50 Book Challenge 2021 Part Six

[southeastdweller]

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

So, we're now almost half way through the year - how's the first half of the year gone for you, reading-wise?

80. A Wild Winter Swan by Gregory Maguire

Gregory Maguire does rewrites of fairy stories, most notably Wicked, this one is based on an Andersen about Swan Brothers.

It's atrocious. Utter slog. Took me 5 goes to read about 200 pages. Very vague fairy story element, badly written, unengaging. Generally not moving or relatable.

Shit.

Ooh thanks elkie, I just borrowed Opal and Nev from the library and loved it so much I wanted to buy it when it came out in paperback. Even better to snap it up for 99p!

@magimedi that was one of my favourite books a couple of years ago

I've bought the first Bryant and May book and Margery Allingham's Tiger in the Smoke.

Thanks for the heads up about the book deals. I've picked up the Anne Cleeves, Ickabog for Dd2, Barbara Pym & Sweet Sorrow by David Nichols. Managed to resist the nostalgic draw of Clan of the Cave Bear - pretty sure I won't like it as much as I did when I was 14!

53. Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart. Reviewed many times, most recently yesterday. I did find this a tough read, although it's very moving. Good but I need something light next.

Hello all. Reading slowly as ever so no reviews to add, but I just wanted to share my excitement at having had a browse this evening in my local library for the first time since March 2020. Picked up an Alan Hollinghurst, a Jonathan Coe, Nazir Afzal's memoir and a travel guide for our (UK) holiday. Just need to find time to read them all!

I have to start reading this thread through one half closed eye. There are lots of interesting sounding books here, but my tbr pile is huge!

I’m going to make an attempt to catch up on my reviews but there’s a lot to get through

Someone Like Me - M. R. Carey Psychological thriller that plays with the idea of the “hidden power” that people often find in times of shock/stress (like suddenly being able to lift a car off an injured person, or outrun a bear) and asks “what if this power was a separate entity from you, and what if it could take over?” The story is split between a woman recently separated from her abusive ex, and a teenage girl dealing with the trauma of a kidnap when she was younger. Really enjoyed this, although some may find some parts a bit too woo.

Q - Christina Dalcher Under an extreme right wing government, children’s futures are decided entirely by their Q scores - a measure of their intelligence and future success. Students are tested every term, and any who don’t achieve high scores are sent to progressively worse schools. Elena has one successful, high achieving daughter, one who’s not coping, and a husband who not only loves the system but is responsible for it. Elena has hidden her daughter’s struggles so far, but things soon reach crisis point. I really liked this, although I’m not sure if “liked” is the right word given how stressed and angry it made me at the world in her story. Near the end though, the repetition of “this is exactly like Nazi Germany!! Look how Nazi this all is!” got pretty annoying - we’d already figured that much out! That was the only irritation for me.

Goldilocks - Laura Lam In a world being slowly destroyed by climate change, where women’s rights are being stripped away, an all female crew head off on a much anticipated space mission. Of course, by “head off” I mean they stole the rocket to colonize a planet for the benefit of (who)mankind, but close enough! Rather than being a gung-ho space adventure though, this story unpicks the complicated relationship between the main character and her mother, the secrets between them in their personal life, not to mention the one that could jeopardize the ship’s crew and the future of humanity. One of my favourite reads this year.

The Secret Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben Tree expert writes tree facts. Packed full of interesting information, from how trees communicate, to which trees bully which other trees, to how trees travel. Fascinating and lovely.

The Last House on Needless Street - Catriona Ward
Reviewed by lots on here, so nothing to add except this was brilliant.

This was a good run!

25. Black Horn (Creasy #4) by A J Quinnell

Another solid Creasy book. After a young woman is shot dead in an apparent poaching incident in Africa, Creasy his friends find themselves fighting a Triad in Hong Kong. Along with the moderately-paced thriller, the author tells us about Africa, trail and spoor, rhino horn trade, the origin of Triads etc.

I very much enjoy this kind of thriller where the author has deep knowledge to share, and would recommend it to anyone here who is interested in the genre.

Most of the Cazalet books and a few others by Elizabeth Jane Howard are on 99p deals with Kindle today if anyone still hasn't given them a try.

67. Friday’s Child by Georgette Heyer

Another Regency romance.
This one starts with Lord Sheringham (Sherry) proposing to the beautiful Isabella. She rejects him in account of his wild ways (and his needing to marry so he can get his hands on his inheritance), so he flounces off declaring that he’ll marry the first woman he sees. And, as luck would have it, the first woman he sees is Hero, who’s fresh out of the schoolroom and has been devoted to Sherry since they were children.
So Sherry and Hero elope off to London and get married as quickly as possible. There’s a lot of bother caused by Hero’s naivety and her habit of taking everything Sherry says as completely true, but of course everything all turns out well in the end.

All very typical Heyer stuff. And one where you have to be in the mood for a heroine who’s incredibly naive.

The next few reviews in my uphill struggle to catch up!

The Last Day - Andrew Hunter Murray
QI elf’s foray into dystopian fiction. The earth’s rotation has ground to a halt, meaning half the earth is baked by blazing sun, and half is plunged into dark, icy doom. Survivors flock to the only few liveable zones, leading to predictable chaos. One woman comes across a dangerous secret that puts her and the powers that be at risk. This was quite gripping in places, but there was so much description of the grim scenery that I ended up skipping through a lot to get to the action/falling asleep. The “draconian isolationist” England was also a touch too close to the political bone right now.

Ragged Alice - Gareth L Powell
A police officer with a supernatural ability to read souls returns to her small Welsh hometown after a traumatic experience at work. A serial killer seems to be on the loose, and as the deaths mount up, an uncomfortable personal connection starts to reveal itself. Powell has a great way with words and, surprisingly for a male author, his female characters are realistic and well drawn.

The Murders of Molly Southbourne - Tade Thompson
Molly lives a quiet life with her parents on a deserted farm. Until she bleeds at least, as her blood turns into murderous clones of herself that she has to kill in order to survive. Her parents have taught her everything she needs to know to survive, but it still might not be enough for her to make it on her own against the mollies. Short, grotesque and good!

OK, finally, some reviews!

34. The Unseen, Roy Jacobsen, trans. by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw. 5/5
    Recommended by a Norwegian member of my book group. It’s hard to express how captivated I was by this book; it’s probably my favourite read of the year so far. When I finished it, I turned back to the first page and read it over again. The story of a family living on a remote Norwegian island early in the 20th century, it has a timeless feel. The chapters are short and jewel-like and give detailed descriptions of the manual labour that the characters undertake to keep their lives on the island going. It reminded me a bit of Little House on the Prairie, but in Norway and for adults. The characters are amazingly lifelike, and slowly the focus narrows in on Ingrid, who is a child when the narrative begins. The translators use some innovative strategies: for example, there are long sentences containing lots of main clauses that are separated only by commas (what grammarians would officially deem run-on sentences or comma splices) which give a gentle rhythm to the story. The characters speak in a strange English dialect meant to mimic the rural Norwegian dialect used in their community. They don’t speak much, but when they do speak, the words are always meaningful. I felt transported to another world in a way I haven’t felt for a long time – not a world where I would actually want to live, because there’s too much hard work and not many books, but a world that it’s wonderful to encounter in Jacobsen’s pages. In short, I loved this with an intensity I can’t quite explain. Also, Norwegian people seem to drink a lot of coffee.

35. Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar. 4/5
    A sprawling semi-autobiographical novel about growing up as an American Muslim (the narrator’s parents are highly educated immigrants from Pakistan). I enjoyed the first part of the book especially; it felt like reading a memoir. As the story progresses it becomes more zany, and certain sections interested me less, like the account of a fabulously rich capitalist who takes the protagonist under his wing. The scope and wit of the novel reminded me at points of Jonathan Franzen. It’s a very American novel, and a very male one. An impressive read and a depressingly accurate satire of Bush and Trump-era America.

36. White Shadow, Roy Jacobsen, trans. by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw. 4/5
    The second book in the Norwegian tetralogy that traces the life of the resolute, resilient islander Ingrid Barroy. I loved it almost as much as the first book – again, I read it twice – but the reading experience was less a comforting escape than the first book was, because historical events intervene with a vengeance. Ingrid gives shelter to a refugee, a Russian prisoner of war who survives the disaster of the Rigel, a ship sunk by the British off Norway during WW2. It was a mistake by the British and apparently the largest maritime disaster in Norwegian history. The prose is as beautiful as in the first book and a number of familiar characters return. Ingrid as a heroine is wonderful as ever.

37. The Mermaid of Black Conch, Monique Roffey. 4/5

I didn’t like this novel much at first. The mermaid being an actual, well, mermaid was weird to say the least, and the various assaults she was subjected to after being captured by brutal, sexist men were hard to read. Eventually, though, I relaxed into the genre of the story – a myth retold for modern times, with plenty of playful elements – and found it rich and inventive. The encounters between different ethnic groups are intriguingly, convincingly rendered: white Americans, white Caribbeans, Afro-Caribbeans and the mermaid herself, who is a member of an ancient indigenous island tribe.

38. My Name Is Why, Lemn Sissay. 5/5 This autobiography is as powerful as everyone has said. The fact that Sissay has inserted an abundance of actual bureaucratic documents into the narrative – reports and letters produced by social workers and other officials – makes the story extraordinarily effective. We not only hear about the child from the author’s adult perspective on his own experience, and from his own poems, but the official documents offer another perspective: damning proof of how he is ‘othered’ and pathologised by the British social system, who have refused to return him to his Ethiopian birth mother. As the mum of a teenage boy myself, I was particularly horrified by how his foster family – the only parents he had ever known – abandoned young Lemn because he was behaving like an absolutely normal adolescent boy. It’s amazing that someone could survive that kind of rejection and emerge as the wise, generous person that Sissay clearly became.

38. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo. This is well written and the characters are good fun with vivid personalities, but the structure of the book (moving on to a new character in each chapter) made it too hard for me to fully engage with any of them. I enjoyed the reading experience, but it all felt a little too superficial to be a standout read.

Catching up on the thread from a few days back...

@VikingNorthUtsire, I liked your review of Their Eyes Were Watching God. I read it many years ago and didn't care for it much, but your review makes me understand why I might not have loved it at first read, and makes me want to give it another go.

@Cornishblues, great review of Priestdaddy. I also preferred it to No One Is Talking About This. I had forgotten the bit about radioactive waste and Lockwood wondering about whether that played a part in her infertility. You're right, that does seem particularly poignant in the light of the special needs baby in No One.

Lovely review of The Unseen, Cassandre.

Cassendre I spent a couple of summers back in the 1980s working on a farm in Norway and have enjoyed a few Norwegian authors, particularly Per Pettersen, but I'd not heard of Roy Jacobsen before. Great reviews and have added to my wish list.

I actually finished some books this week!

33. Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to Happiness - Gently amusing guide to things that have made Bill Bailey happy, which largely turns out to be outdoorsy holidays in Scandinavia and the Tropics.

34. This Must Be The Place - Maggie O’Farrell
The story of Daniel Sullivan, a linguistics professor, and his relationship with his wife Claudette, a film star turned recluse, told from multiple viewpoints and with chapters going back and forth in time to fill in the backstory. I found this a relaxing leisurely read, and the characters felt like real people who I genuinely wished well for, partly because it took me a long time to get through it (life’s fault not the book’s) so I spent a long time in their world. Much better than Hamnet.

@Cassandre. Have immediately ordered The Unseen. Thank you for that review!

@StitchesInTime, the supporting cast in Friday's Child is fabulous though! The Nemesis bit makes me laugh just to think about.

63. Troy by Stephen Fry. I enjoyed this a lot- I was expecting to find it less engaging than Mythos or Heroes, as in general I like myths more than war stories, as it were, but this was very fluent and engaging. Also interesting to compare with the Richard Curtis/ Toby Robinson version I just read to my class. I would recommend this even if you haven't read the other two, you don't need the background knowledge.

@Tanaqui yes, I agree, while Hero is not my favourite Heyer heroine, the supporting cast is fantastic.

61: The Rare and the Beautiful - Cressida Connolly

Group biography of the nine Garman children, who flourished in bohemian and arty circles in the 1920s/30s, and their various offspring - although Connolly focuses mostly on sisters Kathleen, Mary and Lorna.

This started out quite promisingly but as it wore on I started to feel very impatient indeed with these people, whose unearthly physical beauty is constantly gushed over, but whose habit of neglecting their children doesn't seem worthy of much comment. Kathleen became the mistress of the sculptor Jacob Epstein and spent thirty years living round the corner from his marital home and stroking his ego, while sending two of the three children she bore him away (you've guessed it - the girls) to be farmed out to other people...meanwhile the long-suffering Mrs Epstein was already bringing up two children born to two other women her husband had had affairs with.

Mary married the volatile poet Roy Campbell, had a passionate affair with the voracious Vita Sackville-West (shades of Gloomsbury descend over the book at this point) then reconciled with Roy and spent years living in bohemian penury in various picturesque hovels in Spain and Portugal while their two children seem to have been more or less ignored and left to become lice-ridden, to the point where one caught typhus.

Youngest sister Lorna (''spellbinding...the loveliest of all the sisters') who'd married into wealth at 17 embarked on an all-consuming affair with the young Laurie Lee which produced a daughter. Lorna then dumped Lee in favour of the young Lucian Freud, who later dumped her in favour of...her own niece, Kitty.

As a roll-call of artistic big-hitters of the inter-war period, this is an interesting record, since just about everyone you can think of gets a mention, but I was left wondering what the Garmans actually did apart from look decorative, have lots of extra-marital sex and produce children they didn't seem to like much. Ultimately irritating.

Just finished what is only book 26 which is a bit crap really. It was Darren McGarvey's Poverty Safari. I really enjoyed his recent BBC programme , the book not so much. Every chapter comes to some kind of climax which I think he is going to build on with maybe some suggestions - and then he doesn't. In fact, he offers no solutions other than have a baby, really. It's quite polemical in places, and he discusses why working class people might feel deserted by the left. But it never really goes anywhere. Considering it's about my home city, it says very little about it compared to , say, Shuggie Bain.

37. The Sign of the Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Audiobook from BorrowBox. I think part of the reason I am reading/listening to this is so that I can tick off Sherlock Holmes on those infernal reading lists. A convoluted plot expertly and enthusiastically narrated by Stephen Fry. Dated in terms of depicting women and people of colour but interesting in terms of central anti-hero and spotting classic Sherlockian quotes. I liked “while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty” but the most famous from this book is “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

38. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter.

Short stories based on well known fairy tales. Lovely sensual, descriptive writing.

35. When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy

Still ridiculously busy so probably not the best time to read this short but hard-hitting novel based on the author's own experience of an abusive marriage. Kandasamy has been very clear that she does not describe this as memoir, but from reading her comments that's more because she regards memoir as looking at someone's whole life, when this experience should only merit a "footnote" in hers - not because it isn't her representation of what actually happened to her. The form of the novel is loose - not wholly chronological, with thoughts and musings coming from left-field, and structured to some extent about the changing reactions of her parents. It's well and graphically written (Kandasamy is a poet), and I thought the portrayal of the parents' reactions was probably the best bit; Kandasamy is able to criticise their need to conform and inability to respond effectively to her husband's mental and physical violence, as well as showing both their love for her and her love for them. It's probably a credit to the book and the writing that I finished it at all at the moment, but it didn't grab me quite as hard as I expected - I think primarily because I just have too much going on really to think about it at the moment.

No time to catch up on the thread but I really hope things will calm down soon so I can read all your reviews. I have scrolled back far enough to see @BestIsWest and @Terpsichore are enjoying the Sandhamn Murders still - I envy you for still having some to read as they are just what I need at the moment!

Ha! I know what you mean, Best - I had to restrain myself from plunging straight back into the comfort of another Sandhamn book as my next fiction read....I started picking them up ages ago on kindle so I've had them all waiting, and the temptation to binge is strong.

I've managed to resist but I might need to give in after my next non-fiction....I'm up to no. 5, I think.