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.

Really enjoying following along, but bit behind with reading much...

14. You Should See Me in a Crown -Leah Johnson YA novel much recommended and enjoyed by my daughters. Subservient in an entirely predicatable YA way, but charming and fun.

15. The Golden Rule - Amanda Craig The first part of a vague mission to read the women's prize longlist. I liked the premise (two women meet on a train and make a pact to kill the other's STBXHs), and the storyline developed well, with some unexpected twists and turns. Its set in North London/Cornwall, which are both places I've spent a lot of time. I found the portrayal of 'ordinary Cornish folk' grated a bit, though there was certainly some truth in it, and there's definitely something to admire in highlighting the problems Cornwall faces with second homes etc. I haven't read any of her other books, and I might well do now.

That sounds great, biblio. I must look out The Singing Sands now. For some reason there are a few Teys I haven't read, although they're waiting on the tbr shelves.

29. The Birth of Classical Europe - Simon Price and Peter Thonemann

This is the first volume in the Penguin History of Europe series. On its own terms, I think it works well, providing a mostly clear, if at times a little breathless, account of the Greeks and the Romans. Historical events and archaeological detail are well-integrated, and there are some fascinating discussions of the later uses of the classical past. The writers make it clear that there was no ‘European civilisation’ in the ancient Mediterranean that was not connected to and influenced by the Near East and North Africa (Egypt, Carthage). Any sense of a European identity arose from conflict with eg ‘Asian’ Persia or ‘African’ Carthage. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who wants a single-book introduction to the entire span of the classical world, from Troy to St Augustine, as the subtitle puts it.

However, as the first volume in a series, it is far too selective in what it covers. Europe outside Italy and Greece only really gets mentioned if/when it is colonised/conquered. I appreciate that equal coverage would no doubt have required a further volume with different authors, but I was disappointed: I wanted to be taken beyond the familiar. Price and Thonemann recommend Barry Cunliffe on North-Western Europe, but I don’t know if there are any accessible introductions to prehistoric Scandinavia/central/Eastern Europe. A Penguin series should be more comprehensive.

30. Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro

I’ll try not to go on so long this time. Brilliant and heartbreaking, told from the perspective of Klara, an ‘artificial friend’ to a teenage girl with mysterious health problems. About what makes us human, what parents do to/for their children etc. Some inconsistencies within the fictive world might annoy some.

@bibliomania

I enjoyed the Tey Backlisted, Terp.. I'm planning to take the Caledonian Sleeper from London to Fort William in August and have lined up rereads of Tey's The Singing Sands and Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps in preparation. Planning to walk the Great Glen Way and can't wait!

This sounds amazing. If you haven't read Buchan's Huntingtower, I highly recommend it - it's a wonderful romp of a novel.

The Only Plane in the Sky: The Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff

I'm not sure I have much to add to @EineReiseDurchDieZeit's review - which pretty much perfectly describes what I thought of this book and felt while reading it and afterwards. It is one of the best and most difficult books I have ever read. I cried, I followed stories hoping for happy endings only to have those hopes dashed again and again, and I cried some more - just when I thought I'd read the saddest, most distressing story along came another 5 to prove me wrong. Tales of last sightings, last words and last chances to say 'I love you'. And yet there were also tales of kindness, bravery and downright heroism as well as miracles and lucky escapes - but nowhere near enough of those, not even close.

This is a book that will never leave me and that I think I'll come back to again, it was a difficult read but I feel it is so important to bear witness and I'd recommend it to anyone who feels they can manage it. There would be no judgement from me for those who can't.

Belated thanks to @InTheCludgie and @ChannelLightVessel for the . My mood has lifted again which is a relief. I've had garden-variety depression and anxiety since my late teens and have learned to manage my mental health reasonably well over the years (with SSRIs/meditation/self-care etc.) but every now and again I stumble into a bad patch...

All the riffs on titles made me laugh. I actually googled The Kindness Club On Mapleberry Lane and Starry Skies Over The Chocolate Pot Cafe because I couldn't believe they were real. Reader, they were real (duh).

Cote, you've certainly put me off Elif Shafak! The pandering to foreign stereotypes does sound awful. I've read My Name Is Red by Pamuk and it's one of the best books I've ever read. I'd like to reread it actually; it's been a long time since I read it. I should seek out some more of his books.

24. The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett 5/5 Another novel both on Obama’s book list and the Women’s Prize longlist: the story of identical twin women who go their separate ways, with one living as Black in 20th century America and the other passing as white. This isn’t the kind of book I would normally give 5 stars to, as its use of language is quite conventional in some ways – it’s an easy read and I devoured it very quickly. However, the plot is beautifully constructed and the book deals very sensitively with the themes of racism, colorism, and family estrangement. It’s a novel not just about racial identity, but about the different ways we create new versions of ourselves over time, and how willing we are to acknowledge our own past identities, both to ourselves and to others. I have an estranged sister and I appreciated the fact that Bennett didn’t try to tie her narrative up too neatly.

Thanks for the tip, Remus. I have Buchan's collected works on my kindle, so should be able to ferret that one out.

Definitely this @MamaNewtNewt

This is a book that will never leave me and that I think I'll come back to again, it was a difficult read but I feel it is so important to bear witness and I'd recommend it to anyone who feels they can manage it. There would be no judgement from me for those who can't.

I feel exactly the same.

I am so glad this resonated with you in the same way.

All the riffs on titles made me laugh. I actually googled The Kindness Club On Mapleberry Lane and Starry Skies Over The Chocolate Pot Cafe because I couldn't believe they were real. Reader, they were real (duh).

That's an extremely snobbish attitude to have.

Erm, no, I'm afraid its not snobbish, its a group of women who are bibliophiles, who are nauseated by the way books are increasingly patronisingly marketed to "ladies" with increasingly absurd long titles.

As you don't seem to be a regular on the thread, are you "personally invested" in these titles?

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit

Erm, no, I'm afraid its not snobbish, its a group of women who are bibliophiles, who are nauseated by the way books are increasingly patronisingly marketed to "ladies" with increasingly absurd long titles.

As you don't seem to be a regular on the thread, are you "personally invested" in these titles?

No I just like reading them. I'll leave you to it , happy reading.

Oh, we can be much more 'snobbish' than that, if you want. 😁

Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer
A re-read and just what I fancied. Takes a while to get going as she often does, but then all good fun.

All the riffs on titles made me laugh. I actually googled The Kindness Club On Mapleberry Lane and Starry Skies Over The Chocolate Pot Cafe because I couldn't believe they were real. Reader, they were real (duh).

I assumed they were made up titles too

Anyway. Back to the Time Police book for me, I’m hoping to finish that before the end of the bank holiday weekend.

That's an extremely snobbish attitude to have.

And that's an extremely mean and unnecessary thing to post when someone has mentioned that they have just recovered from a period of depression and anxiety.

cassandre I'm glad to hear you're feeling better now and send you all best wishes.

17 (I think) Nothing Stays Buried PJ Tracy - the 8th in the Monkeewrench police and tech geek procedural. I've read another couple of these. This wasn't as good. Usually the outcast tech geeks solve the crime and nearly get killed in the process. This time they seemed to just sit around in their techy van.
It was a quick read and what I needed after Pillars.

Now onto another Inspector Dalgliesh for some beautifully written detective-ing.

@punkingscissors, there really is no snobbery here. I like an early Danielle Steel myself and people on here have Georgian bodice rippers, two a penny detective stories (see my post above) etc.

If you read our comments, you'll see it's an observation that we've gone from:

Weird Occupation+ strange place to set a novel books to
Man's daughter/wife/sister to
Lengthy tearoom based titles to
Women with improbably names doing improbable things to
Ordinary person known to us in the 'hood

I've read several of each (not the tearooms I confess) I think the next big thing will be a combination of all the above with the words "lockdown" or "pandemic" in the title.

19. The Last Englishman by Keith Foskett

This is Keith's story of his attempt to thru hike the Pacific Crest Trail which takes you from Mexico to Canada. I'm a sucker for this kind of very average travel book which is clearly an attempt to fund the next hike and get better sponsorship from gear companies next time.

It wasn't that great, he spent loads of time listing the people he met up with, but not explaining who they were. There was also a huge amount of description of him getting off trail and to the nearest town for coffee, I was not at all surprised when he found himself in a race against the weather and the last hiker in the trail, by PCT standards he had dawdled.

Despite not loving the book, it once again raised the question in my head of whether I want to do it. The logistics of how to keep a job and do I really want to poo in a hole in the ground for six months continue to hold me back.

I expect I shall keep reading these books in the hope of finding the answer! In the meantime I really should find a shorter hike to start off with and see how I go.

Is book snobbery such a terrible thing? Some books repay the time spent reading better than others, so why wouldn't you be alert to signals that an author is lazily following a trend?

Razor, I'm a sucker for reading about walking trips too. I genuinely want to hear about what the author saw and ate each step of the day and how much it rained that day. In real life, I'd rather do shorter and more frequent trips - after 4 days or so, I'm ready for my own bed again. It's a lot easier to hop on and off the shorter UK trails than the Pacific Crest Trail!

I have taken a short break from the fantastic The only Plane In The Sky to read Rosie Hopkins Sweetshop of Dreams so feel qualified to comment.
There’s a place for both in my life, especially at 3am when I can’t sleep and need something lighthearted.
Variety is the key for me.

Good point, Best.

Ah, @Boiledeggandtoast, thank you for the kind words.

@punkingscissors, I'm sorry about the snobbery -- please don't let it put you off the thread! Snarking on formulaic titles can be fun, but I passionately believe that reading is good, that people should read whatever they want to read and whatever makes them happy. There is comfort reading just as there is comfort food; you don't want posh cuisine all the time...

I read mostly litfic but I see litfic as one genre among genres, with its own set of cliches and norms -- not as somehow beyond genres or inherently superior to other genres.

Digression: I grew up in quite a dysfunctional household but one good thing about it was that there were lots of books and lots of reading. My mother would be horrified by most of the things I read now because she was a deeply religious woman who thought literature should be wholesome and pure. However, she believed that any non-modern literature was by definition wholesome (not true, ha ha!) so as I grew older, quite a lot of transgressive books slipped in that way. However, she also had piles of Harlequin romances (the US equivalent to Mills and Boon) hidden away in a wooden chest as her 'guilty secret'. I had a lot of fun foraging in there. Anyway, all this to say that in my own case, the desire to mock books with wholesome, heart-warming titles probably contains the vestiges of child-like rebellion against my mother. But looking back it seems to me that what we were all reading is less important than the fact that we were all reading. Nancy Drew and the Hardy boys, Zane Grey westerns, Christian fiction set in romantically imagined parts of the British Isles by American authors who had probably never set foot in the UK. It was all good!

I'd love to read your review of The Kindness Club or Starry Skies. Seriously.

ChannelLightVessel, what a brilliant review of The Birth of Classical Europe. The authors probably thought they were being inclusive with the discussion of the Near East and Africa, but were ironically limited in their selection of which parts of Europe to focus on...

Is book snobbery such a terrible thing? Some books repay the time spent reading better than others, so why wouldn't you be alert to signals that an author is lazily following a trend?

This is interesting, bibliomania. The critic Roland Barthes said there were two types of texts, 'readerly' texts and 'writerly' texts (in French, 'lisible' and 'scriptible'). Readerly texts are easy to interpret because they offer their meaning up to you on a platter. Writerly texts are more demanding, because the reader has to work actively to make sense of them; the reader (according to Barthes) has to form their own interpretation as they read and so becomes a kind of co-author with the author. In practice, I find that more demanding books do repay the effort -- I'm more invested in them and they stay in my memory longer.

On the other hand, it's obviously too simplistic to divide books into two camps, and I suspect that a lot of apparently 'easy' texts are in fact 'writerly' texts as well, if you look at them carefully enough.

Also the Booker Prize shortlists have annoyed me for some years now, because some of them are books that seem to wear their literariness on their sleeve, if you see what I mean. And just because a book is difficult/bleak/ambiguous doesn't necessarily mean it's good.

Thoughtful posts, cassandre. Despite my defence of book snobbery, I'm wary of "difficult" books and self-consciously lit-fic. I think there are books where the writer wants to tell you something and books where the writer wants to sell you something. I'm happy with easy-reading fiction where author believes in the characters, knows the setting, and bothers with good dialogue. I'm less keen on books that feel churned out based on market research. (I totally accept that you can't always divide them so nearly).