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.

100. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

This is a fictionalised version of Nancy’s real life. The main character is Linda (Nancy) who grows up in a large posh family, and the novel follows her marriages and relationships. As HeadNorth said upthread the characters are monstrous but the satire is well done.

101. Tell Me A Secret by Samantha Hayes

Pretty rubbish psychological thriller where the main character just keeps Doing really stupid things. The ending was convoluted - it hinges on a lodger but I lost track in the end of who was lodging with who, and who was good/bad. Not recommended.

102. Titanic Survivor: The Memoirs of Violet Jessop

Jessop was a stewardess on both the Titanic and Britannic. Despite the title, only a short part of the book features Titanic, and what there is doesn’t go into much detail so doesn’t really add anything to our understanding of the tragedy or what it was like to be a stewardess on Titanic. The rest of the book is about her childhood and her experiences on other ships. It was ok but could have been a lot more detailed, and the constant interspersing of comments from the editor was rather irritating.

103. Beach Babylon by Imogen Edwards-Jones

This is a fictionalised version of what it’s like to run an exclusive tropical island holiday resort. Apparently it’s all based on reality. It’s not brilliant,y written but I do like these books and yesterday this was just what I needed.

There's a book all Scottish schoolkids read but the name escapes me at the mo.

Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon? Loved that book.

For a funny Scottish book (still with plenty of dour dry short characters) there's Magnus Merriman by Eric Linklater which is a political satire - being Scottish it's about the early days of the SNP with some not very well disguised pen portraits of the founding members. He also wrote a children's fantasy novel The Wind on the Moon that won the Carnegie medal when it was first published. DD2 and DH loved when they read it together.

I also love Lanark by Alasdair Gray but that is probably enhanced by knowing Glasgow well.

I also love Sunset Song, but did mean The Cone Gatherers. Do you think an English reader would cope with Gibbon?

Iain Banks -when not being Iain M- is also very 'Scottish', especially The Crow Road (where I went to school!) and The Wasp Factory.

I think I tried to 'root march' Middlemarch (pun intended!) and this is probably not the right way. I enjoyed bits of it but did just find it long and rather dry. I have preferred other Eliots. POTENTIAL SPOILER IN THIS SENTENCE : I do think Casaubon is a brilliant creation though. His awful proposal is one of the great passages of literary cringe!

Sunset Song is probably OK, the film seemed to be popular enough. Cloud Howe and Grey Granite (the other two parts of the trilogy for the non-Scots) are a harder read.

I'm not a fan of Iain Banks, I hate his endings (well, I hated the ending of The Wasp Factory). But I did love the TV series of The Crow Road with a Peter Capaldi as Uncle Rory and agree he is 'very Scottish'. I do feel like now might be a good time to link to The genrefication of national literatures .

@Terpsichore

Yes, I've read it too, Piggy. I thought it was good (not sure 'enjoyed' is quite the right word). I did buy The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau and The Accident on the A35 off the back of it - those two are linked - and they're interesting and tricksy in their own way but very different. They're like slightly strange Simenon novels in a way, the conceit is that they're translations of unknown novels by a French writer called 'Brunet'.

That is interesting, because while I thought His Bloody Project was very good, I also thought he Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau and The Accident on the A35 were basically the same book in a different setting with diminishing returns. To me as an author he seems like a one trick pony.

Good article, Janina. Definitely happening at the moment with young Irish female writers. Right now they're all the new Sally Rooney.

Talking of "dour," generations of Irish schoolchildren have been scarred by doing Peig Seyers' Irish-lamguage autobiography at school. "If I had any idea of the misery ahead, I wouldn't have been half so cheerful setting out". Indeed.

HeadNorth sorry, I didn't convey myself very well there re GMB - though I did read his other two books and found them interesting and a bit quirky, I agree, they're not a patch on His Bloody Project.

The Disappearance of AB was his first book and I did wonder why he essentially chose to go back to the same ground by writing a prequel after the much more successful His Bloody Project. They all share similar preoccupations with 'found' manuscripts, though, don't they, which as you say somewhat lessens the impact.

Interesting article. I nearly chose to do my degree in Scottish Literature, having been pretty much immersed in it at school! I am sure we would have looked at what 'Scottishification' of literature has done. A few novels have tried recently to trot out some Scottishness : The Ninth Child by Sally Magnusson is a decent example , whereas I thought Francine Toon's Pine fell flat.

I guess Burnet is 'writerly' then?

@VikingNorthUtsire

I feel a bit bad for not being more positive about The Years now. I think I would probably have appreciated it more as an audiobook. I found myself almost skim-reading at times and think I missed some of the brilliance because it's deliberately a bit hidden in paragraphs which are otherwise rather list-y.

"We did X and we did Y, at the ABC we saw DEF, and meanwhile [amazing perception beautifully phrased]" - I think I didn't read those sentences as carefully as I should have, and that's my fault.

Don't feel even a bit bad, I thought your review rang very true. I think books often resonate at a particular time in one's life and I think my reading of The Years came at just such a time for me.

I intensely disliked His Bloody Project because the ending was such a cheating cop out. But I think I complained a lot at the time!

32. They Found Him Dead by Georgette Heyer. Another very pedestrian Heyer detective story, why her ability to write charming funny characters almost entirely deserted her when she wrote detective fiction I do not know! But soothing.

I remember being a little disappointed with the ending, but can't remember why. I forgave it because the rest was so good though.

22. Wild by Cheryl Strayed Picked up to entertain me from someone else's shelves. Very readable memoir by Strayed who walked the Pacific Coast Trail from California up to oregon. Appealed because I sometimes think about walking the Appalachian Trail. I enjoyed it but wasn't moved by the sad events that led Strayed to take on this challenge.

23. The Origin of Our Species by Chris Stringer. There's a lot of great stuff here about the evolution of early modern humans and our relationship to the Neanderthals, homo erectus and other primitive human species. The author is clearly an expert in his field, but gives credit to lots of other scientists (including the theories of people who disagree with him), and isn't afraid to admit to his own views changing over time as more evidence emerges (new fossils are found, dating methods become more accurate, the new field of genetic analysis develops). He explains concepts clearly to make them accessible to the non expert.

Despite all those positives, it turns out that I am not quite interested enough in this subject to read a whole book about it, so this was a bit of a struggle. Very much my fault rather than the book's!

38: Footprints in Paris - Gillian Tindall

Last year I enjoyed reading Tindall's memoir The Pulse Glass, which explores her family history through a selection of objects that have passed down to her. This earlier book goes into much more detail about some of the owners of those objects - mainly her forbears, Irish-born doctor Arthur Jacob, her great-great grandfather, who walked to Paris in the early 19thc to make a tour of infirmaries there, and Albert 'Bertie' Tindall, her paternal grandfather. Both forged connections with the ancient Latin Quarter of Paris, and coincidentally Gillian herself eventually spent time there as a teenager, before she knew of any family connection.

She writes wonderfully about the history of places and families, and the passage of time. This just made me want to go back to Paris so badly A lovely, engrossing book, though.

[quote BookShark]**@Hushabyelullaby* thanks for that review - I've added Johnny Got His Gun* to my TBR list as it sounds fascinating.

Meanwhile, I'm still plodding on with Middlemarch and am about halfway through (the Masters had helped with this, as our TV now only seems to get golf in the evenings). Those of you that like it - why? Not meant to be goady, I'm just struggling to see the attraction so wonder what I'm missing. I'm not a complete philistine; I've read one book by each of the Brontes plus The Count of Monte Cristi this year, so I can read "old" classics, but for whatever reason, this I've just isn't doing it for me.[/quote]

It's fascinating and such an awful idea at the same time. I think it's important for people to read, but certainly isn't an 'easy read'.

I think I'm going to look for a chick lit book next as I need something easy, and ultimately happy to get into after that.

Anyone got any suggestions?

"I think I'm going to look for a chick lit book next as I need something easy, and ultimately happy to get into after that."
Have you read Crazy Rich Asians ? Would be my recommendation for an easy entertaining read if not.

45. Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East by Philip H Gordon

Gordon was White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region under Obama. This very much does what it says on the tin, exploring US adventures in regime change in the Middle East starting with Iran in the 1950s and progressing through Afghanistan (twice), Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria. Whilst none of it was entirely new to me, seeing the sorry progression of 'this time will be different' was interesting, if depressing.

I thought it was notable that Gordon contrasts the disastrous interventions in the Middle East (both for the US and for the peoples of the countries involved) with the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union. He paints the latter as a positive outcome, & a reflection of cautious engagement and demonstration of an effective alternative. I have to say that I find it hard to argue that at least to date the 'long game' in Russia has been won by either the West or the Russian people as a whole.

Interesting discussion of Scottish literature. Has anyone read James Hogg's The private memoirs and confessions of a justified dinner? I did it at (Scottish) uni & I seen to remember wondering if His Bloody Project was a bit inspired by it.

There's a bit about phrenology at the end of HBP, IIRC, maybe that was what was disappointing Remus!

Typo fail should be sinner not dinner

Good typo, @Stokey

Yes, I read it - perhaps on the same course you did. Now that you mention it, there are similarities in style. (although it was a very long time ago for me!)

I read a lot about Hogg, but never read Hogg !

@Stokey

Interesting discussion of Scottish literature. Has anyone read James Hogg's The private memoirs and confessions of a justified dinner? I did it at (Scottish) uni & I seen to remember wondering if His Bloody Project was a bit inspired by it.

There's a bit about phrenology at the end of HBP, IIRC, maybe that was what was disappointing Remus!

Yes, I read it at Uni and I think that His Bloody Project was clearly influenced by it - as was The Testement of Gideon Mack.

Someone mentioned The Cone Gatherers further up and I can confirm its bleakness. The Changeling, also by Robin Jenkins, is sadder still.

I conclude we Scots will never be mistaken for a ray of sunshine in our literature.

Trying to think of cheerful Scottish books..... Um - The Broons?