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?

38 Heartstopper Vol 3 by Alice Oseman

Finally got Vol 3 of this graphic novel series. Charlie and Nick go on a school trip to Paris.

Hearts Invisible Furies is 99p on kindle today for anyone who hasn't read it.

Hushabyelullaby Please don't let Kate Grenville put you off a whole genre. I haven't read that one but another of hers is firmly in my 5 worst reads of the year so far.

35. The French Lieutenant’s Woman - John Fowles

Finally got round to this 20+ years after my A-level English teacher wanted me to. It’s 1867 (as Fowles reminds you every 5 minutes, in case you might have forgotten), and handsome young gentleman Charles, engaged to the tiresomely conventional Ernestina, is straight-jacketed by Victorian moral hypocrisy. Despite himself he’s attracted by the Sphinx-like, disturbed Sarah, a mystery wrapped in an enigma that he can never quite grasp.

It’s a very self-consciously literary book - Fowles keeps reminding you it’s a novel, throws in his observations on the problems with Victorians, and even gives you a choice of two endings. His skill is that despite this, somehow the whole thing doesn’t disappear up its own… fundament - it was the sort of book that’s so gripping you take an extra ten minutes in your lunch break, thinking, ‘just another chapter, no one will notice.’ Charles felt very real as a man faced with the prospect of a stifling marriage struggling towards freedom, whereas Sarah with all her inexplicable and frankly often quite bonkers behaviour is not meant to be real - she’s a symbol of freedom, that slips away if you try to grasp it and tie it down. I don’t think my teenage self would have understood any of this.

It also made me see reassess one of my favourite books, The Crimson Petal and the White, which is now quite obviously a response to The French Lieutenant’s Woman, with the same themes of pure and fallen Victorian women. Fowles at one point considers leaving his ending ambiguous, with Charles sitting on the train on the way back to London, but concludes that a Victorian novelist would never have used this kind of open ending. Michel Faber on the other hand is clearly quite willing to use a train journey to leave the ending open (much to the disgust of most readers who’ve just got to the end of 800 pages…).

My motivation for reading this now was partly so I could watch the film with a young Jeremy Irons in it (swoon). I wouldn’t be surprised if Brideshead pops up on my reading lists before too long…

Quick catch up with you all.
Also trying (and mostly failing) to do one fiction and one non. Into the Wild and its spoilt brat anti-hero has kind of flummoxed me for that. I am, however, rereading Pies and Prejudice after being reminded how bloody wonderful it is.

@Terpsichore, have added the manuscript book to my wishlist. @VikingNorthUtsire, your reviews are amazing
@LadybirdDaphne, I read tFLW back when the film came out. Possibly time for a re-read (I've decided to permit myself some re-reads this summer as I look at my shelves and think "God, I loved that" Brideshead I've read a couple of times.

28 The Glass Room Ann Cleeves.
Definitely NOT the best Vera/Ann and had it been my first, would probably have gone into the Kindle 99ps Neither Good Nor Bad shelf on Goodreads. Dunno what she was trying to do with this one. In parts seemed like an Agatha Christie/Midsomer Murders parody. Rushed "ta-da" ending completely out of left field, Joe Ashworth behaving so out of character it was bizarre, and curmudgeonly Vera herself just slipping into prize bitch mode throughout.
It seemed as if AC had a handful of diverse, and equally unpleasant characters she wanted to include somewhere, so threw them all in a country house/locked room mystery. Odd. (maybe this was AC's Goblet of Fire, and the publishers were tapping their fingers waiting)

I remember that as one of her weaker ones too @SOLINVICTUS

58. The Midnight Library - Matt Haig. People love Matt Haig and he always seems to be raved about. I'm not convinced that he's that good a writer. This is about Nora who wants to die. She tries to kill herself and ends up in the midnight Library where her old school librarian shows her infinite possible lives she could have lived and a book of her regrets. For me this was a mixture of cod philosophy and self-help book with quite trite conclusions.

66. A Spy Among Friends by Ben McIntyre. I think this was reviewed by one of you quite recently- when I read the review it occurred to me I knew very little about Philby and the Cambridge spies, althiugh I think I may have watched a film or TV series ma y years ago. This is written as a chronological narrative, a little more story telling than biography maybe, and seems like a good start to what is obviously a complicated bit of recent history.

27. The Secrets of Happiness - Joan Silber.

Rather than the novel I was expecting, these are stories that have a loose interconnection with the family in the opening chapters of the book. A wife finds out that her husband who travels a lot to Asia has a second family with a woman he has brought from Vietnam to New York and who the first family have always known as the friendly hostess at their father's favourite restaurant. I really liked this first part and wanted to know more about the first and second families and I thought the prceeding chapters would deal with each member in turn. However, rather like Elizabeth Strout's, Olive Kitteridge books the next chapters deal with people only very loosely connected to the family (but not in such an integrated way). It is often totally unclear how the people are connected at all -it becomes a bit confusing and the author doesn't include any little details that let the reader know how they fit into the narrative. In fact, when the last chapter does go back to the original family 's eldest son, Ethan, I had to trace back to the first chapter to check he was their son.

Apart from the original two families I didn't particularly connect with any of the stories, they seemed a bit unfocused and there wasn't much in the way of revelations about the "Secrets of Happiness" to be had. Everyone seemed to live pretty joyless lives with just the odd flash of things going well or bringing some sort of fulfillment. I thought it all a bit dull and unrewarding.

38. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy The tale of the sad and disappointing life of the infuriating Jude and his love for his irritating cousin Sue.

An rustic orphan grows up with the sole ambition of getting to Christminster, there to mingle with scholarly types and learn at the great University. Following the breakdown of an ill-advised marriage to some strumpet who first attracted his attention by throwing a pig's penis at him, Jude finally makes it to his dreamt of city only to find that University is not meant for the likes of him. He stalks his attractive cousin for a while before making contact, then the two of them drag out a reluctant courtship for the next 200 pages before finally pretending to get married in an attempt to become respectable. Things go from bad to worse in typical Hardy style, culminating in the murder-suicide of their 3 children, perpetrated by the eldest, closely followed by the premature birth and death of the 4th, inducing in Sue a religious fervour which prompts her to go back to her first husband. Jude sinks into a decline at this and commits suicide by going out in the rain while suffering a cold.
Unrelenting misery with possibly the most annoying female character in all Hardy's repertoire.

Yolandi - Unrelenting misery you are spot on! I also think it isn't that well written. Books are strange though as sometimes they talk to me at certain times of my life and then on a reread I wonder what on earth I could I have gleaned from them.

Jude was one of those books - I first read it at 17 and thought it was one of the best books I'd ever read (along with Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying). I think I identified with the unrelenting misery, the oppression of the class system, misogyny and so on but on rereading it a few years back I struggled through it and thought it was pretty dire.

Terpsichore, I have had the De Hamel book on my shelf for some time (in hardback!). You’ve prompted me to pick it up - I’m on chapter 2 and am gripped. Can’t believe it’s taken me this long as it’s got all the things I like - books, monks, art, anecdote.

And Yoland, your review of Jude The Obscure made me laugh. Hardy doesn’t do lolz but Jude really is the worst kind of schlocky misery. I am a fan of The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess, neither of which are exactly light hearted but have never re-read Jude after I took it to Benidorm as a post A Level read and waded through it while my friends read Jackie Collins.

Great to hear that, Pepe - actually you can help me out, if you wouldn't mind! Are all the illustrations in colour? The paperback has a middle section of colour photos but all the other inter-textual ones and the chapter headings (eg the photos of the book covers) are B&W - which was frustrating as they're so beautiful. I'm on the verge of buying the hardback anyway and the previews suggest I'm right but it would be interesting to know.

Yes, almost all the illustrations are in colour (a small number aren’t and it isn’t clear why). They are absolutely beautiful; it’s one of the highlights of the book, I think. Most are full page as well.

Ooh great, thanks Pepe. Hitting the 'buy' button now

Updating with my latest reads:

52. Murder at the Vicarage - Agatha Christie

Picked this up in a Kindle deal as I do like a traditional murder mystery. I am sure I read this when I was a teenager (as I read most Agatha Christie books then) but I couldn’t remember it at all. It’s a Miss Marple and the murder conveniently happens at the vicarage next door to her so she is able to join forces with the vicar for some amateur sleuthing. The victim is the universally disliked Colonel from the Manor House and the list of suspects and suspicious characters is lengthy. I didn’t guess correctly…

53. Hungry - Grace Dent

I used to read Grace’s food column in the Evening Standard and now read her columns in the Guardian as well as enjoying her appearances on Masterchef. This autobiography moves between her childhood in the 1970s and 80s and then onto her writing career and dealing with her parents declining health in recent years. I am much the same age as Grace so both her childhood experiences and dealing with elderly parents resonated with me. Grace writes about her childhood and career with humour but there is a lot of emotion in the sections about her parents: love, guilt, frustration. Recommended.

54. The Widow - Fiona Barton

I have read a number of books by this author and they can be read independently of one another but there are some recurring characters: Kate, a journalist, and Bob, a police officer. Jean is the widow but the story starts before she is widowed when her husband, Glen, becomes a suspect in a missing child case. The storyline moves between the timeline of the child going missing and the investigation at that time to when Jean becomes a widow to uncover what happened. Kept me turning the pages but nothing special.

64: The Survivors: Jane Harper

Recent-ish Kindle deal. Like Harper's previous books, this focuses on a small group of people and involves secrets from the past: Kieran, girlfriend Mia and their baby have come back to his childhood home in Tasmania's Evelyn Bay to help his mother pack up for a major house-move - Kieran's father suffers from dementia. A family tragedy from ten years ago has overshadowed Kieran's life and now a further shocking event convulses the tiny community.

I wouldn't call this a total spellbinder and the ending seemed a bit limp, but it was OK. The claustrophobic atmosphere of a small seaside village was quite well done, I thought.

Just waving and saying hello betty welcome bk. Got about 5 different books going on still struggling.

39. The Last Days of New Paris - China Mieville Well, that was weird. Not sure what it all means but an interesting read nonetheless... In 1941 a Paris cafe is blasted by a bomb created by a devotee of Aleister Crowley. The "S-Blast" has the unlikely effect of bringing to life manifestations of surrealist art. Paris is sealed off to prevent contain the outbreak with all residents trapped inside, Parisians, Manifs, Nazi occupiers and demons released from hell by the same blast. By 1950 everybody has settled into their roles, there are frequent fights between manifs and demons, the nazis are attempting to harvest the power of both manifs and demons, I'm not entirely sure what was going on to be honest.

Apologies for the repetition, but like Terpsichore I've just finished 18. The Survivors by Jane Harper.

The story of a close-knit, quiet Tasmanian community reacting to the discovery of a young woman's body on the beach, and the incident's link with the past is reasonably engaging whodunnit. I've read a few of Harper's books before, and more than one could be summarised as Young Man with Dark Past returns from Big City to Small Town to solve Sinister Mystery. I quite like the formula, but if you don't you won't like this.

@TimeforaGandT, Grace has a new podcast out called Comfort Eating and it's an absolute delight. I'm a fan too and looking forward to reading Hungry.

Meant to welcome back Betty too.

Currently partway into the 900-page tome that isTroubled Blood so I may be some time. It's engaging enough but I wish she'd stop trying to transcribe certain accents. She doesn't do it for Robin (Yorkshire) or Strike (Cornish and London) but we get phonetically rendered Cockney and Irish. She needs to realize how othering it is.

Should have said I was referring to Robert Galbraith, aka JK Rowling.

Sylvester by Georgette Heyer
Ok. Not her best. It seemed rather long, and the precocious child, unfortunately, didn't drown or be otherwise horribly wounded.

Hello all

A little behind schedule still, and still not finished David Copperfield. But in the meantime...

20. The Nation's Favourite - Simon Garfield

An entertaining behind-the-scenes look at Radio 1 in the late 90s, during Matthew Bannister's sweeping out of the Smashie and Nicey old guard. Pretty funny, full of interesting anecdotes and also amazing to think how much things have changed since the days of DLT and Bruno Brookes.

For anyone interested in the Road to Trump, I highly recommend Behold America by Sarah Churchwell. This is a fascinating , and very readable, exploration of the origins of the ideas about and the phrases 'America First' and the American Dream.

Lots of very explicit descriptions of lynching which is disturbing. She makes the links between Lindbergh, Hearst and various KKK members and politicians and Trump very obvious. I learnt lots about how the American Dream is not a fixed construct and how much it has changed from decade to decade. Also lots about exceptionalism and isolationism.

She hints at Trump, rarely directly mentioning him but his presence ever lurks.