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.

OMG Lace and the goldfish!

Pepe those breaks can be a godsend (said the atheist!). They don't happen here any more as the ex has manage to alienate all of his children and his siblings and they don't have anything to do with him. None of it is his fault of course

Meanwhile I'll just leave this photo here, turned up in my email earlier. It might interest some of you...or not!

Just completed A Fine Balance. I missed out a lot on many great books published in the mid 90s , not sure why other than busy doing other things. This is indeed a very fine (and lengthy!) book which I enjoyed for its richness and broad sweep with so many ambiguous characters, beautifully created and the picaresque nature of the central characters, acting as metaphors , I guess, for the state of India and the treatment of its people: there was lots I did not' know, and was shocked by, having always viewed Gandhis as good, I guess. It is testament to Mistry's characterisation that characters could repop up 300 pages later and I would instantly recognise who they were.

Oh, my, its bleak, though. I wanted some happiness for someone...

1. I let you go by Clare Mackintosh another random book sitting in my book shelf.

After a tragic accident Jenna Gray walks out of her life and ends up in a secluded cottage on the Welsh coast. As she slowly rebuilds her life the past comes back to haunt her.

I really enjoyed this, I don’t want to give too much away. It plods along nicely and then about half way through hits you with an unexpected twist so I was reading well into the night. The only down side was a minor story line in the background never gets finished...not sure the writer will go on to write other books with the relevant characters to continue that part of it.

14. Three hours - Rosamund Lupton. This was exactly what I needed after the long meandering Old Drift & the plotless Outline. I'm sure it's been reviewed on here before but it's a thriller about a school shooting. Great page turner that I polished off in less than a day.

Piggy, thanks for the review of A Fine Balance. It's on my kindle, waiting to be read. Will steel myself for bleakness though. I had figured this might be the case so will pick my moment!

It has some fabulous humour, too , so don't worry. I was over invested in some of the characters I think!

A Fine Balance is a wonderful book, but by gum it is gruelling. My book group felt more like a support network when we discussed it - helping each other cope with the experience.

Oh bett, you have my sympathies. I think - quite apart from the benefit to my own mental well-being - my children get a huge amount from moving happily between two homes. I have (many!) issues with my ex but he’s a decent dad.

I don’t know why “the wanky ex” isn’t a bigger literary trope. Feels as if there is ample material there to go on. Maybe I’m just reading the wrong books.

And echoing the love for A Fine Balance. It’s like being punched in the stomach repeatedly but it is a great novel.

I've said it before, so apologies to anybody who gets the 'broken record' effect here, but I really disliked A Fine Balance by the end. I thought the relentless misery eventually got a bit cartoonish and wearing.

Saturdays At Noon by Rachel Marks does a good line in Wanky Ex. Her second book, Until Next Weekend has an Ex so Wanky I found it difficult to warm to him. Plus, he rides roughshod over so many safeguarding protocols I wanted him sacked and barred from teaching. I don’t think that was the aim of the novel, but she should have done her research on safeguarding.

12. The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott A multistranded story of Cold War intrigued and heartbreak. The mistress of Boris Pasternak suffers for his writing of Dr Zhivago, a novel which takes an unapproved view of the October Revolution. Across the world in Washington, typists, couriers and spies in the CIA spot opportunities and take chances for themselves and the free world.

Did I read about this here? Not sure. I recommended it to my book club because it sounded right up my street. I enjoyed it and would ahappily recommend it, but ultimately I think Prescott was trying to achieve too much and didn't get there. There's about three novels' worth of ideas in here but they're not fully realised, and it means we're told what the characters feel and do far more than we get shown. It makes it quite hard to follow. There are reminders of Laurie Graham in the style and setting, but that just brings home that Prescott is not letting us really inhabit her story in the way that Graham does. I would rather read this than the Sebastian Faulks novel of the same era though.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie

I've said it before, so apologies to anybody who gets the 'broken record' effect here, but I really disliked A Fine Balance by the end. I thought the relentless misery eventually got a bit cartoonish and wearing.

And I DNFd early doors for this reason

Oh and Prescott should be forbidden from ever writing a British character, unless she wants to employ a British editor for those pages.

14 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Thanks to MamaNewtNewt for pointing out this was on the daily deals. I read the short story version of this over 30 years ago and it really stuck with me but I didn't know what it was called or who had written it (or indeed how famous it was). So I was delighted to be able to put a title to the story and to read the novel. It was as good and thought provoking as I remember and the writing is fabulous. Female characters are of their time though. Realised as I was reading it that that Piranesi owes it quite a lot. High recommended indeed!

@InTheCludgie

Titsywoo I bought Firefly Lane on kindle a few days ago, am glad now I only paid 99p for it!

You may love it! Lots of people do, clearly.

@Saucery

Saturdays At Noon by Rachel Marks does a good line in Wanky Ex. Her second book, Until Next Weekend has an Ex so Wanky I found it difficult to warm to him. Plus, he rides roughshod over so many safeguarding protocols I wanted him sacked and barred from teaching. I don’t think that was the aim of the novel, but she should have done her research on safeguarding.

I'm a safeguarding lead, though not for a school, so I'd find that intensely annoying.

10. The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
    The story of a flu maternity ward in 1918 Dublin. It was told from the perspective of the midwife and the author really captured the claustrophobic environment. This was for a book club else I wouldn't have picked it up during a pandemic but it didn't bother me. The details about birth we're very vivid and it was a real page turner at times.

11. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig a woman visits a library between life and death and explores her possible other lives.
    I really enjoyed this one. I loved all the themes and topics explored. I understand the criticism that the language wasn't very florid but I quite enjoyed it. The physics and philosophy reminded me of The end of Mr Y. I do love a fiction book with maths in it.

Next up is The Vegetarian

A Fine Balance was too much for me. It's a brilliant book, but I just couldn't bear all the misery. (See also A Little Life.)

I don't want to get into spoilers but I do wonder if a happily ever after would have pissed off critics, too. I sort of got the bigger 'point' as it were.

It's like how aerated people get over the ending of Corelli! (sp?)

13. Sun Fall by Jim Al-Khalili. This is set 20 years in the future. The premise is that earth's magnetic field is weakening and losing its ability to protect us from dangerous levels of solar emissions. Can our protagonists (three scientists and a young cyberwarrior) come together and find a way to save humankind, using beams of dark matter to reactivate the magnetic field, against the machinations of a doomsday group who are determined to let everyone on the planet die? I don't read much sci-fi but I enjoyed this. It's written by a physicist, so the science is robust, and the plot keeps ticking along nicely.

Now I really did think A Little Life was gratuitous misery-porn, where she constantly inflicted more pain and suffering on (admittedly quite irritating) characters.

Perhaps it was because I didn't feel as if the point of A Fine Balance was just to make bad stuff happen to its characters. There was so much more going on than just that. Whereas the whole point of A Little Life (which I only finished because I was on holiday in a place with no WiFi so was reliant on what was already downloaded to my Kindle) seemed to be to explore how far she could go in making whatever his name was suffer.

21. To the hilt iFrancis. I don't think that this is one of his better books but I'm not in a reading mood much at the moment and not getting into several books so don't let that put you off.

It's the tale of a brewery, an embezzlement of funds and an artist who is presented as an alternative type of character but who mainly paints golf courses and would no doubt be a supplier to Trump as his work is popular in the US market. Along the way he makes several enemies to add to the ones that he already has and there are graphic (by Francis standards) descriptions of what they do to him and another person who is a central character in the book though he's not present and correct.

@Boiledeggandtoast, no, I'm not in France, helas. I'm just a diehard Francophile. And I teach French for a living, though my academic interests are mostly in pre-modern France and in French feminism. When I read for pleasure it's usually in English.

Remus, I agree about A Fine Balance. I read it a long time ago, but I just remember feeling completely demoralised at the end, and even though I've thought about rereading it because I've heard it praised so much, I don't think I could put myself through that again.

A Little Life I straight out hated though. A Fine Balance strikes me as a great novel, just not one I liked. A Little Life was like bad hurt/comfort fanfic. Implausible and self-indulgent. All those privileged people seemingly unaware of their own privilege, and taking themselves extremely seriously at all times. Sorry if there are fans of A Little Life here; I know some of my friends loved it!

Janina, I never heard of Flowers for Algernon before; now I want to read it.

I agree @PepeLePew - A Little Life was just grim, whereas A Fine Balance was both grim and wonderful.