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?

See I loved Black Swan Green and Thousand Autumns, thought Cloud Atlas good in parts, bit disappointed by Slade House, haven't worked myself up to trying Bone Clocks yet.

I have been stuck on non fiction for what seems like months (apart from the interminable Copperfield). I really need a great, and I mean great, novel to get me into fiction. Any recommendations, team? Plot-driven and pacey but nothing book clubby or too many feeeeeelings as Cote would say!

I'm with you on the Jacob book being pretty dull @EineReiseDurchDieZeit. I did like Cloud Atlas though. I also read Utopia Avenue recently which has another Jacob in it, the great grandson of the original one, and a weird Marinus subplot with flashbacks to the original Jacob which doesn't really work. The rest of the book is about a pop band in the 60s & the mind stuff just seems to be tagged on. I wouldn't recommend it! I did think after reading it that maybe I should revisit the original Jacob, but your review has reminded me that life is too short.

And I've just started Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls which is another boy coming of age story set in the 90s that reminds me of Black Swan Green.

@MegBusset have you read Mermaid of Black Conch? That's been my favourite book this year, it's a page turner but still literary.

31. Salt Path by Raynor Winn

Not an original choice for my Cornish holiday last week but I've been meaning to read this for ages.

So many people seem to love it, but I'm with the 50 bookers on here who found various aspects annoying. I think describing the holiday camps as prison is ridiculous!

I enjoyed the writing about being close to nature, but particularly in the first half was unable to get past how irresponsible they were setting off with so little equipment, including running out of water! It's probably supposed to be romantic, walking with so few material possessions but I think they were lucky they didn't get themselves into more serious trouble.

I don't think I'll read the next one.

65: Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives - Brian Dillon

One of those 'did I buy this?' moments produced this volume from a bookcase I hadn't looked at for a while. Not all the nine subjects are writers, but my attention was grabbed because one of them is Proust, and illness is a recurrent obsession in his writing (as it was in his life - no surprise there!). Charlotte Bronte and James Boswell join him on the literary side, with pianist Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol as the artists, and Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Alice James (sister of Henry) and Daniel Paul Schreber, a 19thc psychiatric patient who fascinated Freud, completing the nine.

Somehow I can't say I ever quite got totally immersed in it - which was annoying, because the details of the individual case-studies are really interesting, especially the Victorians with their mysterious 'neurasthenia'. There's still massive debate over whether, for instance, Darwin's lifelong complaints of poor health, which ruled his household, were related to actual disease, or whether Florence Nightingale's physical breakdown, in her 30s, leading to her being bedridden, was anything other than a supremely capable female finding an effective way to react to the infantilisation of a young (ish) upper-class unmarried woman in mid-Victorian society - nowadays she'd doubtless be heading a large corporation, with conspicuous success.

I think the problem for me was that there's a bit of a disconnect between the biographical, even slightly gossipy details of the subjects and their illnesses, and the passages where Dillon expounds on the nature of hypochondria and what constitutes it. It's a book of two halves that don't quite match up. Having said all that, I did enjoy the gossipy bits....and maybe I'll now get round to Mark Bostridge's biog of Florence Nightingale, which has been on my tbr pile for ages (although he thinks she really did have a diagnosable illness - brucellosis, caught in the Crimea).

The Appeal - Janice Hallett.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. Murder mystery told through the medium of emails and messages recovered from various suspects all of whom are involved in an amateur dramatics group who launch an appeal to fund treatment for the group leader’s granddaughter.

18) The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley It has taken me a age to finish this. I really thought I would like this as a friend was raving about it but no it didn’t quite do it for me. A very average 3/5. I persevered as had it to read for two book clubs and both book groups I couldn’t make in the end. It was not a page turner and I could have easily DNF. I just got quite bored with it. So no not a recommendation from me. It is about Julian an eccentric lonely 79 year old who has started of a kind of diary project in his green book about how his life has not been authentic and how lonely he is. He leaves his book in Monica’s cafe for the book to be picked up by another random person to write in and the next person just so happen’s to be Monica the cafe owner. You meet various characters the book goes to next whose lives become intwined with each other. The ending was one I guessed from the start.

Next up I’m going to start The Midnight Library by Matt Haig although have read some hit and miss reviews about this so will see how I get on.

Enjoying everyone's reviews, all of them are useful and interesting, even the ones where the book has not lived up to expectations.

29. The Country of Others by Leila Slimani This was my first book by this author. It sounded really interesting but I got 2/3rds of the way through, plodding and then DNF as I decided life is too short and there are so many more books to read. I've tried hard this year to read only books that have recently been released rather than retreating into pre 1950's fiction but I'm having an abysmal hit rate.

Mathilde is a young French woman who meets and marries a Moroccan soldier during WWII. After the war they move to Morocco to his isolated run down family farm. Mathilde quickly becomes a mother. It is a total culture shock for Mathilde, not only the heat and sheer poverty of her existence but also the isolation and being treated with suspicion and shunned by society and her in laws. Her charming soldier suitor has become a disgruntled and abusive husband but can she leave?

I liked the premise of this book but found the pacing off. It was difficult to get inside the head of Mathilde and it had strange insights randomly thrown in. For example, within the first few pages without knowing much about Mathilde we are told she masturbates and achieves orgasm through imagining the carnage and violence of the war. It was just weird and not referred to again or in keeping with the character. Events didn't flow or make sense. We are told Mathilde's husband is violent and abusive and that both he and his family are vehemently against education for girls. He is peniless and can't afford anything. Mathilde is needed to work every moment of the day but then their daughter is sent to primary school even though it is 15 miles away, requiring Mathilde to make a 30 mile round trip twice a day in their unreliable van - how did she persuade the family, how can they afford the petrol etc? None of it is explained. Due to events like this I found the narrative confusing and disjointed. It also felt flat and dull.

I am going on my Barnard Castle holidays next week (yes, really). Apart from James Herriot, anyone got suggested reading for the Dales?

I think at least some of the Jackson Brodies are set in N.Yorks/Teesdale. I remember him having a thing for the abbeys.

They are. Read all of those though ...

I did start reading one of the Dales Detective books but haven’t got far enough to comment really.

I think we may have discussed these sites or similar a few years ago, but there hasn't been mention for a while. Books by location...

Trip Fiction

Global Book Map

Oh how fascinating!

69. Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith
As a whodunnit, it works well enough - I was taken in by the misdirection. Did it need to be 900+ pages? No it did not. Robin and Strike are fine, even if I don't find them as enthralling as their creator does, but I'm bored of the whole "Will they, won't they" thing. It's been stretched out longer than Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis in Moonlighting. Shag or don't shag, I really don't care.

The "no one is brave enough to tell a high earning author to edit" has been a problem for JKR since Potter #4

84. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

Much read on here. I read it in pieces because it was anger inducing, I think another poster said the same.

Everything, Just Everything Is Shitter If You Are A Woman and You Can't Even Fucking Prove It Because Research Is Sexist.

I think the thing that I found most shocking is that most medicine/trearment for most diseases has been predominantly or exclusively data gathered/scientifically tested on both men and male animals. No one knows what it will do to women and no one has thought to care.

Disgusted.

An important but heavy book.

A lot of the continued lack of research on medicines in women is a hangover from the thalidomide scandal.

For a trip to Barney, some of Pat Barker's novels are set in Teesside, she's a local. More Middlesbrough than the gentile Barnard Castle though. And Queen of the Desert by Georgina Howell is a biography of the fascinating Gertrude Bell which is well worth a read. She grew up in Redcar but the majority of the book is set in the middle east. I've not read any but Gervase Phinn's memoirs of being a teacher and school inspector in the Dales are very popular (the local bookshops are full of them) so that might hit the spot. Have a good time in Barney, it's lovely and well worth a visit, we go there regularly.

Thanks for the welcome backs, im reading Richard Cole's book about his late husband David's death.

109. The Siege - Helen Dunmore Set during the siege of Leningrad, a family fight for survival against the unrelenting cold and hunger.

This is beautifully written, but I spent the whole book waiting for something to happen. I can live with no plot if it is a study of human nature or of character, but didn't feel this achieved that and needed something more. The sequel looks like it has more about it.

109. Another Life - Jodie Chapman A young couple divided by religion split, but spend their lives bumping into one another. What if.

Entertaining enough, but nothing groundbreaking. Felt a bit YA in places and very simple after the richness of the language in The Siege.

110. Charlotte - Helen Moffat Tells the story of P&P and beyond from the perspective of Charlotte Lucas.

Quite decent in places if you like that sort of thing, but I did have a lot of niggles with it. Ultimately the plot was too implausible and I found the attempts to weave in her own writing with JA annoying. She rewrote the major scenes lifting whole sentences of JA's own words and then popping her own in, or slightly rewriting sentences so they were almost but not quite JA. This grated in a way that other rewrites haven't. I usually enjoy falling back into this world, but it wasn't my favourite attempt.

Updating before I fall off the thread…

69. Earth Abides by George R Stewart

This is a post apocalyptic book originally published in 1949.

It opens with our protagonist, Ish, recovering from a snake bite that’s left him feverish and bedridden out in the wilderness for a while. Once he’s recovered, he sets off home from his field trip to discover that a pandemic has killed almost every other human on the planet.

Ish ponders a lot about existence, what’s going to happen to the world and so on, and sets off on a trip across the USA to look for other survivors. He meets a few people, no one he likes enough to stay with, muses some more about the prospect of humanity surviving, and returns back home to San Francisco.
Where he does eventually find some other people to form a group with.

Ish’s group is made up of nice, ordinary, easy going people. They’re not really motivated enough to do anything about restoring civilisation, not even a bit of gardening to grow their own vegetables - after all, there’s more tinned food in the shops than they can eat in a lifetime, and it’s a nice temperate climate in San Francisco, so why bother? And the whole group, along with their children and grandchildren, move towards a simpler hunter gatherer lifestyle.

It’s a very slow and gentle post apocalypse tale on the whole, with very little conflict.

70. Dead Head by C J Skuse

This follows on from Sweet Pea and In Bloom. Serial killer Rhiannon has fled the U.K., after having posted her very incriminating diary to a journalist, and is on a Mediterranean cruise while she waits for her contact to get her sorted out with a new identity.
Unsurprisingly, there’s more of the murderous behaviour that she’s displayed in the previous books.

71. The Pact by Amy Heydenrych

Forgettable story about a woman who’s found murdered shortly after a bullied colleague plays a nasty prank on her.

72. Killing Kate by Alex Lake

Psychological thriller.

Kate’s gone abroad on holiday to get over breaking up with her long term boyfriend. Her ex is not taking the break up well, as demonstrated when he calls her in her hotel room, and confesses to having called every hotel in the holiday destination when Kate asks how he got the number.

And then, when Kate returns home, she learns that a serial killer has been killing women who look like Kate. And her ex’s alibis are very flimsy.
Coincidence? Or something more sinister?

The plot does get a bit far fetched, but overall a good page turner.

40. The Power by Naomi Alderman.

I listened to this through BorrowBox after hearing a discussion on The Women’s Prize for Fiction podcast.

I was surprised by my own reaction to the switching of gender roles: men not allowed at night unless they are accompanied by a female relative, the fear of potentially being attacked, FGM but for men but disappointed by some of the character arcs and storylines. There was no slow subtlety to this story and I did feel somewhat bashed on the head by “issues”. Interesting premise, though.

41. The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller.

A brief intense romance between an unfulfilled middle-aged woman and a wandering photographer; this novella worked well for me as a holiday read.

42. The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, Book 2) by NK Jemesin.

Oh yes, I am loving this fantasy trilogy. Very much looking forward to seeing how NK Jemesin brings it all to a close. Will I approve? (Not that she will care! 😂)

Meg, completely with you as I also loved Black Swan Green and Jacob de Zoet, the latter I listened to via Audible.

68. Grown Ups by Marian Keyes. I love Marian, and although objectively this may not be one of her best, I found a lot in it that chimed with me and my life, as well as some lovely escapist hotel and travel sections. A pleasure if this is your cup of tea! Xxx

29. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart - As everyone says, this is gruelling, but rewarding. The quotes on the cover include ‘just about unbearable’, ‘gutted’ and ‘excruciating’ - with rave sales pitches like these we can’t say we’re not warned. Shuggie grows up in 1980s Glasgow with, initially, his grandparents, father, brother, sister and his alcoholic mother Agnes - but gradually everyone else drifts away leaving Shuggie to cope with Agnes alone.

The book takes you to places and experiences that other novels do not reach. Growing up different in a way that is visible to everyone but yourself - and the baffling hatred that that elicits. The bonds of family and the burden of an incapable parent. The poverty of worklessness, hunger, coin-operated meters and debt. Agnes has a sense of entitlement borne of being attractive but is brought low by men who would rather than see her broken than coping without them. Thankfully, there is always love - between the mother and her children and between the children.

Thanks janina. I'll check those out. Gertrude Bell was an answer on Pointless yesterday!