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.

The Passage was amazing. The sequels near breathtakingly disappointing.

No demented I was equally conflicted by Piranesi, I loved the imagery and that has really stuck with me, (I'd like to see it brilliantly brought to life on screen) but found the story frustrating and full of plot holes.
I also DNF another thread favourite The Five, I recognise it's an important, well researched piece but it felt too much like reading someone's PhD history thesis and I couldn't maintain interest in the minutiae of these women's lives.

The Institute is a good shout Pepe for a Stephen King for teenagers read.

@MegBusset I think The Long Walk is a great shout! Not related to your question but I LOVE that book, it's one of my favourites

The Long Walk is so good!

Cell might be a good start, or The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

I'm so glad that somebody else isn't totally raving about The Five. I've returned to it a couple of times but just can't get on with it.

12. Hidden Depths by Ann Cleeves. The third in the Vera series. A woman comes home to find her son strangled in the bath and covered in flowers then a few days later there’s another body in a rock pool also covered with flowers. I must say I am enjoying these books more than I thought I would.

I'm not raving about The Five. I finished it and I thought it was worth the read, but I'd be lying if I said I was enthralled by every detail.

14. Dead to Me - Lesley Pearse

I'm trying to read books outside of my usual 'go to' genres of psychological thrillers/who dunnit types, that was my reading aim this year. This book is one I probably wouldn't have looked at otherwise.

It's about two young girls who meet in London in pre WWII Britain and follows them to adulthood. The girls are about as different as it's possible to be, Verity from a privileged, wealthy family, and Ruby who is incredibly poor from a single parent family. Fate takes them and almost reverses their roles.

It tackles the hardships of being poor, but equally of being wealthy (narrow minded, money obsessed, looking down on lower classes), it shows attitudes of the time, but also tackles abuse (physical and sexual), of women and children.

Despite this, and following the girls as they grow up in the war years, it's quite an uplifting book. I really enjoyed it and found I liked the main characters and could empathise with them. The characters I didn't much like I could understand how they got to the way they were, and the character I loathed, I still felt the same way about at the end.

The book is essentially about enduring friendship through all the trials of the girls' lives.

I read it The Five but IIRC I didn't rave about it and found it rather dry at times when it shouldn't have been.

14. A Libertarian Walks into a Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

In the early 2000s, a group of libertarians decided that by moving en masse to one small town, they could create their utopia of minimum government at a local level. Grafton, in New Hampshire, was chosen as being thinly populated and hopefully having many residents already in sympathy with their ideals. Over the next few years, public funding for services shrank as the incomers persuaded or voted down town budgets. At the same time, the bear population of the state was multiplying and coming increasingly into contact with people.

New Hampshire small town journalist Matt Hongoltz-Hetling explores the results of this experiment through interviews with a whole range of people from the town, incomers & longstanding residents. The result is a really charming book. He clearly is not signed up to the low-tax no-state agenda, but writes of the diverse and often eccentric characters from Grafton kindly and with respect.

Although the politics are different (and there's a lot more guns!) I found his descriptions of Grafton rather reminiscent of where I live in west Wales, with the woods full of assorted people just wanting to get on with their lives & stay under the radar of the authorities. In both cases, the wildlife benefits on the whole; unfortunately, the New Hampshire wildlife is more likely to do serious damage to humans.

I'm not convinced by some of his conclusions (specifically those regarding the role of the parasite causing toxoplasmosis), but it's a meandering, discursive and thoroughly enjoyable ride to get there. I listened to the book on audio, & the narrator was also excellent & definitely added to the enjoyment.

15. Fountainville by Tishani Doshi Another of the New Stories from the Mabinogion novellas. I'm really impressed by this series, I'm going to take a break for a bit to read some non-fiction, but I'll definitely come back to them.
    This one retells the Lady of the Fountain and is set in India, with much of the story centred around a surrogacy clinic and the women who run it. Again a short but very complete feeling book, with memorable writing & characters - I'll be looking out for more of her work.

Hilt by dick Francis is 99p for the kindle at the moment

Really interesting to read all your Mabinogion inspired reviews Sadik. I read some of the Mabionogion a few years ago as I love the Owl Service by Alan Garner, but still don't know enough about all the Welsh mythology.

Belated thanks to southeast for the new thread, as I try to catch up!

My list so far:

1. Ruth Ware - One by One
2. Polly Crosby - The Illustrated Child
3. Simon Mayo - Knife Edge
4. MG Leonard & Sam Sedgman - Kidnap on the California Comet
5. Sophie Hannah - The Killings at Kingfisher Hill
6. Emma Carroll - The Ghost Garden
7. Chelsea Pitcher - This Lie Will Kill You

And to add:

1. 8. Emily St John Mandel - Station Eleven

What can I say?! Bought on the 99p Kindle deal to see what all the controversy fuss was about. Found it overly confusing and pleased with itself. It had an interesting premise but I found myself thinking JUST TELL THE SODDING STORY several times. I am not a fan.

1. 9. Ben Elton - Time and Time Again

10. Stephen Fry - Making History

Both time travel books with the premise: if you could go back in time to change one event, what would you change? And pretty much follow the same formula of: does that make things pan out the way you thought they would? With the conclusion of: DON'T MEDDLE. Don't get me wrong, both are worth a read, but I vastly preferred the Ben Elton book as Stephen Fry seemed to include several pages just to prove how clever he is talking about random things and I know that already (sorry Stephen, I do think you're an entertaining chap in general, but didn't see the point of these!).

11. Matthew Reilly - The Secret Runners of New York

Another time travel book, YA this time, where some students at a v posh and expensive school in New York are able to run through an underground tunnel in Central Park and observe the location in the future after some sort of massively destructive event. Actually a lot more entertaining and thought provoking (and sad, in places) than I expected.

12. Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

Jurassic Park with dragons!! Switch your brain off and enjoy the ride!!

13. Matthew Kneale - Sweet Thames

Set during the Victorian era when the hunt was on for a solution to the 'Great Stink' and the origin of cholera outbreaks. An engineer's wife goes missing and he has to hunt high and low through the slums of London to find her. I probably would have found this more interesting had I not read it straight after a few other 'back and forward' type books, but it zipped along entertainingly enough.

14. Jennifer Lynn Barnes - The Inheritance Games

YA fiction set in the USA where a teenager is named sole inheritor of a vast fortune for reasons no-one knows. Avery is from a poor background and has never met or heard of the billionaire who names her in his will to the exclusion of his family, but she now has to spend time with them solving puzzles to work out why. Quite intriguing (if full of the usual ridiculously good looking teenagers), the sequel is out later this year.

15. Emily Brightwell - Mrs Jeffries Dusts for Clues

A police inspector's household staff solve murders for him in Victorian England, to provide assistance without him being aware. There are loads in this series and I find them easy reading (with the advantage of being quite short!).

16. Richard Osman - The Thursday Murder Club

Obviously much reviewed on here, I enjoyed it really it was what I needed after several 'back and forward in time' type books. Straightforward murder mystery, clues scattered around, solution given at the end - job done.

One DNF to report - Matthew Sullivan - Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore. Just too self-satisfied for my liking, I skipped to the end and read that instead, and don't feel like I missed out by not reading 100+ pages!

Eine we are in complete agreement about Laura Fairlie - Marion is entertaining, resourceful, witty and excellent company, but does he consider marrying her when there's a pretty young lady around?! Nope, even though said young lady is insipid as can be - and Jude the Obscure. I felt robbed of a few hours of my life after finishing that absolutely dreary and pointless nonsense....

What a great review of an intriguing-sounding book, Sadik! Did you get it from Audible, or from elsewhere? I might see if I can get hold of a copy.

Sorry, I have got a bit of a review backlog! I’ll do them one at a time…

7. Charlotte by Helen Moffett
Avert your eyes now if you hated Longbourne and Wide Sargasso Sea and all the other books that try to fill in the missing bits from famous works! This one tells the story of Charlotte Lucas after she has married Mr Collins and settled down to a dull-but-secure life in Hunsdon Rectory. The story begins in 1818, seven years after the end of P&P; after the first couple of chapters (which contain a sex scene between the Collinses that I really didn’t need to have in my head), it settles down to a rather autumnal story of bereavement, learning to live with grief, sexual awakening, contentment and self-discovery. Along the way, it takes in inheritance laws, the cruel and unfair financial dependence of women and girls on their husbands/brothers/fathers, child loss and childlessness, anti-Semitism and the repair of harpsichords.

There are some slightly eye-opening characterisations: Anne de Bourgh turns out to be a cross between Lady Hester Stanhope and Anne “Gentleman Jack” Lister, and her mother is not quite as monstrous as Austen makes her out to be. Moffett addresses the elephant in the room head on: how can Mr Collins be a sympathetic character if he’s just an obsequious buffoon – and more importantly, how can we feel sympathy for Charlotte knowing that she has willingly allied herself with such a ridiculous man? Like Janice Hadlow in The Other Bennet Sister, Helen Moffett softens Mr Collins’ character, making it clear that he is a bit dim but fundamentally well-meaning, and that his social clumsiness stems from nervousness and a desire to please. At one point, Charlotte muses “He might be fatuous, but he was never cruel, and lacked the wit for sarcasm. Nay, Charlotte had to consider that she had heard more barbed words fall from Mr Bennet’s tongue in addressing his wife than she was likely to hear in a lifetime of marriage.” I hadn’t really considered this before, but Charlotte is the Mr Bennet here, being the sensible, rational person married to someone of inferior understanding. As this makes clear, there can still be mutual respect and affection in a marriage, even when there is no meeting of minds. I wouldn’t like to be married to Mr Collins, but I would hate to be married to Mr Bennet, too (and to have him as a father, actually)!

I also enjoyed the way that the articulation of different perspectives has made me think about small scenes in P&P in a different way. For example, when Elizabeth speaks approvingly of Wickham’s plans to marry Miss King for her fortune, Charlotte is hurt because her friend had treated her so harshly for doing essentially the same thing – a parallel I hadn’t picked up. Likewise, it’s interesting to see Mr Collins’ feelings when he hears that Darcy has succeeded with Elizabeth where he failed.

This is a competently written and interesting book – not quite as good as The Other Bennet Sister in my opinion (and there’s a clear warning to stay away if you hated the latter!), but quieter and more sombre in tone. There was an attempt to include some romance that, thankfully, got subsumed into the bigger theme of Charlotte’s self-discovery rather than becoming a major plot point in itself (and the bits that were included were a bit silly, IMO). I really enjoyed the attempt to expand the world of P&P and tell some of the more hidden stories, so I had no problem with the author piggybacking on someone else’s work in order to do so. When I was an undergraduate, my lecturers were always going on about intertextuality, about the way that one literary text can reference and be in dialogue with another, and isn’t this essentially the same idea (albeit in a less elevated form)?

14 Homecoming by Susie Steiner.
I’m a fan of her Manon Bradshaw crime novels so I thought I’d give this a try.
Ann and Joe are struggling tenant farmers with two sons. Max is trying to learn everything he can about farming from his Dad with a view to taking over the tenancy, Bartholomew moved away to start a business down south. Plans go wrong, wives and girlfriends are treated badly and stop putting up with it, sheep prove a problem......
I really liked this unassuming family saga. Her female characters aren’t just there to move the plot from A to B (I particularly like Primrose, with her love of electrical wiring) and I recognise the down-to-earth quiet friendships and rivalries of the men. I genuinely cared how it would all pan out for them in the end and was glad to see no windfall inheritances, surprise oil wells on their land to save them from penury. There’s just their own dogged resilience to see them through what life throws at them.

Great review mackerella. I’ve got Charlotte on my kindle somewhere so will hopefully get to it soon.

35. The Picts And The Martyrs by Arthur Ransome

The Ds (Dick and Dot Callum) are due to stay with the Amazons while the Amazons’ mother is away. Unfortunately, the Amazons’ Great Aunt (a formidable figure) gets wind that their mum is away, and decides to come and stay to look after the Amazons. They know the GA will be horrified if she finds out that Mrs Blackett was allowing the Ds to stay while she was away, so the children decide that Dick and Dot must go and hide in a cabin in the woods (the Picts) while the Amazons stay home and read to the GA (the Martyrs). I enjoyed this one, the storyline is good fun. Not much sailing in it so you might be disappointed if that’s why you read these, but that doesn’t bother me. Now on to the last in the series, Great Northern?.

@sadik I am adding A Libertarian walks into bear to my wishlist as it sounds excellent. My husband and I are interested in American politics and he is a believer in small government (me not so much) so it sounds like this will spark some discussion!

I might wait and get it on audio book when we are finally allowed on road trips again...

10. All That Remains: A Life in Death - Sue Black. Recommended by lots of people on this thread, this is the unusual and fascinating memoir of a forensic pathologist and her work in missing person cases, crime scenes, mass fatalities and genocide in Kosovo. Really interesting.

Bear book was indeed on Audible Mackerella - and I'm adding Charlotte to my TBR list :)

Oh I loved The Picts and the Martyrs Chessie. One of my favourite Arthur Ransomes!

9. Born to be Mild: Adventures for the Anxious, by Rob Temple
Along the lines of Bryony Gordon and Matt Haig - author tries to negotiate life as best as possible while grappling with mental health issues and alcohol problems. In his 30s, he has moved back in with his parents and is trying to challenge himself to live more fully. He prefers jokes to self-pity, and so it comes across as a light read, although there is tough lived experience underlying it. In the background is an affectionate portrayal of his parents and their cosy rituals (he writes the Very British Problems books and revels in a certain type of English haplessness).

I really liked that book, bibliomania. I also thought it would be light and fluffy and Very British Problems but he talks a lot about his anxiety and how it affects him.

I agree, Saucery - it initially looks fluffy, but he doesn't sugar-coat the fact that his problems are potentially life -threatening.