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?

Woah, @cassandre - respect! I can't imagine having to teach Proust; just reading him feels like scrabbling up a vertiginous mountain but occasionally reaching an amazing view that suddenly makes you feel it's worth it after all The fact that I'm doing it with a group of friends makes all the difference, I think: they come up with great insights I wouldn't have had myself.

By this point I do feel I'm embedded in it, though, and will get through to the end. I really got drawn in by the first volume and the Combray section (I feel sure Proust had synasthesia - his descriptions/associations of colour and sound are so vivid) but the volume I've just finished is very different....largely a never-ending social gathering and a minutely-detailed examination of who's related to who in the Guermantes circle. But even that exerts a weird fascination. It's actually funny at times, which I'd never have imagined before I'd read it. Old Marcel could be quite a wag when he felt like it.

Love your post cassandre! I really enjoyed hearing about your struggles with Proust (sorry!). Unlike you I'm not sure I'd like Deborah Levy as a friend, she comes across to me as a teeny bit self-satisfied, but I am still fascinated by her autobiography. And I'm also a woman in a man's world at work!

@cassandre

When a book was inspired by a real case, but doesn't feel in the least believable, there's an issue.

Proust is on my list this year Swann's Way at least but I have done Joyce this year and it was a hardship, so maybe next year or in the Autumn.

Sounds quite unfair to throw you in on a complex text you've never read.

In a slightly less unfortunate, book burny way, Carol Ann Duffy used to go and pull her books off shelves in libraries and bookshops if they were inn 'wimmins sections' and refile them under poetry. She left a note inside for the reader, who now have their own little letter from CAD.

I do so love her.

Wow, respect to those toiling through Proust! I have never read any, but bought Swann's Way (19 hours 44 minutes!) when it was in a £3 Audible sale and am hoping to get through it give it a whirl that way. The Swann's Way I really want to read, though, is Donald's autobiography

I've just been catching up with the thread after several days off - like Viking, I've been in Naarf'lk, on a campsite with no electricity. (Where were you, Viking? We were near Cromer and had glorious weather, fresh crab and many, many ice creams, all of which was deeply restorative.) The campsite had a play area, which meant the children buggered off for hours at a time and DH and I could get some solid reading in. It was brilliant!

@StitchesInTime, that sounds remarkably incompetent! What channel was it on? Was it cut for adverts? (Also, was it very dated? I provably haven't seen it since the aforementioned 80s!).

34. Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
This is 13 years old now - I read it at the time it came out. I bought it for my teenager, but was seduced by it again. It's a young man's book in a good way, a terrific pageturner with lots of verve and arrogance. It really does explain a lot of research and statistical issues very well. The windmills he tilts at feel a bit out of date now - eg Gillian McKeith, MMR media coverage - but then this book was part of the process that made things move on towards a better country. Immensely readable.

Sorry, I have been a bit slow recently (dealing with family crisis / death) but:

44. Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart

I know plenty of you have read this story set in Glasgow about Agnes Bain and her son, Shuggie. Whilst it was pretty grim reading in places, I thought the way it portrayed the mother and son relationship was excellent. It’s not my usual sort of reading but I was gripped by it and found it desperately sad. However, I did find it difficult to believe it was set in the 1980s as the attitudes seemed (to me) to be more reminiscent of the 1960s / early 70s - the woman staying at home and dressing in her best clothes to show her husband could support her and that she didn’t need to work etc. or maybe it’s a class thing? All the women I knew in the 1980s (my mother and her friends) worked and were happy to do so and have their financial independence (but all middle class). Picked up the references to pleather! And agree, that’s wrong.

@Tanaqui I think it was on one of the ITV channels, can’t remember exactly which one now.
It didn’t feel too dated, it’s obviously not set in modern times, but then I wasn’t expecting it to be.

My Dad didn't want my Mum to return to work when my younger sister started school because he didn't want people thinking he couĺdn't support his wife and that was the mid 80s. She did lots of voluntary work instead until she went back to work in the 90s. I don't know the reasons why but MIL didn't do paid work either in the 80s, again she did lots of very valuable voluntary work. Both Scottish (upper) middle class women, one in a city and one very rural. I think Scotland back then was still very traditional as far as women's opportunities went.

30 To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

Time travelling capers in Oxford (and Coventry). Great fun and perfect reading for punting since a big chunk of the book took place on the river (the Thames rather than the Cherwell but lets not quibble).

Mackarella , we were just near Stalham. Failed on the crab sandwich front but ate lots of fish and chips and messed about in boats. Read Coot Club and just finishing Waterland (recommended here, thank you) - I haven't bothered before with location-based holiday reading but these were both perfect companions. Will say more when I review.

I had to read Proust (or at least Swann's Way ) at uni. Always makes me think of Molesworth.

And wot,' sa GRIMES, 'have we all been reading in the hols?'

Tremble tremble moan drone, i hav read nothing but red the redskin and Guide to the Pools. i hav also sat with my mouth open looking at lassie, wonder horse ect on t.v. How to escape? But i hav made a plan.

'fotherington-tomas,' sa GRIMES, 'wot hav you read?'

'Ivanhothe vicar of wakefieldwuthering heights treasureislandvanityfairwestwardhothewaterbabies and -'

'That is enuff. Good boy. And molesworth?'
He grin horibly. 'What hav you read, molesworth?'

gulp gulp a rat in a trap.
'Proust, sir.'
'Come gane?'
'Proust, sir. A grate fr. writer. The book in question was swan's way.'

'Gorblimey. Wot did you think of it, eh?'
'The style was exquisite, sir, and the characterisation superb. The long evocative passages---'

'SILENCE!' thunder GRIMES. 'There is no such book, impertinent boy. I shall hav to teach you culture the hard way. Report for the kane after prayers.'

Chiz chiz to think i hav learned all that by hart. It's not fair they get you every way.

My DH is form South Wales and his DM never worked apart form 'little part time jobs' once she had children 9and had no qualifications and no desire to have any). My DM was a social worker, more relevantly, in Glasgow in the 70s/80s and what she encountered was horrific. I actually think Shuggie Bain could be grimmer. It skirts around the issues of drug addiction , for example. I think Agnes is meant to be a bit of a throwback to the 60s and meant to show that times were changing and she was stuck in glamorous teen years? She is literally 'fur coat and nae knickers'. Certainly in mining communities, where they move to, women just didn't work. Agnes does try to better herself and is momentarily happy with her job in the petrol station.

I don't know if it is a working class/ Glaswegian thing (although I saw the same in Yorkshire) but I always have thought you should dress up nice when you go out and about and look 'gallus'. James Patrick in his study of Glasgow Gangs was certainly struck by how groomed they were and how much their appearance mattered to them. I think the 80s shell suit put paid to a lot of working class glamour.

Also, just finished *The Artful Dickens'. Interesting in parts although a lot of quoting from his works to prove the same point repeatedly. I think you need to know Dickens really well to fully appreciate it and I wanted to learn more about Dickens himself and how his works were received by others . The most entertaining chapter was the one about names. Spoilers abound so I had to keep skipping stuff on Little Dorrit! He focuses a great deal on some books : Bleak House, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, Our Mutual friend, Little Dorrit, The Pickwick Papers and Edwin Drood in particular. Enormous spoilers re David Copperfield!

Viking

Terpsichore, I would LOVE to be part of your Proust reading group. I do want to read the whole of his saga one day, I’m just not cut out to teach it! It’s true what you say about other people’s insights though. Some of my students are amazing, and I felt like I learnt loads just by talking about Proust with them. I agree about the synaesthesia too. His prose is extraordinary evocative. It’s just that at times I was like, ‘Marcel darling, we’ve been looking at these hawthorn blossoms with you for eight pages.’ Seriously, I like the fact that he is so determined to capture his memories, and to share them with the reader. And he is so good at showing how memories are layered onto memories – how whenever we go back to a childhood space, we experience it on multiple levels, with perceptions and memories from different points in time coming together and making us feel all sorts of different emotions. And yes, he can be very funny despite the earnestness. There is lots of acerbic humour in his portrayals of characters across different walks of society.

EineReise: Sounds quite unfair to throw you in on a complex text you've never read. Yeah, well, I could have said no to be honest. I said yes partly because of people-pleasing (see my remarks above, ha) and partly because I was really arrogant and didn’t realise it would be so much work. Duh. I sometimes teach work outside my period to first years and it’s fine. But Proust studies seems to have its own complex critical vocabulary.

In a slightly less unfortunate, book burny way -- this made me laugh, Piggywaspushed. Thanks BestIsWest for alerting us to the twitter row about wimmin. Twitter had a lot of commotion yesterday – in addition to the Winterson thing, Naomi Wolf of The Beauty Myth fame got permanently banned (I’m not sorry – her Oxford DPhil was a mess, and she was completely over the top with her vaccine conspiracy theories), and Richard Dawkins decided to weigh in on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, suggesting that it was a load of crap. All these people were very much on form if you ask me. Self-absorbed. Tarahumara, maybe you’re right about Deborah Levy, but her self-satisfaction pales in comparison to the above culprits.

I think Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is brilliant, but I’ve found most of her later fiction to be really pretentious. She reminds me a bit of Jonathan Franzen, who was happy enough to appear on Oprah but objected when Oprah Book Club stickers were affixed to his books – he thought that somehow devalued the books’ status as litfic. Please.

Also at Viking!

to TimeforaGandT, I'm so sorry for your loss.

@TimeforaGandT. I hope things are going as well as possible.

55. Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie. I only read this a few months ago and I still didn't entirely remember it! The first Miss Marple, it's very well done, with lovely narration from the Vicar. One of the best.

@TimeforaGandT, sorry to hear your news.

A couple to add here:

31. Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

A family saga drawing in three generations of black Americans, this was beautifully written and I appreciated it in the abstract, but I felt that nothing much really happened, and it wasn't what I wanted at that precise moment. So probably my fault, not the book's. It was short, though.

32. My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal

This was much more what I felt like - told from the point of view of nine-year-old Leon, it is the story of his separation from his mother and baby half-brother following his mother's breakdown, and his experiences with social services and foster care thereafter. It sounds depressing and it is in parts, but it is also (perhaps unrealistically) optimistic. Leon's voice rings true, many of the adults he encounters are well-meaning and there are some points woven in about the care system and racism in the early 80s (it's set in 1980 - 1981 and Leon is mixed race) which are thought-provoking without being hammered home. For me it had a similar feel to The Curious Incident... and Lissa Evans' wartime novels.

So sorry, TimeforaG&T

New book stash just arrived.

I hope you're as all right as you can be, TimeforaG&T

Yes, Naomi Wolf's catastrophic misunderstanding of the historical records was absolutely jaw-dropping. No wonder the entire US print run of her book had to be pulped. Imagine

152. The Little Women Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly

Modern retelling of Little Women. Three sisters are the great grand-daughters of Jo March, and find her letters hidden in the loft. The three sisters are basically Meg, Jo and Amy in modern day. Ok but more chick-litty than I expected.

153. The Therapist by B A Paris

A woman moves into a new house, discovers someone was murdered there, and becomes obsessed with trying to solve the murder. OK.

154. As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales From The Making Of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes

If you like the film you will enjoy this, with lots of backstage gossip. If you don’t like the film, you won’t be interested in reading this anyway!

155. Katharine Parr, The Sixth Wife by Alison Weir

The last in Weir’s Tudor Queen’s series. Good, although not the most interesting of the series (the title says it all - all the others had a subtitle relevant to their personality or the events of their marriage but poor Katharine is just ‘the sixth wife’).

156. Shatter by Michael Robotham

Part of the series featuring psychologist Joe O’Loughlin. Here, Joe tries to track down a killer whose method is making women kill themselves. I liked this as it was a bit different and partly set in Bristol, a city I know quite well.

157. Reasons To Be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe

This is meant to be hilarious but I just found it a bit boring. Set in 1980, 18 year old Lizzie leaves home and becomes a dental nurse. Not a lot else happens (except one event towards the end of the novel but which doesn’t seem to really affect Lizzie at all).

158. Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Really interesting look at how Britain today has been formed as a result of the British Empire. I don’t really know a lot about the history of the empire (one of the points made by this book - it’s not taught any more) so found this very interesting although I think a bit more background knowledge would have been useful before reading this.

159. Sisters by Michelle Frances

A pair of sisters who don’t really get on end up going on the run together across Italy, France and Spain. All a bit ridiculous with a weak ending and some loose ends, but I did like the summer holiday setting.

160. The Official History Of Britain: Our Story In Numbers As told By The Office of National Statistics by Boris Starling

I really enjoyed this, although there’s a lot of numbers in there so it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. It explains through statistics how Britain has changed over time. No real surprises but still interesting to see the actual statistics involved.

161. The Rosary Garden by Nicola White

Set in 1980s Ireland, the body of a baby is found by a teenage girl in the grounds of a convent, and the police suspect the girl may know more than she’s saying. Not a fast paced book but I found the setting interesting. Not a book for anyone sensitive to things involving babies though.

Oh so sorry time. I was so interested in your review of Shuggie Bain, I missed that you had had some sad news. Sorry

Sorry TimeforaG&T, I also missed your sad news