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?

Sorry for your loss @TimeforaGandT. I've got Shuggie Bain on my Kindle waiting but didn't want to read anything depressing during a sunny week off work.

@ChessieFL I read Reasons to Be Cheerful last year and also found it disappointing. It's actually the third in a trilogy which starts with Man At The Helm, which I read first. That's set when she's 10 and has more background about her appalling parents, but I still didn't find it that funny, was more appalled by her mother.

59. Treatment-free Beekeeping by David Heaf Obviously only going to be of interest to beekeepers! In case anyone on here does keep bees, this is an exploration of various aspects of keeping bees without varroa treatment. I'm always a bit wary of 'natural' beekeepers, but Heaf deals with the subject in a well referenced and systematic way reflecting his background as a biochemist. Though I'm not immediately inclined to drop treatment entirely (and certainly not moving away from conventional National hives and supplementary pre-winter feeding) I was particularly interested in the data from Gwynedd regarding winter losses showing no statistically significant benefit in survival for beekeepers who do treat as opposed to those (many) who don't.

Thank you all for your messages - this really is the loveliest corner of mumsnet and the Internet. I will be reading your posts even if I am not contributing.

I was interested to read about your experiences Janina and piggy and how they contrasted with my mother and her friends. I agree that pre the shell suit era that people did make more of an effort in respect of their appearance if going out even for the groceries (no onesies then!) but I was surprised that extended as far as a fur coat!

Chessie, I read Shatter a couple of years ago and found it quite a disturbing read although I did enjoy the Bristol setting. I don’t think I am very good at dealing with brutal crime. I like it all nicely sanitised a la Agatha Christie or Midsomer Murders!

Time

68. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Jason Taylor is 13. He is getting his first crush, his cousin Hugo has taught him to smoke, he is very close to getting in with the cool kids and is hiding his poetry talent. This year, everything will change.

Very disappointing actually, average coming of age tale which overdoes unsubtle nostalgic references.

Relates to "The Mitchell Universe" in that Robert Frobisher from Cloud Atlas and Hugo Lamb from Bone Clocks are mentioned, but is otherwise not a patch on either and very run of the mill.

for @TimeforaGandT. This really is the loveliest corner of the internet.

@Stokey I also read Man At The Helm and found it disappointing. I only read Reasons To Be Cheerful because it was already on my kindle. Won’t be bothering with any more of hers.

@TimeforaGandT I’m sorry to hear your news and I hope reading and this thread help take your mind off things. I don’t like crime books that are too gory/nasty (I’ve given up on Peter James for exactly this reason) but I didn’t think Shatter was too bad (although obviously not a nice read!). I’m not a Christie fan but agree that although they deal with murder it’s not done in a disturbing way.

Sorry about your loss, Time

I'm disappointed to hear about the Nina Stibbe books because I've also got both of them on my Kindle (99p deals that I bought because I enjoyed Love, Nina). I might still give them a go in the interests of tidiness but will dial down my expectations!

Love the Molesworth excerpt Viking! I must read those agane again some time - I'm sure I'd get a lot more out of them now I'm grown up.

Sorry to hear your sad news Time, hope you are doing ok x

Sorry things are tough, Time.

Had a lovely break over half-term, cycling in the Yorkshire Dales. Breathing gusty sighs at the return to work.

52. The Golden Rule, Amanda Craig
Our heroine has just become a single parent, and her ex will only pay her £1200 rent plus £120 child maintenance, the meanie, so clearly deserves to DIE. Then she meets a stranger on a train who promises to kill him provided she performs the same favour in return. But it turns out to be harder than she expects. Will someone die? More importantly, will our heroine ever get to live an upper middle class existence without - oh horror and indignation - having to work FULL-TIME?

As a single parent myself, who knows lots of others, I was deeply irritated by the self-pitying heroine. The villain is cartoonish, the plot implausible and the author peers with anthropological curiosity at poor people (my dear, some people can't even afford good coffee!). However, it did draw me in and I had a little internal cheer a few times towards the end, despite its blatant wish fulfilment.

53. Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier
A compassionate look at how social contagion is convincing adolescent girls that they are trans. Some may be, but the likelihood is that this isn't an appropriate path for many, and she makes a case that society needs to do better in protecting them from permanent harm while they are still learning who they are.

54. Tales from Lindford, by Catherine Fox
Strictly for existing fans. The author completed a trilogy about a group of characters linked to a cathedral, and found herself wondering how they would have got on during lockdown - lots of praying and weeping with an occasional ribald joke, as her readers might expect. She doesn't introduce the characters, so this is not the place to start if you're new to Lindford. Not her best writing, but I enjoyed meeting old friends.

55. They do it with mirrors, Agatha Christie
A rather lightweight Miss Marple. Finished it two days ago and can't remember much about it.

56. The Appeal, Janice Hallett
A whodunnit told almost entirely via emails. This was cleverly done - interesting to see characters emerge through their correspondence. A few central characters are silent, and you start to discern their personalities through the reactions of others. Original and enjoyable.

@mackerella if you have already read and enjoyed another book by Nina Stibbe you may well enjoy the others. I’ve only read the two I mentioned and have now decided that her writing style isn’t for me!

Good review of The Golden Rule, bibliomania. I wanted to like it more than I did. I found it irritating for some of the same reasons you mention.

@bibliomania

One of the worst and most tick box cliche books I have ever read was by Amanda Craig and I have never ventured since!

Interesting to hear the discussions about The Golden Rule as I'm currently halfway through A Vicious Circle by Amanda Craig. Many of the characters are monstrous stereotypes (which she gets away with thanks to the figleaf of "satire") but I'm enjoying it all anyway (possibly because so many characters are monstrous stereotypes ).

Thanks for the review of Tales from Lindford, biblio - I read Acts and Omissions last week (inspired by your recommendation a couple of threads ago) and have already classed myself as a fan on the basis of that book alone! If anyone else is interested in them, I bought books 2-4 on Kindle for less than £2 each last week, which is a big reduction on the prices a couple of months ago.

It seems I'm not alone in my view of Amanda Craig! I think her intentions are good in writing about social issues, but she has limited experience. I wasn't as shocked as she wanted me to be at the idea of someone who went to Durham University having to work part-time as a cleaner.

Glad you're enjoying the Catherine Fox books, mack! It hasn't been a universally popular recommendations, but I find her very soothing.

My thoughts were that she had no idea how real people live and got her concept of how things are in the UK from the Daily Mail.

I'm also really sure she's the author who was horrible about Maeve Binchy when she died, hang on I'll google

Yes here we are. The woman had just died. So unnecessary.

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9446816/If-Maeve-Binchy-had-been-a-mother-....html

Time, sorry to hear about your loss.

I too am new to the Lindchester fan club. I found the last one I read more of a slog but I'd love to know how they all got on during lockdown, so will seek that out despite my attempt to make it through June without buying too many new books.

48 Failures of State by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott
This tells the story of the UK response to the pandemic so far. It's a much more detailed and extensive telling of things that Calvert and Arbuthnott have already explored in their Sunday Times pieces, and a lot of it is familiar. And to be honest what isn't familiar is unsurprising - that Test and Trace doesn't work as it should, that care homes were not protected as they should, that the government was too slow to lock down and didn't heed the advice of its advisors.

So on the one hand, I got to the end of this and wasn't really sure what I'd learned, beyond having my existing views confirmed. On the other hand, if I'd started this with even a shade of sympathy for the government based on the fact I would think it is hard to make the right decisions in a timely manner with something like this, I've completely lost that now. Calvert and Artbuthnott put the knife in hard, particularly to Johnson and Sunak, and have plenty of sources, on and off the record, to back up that decision. The delay over the autumn circuit breaker and the vacillating over Christmas in particular are damning when the evidence is considered and weighed.

There's clearly going to be a second version of this book in the not too distance future as it stops more or less at the time the schools went back in January then didn't. And I'm sure this is a book that will be rewritten by many different people in the future as more evidence comes to light. Because ultimately I suppose the jury is still out on who did better - and how to weigh a successful vaccine roll out against slowness in locking down in terms of lives saved or lost. I'd like both, of course, but I'm not sure that many countries achieved that. I'm still very angry, though, at the avoidable mistakes that were made.

One thing I would say is that the audiobook of this is terrible. The narrator is slow and ponderous and way too dramatic - it's like he's reading Dickens or something. Clearly too much time channelling Laurence Olivier and not enough time getting in touch with his inner Paxman.

42. Big Brother - George Orwell

This is another re-read for me, I originally read it 30 years ago. When I first read it at 15 I had no real concept of how truly forward thinking and scary this was. It is a distopian novel, that still to this day doesn't seem ridiculous in its visualisation.

In part one we learn how everything is controlled in your world, work, private life, speech, you are constantly watched, your family/partner/and especially your kids, will report you for the slightest wrongdoing, and history is forever being rewritten and evidence of such destroyed. Winston and Julia fall in love and are against Big Brother (secretly), they join The Brotherhood, a secret organisation whose aim is to bring down The Party.

We learn that Winston and Julia go to O'Brien's house who tells them that members of The Brotherhood wish to bring down Big Brother, headed by Emmanuel Goldstein. They are expected to lie, murder, cheat, and betray for The Brotherhood, both agree they will.

In part three we further learn that The Brotherhood doesn't really exist, but is simply a way for The Party to discover those individuals who want to rebel. Once it has they are captured, tortured and retrained. They do this over months, and we see that the strong person Winston was, opposed to The Party in every way, is successfully tortured in loving Big Brother, as is Julia.

The Brotherhood seems to be a tool used by The Party to flush out any doubters and retrain them, however it also has the side effect of highlighting to other people in society what happens if any one tries to go against them.

The ultimate futility was brought home to me when at the end it has a dictionary of Newspeak and the words that these replace. Even the way people speak is controlled, and it makes for a feeling of hopelessness that Big Brother and The Party can be overthrown.

I enjoyed this book a lot, apart from a bit in the middle where Orwell tries to explain things in a big essay style section. It doesn't fit with the rest of the book IMO, and I feel that the reader understands plenty of how the state of the world lies without this.

I've been studying so much I've not had a lot of time to read - this was my last book:

Adrian Mole: the Wilderness Years - Sue Townsend. The fourth in the Mole series and as Adrian ages I feel he's not as endearing and funny as he was when he was a teenager. But I loved the early 90s nostalgia element.

New thread:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/what_were_reading/4264681-50-Book-Challenge-2021-Part-Six?watched=1

Sorry for your loss TimeForaGandT

That was pretty shitty of her, Eine.

28. Postcards From The Edge - Carrie Fisher

I thought this was another instalment of her autobiography so was surprised to find a fiction book!

However it's great. Following a film star through addiction and out the other side, written quite originally with some journal entries and a lot of dialogue. I actually really enjoyed the lack of description or back stories! I'm a fan, and will read more.

35. The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
Saw people were reading this on here and fancied something straightforward. Unfortunately for me it was just a bit dry and unengaging - too much of a puzzle by numbers. Nothing wrong with it. And I never guess the murderer.

Im not getting the bolding right - changing backwards and forwards... When I do a list, I bold only my favourites. But when I review I aim to bold title and author every time. Is that right?

This is correct!