50 Book Challenge 2021 Part Five

[southeastdweller]

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

How're you getting on so far?

Yolandi, don't know if it's mentioned in the book but Amazon have a platform called mturk (short for mechanical Turk) where they pay humans to do the behind-the-scenes tasks where humans outperform computers, such as scanning photos to identify their contents. It's named after von Kempelen's machine.

Ah, sorry misread your review - if it's a fictional account set in C18th then I don't suppose it mentions Amazon

After my ski slope bollocks I'm indulging in a Jean Plaidy historical bollocks though at least nobody pretends the lovely Jean's stories are anything other than for dummies.
I'm on the second of the Ferdinand and Isabella series, Spain for the Sovereigns and it's comfort food wimple-headed trash. Love it (autocorrect would like me to tell you it's simple-hearted but I shan't)

I have the Ali Smiths on my Kindle tbr...are they standalones or do I need to read in order?

@VikingNorthUtsire, no mention of Amazon, no

I didn't know about Amazon's mturk until I googled mechanical turk with the aim of finding out more about the historical version

@SOLINVICTUS

After my ski slope bollocks I'm indulging in a Jean Plaidy historical bollocks though at least nobody pretends the lovely Jean's stories are anything other than for dummies. I'm on the second of the Ferdinand and Isabella series, Spain for the Sovereigns and it's comfort food wimple-headed trash. Love it (autocorrect would like me to tell you it's simple-hearted but I shan't)

I have the Ali Smiths on my Kindle tbr...are they standalones or do I need to read in order?

Both. They're standalone (with some subtle overlap in characters) but they follow an arc, so if you have them all then read them in order.

wimple-headed trash

35. 4.50 from Paddington, Agatha Christie
Miss Marple unlocks whodunnit. Not one of her best - over-reliant on coincidence. Ask me tomorrow and I'll have forgotten the murderer.

The Cottingley Cuckoo by AJ Elwood
Enjoyed this twist on the Cottingley Fairy affair, with a series of letters from the past opening up a series of modern day events centred around a young woman unsure if she wants her future to unfold as it seems to be doing.
I was surprised to reach the Acknowledgements and discover that the author also writes as Alison Littlewood. I’ve DNFed several of her books under that pseudonym, including one about the Cottingley Fairies. Glad she has had another crack at writing about it and it was a pleasing page turner if you like this sort of thing.

I remember being freaked out in that excited to be terrified way when you're about 8 when I read an article in my gran's Weekly News (I guess the 1970s version of Take A Break) about the Cottingley Fairies. The women hadn't 'fessed at that point and it fascinated me...the wooooooo chilling bit was about the photographs supposedly being analysed and the lab discovering that the fairies had moved on the negative during the processing. 🧚🧚🧚
I was pretty gutted when they turned out not to be real.

I was told as a child that dust motes in sunlight were fairies dancing. I was a prime candidate for Woo from a young age
The book considers what could really be a fairy’s true nature. Delicate wings, benevolence and dancing don’t feature prominently......

I do like a book that delves into darker folklore, particularly Changelings and the stories people would tell about them to justify natural diseases and disability as curses rather than the non existence of a just God.

I was a prime candidate for Woo from a young age

Me too except for me it was Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess and the notion that dolls play when you aren't in the room (a long time before Toy Story)

The Secret Garden for me. The first part, told so matter of factly, where cholera is raging and Mary is the only one left alive is chilling to read as an adult.
I try the handles of all doors in garden walls as a matter of course even now. National Trust guides can get a bit sniffy about that so best to do it when they aren’t looking.
My Granny spun me the most wonderful story at some burnt out ruin of a country house. Told me to peep through the keyhole and imagine it as it was. Described my pinafore and little button boots.

I was terrified by the first chapter of The Secret Garden. I woke up during the night after reading it and screamed the house down!

Another from the "it's a 99p and that was 98p too much" genre.

Thank you for making me properly LOL this morning, SOL!

31. The Mum Shop by Ceci Jenkinson

Fun story that I read to/with the DCs. 11 year old Oli Biggles is fed up with his mum because he can’t eat pepperoni pizza all the time and she won’t let him watch Real Blood Bath Murders on TV. In a moment of pique, he threatens to take her to the Mum Shop and exchange her for a more liberal mum … and is surprised when she calmly agrees, and it turns out that there really is a Mum Shop in their town! Needless to say, the replacement mums that Oli gets are nowhere near as good as his real mum, especially Mother 44, who turns out to be an embittered science teacher drives a tank and leads the Black Cane Brigade, the main aims of which are to get rid of “modern nonsense” by banning TV, making children eat milk puddings and caning them regularly. Can Oli and his friend Skipjack foil the Black Cane Brigade and get Oli’s real mum back? (Yes.)

31. Spring by Ali Smith

Not much to add to Viking’s brilliant review above – I think she’s said most of what I wanted to say! If you do have all of them already, SOL, I’d start with Autumn and go through in order – one of the joys of the series is spotting all the thematic connections between the books (Dickens, Shakespeare’s late romances, female artists, sinister aspects of surveillance capitalism, Brexit, etc) and discovering the connections between the characters as well. One of the main characters in Autumn is Daniel Gluck, and I think you’d get more out of the subsequent books if you’d already read his story first.

I thought this was the best book so far in the quartet, despite the fact that Smith really lets her anger rip and some of the political commentary is hardly subtle. She’s so good at drawing out the ways in which modern life is weird and unsettling and absurd and alienating, satirising sensationalist TV adaptations, marketing emails, web 1.0 entrepreneurs and faceless Capita-style corporations but with a light touch.

I was surprisingly gripped by the first third or so, which deals with Richard and Paddy’s relationship, and loved Paddy’s insights into Katherine Mansfield. The story flagged a bit with the introduction of Florence, a precocious and otherworldly child who ends up taking Richard and detainee custody officer Brit (no, really) on a kind of magical realist road trip to Scotland. I do see that Florence is meant to be the kind of unreal (or possibly hyperreal) figure symbolising “goodness” that you get in late Shakespeare (like Hermione in The Winter’s Tale) – and this is explicitly acknowledged in Spring: "The girl is like someone or something out of a legend or a story, the kind of story that on the one hand isn't really about real life but on the other is the only way you ever really understand anything about real life." But I found her conversation with Brit on the train a bit tiresome – it was only when the action started again and Florence was able to go around possibly working miracles once more that it really worked for me. (Incidentally, this is an even more “talky” book than the previous two – so many words, in so many different voices!)

I’ve read a few reviews that complain that the book is disjointed – a collage of ideas that don’t really coalesce. I can see what they mean, but for me the parts were glued together thematically (and she does eventually bring the two main narrative strands together to make a single plot). I enjoyed trying to spot the connections and resonances with the other two books, and with the outside world. Florence’s hypnotic powers hint at the way that tech companies keep us in thrall to their products (and also possibly at Greta Thunberg). The wanderings of Pericles are mirrored by the theme of global migration. This book seemed to have a more obvious connection to its season than its predecessors, with its themes of children, innocence, new beginnings and sacrifice.

I know that Ali Smith is a bit marmite, and it’s clear that this is a very artificial book (in the sense that it’s full of artifice – it’s intricately structured, and full of wordplay and bizarre supernatural happenings. I think you just have to go with the flow and read it as symbolic rather than literal. Towards the end, Richard mentions a Tacita Dean film about a hot air balloon: "alchemy and transformation become matters of good spirit, something dismissible and ridiculous - and magic, if you'll let it be." That’s how I feel about this project .

Great review, Mackarella - sounds like we got very similar things out of Spring

We can form an Ali Smith fan club on here, Viking!

35. The Fear by C L Taylor

When Lou was a teenager, she was groomed by her karate teacher, Mike, and ran away to France with him. Things went badly, he ended up in jail, and she moved away and started a new life in London.

Now aged 32, Lou’s returned to her old hometown following the death of her father, and quickly discovers that Mike is involved with a 14yr old, Chloe.

She’s determined to stop history from repeating itself.
And things move remarkably quickly from Lou trying to report Mike to the police and so on, to Lou locking Mike up in a disused dog cage in her father’s barn. I wasn’t expecting something like that so early in the book, and it was difficult to see how things could possibly end well for Lou.
All somewhat far fetched but it kept me turning the pages.

Right, as I disappeared from the thread between books 8 and 28, I’ve decided to make myself really unpopular by going back and reviewing the missing books, even if it means I’m doing it simultaneously with newer reviews. Hah, that will confuse you all!

9. Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

Hmm, this was an odd one. I like Sarah Moss, and was eager to read this book because it covered several areas (universities, cultural heritage, experimental archaeology) that I know a lot about because of my previous and current lines of work. So I was reading this a bit more beadily than I might have done otherwise.

It’s been reviewed a lot on here, so I won’t recap too much. 17-year-old Silvie (named after the ancient British goddess Sulevia) is spending the summer holidays in Northumberland on an “experiential archaeology” course organised for undergraduates at an unspecified university. The participants have to live like Bronze Age Britons, foraging and hunting for food, cooking over open fires, wearing itchy tunics and flimsy home-made sandals, etc. Silvie’s father Bill is an autodidact with a passion for ancient Britain, and for self-sufficiency of the kind that despises modern living as weak and soft; he has been asked to join the course because he has a huge amount of practical knowledge that the academics lack. Silvie and her mother have been dragged along to act as skivvies, doing all the cooking and acting almost as slaves to the others. The power dynamics are clear right from the start: the students are all treating it as a bit of a lark, and can opt out of sleeping in a hut for the relative comfort of a tent and slope off to the village shop for illicit ice creams, but Sylvie and her mother are forced to act as skivvies to the university lot. Tensions rise, culminating in a moment of collective madness and near tragedy.

This book was published in 2018, and it’s hard not to read it as a “post-Brexit” novel. There are overt themes of Britishness and belonging and connection to the land, all of which have taken on new resonances since the referendum. Some of Bill’s rants about ancient (and modern) Britain are a bit unsubtle in that regard. Luckily, it’s about more than just Brexit: it touches on themes of power (especially through male violence), authority (does it come through learning or through experience and practical knowledge?) and, above all, class. Moss avoids splitting the characters neatly into men = abusive, violent and pompous; women = victimised and blameless. It made me genuinely uncomfortable to see how Molly’s privileged background made her unable to understand Silvie's inaction, and also to see how Silvie unjustly despised her mum for her inaction. Likewise, Silvie’s mother’s passivity when Silvie was being bullied by her father is understandable but also repellent.

Sarah Moss is so very good at bodily sensation and imagining to do with nature and bodies: she’s one of the few writers (for me) who can really evoke what it’s like to inhabit someone else’s body and to be in their environment. Ironically, this is a major theme of the book: what it’s like to be in an utterly different context, and whether/how we can ever understand that. There’s a lot of pondering about what it would have been like to be a Real Life Ancient Briton, and how the experiment that the group are undertaking is bringing them closer to that experience. I’ve spent a lot of time working with Very Old Things and trying to imagine the lives of the people who used them, and also trying to find out how they were made, so some of the breathless wonder at being in direct, physical contact with the past was a bit trite for me. Also, there’s a qualitative difference between proper experimental archaeology (based on evidence from material culture) and the half-baked, borderline abusive, idea of recreating ritual in the absence of physical evidence. Really, what the group are doing in this novel is glorified reenactment/cosplay, not proper academic enquiry! Despite all this, I found it a powerful and intelligent book (not quite sure what to make of the end, though!)

The Women's Prize shortlist is due to be announced on Wednesday.

Some great reviews, thank you!
My next question was going to be which Ali Smith but you've answered me so I shall plunge in as soon as I've finished with Ferdinand (fnar)

I started Ghost Wall last year at some point then abandoned it. Not as a DNR/crap but as a "not in the right mood for this at the moment" abandon. I think I may have the real book rather than the Kindle. Must dig it out (double fnar) and try again. I like the way Sarah Moss writes. The wordcraft. I think that's what I'll like about Ali Smith too.

In other news my colleague asked me to "do Finnegan's Wake with 5b because I won't have time" Reader, I laughed. (then told her to fuck off) She's already foisted Virginia Woolf and Ulysses onto me. (I'm the language teacher, she's the literature)

Yes, I can see similarities between Sarah Moss and Ali Smith (although the former is more serious-minded than the latter). What I didn't say about Ghost Wall but meant to is that the premise is a bit silly, and you can see the climax coming from a mile off, but I didn't mind because the writing and evocation of atmosphere were so good.

5B? Is that year 11? What are they doing with all that Joyce? (And you should definitely tell your colleague to fuck off.)

5b are final year high school. I'm in Italy. They have this absurd (IMO) programme where they do tasters of everything. So for Dubliners they just do Eveline and The Dead, for Woolf they just do Mrs. Dalloway's party. Etc.

Poor Italian schoolchildren. Irish schoolchildren weren't exposed to Joyce, at least not in my day. A residual fear of dirty bits?

36. The Weekend, by Charlotte Wood
Three old friends in their seventies come together to clear out the house of a dead mutual friend. We move backwards and forwards between each perspective, seeing each through her own eyes and those of her friends. There's frustration and irritation with each other, but underlying it all is the deep bond of long ties. This was an unsentimental but ultimately touching portrayal of lifelong friendship.

33 Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers
I am not the first on this thread to have read and enjoyed this novel which has been longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Jean is a journalist, living a quiet and lonely life with her mother and working at the local paper. She has a lead to pursue, and in the process of writing the story, befriends Gretchen, the woman at the source of the story who believes she has had a virgin birth, and her family. It's hard to say too much without revealing details of the plot. I loved the period detail (it's set in the 1950s) and the development of Jean's character and life reminded me a little of Anita Brookner. Jean's happiness becomes bound up in the life of Gretchen and her family even as she carries on researching the story and blurring the boundaries between the personal and the professional. I know that not everyone loved the ending. I found the resolution of Gretchen's story a little unsatisfactory, to be sure. Jean's story...I don't know. I'm still reflecting on that.