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

I wish I'd DNFed my latest read.

219. The Once and Future Witches - Alix Harrow 1893 New Salem, three sisters join the women's suffrage movement, but start to explore the old ways and turn to witchcraft instead as a way to give local women power.

This actually sounded like a really interesting premise, but it was so poorly executed. It was a very long book and not enough plot to warrant the amount of words. There was very little suffrage and a lot of nursery rhymes and spells. Most of the word count seemed to be a research dump rather than advancing the plot. The characters were largely uninteresting and not very well developed. I only finished it out of bloody mindedness after getting that far in, but god I was bored. It felt a bit YA and might appeal to fantasy fans, but it didn't do anything for me.

Stitches - yes, walking vicar = Book of Strange New Things. Lots of people loved it iirc, but it made me very cross, although I liked the aliens.

One Two Three Four has been shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford non-fiction prize.

I did finish A Gentleman in Moscow but really don't get the hype.
I should have loved it, I have a degree in Russian, and have read a LOT of Russian Literature, a lot of it well known for being slow burners. I also like character driven historical fiction, but just found it so dull. For me it was another example of a really tedious book, with glimpses of a great book trying to get out. (Normal People was another example)

KeithLeMonde you might find Prison A Survival Guide by Carl Cattermole a less lightweight (but still very readable) book

Oh how lovely, you're all chatting about the wanking vicar (or walking vicar as the much politer autocorrect of Remus would have it). I have missed this thread while I've been ploughing through Infinite Jest with ever diminishing returns. In fact, rather than read the thing, tonight I have just taken to googling such terms as 'racism in infinite jest', 'misogyny in infinite jest', 'ableism in infinite jest', 'was david foster wallace actually more of an annoying privileged shit who needed to grow up a bit (but could write) than a tragic genius' etc. I will finish it, but its flaws have defeated me for now, and I'm going to read something nicer.

139. The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo

Sahei Inugami leaves behind a tremendous fortune and a convoluted will designed to pit his family against each other. As beneficiaries start dying, a detective investigates.

Set in Forties Post War Japan, this has a big vibe of Agatha Christie Does Japan about it. I got this in the Kindle Daily Deals, and whilst it was good, I found myself itching to move on from it, and I found the translation seemed oversimplified.

OK.

Too much RL has meant that most of my reading lately has been comfort re-reads of old favourites which I don't count towards my total (on the grounds that the same books would pop up in my lists too often!). I've managed one almost 'proper' read - it's a cookery book, but more a principles & ideas one rather that a recipe book, so I'm going to count it. (Shame I didn't like it more )

90. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat This was a birthday present, and I can see why I was given it - I like to cook, I treat recipes as rough suggestions rather than lists of instructions and I'm interested in the science of food. The idea behind this book is to take what the author considers the four main underpinnings of good cookery, and explain how each works. I suspect if you were someone who had some basic cooking experience, but only ever cooked by following recipes line by line, it could be useful in helping you move on beyond that stage. I think complete beginners would find it overwhelming, and as a middle aged experienced cook I found most of it pretty basic stuff dressed up in fancy clothes. Actually, the main thing I reckon I took away was an understanding as to why I find the vast majority of restaurant food unpleasantly oversalted.

DD has had it recommended to her elsewhere, so I'll pass it on to her to see what she thinks, but if I were going to suggest a book to transform someone's understanding of cooking it would be something like the Constance Spry Cookbook, definitely not this one.

eine I felt the same about Inugami another DNF.

Gentleman should have been right up my street too bookwitch. Funny how sometimes it just doesn’t connect. I also did not love Normal People though found it very readable.

42. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
A complex lawsuit about inheritance is buried deep in Chancery, and many livelihoods depend on it. What will be the final judgment? Who will 'win'? And in the meantime, what is going on with the inheritance of family ties and the making of new families of blood and friendship, all over Victorian London?

This was the first Dickens I ever finished and enjoyed. But my previous liking seems pale now. This is the cavalcade of characters you get with Dickens, the catchphrases and vivid voices, the living scenery. This time I was bowled over by the sheer sensuality of it. I read a chapter at a time, which worked better than trying to tackle it in big lumps. I believe I really felt the cold air, the breeze, the snow and rain, the dust and the shafts of light in dim rooms. I laughed and I cried.

I ADORE Bleak House I thought the adaptation from 10 years or so ago was well done too.

Great review permanent when you said you could feel the cold air I had a vivid memory of the first page!

I lent my parents the dvd of the BBC adaptation ten years ago and I got it back in the post in July. They finally watched it.

Eine - you have made me feel better about my fail with Rules of Civility!

74. Follow Me to Ground - Sue Rainsford

Intriguing horror-fantasy novella. Set against an unspecified agricultural landscape (Ireland? America?), Ada and her father are non-human creatures drawn from The Ground itself, who operate cures on the townsfolk using 'unconventional' surgical techniques and burying them in the ground to be restored. It all starts to unwind when Ada begins a relationship with local young man Samson, which his sister and her father are none too pleased about.

It's the sort of story that sounds a bit daft if you describe it to someone who hasn't read it, but the world-building is excellent and utterly immersive. It has a feel similar to the movie Under the Skin, with a non-human female entering into peculiar intimacies with those around her, leaving you not quite sure what's going on. The imagery of surgery and live burial was gory and unsettling, but I'm not sensitive to that type of horror or medical detail so it wasn't 'scary' to me. It is loaded with ambiguity, giving you hints on how Ada's world operates but withholding enough to maintain the mystery. That said, the ending was a little too open even for me (and I like ambiguous endings), and the final reveal seemed like a statement of the bleeding obvious, although possibly the point was to emphasise Ada's uncanny nature - what's obvious to a human reader might be obscure to her.

The sort of novel that your mind will keep puzzling over long after you've finished it. Not perfect, but a first novel that gets its hooks into you - I'll be looking out for whatever Sue Rainsford writes next.

96. In The Fifth at Malory Towers by Enid Blyton

Another nostalgic re-read. The Fifth formers put on a pantomime in this one.

Wow, that's a great (but pretty devastating) review of the Chris Atkins book, Keith. How interesting that he is described as a "left-wing documentary maker" but seems to have so little awareness of his own privilege and such readiness to use it to his own advantage.

Sadik, I asked for Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat for my birthday last month as I'm a very keen cook (hate the word "foodie", but I suppose I am), and it's always coming up on lists of books that foodies should read. I didn't get it, so I'm none the wiser (but I did get three books about Lego and a biography of Robert Hooke, so I was still pretty happy).

Permanent what a lovely review of Bleak House! It's probably my favourite Dickens, and your review has brought back the first scene to me too (all that fog!) There's an interesting discussion about this in one of the John Sutherland literary detective books that were mentioned in an earlier thread.

Eine, I am THRILLED that you enjoyed Noble Savages so much! Rupert Brooke really was a twat though, wasn't he?

Nice to see you, Ham but oh bollocks re the stupid spellcheck. The vicar was most definitely not just walking.

Finished You let Me In by Camilla Bruce and really liked it. It's a clever, dark fairy tale, constructed as a letter from a famous author to the niece and nephew to whom she is leaving her estate. She's had a chequered past involving estrangement from her family, possible insanity and possible murder.

The letter tells her niece and nephew about her relationship, from when she was a child, with 'Pepperman', kind of vampiric fae figure who essentially grooms the child towards becoming his sexual partner as well as his life blood. But, as if that's not dark and strange enough already, it soon becomes apparent that there's much more than this going on below the surface. And then there's the murder, or possibly murders, to contend with too.

It's a first novel by a female writer, but one that dragged me in with the sample and then kept me gripped throughout. Recommended, but not to Cote.

Idiom - I like the sound of Follow Me to Ground, and have added it to my Wishlist.

Despite having a huge tbr pile (well, 7 books) I have started reading Moby Dick. I’ve never read it before but saw a review saying how funny it was and I was intrigued. I have to admit I thought it would be a traumatic book about whales and death. I also saw that it was a children’s book (Is that right?!) which absolutely bemused me - children must have been made of sterner stuff in the 19th century

I put it off for a while as 19th century punctuation (looking at you, Henry “17 types of punctuation in one sentence - why, if I could fit in 117 (and who’s to say I couldn’t? Much wordier a man has succeeded where I may fail - a Dickens perchance?) I would prostrate myself afore the gods of punctuation for such a chance; in fact lest the gods be listening may they remind me where the blethering feck I was going with this sentence...” James) is not my favourite thing to read.

However. 11 chapters in and I am hooked! (Harpooned?)

Highlight so far is Ishmael and Queequeg’s relationship, with Ishmael transitioning from “look at this terrifying stranger who scares me to my very core!” to “so anyway, there we were in bed with our legs wrapped around each other, chatting and giggling,” in a mere few pages

The shine may wear off when I’ve read another few thousand pages, but for the moment it is hitting a spot for me.

Damn, I missed the Craig Brown Beatles book.

Hate to be the prophet of doom here but I loved the beginning of Moby Dick

My joy was somewhat shortlived

Remus - You Let Me In sounds pretty good too...

Queequeg and the diversions into lessons about blubber etc were the only things I really liked about Moby Dick. The rest did very little for me.

In fact I needed a whole thread, to get me through it! www.mumsnet.com/Talk/what_were_reading/1722772-Moby-Dick-support-thread

Diversions into blubber sounds very comforting to me at the moment. I will look forward to those bits

Eine if it all goes wrong from here on, I’ll ditch it and pretend it was a really good novella