50 Book Challenge 2020 Part Nine

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the ninth 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 still not too late to join, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

The previous threads of 2020:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

Tanaqui, is it Stranger With My Face? I loved that one too. About Natalie, searching for her birth parents? It doesn't quite start that way but there is a part in the first chapter where her friends are talking about how gorgeous she is, and she looks at herself in the mirror and thinks that she supposes she is lucky.

217. Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood by Jasper Rees

I’m a big Victoria Wood fan so I’ve been looking forward to this coming out. It’s very thorough particularly about her career although does include a reasonable amount about her personal life. The author does not include his own analysis of what she must have been like - it’s a very factual book and you’re left to form your own opionions based on the information given. Lots of her friends and family spoke to the author, including her ex husband and children, so this is likely to be a very accurate portrayal. I really enjoyed it and I’m now digging out my Victoria Wood DVDs! Definitely recommended if you’re a fan.

218. Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome

Second in the series, featuring more sailing and camping adventures in the Lake District. Not quite as good as the original but I enjoyed it.

Chessie I wasn't a fully paid up member of the VW fan club - although sometimes I did find her very funny - however I heard an interesting interview with her biographer Jasper Rees on Woman's Hour last week. Among other things he mentioned her having an unhappy childhood and also that she was quite domineering when directing her own work. I realised that I knew very little about her.

The audiobook comes out at the same time as the hardback and is being read by Julie Walters, Celia Imrie, Duncan Preston and all the usual suspects. I think that's a great idea.

Chessie thanks for those two reviews, I think I'll look for the first and re-read the second.

I'm reading low brow fiction at the moment, nothing really that will interest the thread in general but I've finished Veronica Henry's Home from Home, The Boy in the Photo by Nicole Trope and The Other Daughter by Shalini Boland. Roughly 1: Twee country fiction 2. Formulaic psychological 'thriller' and 3. The same with an implausible, rushed ending.

Hello all :) I've been buried in a big book and distracted by twitter and haven't been here for a long time. I've enjoyed catching up.

40. Between the Stops by Sandi Toksvig
    A kind of memoir structured around a bus journey in London.
    I was expecting this to be extremely light, a few 'wry sideways looks at life' kind of deal. But there's quite a bit more to it than that. A lot of personal reflections about family, love and splits, children, which hit quite hard, and inevitably because Sandi is a lesbian, reflections on the homophobia of the frighteningly recent past. I mean, she came out in 1994, which is no time at all to me. It says she was the first out lesbian in British public life, which I thought MUST be wrong, but I retired defeated having been unable to think of any others earlier. And she was terrified.
    Sandy writes well and hits quite hard. She's a serious person working in comedy. I remember that from Number 73 - she seemed to think children were important even in that very simple show.

41. Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keele
    The story of The Troubles, built around the disappearance of Jean McConville but spiralling out from that to encompass a much broader picture of Northern Ireland. PRK is a journalist and writes so well; this is an immensely engaging and affecting multiple portrait of some selected threads in this tortuous conflict. I was born in 1969 so growing up it felt like a war that had always existed and would never end.

@ChessieFL I read an article in Radio Times about Victoria Wood's biography , which hinted at a darker side to her personality. It made me a bit hesitant about reading it., but your review has encouraged me to put it on my TBR pile. I saw her stand up show twice at different times and I don't think I've ever laughed so much .

It’s not really a darker side Black, just that she was very private and introverted off stage and as Highland said very demanding to work with, insisting on everything she wrote being spoken exactly as she had written it which doesn’t sound very easy for those who worked with her - but it can’t have been that bad as lots of people worked with her over and over again.

chessie I’m a huge Victoria Wood fan and I’m hoping to get his for Christmas so thanks for that great review. I think it’s hard for people to match her down to earth performances with an exacting personality, but the combination of both those things was probably exactly why she was so successful. She was so important to me growing up, and I’m so sad she’s not here anymore.

Also a VW fan. I can understand why she wanted her words spoken exactly as written - they were very precise in their comedic meaning. Dinner Ladies was wonderful although Acorn Antiques mystified me a bit. I’ll be adding that to my Christmas wish list.

Reading the excellent House of Glass at the moment.

@ChessieFL That does make sense and I look forward to reading more about her. I have put in a library reservation and I'm 27th in the queue so I may be downloading it onto my Kindle!
@SatsukiKusakabe. I'm sure you're right. I was shocked and sad when she died. She was the subject of Great Lives on Radio 4 and the actor who chose her was in tears when he was talking about her.

77: People Who Say Goodbye - P. Y. Betts

I haven't been able to read much since losing my mum but in the odd moment I've turned to this book, which is apparently a cult classic. I picked it up somewhere secondhand ages ago and it's been at her house (I spent a lot of time here anyway and as I accumulate books everywhere I inevitably have a fair collection).

P. Y (Phyllis) Betts was in her 80s when she wrote this memoir of her childhood during the early years of the 20th century. It's a wonderfully clear-eyed and unsentimental account, detailing her relationships with her parents and brother (she evokes her determined mother particularly well) as well as wider family (eccentric aunts, detested rich maternal grandfather and her poor but dearly beloved paternal grandparents). Most delightful of all is Phyllis herself - solid, sensible, endlessly curious about the world, constantly hungry and resolutely unimpressed by the behaviour of adults.

It's been a strange but not unpleasant experience to read this in the house where I grew up, with so many memories of my own childhood. Highly recommended if you come across this book.

@Terpsichore I'm glad you have found comfort in the right book for you at the moment. It sounds lovely. I have reserved a copy at the library. Wishing you well.

Very excitedly downloaded Adam Kay's latest, Kay's Anatomy, this morning, only to very rapidly realise it's a children's book

I guessed there probably wouldn't be too many unlikely objects inserted into bottoms etc in this one, so I returned it to Audible!

Well, if that's your criterion for a good book, Idiom.....

Idiom What a disappointment!

216. The Last Story of Mina Lee - Nancy Jooyoun Kim The American daughter of a Korean immigrant finds her mother dead in her apartment and from documents she finds, pieces together her mother's life and things she never realised about her background, including that her grandparents had fled from North Korea to South during the Korean war. She wishes she had spent more time with her mother and trying to understand her.

Interesting enough plot and competent writing. This genre is starting to feel a little over done at the moment, but I do find the backgrounds interesting as a window to a world I am vaguely aware of, but have little previous understanding of.

217. Our Bodies, Their Battlefields - Christina Lamb Recently read and reviewed by Idiom and Pepe so I won't go over content. I had to read this in installments as it was so harrowing and I had a neighbour stop me in the street to check I was ok as I was listening while walking the dog and she said I looked stricken. I agree that this is a very important and vital book to give voice to the women affected by rape as a weapon of war, but it really isn't an easy book to read.

Well, I must admit I am partial to a rogue foreign object anecdote...

72. Who Am I, Again? - Lenny Henry (Audible)

Lenny Henry recounts his life story from his birth to recent Jamaican immigrants, to the early years of his show business career. I found the early section more interesting, on the experience of growing up as British-born child of Windrush Generation parents, and the degree of overt racism that was still current only in the generation before mine (Lenny Henry is the same age as my mum). The details of his early performances on shows such as New Faces and Tiswas was less engaging, probably because they're before my time so have no nostalgia value to me. This really gained from being an Audiobook, because as a consummate impressionist, Henry was able to perfectly capture his parents' patois and the Dudley drawl of his younger days.

73. The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being - Alice Roberts

Exploration of human embryology and anatomy, and the light it sheds on our evolutionary past. This was billed as popular science, but the tone was very uneven, at times overloaded with complex anatomical terminology, and at other times quite silly and faux-girlish ('I think this worm should be called a Sperm Worm, because it looks like a sperm' ).

I stuck with it though, because the content was so interesting, showing how our evolutionary ancestry is revealed in the early stages of embryological development; at one point it looks like we are going to end up with gills and a fish heart, for example, because the genetic programming for development is similar for all vertebrates. The outstanding message is that humans are very much part of the natural world, and don't have a particular uniqueness; the differences in, for example, brain size, bipedalism and tool use are matters of degree rather than marking an absolute separation from the animal kingdom. Overall, quite heavy-going, but fascinating.

@InMyOwnParticularIdiom honestly I can’t ever look at kinder eggs in the same way after his first

[quote Palegreenstars]@InMyOwnParticularIdiom honestly I can’t ever look at kinder eggs in the same way after his first[/quote]
Having spent a time working in A&E medical records and having to read numerous records for auditing purposes I can assure you that kinder eggs are one of the less common objects of choice for internal insertion for pleasurable (ahem) purposes.

I’m really pleased I trusted my instincts and didn’t read any Adam Kay after seeing this convo. It doesn’t sound like it’s up my, er, street but no judgement it would be boring if we all etc etc....

138. Noble Savages by Sarah Watling

This was I think, recommended by mackerella on a previous thread and has proved a great recommendation.

The four Olivier sisters :

Margery, Brynhild, Daphne and Noël

(Cousins to THE Laurence)

were the daughters of prominent members of the Fabian Society, and raised in an idyllic proto Feminist way.

But they soon discovered that as they became women they failed to meet social (male) expectations with their unconventional ways, whilst at the same time finding suitors amongst the great and the good. Three were among the first women to attend university, and Noël was one of the first female doctors, not only in general, but two maintain her career after marriage and childbirth.

Though Daphne, who was involved in the Steiner movement and Brynhild, who was the most beautiful, had interesting lives; the book massively belongs to the eldest and youngest, Margery and Noël.

Noël's life was as "romantic" and "successful" as Margery's was grim as fuck, really.

As Noël became one of the first career women, and a doctor, Margery became one of the first people in Britain to be diagnosed with schizophrenia. At this stage, she had spent many years in an institutionalised state, and remained institutionalised until her death.

Depictions of both her illness and its treatment (pre pharmaceutical) are difficult and hard to read, as are the social reactions at the time. Comments from the Olivier social sphere include insinuations that Margery merely needed a good shag

It wasn't all great for Noël, at age 15, she caught the eye of Rupert "Forever England" Brooke, who was 22. Obviously, it did not work out, and Brooke famously died. Outrageously, there are SEVERAL accusations over the years from biographers that Noël "toyed with him" and has "led him on" - rather missing the fact that he was massively intense and over the top towards her and she was an actual child.

Noël was also part of the Bloomsbury set, enough so to name a child after Virginia Woolf, and she also had a long term romance with James Strachey, brother of Lytton.

Watling does ponder whether one should write a biography about people who REALLY didn't like biographies and found them slightly offensive; but I am really glad she did because it's such a window into the lives of women and girls in the first half of the 20th Century

5/5 heartily recommend

That's two in a row, now, and both non fiction.

Why am I finding fiction such a damn disappointment this year?

(Sigh) wish there was an edit button for SPAG

93. The Wolves of Winter by Tyrell Johnson

This is set in a near future world where society has collapsed following nuclear war, the subsequent nuclear winter, and a flu pandemic.

Lynn lives in a very isolated tiny community in the Yukon in Canada with her family. One day, Lynn stumbles across a stranger in the forest, which leads to all sorts of trouble.

I had been expecting a sort of story around the social impact of introducing a stranger into a tiny community that’s not seen anyone else for years, but it turned into more of a thriller story. The flu storyline was a lot more prominent than I’d expected it to be. But generally all entertaining enough.

94. Panic by Lauren Oliver

This is basically about a bunch of teenagers daring each other to do some really stupidly dangerous stunts to win lots of money.
I struggled a bit with this one. Mainly because of the extreme nature of the stunts.

95. My Son’s Not Rainman by John Williams

Williams has written this book about his son, who has autism and cerebral palsy. Well written and entertaining.

Currently reading and enjoying You Let Me In by Camilla Bruce. It's 99p on Kindle and I must've read a review of it somewhere because it's been on my Wishlist for ages.

This must've been the review I read.

218. Vesper Flights - Helen MacDonald A series of essays about humanity's relationship with nature and what we can learn from it, touching on many pressing issues. It's her usual mix of memoir/nature/science/philosophy/history and more.

I listened to the audiobook and it was solace for the soul. Beautiful writing as usual and narrated in a very calming and meditative way. I listened to this all in one on a very long walk, but think it would suit being dipped in and out of better. While it does touch on immigration, nationalism, Brexit, global warming and other big topics, there's not a virus in sight!