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?

I'm so sorry for these who are having a hard time.
I completely forgot that I read another book after the biography of the US Declaration of Independence Signers:
13. The Dinner Guest by B P Walter
I enjoyed the suspense in this book, and the writing was great: however, while I had sympathy for many of the characters and understood what made them who they were, I didn't really like any of them, to be honest.

71. Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

An unpleasant and weak man hides his sins and deceits behind his status as a preacher.
His son John wants to give his life to the Lord so why is his father STILL dissatisfied?

I mean, this got a bit too bogged down in Jesus for me to LOVE it, but, there was enough in the writing for me to read more Baldwin, this was my first.

Sadik I DNF Plain Bad Heroines the other day after only getting around 10% through. It’s quite rare for me not to carry on (especially as I reserved this at the library) but I just couldn’t get on with the narrative style. Had it been shorter I might have persevered but I just couldn’t put up with almost 700 pages of that narrative style. It’s a shame as the story sounded interesting.

58. The Night Hawks, Elly Griffiths
By my count, this is the 13th Ruth Galloway book. If you've liked the series so far (and I have) this is more of the same. It's the usual mix of archaeology, murder, complicated personal relationships and workplace politics.

53: Tonight You're Dead - Viveca Sten

Enjoyable and not-at-all-gritty Swedish whodunnit, part of a series set around the idyllic island of Sandhamn, not far from Stockholm. Welshwabbit is the other fan on here, I think

This is number 4 and I could have sworn I'd read no. 3, but it turns out I haven't (they're all queued up on the Kindle tbr list)...anyway, I kept going and will just double back to 3 at some point. It doesn't much matter as the general gist is the same. Policemen Thomas investigates a crime while his old friend Nora struggles with her ongoing marital problems, and occasionally they intersect when she helps out with some useful info. The well-described Swedish setting is highly alluring, even more so after a year + of no travel or holidays. In fact in that respect it's a bit like the book equivalent of a BBC4 Saturday night Scandi crime series.

49 Insignificance by James Clammer

This is a short but powerful novel, which traces a day in the life of Joseph, a plumber who is back on the job after a period of illness. This is about duty, desire, lust, mental illness, family ties and family resentments, as well as the heat of a suburban summer day and the lassitude that arises. And plumbing. There is quite a lot of plumbing. I thought this was tremendous. Unusually, I was gripped by every single sentence, and re-read many of them several times because I was so caught up in the way Clammer uses words and phrases. In that sense, there were places where this came close to poetry, while also having a clear plot and narrative arc. Would highly recommend if you want something different, challenging and a little disturbing.

51 American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

This is the story of Lydia and her son Luca, who are fleeing a drug cartel in Acapulco that murder her entire family at a weekend barbecue. Lydia is forced to leave her life behind and try and get to the US, travelling across armed checkpoints, outwitting her captors and boarding La Bestia, the freight train which runs north to the US border and which is used as the main migrant route by thousands of people trying to leave the violence of Southern and Central America for what they hope will be a better life elsewhere.

This is a hugely readable story and I see why it's sold so many copies. I don't think it's perfect - it can't quite make up its mind if it's a thriller, a political novel or something else, and the relationship between Lydia and the boss of the drug cartel was never really fully explored or resolved. And there's very little time given to what happens to immigrants when they do reach the US, apart from a brief encounter with a character we meet briefly who's been deported. I am always slightly frustrated when the child in a novel like this isn't allowed to just be a child - Luca's preternatural intelligence is an important part of the plot, but it is distracting and gets in the way of us being able to really see the impact that a journey like this would have on the many children who undertake it.

I know this has been heavily criticised for what some have perceived as cultural appropriation, and for the supposed inaccuracies in the depiction of Mexican migrant life. I understand the frustration Hispanic writers (and non-writers) may feel when seeing a story that they are trying to tell propelled to the top of the bestseller list by a white American woman. That's a criticism of the publishing industry, in my view, rather than of Cummins. And in all honesty, these stories need to be told, and widely read. I suspect far more people now know about the issues that migrants into the US face as a result of this novel than from reading the (actually much better) Lost Children Archive or similar novels. It reminds me a little of the controversy around Edna O'Brien writing about Boko Harum in Girl - if a story can raise awareness of something that is hidden from view most of the time, then I find it hard to criticise the storyteller. I can't comment on the inaccuracies - that's a slightly different issue. And certainly I will concede her publishers may have made some PR errors along the way - not sure the centrepieces at a celebratory dinner in Cummins' honour needed to have barbed wire wrapped around the vases to make a point about migration into the US.

51 Hungry by Grace Dent
This is a better-than-average memoir that resonated really strongly with me as a near-contemporary of Dent's who's also found herself way out of her depth in smart London restaurants trying to look happy as the fifth plate of a 97 course tasting menu comprising bark and lobster breath is put in front of me. For anyone with a working or lower middle class 70s upbringing there will be a lot to identify with - her account of her time as a Brownie was very funny and brought back all sorts of memories. Her love for her family despite their flaws is very evident, too. I found her account of her dad's struggle with dementia very moving.

@SOLINVICTUS I think the Allende is over researched and under edited, rather than badly translated. I've read House of the Spirits in Spanish & English, and didn't notice a discernable difference, although my Spanish is by no means fluent.

There is quite a lot of plumbing.

It's gone on the list, anyway!

Thanks for the review of Hungry as well, Pepe. I like Grace Dent's columns in the Saturday Guardian, and found her accounts of her mother's illness and death earlier this year really moving. It's one of today's Kindle daily deals, so I've just bought it for 99p. Result!

Books 16 and 17 were
The Salt Path
The Wild Silence
Both by Raynor Winn.

Salt Path was the better of the two

[quote Stokey]@SOLINVICTUS I think the Allende is over researched and under edited, rather than badly translated. I've read House of the Spirits in Spanish & English, and didn't notice a discernable difference, although my Spanish is by no means fluent.[/quote]
That makes sense, and explains the bits that feel "textbooky". Enjoying it though.

Also reading Into the Wild by Krakenauer which is disturbingly good.

I seem to be not posting despite writing and clicking. Will try again.
Krakauer Bad autocorrect.

Place marking - several books on the go but moving slowly on them all!

Thanks for the new thread, south.

Here is my list so far:

1. Fates and Furies by Lauren Geoff.
2. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo.
3. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

4. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe.

1. The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne.
2. The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante.

7. To Throw Away Unopened by Viv Albertine. 8. Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith. 9. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. 10. William Blake Poems, Selected by Patti Smith. 11. The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste. 12. Shards of Honour (The Vorksigan Saga) by Lois McMaster Bujold. 13. A Burning by Megha Majumdar. 14. The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did) by Philippa Perry. 15. Beastie Boys Book by Michael Diamond and Adam Horowitz. 16. A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson. 17. Boys Don’t Try: Rethinking Masculinity in Schools by Matt Pickett and Mark Roberts. 18. For Goodness Sex: Changing the way we talk to teens about sexuality, values and health by Al Vernacchio. 19. Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga. 20. The Mountains Sing by Nguyên Phan Quê Mai. 21. A Promised Land by Barack Obama. (Audiobook) 22. Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. 23. In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. 24. North by Seamus Heaney. 25. Holy Sister (Book of the Ancester #3) by Mark Lawrence. 26. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. 27. Value(s): Building a Better World for All by Mark Carney. 28. Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid. 29. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. 30. Luster by Raven Leilani.

And my latest reads:

31. Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore.

Enjoyable audiobook from BorrowBox. I’ve never read any Helen Dunmore so this historical fiction novel, set in the late 18th century, was a punt and worked out well. Lizzie Fawkes, raised by her intellectual, free-thinking mother, marries on impulse and, as a woman of that time, has very little choice when things turn out not as she would have hoped. A predominantly female cast exploring motherhood, society and duty with the backdrop of the French Revolution and its secondary effects on life in England.

32. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf.

Victoria Woolf has such a beautiful and erudite way with words. Published in 1929 and 1938, respectively, these essays distil, in a balanced, logical and even humorous way (A Room of One’s Own), the culmination of years of work: her thoughts, her research, her observations.

A Room of One’s Own ostensibly tackles women in literature and Three Guineas is a three part answer to address how women can help to prevent war. But they are so much more than that: independence of thought, forging a new way, patriotism and society - these essays are densely full of ideas, still relevant today. I can see myself revisiting these in the future.

“We can best help you to prevent war not by joining your society but by remaining outside your society but in cooperation with its aim. That aim is the same for both of us. It is to assert ‘the rights of all - all men and women - to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty’.”

I am slowly working my way through feminist texts, classic and more modern. I find myself wondering how I have not read these before and if my teens and twenties would have been different if I had.

Now, I am listening to Women, Race and Class by Angela Y.Davies and on the physical TBR-at-some-point pile is Extracts from The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir (part of my birthday haul from DH).

33. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood.

Audiobook. Short novella from the point of view of Penelope, Odysseus’ wife. I liked how the female characters are not blandly likeable, the snarky look at toxic female-female relationships and how they undermine progress, the chorus of the dead maids. I have enjoyed the recent retellings of The Iliad and The Odyssey - Circe and The Silence of the Girls - and enjoyed this one too.

34. The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry.

Another entertaining and likeable read mixing historical fiction and crime with the backdrop of the history of anaesthesia. This is my kind of crime novel (crime not being a favourite genre of mine).

47. Harnessing Peacocks - Mary Wesley. I'm sure I'd read this before but didn't remember it and was the perfect read for a sunny half term. It follows Hebe, who works as a live in chef for rich old ladies, doing a few weeks here and there and fitting it in around her son Silas's school holidays. But she also works as a courtesan and has a syndicate made up of men loosely connected to the ladies she works for. The members of the syndicate we meet are obsessed with her and her secretive nature. There are some great characters in this, a few slightly unbelievable coincidences, and the whole thing is a jolly romp.
48. Not that Sort of Girl - Mary Wesley. I thought I'd read another of hers during a hectic start to the work week. I didn't enjoy this as much. It's about recently widowed Rose who, despite her innocent appearance, has been having an affair with Mylo all her adult life. Lots of flashbacks to they're various meetings, mainly during the second world war, but not as good as Harnessing Peacocks or The Camomile Lawn.
49. No-one is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood. I'm not sure what I thought about this, is very clever but was a bit fragmented (intentionally) for me. The unnamed narrator spends her time on the internet, the "portal", and is known for her amusing Tweets. The first half is musings on the portal and what everyone is looking at, reacting to. It's deliberately written like Twitter threads and I think works as a genuine internet novel. It did make me think a lot about internet use, constant scrolling and attention spans. In the second half of the book, her sister's baby is discovered to have severe disabilities and the narrative moves to more what is real and how the baby is not reflected in the portal. I felt quite detached from the book as a whole, but am interesting read.

43. When I was Ten - Fiona Cummins

Two sisters are physically and mentally abused by parents, who to all appearances, are great. One day one of the sisters snaps and kills then both as they sleep.

The book follows the story of the sisters and ultimately reveals that all is not initially as it had seemed.

I enjoyed this book and didn't force the way things were revealed to have happened. It's not amazing but I found it a solid book to get lost in.

44. The Chain - Adrian McKinty
I really liked the premise of this book! It is described as 'VICTIM, SURVIVOR, ABDUCTOR, CRIMINAL...YOU WILL BECOME EACH ONE'

I've tried explaining it in my own words but can't better the blurb, so here it is

Rachel Klein drops her daughter at the bus stop and heads into her day. But a cell phone call from an unknown number changes everything: it’s a woman on the line, informing her that she has Kylie bound and gagged in her back seat, and the only way Rachel will see her again is to follow her instructions exactly: pay a ransom, and find another child to abduct. This is no ordinary kidnapping: the caller is a mother herself, whose son has been taken, and if Rachel doesn’t do as she’s told, the boy will die

“You are not the first. And you will certainly not be the last.” Rachel is now part of The Chain, an unending and ingenious scheme that turns victims into criminals

The rules are simple, the moral challenges impossible; find the money fast, find your victim , and then commit a horrible act you’d have thought yourself incapable of just twenty-four hours ago

But what the masterminds behind The Chain know is that parents will do anything for their children. It turns out that kidnapping is only the beginning

As a parent just the idea of this is horrific, far fetched you may think, but the fact it's completely plausible makes it all the scarier! There are no whodunnits, but I was still able to while away a few hours with this. In fact I kept wanting to read on, even if I did question it in parts..

and didn't FORSEE the way things were revealed, not force

54: Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell

I enjoyed Shaun Bythell's Diary of a Bookseller a couple of years ago and this is essentially more of the same: encounters with baffling and/or obtuse customers, endless frustrations with Amazon and the technology that powers online selling, and the various weird and wonderful (or not) members of staff who work in his shop.
There's also a certain amount about his private life: in this sequel his girlfriend - in fact, wife - 'Anna' decides to leave him and return to America (he's since remarried and had a baby), and was later also to write her own book about working in this eccentric establishment, so it's spawned something of a mini-literary genre of its own by now.
Very enjoyable for those with a love of lurking round secondhand bookshops.

"I DNF Plain Bad Heroines the other day after only getting around 10% through"

TBH I can see that the style could be annoying, I think it just appealed to me. I had it as an ebook for the library, and hadn't actually realised it was particularly long (it was a pretty quick read). I found the historical sections much less appealing, & zipped through those, particularly because as a confirmed non-horror reader I only skimmed the spooky bits. I really enjoyed the modern day sections though, & the interactions between the three women leads.

from the library!

@ShakeItOff You mention listening to Women, Race and Class - who is reading it? Is it Angela Davis herself?

36. Broken Greek by Pete Paphides
I think a few on here read this when it first came out. Reading lots of gloopily positive twitter publicity put me off a bit, but not enough not to get it in paperback. And it's great. I felt it was quite close to Frank Skinner's autobiography, but fewer jokes, more music, gentler emotion. PP is exactly my age which helped me think about what was similar and different in his experience growing up with Greek Cypriot immigrant parents who were never reconciled with having to stay here. I loved the way that he wrote about his intertwined relationships with his mother, his brother and music. He writes sympathetically about his father too but the complexity of that relationship is greater. In general, more subtle than I expected and of course I've downloaded the Spotify playlist.

72. Chanel's Riviera by Anne de Courcy

The Blurb :

Far from worrying about the onset of war, in the spring of 1938 the burning question on the French Riviera was whether one should curtsey to the Duchess of Windsor. Few of those who had settled there thought much about what was going on in the rest of Europe. It was a golden, glamorous life, far removed from politics or conflict.

Featuring a sparkling cast of artists, writers and historical figures including Winston Churchill, Daisy Fellowes, Salvador Dalí, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Eileen Gray and Edith Wharton, with the enigmatic Coco Chanel at its heart, CHANEL'S RIVIERA is a captivating account of a period that saw some of the deepest extremes of luxury and terror in the whole of the twentieth century.

From Chanel's first summer at her Roquebrune villa La Pausa (in the later years with her German lover) amid the glamour of the pre-war parties and casinos in Antibes, Nice and Cannes to the horrors of evacuation and the displacement of thousands of families during the Second World War, CHANEL'S RIVIERA explores the fascinating world of the Cote d'Azur elite in the 1930s and 1940s. Enriched with much original research, it is social history that brings the experiences of both rich and poor, protected and persecuted, to vivid life.

The Reality :

First Half : Shallow insufficient and insubstantial depictions of some of Chanel's friends, and also people in the neighbouring areas, some with little evidence provided that they even ever met Chanel

Second Half : Depictions of life under the Vichy regime and of Jewish persecutions. Whilst this is an important topic, it randomly digresses so much, and then goes oh yes, this is where Chanel was then. Chanel was an antisemite, and had a German boyfriend, she experienced little of the deprivations of the war, and so quite what it has to do with her is anyone's guess.

Livid.

Doesn't know what it is or what it wants to be. Is basically a superficial poorly written social history of the region before and during the war, invoking Chanel's name for glamour, relevancy and sales.

Easily worst this year. It has such good reviews too 🤔

14. Confessions of a Bookseller, Shaun Bythell Like @Terpsichore, I had read Diary of a Bookseller a few years ago: I listened to this one on audiobook. I found it enjoyable overall, with some very funny parts (such as the translation books with very detailled phrases). I felt there were some times where Bythell came across as overly condescending (Nicky may not have been the best employee, but she seemed more competent than he gave her credit) and also I appreciate that with the audiobook version, Granny's accent and phrases were more exaggerated. I'm so so glad that he is happy and settled with a baby (I did not see this in the epilogue).

55: House of Correction - Nicci French

After moving back to the village where she grew up, Tabitha Hardy finds herself in a living nightmare - accused of the murder of her next-door neighbour. In prison, she struggles to overcome her terror and confusion and decides to defend herself in court at her trial, even though she has no concrete memory of what happened on the day of the murder. Can she piece together enough proof from the evidence to convince a jury that she didn't do it?

I can't help finding Nicci French (well, the writing duo known as NF) compulsively readable, and this was no exception, even though I can't seriously believe that any judge would allow a defendant to conduct themselves in court in the way that Tabitha Hardy does. Twisty and enjoyable.

(@ComeDoonTheStairs re Shaun Bythell - I was googling to find the spoof rap video he mentions, and stumbled across the fact that he's now married with a little girl - but yes, it's not mentioned in the book).

@Terpsichore yes, I'm the other Sandhamn Murders fan! The setting is definitely the main pull for me. And after however many books it is now, I even quite like Nora.