50 Book Challenge 2021 Part Four

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fourth 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, the second one here and the third one here.

Witchcraft and The Art of War, Eine? That's quite a combination!

Desperate times biblio Desperate times

I'll pop in to pop my head over the woo parapet and out myself as a dabbler and sister mystic too.

22. Findings, Kathleen Jamie

Thank you to everyone here who recommended Kathleen Jamie. I would never have picked this up otherwise, I'm afraid to say - a female Scottish poet writing about wildlife just sounded too worthy and dull. WELL HOW WRONG COULD I BE?

This is just beautiful, both down-to-earth and transcendent. Each chapter has a different topic - some about trips that Jamie makes (to an uninhabited island, to an ancient burial site) and others about wildlife that she spots during her daily life, looking out the window while she unloads the tumble dryer. The language is beautifully clear, like a stream, not show-offy, not attention-seeking, but flowing and luminous; it runs so effortlessly that you almost don't notice it until suddenly an image will stop you and then you find that you're surrounded by beauty, carefully-chosen words that are just so right in their places. I've already bought this as a gift for two people since finishing it - definitely my best book of the year so far and will take some beating.

23. Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan, Ruth Gilligan

This book opens in 1901 with a Jewish family, cramped into dark bunks on the ship that is taking them from Lithuania to a new life in America. They reach port, there's confusion, it's dark, and somehow it isn't until the next day, after a night in a boarding house, that they realise that they're not in New York at all, but in Cork.

There are three stories in this book: Ruth, who arrives on the boat and grows up to be a Dublin midwife; Shem, a Jewish boy living in a psychiatric institution (though this being 1950s fictional Ireland, it's more of a racist prison run by cruel nuns); and finally Aising, a modern day young Irish (Catholic) woman who falls in love with a Jewish boy from North London. The alternating storylines work well here (not always the case) and the connections between the characters are subtle. I did find it a bit frustrating that Gilligan holds some things back from the reader in a way that feels awkward (Shem has lost the power of speech involving a traumatic experience involving his mother, although we have to wait several chapters to find out what this is), but she uses misdirection well so that the final twists and revelations are genuinely moving and satisfying (although, yes, sentimental). The ideas behind the book (exile, being an outsider, language, stories) are interesting ones. If I say "this would make a good book group read", it's not always a compliment, but it is here - there's lots to think about as well as a satisfying story.

Any other recommendations for a beginner witch then?

I am interested in seasons, moon phases, circle of life (maiden/mother/crone) and stuff like that. I think that is basically paganism, but I will stand corrected. I want a good introduction that's not too woo. It's hard to identify the pish (as Eine so accurately describes it )

@RavenclawesomeCrone

I've read a lot of useless pish I'll be honest Crone - the best Tarot book bar none is REALLY surprisingly, The Complete Idiots Guide To The Tarot - Arlene Tognetti.

The one I get a LOT of use out of is The Charmers Psalter by Gemma Gary

I'm a bit in love with Luna right now for how grown up it is and how clear it is on basics. Very Practical Magic may be poorly written but its really helpful for ACTUAL spells for ACTUAL things which very oddly a lot of these books actually lack.

Thanks Eine

Another pagan reporting for duty. Not wiccan though, more of a hedgy/drunk in a ditch type. I've not read anything for years so not very up on what to recommend these days. To anyone new don't sweat the small stuff or get bogged down by the detail/ritual. Need a candle - that old birthday one stuck in the back of the cutlery drawer will do. Intent is all you need.

Yeah there's whole book I read, think it was Miller's Elements that just shrieks intent at you.

I think people get too caught up in wanting exact instructions like a recipe. However, when starting out it does take time to figure out what works for you, style, spell type, before you gain confidence to "do your own thing" because the purpose is the relevant part.

Glad to see I'm not getting pitchforked off the thread anyway

🥰

The ones that I have enjoyed most are probably (all quite a few years old now):
The Myth of the Goddess - Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, an exploration of Goddesses through time from a Jungian archetypal perspective.
In a Chariot Drawn by Lions - Asphodel Long, the hidden Goddess in the Old Testament.
Alone of All Her Sex - Marina Warner, a history of the worship of the Virgin Mary, the early chapters draw parallels with older Goddesses.
As a teenager, Robert Graves got me into it with The Greek Myths and The White Goddess, but they are quite bonkers at times and definitely his own personal take on things!

And if you like war and Goddesses, Barbara Ehrenrich’s Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War is worth a look (especially the first half on the origins of human violence in prehistory).

That's brilliant @LadybirdDaphne Thank you

After seeing loads of good reviews I thought I'd reserve Thursday Murder Club, so did so on BorrowBox before Christmas. Here's my review

24. Thursday Murder Club - Richard Osman

I've had it for a couple of weeks now and have been trying to get into it since. It's my first DNF and I'm so disappointed. I found it faintly ridiculous, although liked the premise. Everything is accompanied by lemon drizzle cake () which reminded me of Enid Blyton's lashings of ginger beer, but that's as far as the comparison goes. SO underwhelmed with this book.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit

Glad to see I'm not getting pitchforked off the thread anyway

🥰

Seems more like we've got another link in the thread Venn diagram! How lovely!

@VikingNorthUtsire, I've just ordered Findings and the sequel Sightlines I'd not heard of Kathleen Jamie before but they sound fabulous.

Also added all @LadyBirdDaphne's list to my wishlist.

Ooh I like a bit of woo & paganism but haven't look at much for years. I used to read quite a bit about it but never practiced, all sounds very interesting. My family are all into that kind of thing, I have an uncle who's an astrologer, an aunt who does readings at a spiritual church & gran on the other side used to swear by tea leaves. So may be time to resurrect my inner witch.

@StitchesInTime I always feel Scarlett Thomas has the bones of a good book but doesn't fully deliver.

25. The Ask and The Answer - Patrick Ness. Continuing accompanying Dd1 in her YA Dystopian exploration. This series is based on an interesting premise and is well executed. It does make me feel cynical reading after her though as she's so engaged with it all, whereas I sort of know where is going so don't get as involved.

Both those reviews make me want to read the books @VikingNorthUtsire!

22. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy by Ray Terciero and Bre Indigo. Modern graphic novel retelling of Little Women. Didn't capture the spirit of the original for me, and I don't think it adds anything either. If it was my first encounter with the story, I rather think it would put me off the original, which I doubt is the intention!

17 Freedom Bound: Escaping Slavery in Scotland by Warren Pleece

Kids graphic novel I got for the DC. This was written in conjunction with the University of Glasgow who has done a lot of work unearthing the extent of the links between the University and slavery (there's a lot, Glasgow became a wealthy city because of the tobacco trade). This focuses on the stories of three real life runaway slaves, the third of which was the first slave to be granted his freedom by the courts in Scotland. There's more information and references at the back. Copies have been given to every school in Scotland. It's a child friendly read on a horrible subject.

Nothing to add to the discussion about pagans and spells, apart from to say I do love a good book about something I don't know much about and perhaps there's a neat segue from my recent books about nuns, the Catholic Church and the Anglican bishopry into that. So following with interest.

20 The Truants by Kate Weinberg
This was a terrible disappointment and the person who told me this was "better than The Secret History" is going to get a hard stare next time I see them. Jess (I think that was her name, I stopped caring after a while) is intense, clever and pretty but obviously doesn't think she's any of those things. She goes to the University of East Anglia (whose PR department should be asking a lot of questions at this point) where she meets Georgie (predictably beautiful, messed up, brilliant and drug addled), Nick (predictably handsome, but - as he is a geography student and not an English student - must also be predictably a little dull), Alec (predictably mercurial and a brilliant investigative journalist who has somehow rocked up in East Anglia from South Africa, drives a hearse and makes women quiver just by stroking their arm) and Lorna who really should have been the subject of some fairly serious scrutiny from the faculty as a result of her wildly inappropriate relationships with students and somewhat lacklustre teaching of Agatha Christie even though we are told repeatedly it is brilliant.

Basically, they all get tangled up in a mess I never fully fathomed and through a series of wild coincidences and terrible clunky expository dialogue that leaves a trail of clues in its wake while also making the reader cringe because no-one talks like that AT ALL even if they are pretentious Eng Lit students or brilliant journalists there are some deaths and some soul searching and some random shit on an Italian island and then it all ended, apart from a slightly weird bit where Jess has a sort of reconciliation with the family she's repeatedly told us are awful even though they turn out not to be, for reasons I didn't care about by that point.

This was an audiobook and the narration was (predictably!) terrible. I could have done without her attempts to do a South African and Italian accent at various points, although it was at least a distraction from the awful dialogue.

This got great reviews. So maybe it's me. I don't know. I'm somewhat grumpy about it. That may be obvious.

Oh, I'm not sure I picked up any grumpiness there, Pepe......

I thought Truants was bloody awful too Pepe

Catching up with quite a mixed bag of books that I've read lately. Would quite like to read more Women's Prize nominees, but because of lockdown and extended library due dates, the library reservations queue is moving like treacle and I'm having trouble getting hold of them. And I don't like to listen to books, I like to read them (I know, I know, it's just the way my brain works, I'm really bad at processing language aurally). I may have to actually, gasp, buy some books! I used to buy heaps of novels, but I've slowed down massively on the book-buying in recent years, because there literally isn't enough space in the house. Anyway.

14. The Farthest Shore, Ursula LeGuin. 4/5
    I didn’t love this book quite as much as I loved the first and second books in the Earthsea trilogy, but it was still brilliant.

15. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes. 4/5
    A great read (which I discovered via this thread!). Original use of first-person narration, and a very thought-provoking account of what it means to have cognitive disabilities, and how people with special needs were treated (especially in 1958 when this book was written). The novel was spot-on in its demonstration of how cognitive intelligence and emotional intelligence aren’t the same thing. On the other hand, I found the mother figure almost unbelievably villain-like, and the flashbacks to her abuse of the protagonist in childhood were really difficult to read.

16. Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters. 4/5
    From the Women’s Prize longlist. An uncomfortable book to read at many points, but full of insights into the experience of trans women. At times the narrative did seem too preachy, elaborating aspects of trans and gender identity in rather heavy-handed fashion; however, the perspectives were interesting nonetheless. The novel is quite scathing in its treatment of cis men who are happy to have sex with trans women, but who fail to acknowledge these relationships publicly or support the women in any meaningful way.

17. Aeneid, Vergil, translated by Shadi Bartsch. 5/5
    An impressively fast-moving and readable translation of the Aeneid. The intro and notes are fantastic, and highlight the Trojans’ status as refugees as well as proto-imperialists. Compared to Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, which I consider a gold standard in Classics translation, the English here feels more heavy and dense, but I think this is the result of the Latin original being more dense and compact than the Homeric Greek. Bartsch opted to use the same number of lines in English as in Latin, which must have been quite a challenge. In places the line endings and enjambement seemed a little awkward to me. However, as I read on the verse seemed to flow more and more smoothly – maybe I just started to get more used to the rhythm.

18. The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney, Okechukwu Nzelu. 3/5
    A book group read. This novel has an excellent start, and I’m glad I read it for the perspectives on black, mixed-race and gay experience in Britain, but it fell short for me on the level of style; the prose didn’t draw me in. A number of characters and plot points felt unconvincing or under-developed.

Place marking only. Reading a thing about bones which I got in the Kindle deal. It's oaky, not great.

1. Midwinter Murder by Agatha Christie
2. Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
3. The Familiars by Stacey Halls
4. Three Hours by Rosalind Lipton
5. Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz.
6. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli.
7. Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

8. Love after Love by Ingrid Persaud. Winner of the Costa First Novel award. This is a simple story of three people: a mother, her son and their lodger set on the island of Trinidad and, later on, partly in the US. This is another book told from different viewpoints but whilst I often find this irritating it worked really well here, each of the three protagonists having a distinctive voice. This book snuck up on me and after initially finding it rather average I ended up racing to the end and finding myself emotionally wrapped up in their lives and loves. The novel is written in dialect which only adds to the terrific sense of place and makes the characters come alive. My favourite read of the year so far.

Now heading into The Midnight Library for some whimsy...

Uh oh, I was really looking forward to The Truants, as The Secret History is my forever favourite. I'm in for a disappointment, aren't I?