50 Book Challenge 2021 Part Three

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the third thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2021, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read. Could everyone embolden their titles and/or authors as well, please, as it makes the books talked about easier to track?

The first thread of the year is here and the second one here.

I'm doing the 3rd Simon Schama on Audible and shockingly I've just got to the fact that all of Mrs Gaskell's earnings were paid to her husband who gave her pocket money

Fucking hell

Many thanks, I'll take a look...I really enjoyed Hearts Invisible Furies

My tuppence-worth on the two talking points of the last few days:

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I have read the PD James, the Ali Smith, Stuart - A Life Backwards and The Loney from your list. Of those I'd go for the Ali Smith, which is a bit of a surprise because I don't really like most of her books, but I did love that one. The others are all decent; I agree with @highlandcoo that The Loney peters out at the end.

Any Human Heart is awesome.

On to...

9. Lanny by Max Porter

Immediately I finished reading this I looked online to see whether anyone had made comparisons between it and Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13. Quite a few had, and like me, most felt Lanny was rather slight in comparison. It is perhaps unfortunate for Porter that another book centring around a missing child was written not long before his own. The books are different in their focus; whilst both are set in small villages, Lanny is much more about the child himself and his family and immediate circle, although there's a lot of Greek chorus village commentary, whereas in Reservoir 13, the whole focus is on the ripples that spread out through the village as a result of the child's disappearance. There is some wonderful, poetic description in Lanny; I enjoyed the Greek chorus bits, which were well done, and the elemental being that is Dead Papa Toothwort is fantastically evoked even for someone like me who finds magical realism a bit twee. I liked the voices of Lanny's parents. But somehow the whole was less than the sum of its parts, and I found the ending pat and sentimental. Reservoir 13 felt to me like a much more mature, thought-provoking, deeper examination of village life - although to be fair, I don't think that's what Porter was aiming for.

I raced through it, though, and at points it was wonderful just to get caught up in the language, so don't let the downbeat parts of this review put you off!

I think if you liked The Heart’s Invisible Furies then I think you will also enjoy Any Human Heart so go for it!

I read How to be Both on Kindle and really weirdly it has the book twice in the Kindle edition so you start with the painter and then do the modern and then it starts again with the modern followed by the painter - took me a while to realise! So, it’s half the length you expect it be from the Kindle reading time indicator.

13. Hamnet - Maggie O’Farrell

Might have been wrong book at the wrong time (real life is getting in the way of reading at the mo and making me grumpy) but I just didn’t gel with this, and think the disappointment was probably all the greater because my expectations were high. Stylistically I did not get on with it at all - the present tense narration added to the sense of distance from the characters, and the ‘describing things with three adjectives/clauses’ business was all I could see in places, although it did mercifully let up a bit towards the end. The characterisation of Agnes as an intuitive whose predictive powers seemed to ‘real’ jarred in a novel that was otherwise historical realist. To say something nice, the relationships between women were well-observed. But it was overall a book to be got through rather than enjoyed. In my current frame of mind, I think I’ll go for some comfort Terry Pratchett or similar for a while.

12. The Darkest Evening, by Ann Cleeves
The most recent Vera book. Solid traditional crime fiction. A young woman is found dead in the snow - whodunnit? One of the rotters in the Big House, someone from the gossipy local village, or maybe a family member? Reliable.

13. The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig
An intriguing concept - wouldn't we all like to know how our lives would have turned out of we made different choices? It's marred by clunky execution. Why trust your reader to unravel the subtle nuances when you can batter them around the head with the Moral of the Story?

@VikingNorthUtsire

Bett wild swimming is all the rage don't ya know....

I see more dissent in the ranks so I fear that I will have to rescind my agreement to a Stratford tea room.

Daphne some of the things you didn't like with Hamnet were the very things that I did like. It's good that we aren't all the same.

How's your swimming?

This sets of three in Hamnet infuriated me.

I need more scones to get over remembering them.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie

This sets of three in Hamnet infuriated me.

I need more scones to get over remembering them.

Scones are always a good idea. Which goes first, cream or jam?

Jam then cream - although my dp says this is barbaric. And the jam must not be strawberry.

Swimming is about the only exercise I’m competent at. You can hoy me into the Avon all you want. Just don’t try to make me run...

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie

Jam then cream - although my dp says this is barbaric. And the jam must not be strawberry.

I was about to reply and say how I do them but I appear to have forgotten, I think I need to go and buy scones, jam and cream to check that it really is jam and then cream. The jam has to be black cherry and the cream has to be proper Cornish clotted cream.

Here for the scones. Firmly on the Jam then cream side. Raspberry Jam.

Nooo, cream THEN jam. Heathens.

Jam and then cream. Raspberry or strawberry jam, clotted cream.

Prefer running to swimming. But either better than cycling.

Plum jam, rhubarb jam, raspberry jam in order of preference. Proper clotted cream is a must (and I'll take the crust). And there must be Earl Grey and cream cheese and cucumber sarnies, and egg and watercress in an ideal world.

The PD James talk serendipitously brings me to

11. A Mind to Murder second in the Adam Dalgliesh series. Very cozy in a murder in suburbia (well, London) kind of way, and very much of its time. Young ladies in euphemistic "trouble" and married men being blackmailed for some never named proclivity but for which they needed psychiatric therapy, so who knows?
Beautifully written, and very much in the Christie style. Very much reminiscent of the country house murder trope, but set in a 1960s London psychiatry practice. A story of how ordinary people and up doing extraordinary things, and of how those extraordinary things ruin more lives than one, and occasionally end them. Characterisation is second to none, as ever with P.D James, and it's interesting how in these early Dalgliesh books, we don't really get to know him at all. His character serves almost as the bystander sent to observe. None the worse for that.

Jam then cream. No strong feelings on the flavour of jam but agree it MUST be clotted cream. The most disappointing cream tea I’ve ever had served up squirty cream! The horror.

43. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell

Picked this up when lots of people read it at the end of last year. I wasn’t sure at first - the speed of the relationship developing didn’t ring true - but then it sucked me in and I couldn’t put it down. Such a sweet story.

OMG, I can’t remember either - think i do cream then jam. Isn’t one way the Cornish way and the other the Devonian?

15. The Offing - Benjamin Myers

Robert is the son of a miner in post-war Durham. He is 16, has taken his final school exams and a future down the mine beckons. Before that, Robert has a summer of freedom and he sets off on foot, picking up casual work at farms and camping wherever he finds himself. In North Yorkshire he encounters Dulcie (and her dog, Butler). Dulcie is worldly, generous and unhappy but spending time together expands Robert’s horizons and enables him to see his capabilities. I really liked this and bought into the characters and enjoyed the descriptive writing.

When constructing a cream mountain, the only structurally safe way to do it is to lay a jam foundation.

Just for balance, I hated The Heart's Invisible Furies AND Any Human Heart and I just had to Google them to remind myself which was which. Nasty boring old man vs pointless boring coincidence old man.

My perfect scone would be a fruit scone with butter and apricot jam. I'd skip the cream and give it to you guys so you could have extras, and you can put it on in whatever order you like, I don't care.

Must admit neither of the Heart books appeal to me.

Gosh I’m thinking about scones now.

It would be cream then strawberry jam but if I’m totally honest I like it with just butter.

1. Lucky by Alice Sebold this is a memoir about how she was raped at 18 near her college by a stranger and living with it afterwards. It pretty much starts with the rape and does give a lot of detail which is a harrowing read at parts. The majority of the rest of the book covers her remaining years at college and only quickly goes over the later years. A good read.

@bibliomania

When constructing a cream mountain, the only structurally safe way to do it is to lay a jam foundation.

Indeed. Surely Jam is precarious on top of cream.