50 Book Challenge 2020 Part Ten

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the tenth (and final?) 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
9

I've just checked and these threads this year have moved more quickly than any other year since they started back in 2012! We'd never reached ten threads in any other year.

My NY resolution is to buy MORE books but paper ones not kindle, the latter is just so easy but (a) actually I like reading paper books better and (b) I'd rather not give my money to Jeff Bezos.

Only a quarter of the books I've read so far this year have been on paper, and nearly half on Kindle (rest audio or online library) I'd like to shift back to previous years where nearer half have been paper. I don't actually have much of a paper TBR pile - the only physical books I own but haven't read are ones I've been given but don't actually fancy.

This year I have read more physical books, but that’s because I haven’t been travelling. I usually use my kindle a lot while commuting.

I can't remember the last time I read an actual book rather than a kindle book, it must be years. In my defence that's partly through circumstance as I don't have a light in my bedrooom due to no power sockets so I need the kindle light to read by.

Having seen the photo of the front covers I do miss that browsing in a book shop for books, many years ago I used to spend £50 a month in the local independent book shop before children and leaving my high paid job to do a lower paid but more rewarding one. I'm still happy with my kindle though.

I have to confess that being in a bookshop gives me a slight sense of panic nowadays (not that I’ve been in one for months). So many books, so much choice, resulting in fear of buying the wrong one (FOMO).

Ideal Homes - Deborah Sugg Ryan

A good look at the typical 1930s suburban house. I found this absolutely fascinating. The book examines the architecture and interiors, how modern appliances and design started to creep in and the influences on class and sex. Lots of great pictures too.

I love browsing bookshops, that’s the thing I missed most in lockdown.

80 On Chapel Sands Laura Cumming
Another review of this book. I liked the writing style and the descriptions of the Lincolnshire cost. .As I read the first part of the book I felt that the strong,loving bond between the author and her mother was clouding her judgement of the character and motivation of her adoptive grandparents. I felt it was to her credit that she began to re- examine what she knew and came to a more sympathetic conclusion. I was sorry that her adoptive grandmother, Vida, had no-one to speak for her and remained a rather shadowy figure.

I'm also missing bookshops - there is a good but small one nearish to me, but usually I manage a couple of city visits over the year & do some serious browsing. Maybe next year, who knows :) In the meantime I've bought a cheapy e-book from Hive, & going to see if I can make it work on my phone kindle app.

195. Jack by Marilynne Robinson

As the fourth in the Gilead series, it is pretty much impossible to review on here because the story is an extensive spoiler for the endings of the first two books, Gilead and Home

The first two books along with Lila are beautifully written, important reads.

Sadly, Jack adds nothing really and is easily the weakest.

Lots of moralising dialogue. Regardless of the obvious obstacle his relationship faces, I found it more of an obstacle in my own head that anyone would find this tedious arsehole depicted in any way worthy of their time, let alone as a significant other, particularly a woman of such obvious intelligence and class.

Robinson needs to leave Gilead and Home alone and not start tarnishing them with increasingly unnecessary follow ups.

119. Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

One of the Rivers of London books, starring magic using police officers. Enjoyable.

A follow on chalet school book,two chalet girls in India, was on KU so I thought I'd have a look but I've just about given up on it.

I'm well aware that EMBD was a writer of her time and that social attitudes have moved on but this book was written in 2006 and by an Indian author, not a white British author with connections to colonial India. In one part of the book it states that the children were at the chalet school because of the climate in India is 'not suitable for white children' and later a character mentions the punkah wallahs and complains that 'native servants are so lazy' and that'd they fall asleep when you were too hot and needed them to do the fanning.

I found this unacceptable in a contemporary book and don't really want to read on.

99: Step by Step - Simon Reeve

I really enjoy Simon Reeve's thoughtful and well-made TV journeys so when this memoir appeared in the Kindle deals I snapped it up. Turns out I wasn't wrong to feel instinctively that he's one of life's good guys - he chronicles his very ordinary upbringing in Acton, his lack of education and his struggles with depression (to the point of being on the brink of suicide) and dead-end jobs.

Landing a humble role in the post-room of the Sunday Times turned out to be the chance he needed to unlock his considerable potential, and - amazingly - led to his writing the first book ever to identify the magnitude of the threat posed by Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden...while it was pretty much dismissed on publication, the atrocity of 9/11 a few years later revealed him to have been all too right. TV quickly came calling, and he writes fascinatingly about his first few travel series and what makes him want to explore parts of the world that are often dangerous, unstable, and which other people would run a mile from.
A really engaging read, and he comes across as a genuinely humble and grounded person.

Terpsichore Brilliant review - I thought the same when I read it. One of the stand out books, I wish my DS would read it.

Bestiswest I've now added that home book to my list, thanks.

I just got my first paper library book since March :) Our library has been doing order & collect for a while, but only just started to offer orders from other libraries (it's tiny, & so rarely anything in stock I want). Waiting to here now whether they'll stop the inter-library loans again after Christmas once we're back into lockdown!

Seasonal name change but not much of a disguise!

Just finished Midwinter Murder a selection of wintry Agatha Christie short stories. I suspect I have read some before but I didn't specifically recognise any.

Typical fare : a bit snooty, a bit misogynistic but all rather fun.

I like it Piggy, you've reminded me to do my name change too.

Nice work with the name changes. Mine's pretty cryptic, so well done if you've worked out who I am.

80. The Five: the Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold Already favourably reviewed many times on this thread, and I can only add to the praise. Thoroughly researched and well written, this leaves you in no doubt about the lack of positive life choices available to working class Victorian women. The author cuts through the misinformation, lazy assumptions and melodrama to document every known detail about the whole life paths of these five women. And as I'm not re-reading A Christmas Carol this year, this gave me quite enough of a seasonal dose of Victorian squalor and poverty.

Work has been horrendous during the past few weeks- I’m still reading but haven’t been updating. Some of these are very short but I don’t even feel guilty, as I finished both David Copperfield and The Stand not long ago!:

189. The Perks of Being a Wallflower- Stephen Chbosky I’ve read this before, but this was the audiobook. I’d forgotten that parts of it were so depressing but loved the references to indie bands especially The Smiths and Ride.

190. Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops- Shaun Bythell Lovely but far too short.

191. Egyptian Mythology: A Concise Guide to the Ancient Gods and Beliefs of Egyptian Mythology- Hourly History This plugged a few gaps in my knowledge.

192. The Art of Resilience: Strategies for an Unbreakable Mind and Body- Ross Edgley This was the audiobook. I’m more interested in mental resilience so the advice on physical training etc. was slightly wasted on me. It did, however, remind me how much I miss swimming :(

193. Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide- John Cleese Short and sweet- I’ll probably read it again to get the full benefit.

194. The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother- Amy Chua I’ve read it before, but this was the audiobook. It is a brutally honest account of how the author raised her daughters to be outstanding Classical musicians, threatening to throw their toys away if they didn’t practise etc. One daughter went along with it, the other rebelled but both seemed to end up as surprisingly well-balanced human beings.

195. The Cockroach- Ian McEwan I listened to the audiobook, but now I want to read the book- it zipped along so fast that I think I missed some crucial bits. Jonathan Coe’s Middle England is a more accomplished book in the tiny genre of Brexit novels, but this was amusing and well-handled.

196. Ready Player Two- Ernest Cline I paid full price for this on the Kindle, as I was so keen to read it. I felt that it almost reached the heights of Ready Player One. The 80s references were possibly a little more clunky- the chapters relating to John Hughes films and Prince were enjoyable but overly long- and it got a bit silly towards the end, but the final resolution was very satisfying and overall I felt it was a success.

197. The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman- Denis Thériault This was mentioned on here recently: I enjoyed rediscovering it.

198. Decline and Fail: Read in Case of Political Apocalypse- John Crace A collection of his columns from (if memory serves) 2018-9. I found it both amusing and depressing that while reading the repeated failures of Theresa May's Brexit deal, we STILL haven’t managed to agree a suitable deal.

199. The Thief of Time- John Boyne This is just as well written as his other novels I’ve read ( The Heart’s Invisible Furies, A Ladder to the Sky, A History of Loneliness, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas etc.) but, for some reason, I didn’t enjoy it quite as much. One reason was possibly that it was never explained WHY the main character had lived for 256 years.

200. The Zombie Survival Guide- Max Brooks This audiobook was fun, but I preferred the paperback. Anyone who likes Shaun of the Dead would enjoy it. The advice is so realistic that I almost filed it under non-fiction.

I have converted to preferring my kindle to a paperback over the last year or two, mainly because you can enlarge the font.

85. The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison. This started as Sherlock wingfic (and although set in Victoria times, I am pretty sure it was inspired by the Benedict Cumberbatch version!), but is also a retelling of several of the Conan Doyle stories, with added true Victorian crime (mainly Jack the Ripper), mixed with bits of steampunk and a hefty dose of the occult. It pretty much comes off- there are one or two places I found things jarred (but can't say more because of a hefty spoiler), and I wish they had used British spelling for a book set in Victoria London; but if you like any of the Sherlock variations, you might enjoy this.

Well, that's my last Christmas in the UK buggered, and it looks like the sale of my house has probably fallen through too. What an absolutely shite day. Don't know what I'm going to read next, but pretty sure I'm going to be pissed off with it.

69. The Ninth Child - Sally Magnusson.

I bought this in the Kindle daily deal. Did not enjoy it as much as The Sealwoman's Gift which I really liked. This was an interesting premise: set in mid-C19th Glasgow/Trossachs and the building of a tunnel from Loch Katrine to provide clean water to Glasgow. Isabel Aird has suffered numerous miscarriages and accompanies her doctor husband to live at the rural site of the tunnel building, where she meets a strange man called Robert Kirke, who we learn has a pact with the faeries.

This had all the ingredients of a great novel but it fell short. No idea why. It just didn't draw me in, in the way a book like this normally would. I did enjoy the historical setting though, especially the dual story line of Queen Victoria and Albert.

70. The Ickabog JK Rowling. Read this to my kids. Thoroughly enjoyed it!

Sorry to hear that, InMyOwnTier - what a rubbish thing to happen

(Half-heartedly joining in with the Christmas name-change thing....)

I seem to have gone right off the idea of reading again.

InMyOwnTier - sorry to hear that. Sending very non-MN/non-Covid hugs.

196. Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

In Poland an astrologer suspects foul play when her neighbour known as Bigfoot is found dead.

Fully fits my new axiom that if you want to read a BONKERS novel read a short one.

Wasn't for me. Too random.

Idiom

Running out of patience for reading, would like to meet my goal in the next few days and then just telly it til Jan 1st

16. The Beedle and the Bars, JK Rowling. Had this sitting on the shelf for ages. A nice little read and I found the notes by Albus Dumbledore a nice touch if a bit pointless at the same time.

17. Once you know this. Emily Blejwas.
    Debut book for young adults. Caught my interest when scanning through the online library but only because I somehow misunderstood the synopsis.

A young girl growing up in Chicago in poverty, with her mums abusive boyfriend decides to plan how she can make her life better.

It doesn’t get too deep due to the audience it is written for bit is a pleasant read from the young girl’s perspective.