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.

Eine

Well done for sticking with it Eine!

Great review Eine. I admire your commitment to finishing it! Audible can DEFINITELY make tedious books more tedious, so you are clearly some sort of reading warrior woman.

Oh Eine, I hoped (although didn't really believe) that audio would be the way to go for Ulysses. After 30 minutes, I was starting to have my doubts, but that's the nail in the coffin. Perhaps I just need to be disciplined about xx pages a day if I ever want to finish it. It really is quite tedious though. Perhaps now is the time to ask myself if I really do want to finish it or whether life is in fact too short.

I tried about 10 minutes of the RTE recording of it and gave up after reading on a blog that audio was the way to go. 42 hours . But Eine it was worth it for the rest of us to enjoy your review and now you'll be able to tick off one more on those dead white male 'must read' lists that the papers love.

Eine - I have to ask: Why?

Wowsers @EineReiseDurchDieZeit, you did it! So we don't have to. I have a copy of it, from belonging to one of those book club things years ago where you had to get something every month. Do they still exist, I wonder? I love some of the Dubliners stories, but have no urge to even try Ulysses. (All on this evening trying to help DD with Tristan fucking Shandy and his inane gobbledegook)

Just jumping in before the thread end with my (I think), 17 and 18.

17 Findings Kathleen Jamie (speaking of Scots) Oh my this is just as special as (iirc) Viking's review said it was going to be. It's really a book about nothing. It's s book about everything. There are interesting bits, happy bits, sad bits. It's like a thinking aloud (but sparsely and definitely not Joyce-esque) stream of consciousness. It's bloody lovely.

18. Shroud for a Nightingale PD James, Dalgliesh book 4. Again, such a pleasure to read clever detective fiction rather than lazy psycho next door guff. As the others in the series it's about how ordinary people living ordinary lives end up not being ordinary at all. My favourite so far in this series. I remember watching it being televised possibly in the 80s.

Am now reading The Familiars for my fiction and No Such Thing As Society- Britain in the 80s for my non. Enjoying both.

Re: Iain Banks- Espedair Street ❤️

18 and 19, I'm doing myself out of a book!

I need to know what he sang now Eine. I have never got past page 1. I had a colleague who claimed it was her favourite book. She lied about lots of other things too.

I loved Inspector Dalgliesh SOL. I must be due a re-read. The TV series was great too.

@Sadik

Eine - I have to ask: Why?

I was raised as an Irish Catholic, and I genuinely think the book would be impenetrable if you didn't have those religious and cultural touchstones.

And even though I have them, it was genuinely like sitting through the worlds longest and Most Boring Mass at times

Stuff like endless lists of saints names. References to responses in the Latin Mass

The last chapter from Mollys POV is quite good but I can see why the book was banned because Mollys POV is full of filth

@BestIsWest

I need to know what he sang now Eine. I have never got past page 1. I had a colleague who claimed it was her favourite book. She lied about lots of other things too.

Sometimes he would just sing like little bits completely off key, popular dittys of the time I think

Yes I said yes I will Yes

Go Eine!

I managed about 15 pages. And that was 14 and three quarters too many.

On the strength of your latest update, I’m going to go to Molly’s chapter, read the filth and then forget all about it, Eine. Life is too short for dicking around with tedious nonsense.

Singing in an audiobook is the equivalent of interpretive dance in the theatre. Unexpected, unwelcome and really embarrassing for audience and performers alike.

Here's my favourite Ulysses review:
I began to read Ulysses and I must say it is not too difficult to read however it takes a lot of time due to the neverending references to almost every field of classic knowledge but I want to finish it so that when someone will ask my if I have read it I will say yes I will be so proud that my heart will go like mad and yes I say I have YES.

@Tarahumara

Here's my favourite Ulysses review: I began to read Ulysses and I must say it is not too difficult to read however it takes a lot of time due to the neverending references to almost every field of classic knowledge but I want to finish it so that when someone will ask my if I have read it I will say yes I will be so proud that my heart will go like mad and yes I say I have YES.

Yes I'm quite chuffed to say YES I HAVE and its SHIT

and on @JaninaDuszejko 's point, James Joyce apparently greatly disapproved of racism but illustrated this with extraordinarily racist remarks from characters.

Like, why are we still glorifying certain works of literature internationally and telling a global audience of non white people, hey this is the most amazing book, he wasn't REALLY racist you see, so all these awful things you are reading about your race and your culture, its ok, live with it its SATIRE, its GREAT really, HONEST GUV

Maurice is excellent, I love the passage where Maurice talks to Clive about why he adores him.

New thread here - www.mumsnet.com/Talk/what_were_reading/4219069-50-Book-Challenge-2021-Part-Five?watched=1

@PepeLePew

Singing in an audiobook is the equivalent of interpretive dance in the theatre. Unexpected, unwelcome and really embarrassing for audience and performers alike.

Ulysses is fucking shit

But I did quite like Dubliners

And Portrait Of The Artist

FORTY TWO HOURS