the English patient film and book too!

Shiny new thread

Bringing my list over, with the ones I liked in bold:

1. The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross
2. L'Ambiance Va Être Chouette! - Dans les coulisses de la musique ancienne by Vincent Flückiger
3. Beneath The World, A Sea by Chris Beckett
4. Origin by Dan Brown
5. The Afghan Frederick Forsyth
6. Fall, or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson
7. The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz
8. The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth
9. Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs #1) by Richard K Morgan

10. Cold Storage by David Koepp 11. Broken Angels (Takeshi Kovacs #2) 12. Foundation (Foundation #1) by Isaac Asimov 13. Guitar Fretboard - Memorize the Fretboard in Less Than 24 Hours by Guitar Head 14. Mindbridge by John Haldeman 15. The Ideal Bench by Lito Seizani 16. The Fox by Frederick Forsyth 17. Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovski 18. The Citizen by Frederick Forsyth 19. Woken Furies (Takeshi Kovacs #3) by Richard Morgan 20. This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

21. Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

This was excellent. In his first SF book, the author has imagined an alternate history where Alan Turing chose a short prison term rather than female hormones which led to his suicide (or didn't, as explained in the very convincing case for his murder in his biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges ). In this version of Turing's life, he is supported by the scientific community, lives openly with his lover of many years, and takes humanity centuries forward not only scientifically but also socially. While we are never told when the story takes place we can assume that it is 1990s, since Turing appears as an old but still active character in it.

Juxtaposing yet-impossible scientific advancements such as "biological computing" with a time in the past that most readers will remember is a clever setting for this novel, allowing the reader to concentrate on the artificial human at its proverbial heart without distractions about what a future world would be like. That is for the best, because Adam the humanoid machine raises many interesting questions and some compelling theories about the future of the human race, all with McEwan’s careful analysis and beautiful prose.

What is consciousness? What is a human? These are the most basic questions that this book tries to answer, but there are more. Adam is indistinguishable from a man and often “passes” as one but his actions are mysterious and his motives are unknown/unknowable to his owner/master(s), simply because he is conceived to be a decent, moral, and uncomplicated being whereas humans often have shifting priorities and might not always act in the most decent, moral, or even rational way. The conflict that arises is inevitable.

I very much enjoyed this book and would give a 5* seal of approval to Ian McEwan’s courageous entry into SF, head and shoulders above the meagre efforts of Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro. Especially interesting was Adam’s conviction that future humans will have merged with AI/digital world to such an extent that misunderstandings or lack of communication and understanding will be a thing of the past. There will be no lies, conflict, dishonesty, deceit, melodrama or even anger and hatred in this world of perfect understanding… Therefore, literature will no longer have endless misunderstandings and haiku will emerge as the only possible written art form, with “its still, clear perception and celebration of things as they are”.

Highly recommended.

22. Lexicon by Max Barry

This was a reread and much-needed light relief after Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me. I read and loved Lexicon back in 2014 and I would like to think that I inspired several of you to read it, as well. I have nothing to add to my review from that time (except to say that it's just as good the second time around), so I am reposting that review here:

Wow. Once in a while a book comes up and unexpectedly whacks you, and this is it. Great story, and the writing isn't bad, either. It starts out a little weird and garbled but then everything falls into place and you find yourself reading under the sheets at 2 AM because you just have to keep going

I will not say anything more about this book so as not to ruin the pleasure of discovering it but suffice it to say that it is an intelligent book woven together from neurology, linguistics, psychology, mind control, even a bit of witchcraft (controlling people with ancient incantations), short questionnaires on Facebook asking your favourite colour etc.

Highly recommended. Please read it. I suspect that it will pull the rug out from under those of you who have been reading Harry Potter and other YA fantasy/sci-fi stuff like Delirium, Divergent, etc and convincing yourselves that they are for adults, too

Hmmm lets see

Potentially Team Bartholomew Sulivan tbh

Darwin - arrogant, massive racist

Fitzroy - What a wally at times

Team Maria Fitzroy!

Eine - Congratulations for passing the TTOD test

49. The Night Fire by Micheal Connelly. I found this Bosch novel a bit uneven, but an easy read. Not a place to start the series though.

None of this does anything to make me less nervous about reading TTOD. I’m going to stick with Betts in the refusers corner. Better not to join in than to join in and get it wrong