50 Book Challenge 2020 Part Eight

[southeastdweller]

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

What are you reading?

119. The Professor's House by Willa Cather

I think I've read all Cather's major works now with My Antonia being my favourite.

Godfrey St Peter is a respected professor, husband and father to two married adult daughters. Tom Outland, a posthumous success, their daughters late fiance, died in WW1 and his life and legacy hangs over their world. Cracks have appeared in his marriage to Lilian in later life and whilst it is clear that his wife has changed in his eyes for lots of reasons, for her it dates to the late Tom Outland, and his status as a favoured pupil.

This starts slow but is actually really interesting in parts, very short though.

69: One on One - Craig Brown

This is the sort of high concept book that wouldn't normally appeal to me, but when it's by Craig Brown that changes things a bit. He chronicles 101 encounters between famous people, in a sort of celebrity daisy-chain, starting with Adolf Hitler narrowly avoiding death in a car accident when a young Englishman, John Scott-Ellis, runs into him in Munich in 1931. Then John Scott-Ellis as a 10-year-old converses with Rudyard Kipling; a young Kipling seeks out his hero Mark Twain, and so on.

Things start off fairly straight, though fascinatingly thanks to the anecdotal nature of the encounters, but gradually Brown's footnotes get funnier and funnier, as do some of the encounters (which are all taken from genuine accounts - nothing is invented). Just thinking about how much research he had to do makes my brain explode, so heaven knows what it was like actually writing this, but it ends up being gripping and hilarious in places. And not only does it end neatly back with Hitler as the 101st encounter, Brown reveals that he described each of the meetings in exactly 1001 words, making the book 'exactly 101,101 words long'. An amazing feat in every way.

My library reopens for browsing today!

Wow terpsichore that sounds great.

biblio great news! Mine is allowing individual book reservations. They’re already regretting it if everyone has responded like me!

Mine has now renewed all books until Friday, but then doesn't open until Monday! No info on how it will go about operating. Looking forward to it though.

Can any of you help me with a kindle problem?

If I buy a book it will not download to my kindle unless I enter the title into the search facility. It used to be that I'd buy a book & it would automatically download to my kindle. Can't find a google solution for this.

In DH new, he is getting better. He goes to a local rehab unit today to get him more mobile (broken hip). Great to have him out of hospital but no visiting at the unit. That will be an incventive for him to work hard at the physio.

For anyone looking for bookish gifts you might like to support this lovely independent bookshop (and take advantage of their current special offer)
More than 150 titles with 20% discount. No minimum spend. Discount will be automatically applied at checkout. Free delivery in UK. Sale ends on Friday 11 September 2020.
ALSO, If you spend £50 you will receive a £20 voucher for The Story of Books for you or a friend.
Voucher will be valid until 31 December 2020.

www.thestoryofbooks.com/collections/20-20-book-sale

Great to hear your husband is on the mend magimedi

Good news about DH, magimedi

I don't think I can offer much Kindle help, I'm afraid, but might it be worth going into 'manage your content and devices' on your Kindle account and just make sure the title you're trying to download has been sent to that specific device? It's an odd blip to have, especially if it's just started doing that. It certainly ought to download automatically unless it's trying to send to another device, possibly?

magimedi I'm having exactly the same issue with downloads to my kindle - seems to have started about a week ago. I have reported it and hopefully they will fix the issue.

Recent finishes:

52. Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains - Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

An outstanding piece of travel writing. I knew next to nothing about Arunachal Pradesh before reading this so I learned a lot, but it was also very evocative and helped make up for the lack of travel in my life at the moment.

53. Miss Iceland - Audur Ava Olafsdottir

For some reason this didn't land with me, and it dragged despite being under 200 pages long. It's billed as being a story of courage and optimism, but the main chatacter seems quite passive. I was more admiring of her best friend, who continued to write despite feeling trapped by early motherhood and knowing that her stories wouldn't be read.

54. The Other Side of the Coin - Angela Kelly

Lots of interesting details on how the Queen's wardrobe is put together and bits of trivia. It never occurred to me that the Queen always puts her crown on herself, for example. Most illuminating was the relationship between the Queen and her dresser, who is bound by protocol (riding three cars back in the royal convoy) but still manages to be quite cheeky. There's also some great unintentional humour which I'm sure comes from living in such a surreal environment, for example describing the arrangements for the Queen's visit to the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi as being "just like her visit to the mosque in the old Lincolnshire town of Scunthorpe". A very enjoyable easy read, though if you buy the Kindle version you really need to look at the app to get the full benefit of the photos.

One on One added to the TBR pile Terps, sounds great.

Netflix have just released a trailer for a new Rebecca adaptation

Lily James and Armie Hammer as the de Winters, Kristin ST as Danvers

Not sure about the leads but Kristin ST would make a great Danvers. Keeley Hawes as Beatrice and Tom Goodwin Hill as Frank look to be good casting too.

65. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers A recommendation from this thread, which I wouldn't have picked up otherwise, so thanks. Set in the late 1930's, a deaf mute man lives modestly in a nameless southern US town which, I think deliberately, has no distinguishing features. This focuses around the inner lives of the people he interacts with on a daily basis, who each feel misunderstood, or have some unrealised passion or ambition they can't talk to anyone else about. Each sees the deaf mute man as some kind of kindred spirit, despite him giving away little of what makes him tick. His own inner life is rarely glimpsed, but when it is, it seems to be driven by missing an old friend, who quite frankly seems wholly unworthy, but in whom he clearly sees a kindred spirit, just as others do in him. There is little in the way of plot, just a few defining incidents, as this covers a snapshot of time in the town. The language may be too plain for some, and sometimes the pacing seemed a little off, and characters' inner monologues a bit overcooked, but that can be forgiven when you realise that the author produced this in her early twenties. What an odd book. I liked it.

49: Heroes by Stephen Fry

This is a follow up to his retelling of the stories of the Greek Gods - Mythos, which I read earlier this year. I really enjoyed Mythos, and I was really looking forward to this one. I did enjoy it but I wasn't quite as engaged as I was with Mythos. I found the numerous characters quite hard to keep track of, but that is really my issue not Stephen Fry's!

It certainly covered a lot of Greek myth- the 12 labours of Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, Theseus and the minotaur, Icarus etc.
I'd recommend, and will definitely read the next one on the Trojan War.

Death's Own Door - Andrew Taylor
Another of his crime series set in Lydmouth just after World War Two. The revelation about whodunnit was a bit silly, but otherwise I quite liked this. It was more about the central characters and their relationships than it was about the crime, but I didn't mind that.

Thanks, nowanearly, that's an enticing sale.

187. The Royal Governess - Wendy Holden Fictionalisation of the life of Marion Crawford, governess to the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. She spent 17 years looking after them, but fell out of favour when she later went on to write a book about them. Covers all the events you'd expect. I quite liked this and wouldn't mind reading the book that caused all of the fuss. It sounds like she cared for them deeply and was quite shoddily treated in the end.

24. Star Wars the force awakens Book version of Star Wars TFA.

Luke Skywalker has vanished. In his absence, the sinister FIRST ORDER has risen from the ashes of the Empire and will not rest until Skywalker, the last Jedi, has been destroyed.
With the support of the REPUBLIC, General Leia Organa leads a brave RESISTANCE. She is desperate to find her brother Luke and gain his help in restoring peace and justice to the galaxy.
Leia has sent her most daring pilot on a secret mission to Jakku, where an old ally has discovered a clue to Luke's whereabouts...

FN-2187 was a stormtrooper, yet found that he didn’t enjoy it. When Poe is taken in by the first order, FN-2187 reluctantly helps him escape and Poe names him Finn.

Rey is a scavenger on the planet of Jakku. She lives alone and is waiting to find her family, barely getting by when a little droid keeps following her around. Despite seeming annoyed with the little droid and almost selling him, Rey grows rather fond of him.

The first order locate them on Jakku and after finding the millennium falcon, they go into space yet have problems with it. Enter Han Solo and Chewie!

Han knows what he has to do, Rey has “parallel visions” with Ben/Han’s son and find’s Luke skywalker’s lightsaber. The force begins to connect her with Kylo Ten.

Kylo kidnaps her and uses mind controls, Han is reunited with his wife and she concluded to him that she wanted their son back, therefore alongside Finn head over to the first order. They manage to almost escape when Han talk to his son. He thinks they’re making progress and then he dies.

Anyway they all escape and in the end Rey takes the Falcon and goes to a hidden planet to find Luke Skywalker.

I had recently started watching the Star Wars saga so when I found out about this book I was ecstatic. While I do enjoy the films I do find them rather long, so haven’t exactly fully understood the plot (great movies—just too long!). Now I finally understand it all. While before I overlooked the friendship between Rey and Finn, as with all books you could understand it more and I found it rather emotional.

I also start at college today!

I see Some Kids I taught is on deal today. I know several people on here have read it - would you recommend it to a general reader (ie not a teacher or a parent with dc in school)?

eine imagine KST would be pretty formidable as Mrs D. And I quite like Lily James in other things I’ve seen her in (except the awful Yesterday but that can’t be said to be her fault)

Rebecca looks good, the original film had to change the ending to comply with the hayes code so I'll be interested to see what they do with this film. Although I always got the impression the marriage between maxim and the new mrs dewinter was pretty much sexless, doesn't look that way from the film.

39. Kindred by Octavia E.Butler

about a woman called Dana who gets transported back and forth in time from 1970s LA to an American plantation during the slavery era.
Butler here has tried to make all the characters well rounded and while there is a very strong sense of time and place throughout, the prose is definitely very plot driven. Dana herself ends up in a sort of uneasy friendship with the eventual plantation owner and is mostly passive in the horrors she witnesses as she is very much on survival mode. I like Dana and her observations and I found this abit of a page turner. Overall a quick and enjoyable read.

40. Unexplained by richard maclean smith

Based on a podcast of the same name (which ive never listened to) the book details 10 unexplained mysteries from alien sightings to ghosts. I brought this for £3 from the works and it was fine for what it was but did ramble in places.

41. Such a fun age by kiley Reid

This book starts with Emira, a black babysitter for a wealthy white family taking the child she looks after to a grocery store late at night. She is then accused of kidnapping while someone films the encounter.

I'd describe this as a light read with big themes. I especially liked how the book explored the issue of a white family using their black employee to project their own desiresd image and Emira herself who is in her mid twenties and not sure what she wants in life but is feeling the pressure to make or do something in her life. This would make a good book club read and I enjoyed this.

Sadik it is a wonderful book. One of the reviews in the back said something like 'Reading this book will make you a better person' and I can kind of see what they meant. It's very heartwarming, but not in a cheesy way. Don't miss it! (NB it's on the Monthly not Daily Deal, so you have plenty of time to make up your mind).

Thanks Fran - sounds like just what I need right now :)

Sadik I thought it was a great book. One of my standout reads of two (?) years ago. I'm not a teacher fwiw!