50 Book Challenge 2021 Part Seven

[southeastdweller]

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

Glass Houses - Louise Penny another in the Inspector Gamache series set in Quebec. I don’t know, some of these are good, some not so. This is one of the not so good, overly complex ones with Gamache attempting to take down a network of drugs cartels and the murder is almost incidental.

Currently not enjoying Some Tame Gazelle - Barbara Pym and wondering whether to bother continuing. I know some on here love her but maybe I’m missing something because every character is intensely irritating me so far.

47 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Hated the start of this and Monique's reporter style of writing at the beginning: 'I turn around to see the seventy-nine-year-old Evelyn Hugo walking towards me'. But once we started to hear Evelyn's story in her own words I loved it and couldn't stop reading it. A really enjoyable ride.

The Code Breaker is also on daily deals for 99p, one of my reads of the year so far.

I love Pym, Best, but i'd say that if she doesn't reel you in from the first mention of the curate's combinations, she's probably not for you.

OK, I was being unnecessarily dramatic about Untamed by Glennon Doyle I think. My book group had an entertaining and wide-ranging discussion on it. Main conclusion was that if you can get past the self-congratulatory tone of the American self-help genre, there are lots of good ideas in it.

LadybirdDaphne, coincidentally, Elizabeth Gilbert (known as Liz) seems to be a BFF of Glennon Doyle and gives her helpful advice in Untamed. I haven't read anything by her because the negative reviews years ago of Eat Pray Love put me off. My feelings about Brene Brown are a bit like my feelings about Doyle. On the one hand, I feel uncomfortable because they are privileged white women writing for an audience of privileged white women. On the other hand, I myself am a privileged white woman who often struggles with self-doubt and with not feeling at home in my own skin, so who am I to judge?...!

BestIsWest, I am planning to read Some Tame Gazelle soon, so am interested to hear your impressions of it.

On the subject of privileged white women:

90. A Year of Living Simply by Kate Humble Absolutely (and I imagine unintentionally) hilarious. TV presenter Kate Humble decides, while enjoying rural bliss on holiday at her second home in France, that she needs to appreciate the simple things in life more.

Fair enough - Gretchen Rubin in her Happiness Project does something very similar, and I like her books a great deal and find them helpful and touching. Rubin focuses on acknowledging her good fortune in life as a starting point, and then taking the time to step back from day-to-day irritations and appreciate her family, work etc properly.

Kate H's approach is rather different. She finds out about Repair Cafés, & visits the founder in Holland. Then when her toaster breaks, she buys a new part and gives it to her husband to fix. After explaining why the Repair Café founder had only agreed to her visit if she didn't fly, and waxing lyrical on the joys of train travel, in the next chapter she flies to New Mexico to be an intern on an Earthship build. She decides that she wants to grow more in her garden, so hires someone to come and do most of the growing for her. She rants about the evils of debt tying people including herself into the work-consume-work cycle, but her exemplar of how to avoid this involves a couple who started with £40k cash and lots of skills to build their own home. (Even more ironically, since she describes how she and her DH were fortunate enough to buy their own home in London with an £80k mortgage when she was in her early 20s, which would have been in the aftermath of the 1992 crash, had they not bought a farmhouse/land in Wales & a 2nd home in France they could patently have chosen to be mortgage free - I'm the same age and also lucked out on the housing market cycle so can say this from experience!)

Overall, I can only think it's a shame that Kate H didn't choose to write this as a spoof weekly column in a Saturday paper - complete with regular cameos from her (I imagine) long suffering husband Ludo.

That sounds really quite nauseating!

I have finished Americanah which, as with all the other Adichie books, I really enjoyed. I would not have picked up on her at all were it not for this thread. She should be on more school syllabuses! They have just added more diverse texts to OCR specs but it is largely Black British writers. A shame : Purple Hibiscus is ideal for GCSE and , on balance , Half of a Yellow Sun would be the better A Level book because of its war context. Americanah is more about relationships and so more grown up. I like the way it is really about what it is to be Nigerian - and what it is to be a Nigerian woman, and/or a woman, and a Nigerian in America/ Britain/Nigeria, and a Nigerian man, and marriage, and so on... It has interesting things to say on race in America and in Africa. I preferred the Nigerian set sections, all in all.

She is such a fine writer.

150. The Rebel Nun - Marj Charlier
     Novel based on real events. Bastard daughter of a sixth century king is deposited in a monastery. She hopes to become the next abbess but her ambitions are thwarted when an evil bishop installs his own successor in a bid to get his hands on their holy relics. After serious mismanagement and a breakdown of discipline Clotild decides to lead a rebel faction of nuns across country to beg her royal uncle to intervene.
     Decent enough monastic romp if you are in to that sort of thing that focuses on the fates women and limited choices they have to live independently.

151. The Only Plane In the Sky - Garrett M Graff
     Much lauded here recently and deservedly so. I thought it was incredibly well put together. The audiobook version is very well done with an ensemble cast.

Oops, forgot one.

149. Inseparable - Simone de Beauvoir Previously unpublished short novel about an intense friendship between two very different young girls that goes into young adulthood before ending abruptly. Commentary on differering attitudes to what a woman should be and the societal constraints of the time. Seen as too controversial to be published at the time of writing she left instructions for it to be published after her death. This is the first of more unpublished work to be released. Beautifully written and based on her own experience.

I HAVE FINALLY FINISHED THE FUCKING MILLENNIUM FUCKING TRILOGY.

Just saying.

I also (apart from the brief interlude of the gripping (why the fuck couldn't he have written like that in the other 987,000 pages) skim read lots towards the end, and don't care.

I almost threw it out of the window when it had all been resolved then she fucked off to Gibraltar and we had yet another inconsequential and irrelevant subplot explained in great detail.

Oops, so excited I forgot to say what was gripping.
The court room bit.

Thanks for the new thread South. I have fallen off the thread a bit, I'm still getting over the broken ankle and the operations, so I've been focusing on easy reads and Audio books have been brilliant for when I've struggled to concentrate.

Anyway here is my list and a few recent reviews:

1. Eleanor the Secret Queen: The Woman Who put Richard III on the Throne by John Ashdown-Hill
2. 52 Times Britain was a Bellend: The History You Didn’t Get Taught At School by James Felton
3. A Double Life by Flynn Berry
4. The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule
5. Tall Tales and Wee Stories: The Best of Billy Connolly by Billy Connolly
6. A Million Dreams by Dani Atkins
7. The Never Game by Jeffery Deaver

8. Misery by Stephen King

1. The Crooked House by Agatha Christie

10. Pied Piper by Nevil Shute 11. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 12. Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell 13. The Stubborn Lives of Hart Tanner by Shawn Inmon 14. The Tommyknockers by Stephen King 15. Fever of the Bone by Val McDermid 16. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth 17. The Retribution by Val McDermid 18. Bring Me Back by B A Paris 19. The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly 20. Scrublands by Chris Hammer 21. On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons by Laura Cumming 22. Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge 23. The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel 24. Klopp Actually by Laura Lexx 25. The Only Plane in the Sky: The Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff 26. All the Hidden Things by Claire Askew 27. Feynman by Ottaviani and Myrick 28. Becoming by Michelle Obama 29. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke 30. Cross and Burn by Val McDermid 31. The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill 32. Doing Time by Jodi Taylor 33. Hard Time by Jodi Taylor 34. Why Is Nothing Ever Simple? by Jodi Taylor 35. Plan for the Worst by Jodi Taylor 36. The Ordeal of the Haunted Room by Jodi Taylor 37. Another Time, Another Place by Jodi Taylor 38. The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin 39. Raising Sparks by Ariel Kahn 40. Ruth and Martin’s Album Club by Martin Fitzgerald 41. Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld 42. Only the Innocent by Rachel Abbott 43. I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death by Maggie O’Farrell 44. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom 45. Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor 46. The Very First Damned Thing by Jodi Taylor 47. One Word Kill by Mark Lawrence 48. Limited Wish by Mark Lawrence 49. A Symphony of Echoes by Jodi Taylor 50. When a Child is Born by Jodi Taylor 51. Dispel Illusion by Mark Lawrence 52. Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves 53. Hidden Depths by Ann Cleeves 54. Roman Holiday by Jodi Taylor 55. A Second Chance by Jodi Taylor 56. Christmas Present by Jodi Taylor 57. A Trail Through Time by Jodi Taylor 58. No Time Like the Past by Jodi Taylor 59. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? by Jodi Taylor 60. Ships and Stings and Wedding Rings by Jodi Taylor 61. Lies, Damned Lies, and History by Jodi Taylor 62. The Great St Mary's Day Out by Jodi Taylor 63. My Name is Markham by Jodi Taylor 64. Recursion by Blake Crouch 65. The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray 66. And the Rest is History by Jodi Taylor 67. Christmas Past by Jodi Taylor 68. A Perfect Storm by Jodi Taylor 69. The Camomile Lawn by Mary Wesley 70. An Argumentation of Historians by Jodi Taylor 71. The Steam Pump Jump by Jodi Taylor 72. The Battersea Barricades by Jodi Taylor 73. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford 74. And Now for Something Completely Different by Jodi Taylor

75. Hope for the Best by Jodi Taylor
78. When Did You Last See Your Father by Jodi Taylor
80. Why Is Nothing Ever Simple? by Jodi Taylor
83. Hope for the Best by Jodi Taylor
84. The Ordeal of the Haunted Room by Jodi Taylor

Continuing my journey through the Chronicles of St Mary's audiobooks which I have loved, like being wrapped in a comfort blanket with a hot chocolate.

76. The Back Road by Rachel Abbott

This is the second book in the DI Tom Douglas series and I found this story of a hit and run in a small village, where pretty much everyone seemed to have been out and about on the night in question, intriguing. There was a bit of a side mystery in terms of the main character's father, which had a pretty surprising outcome. Nothing earth-shattering but enjoyable.

77. Stranger Child by Rachel Abbott

This is the third book in the DI Tom Douglas series. Tom is now in Manchester (he gets about a bit like) and investigating the reappearance of a girl who was kidnapped years previously. The story definitely didn’t go where I was expecting and I was kept guessing through all of the twists and turns. Parts of it were hard to read, not in a graphic way, but I struggle with anything where children are in danger these days.

79. Nowhere Child by Rachel Abbott

A short story follow-up to Stranger Child. I liked this, but think it could very easily have been part of the previous book.

81. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

I have read a couple of John Wyndham novels and loved them and this book continues that trend. When a freak cosmological event renders the vast majority of the population blind, the Triffids of the title, a plant that is able to walk, is quick to take advantage. The different approaches people take to the 'end of civilisation' were interesting as well.

82. In Five Years by Rebecca Serle

The main character (not a good sign when you can't remember said character's name) has a flash forward vision, five years into the future. There was just cliché after cliché and the main character was a buttoned up control freak who didn't really have many redeeming features.

85. Chocky by John Wyndham

Another John Wyndham, this one an audio-book. When Matthew starts hearing a voice in his head his parents aren’t sure if it is an imaginary friend, or something more worrying. Really enjoyed this one, although the poshness of the narrator (the story narrator not the audible narrator) was a bit irritating after a while.

86. The Dark Half by Stephen King

This is the first Stephen King book I have read for a while. I put off reading this - the next book in my mission to re-read all Stephen King books in order - as I remember really not being keen on it. Turns out that I had got it mixed up with a Stephen King short story, Secret Window, Secret Garden, which has a similar theme. Anyway this book was just ok and another example of King drawing heavily on his own life with the main character, a writer who is a recovering alcoholic, dealing with the manifestation of his 'dark half'.

87. Come Again by Robert Webb

I really like Robert Webb, and I really like time travel, so this story of Kate, who travels back to the early 1990s to try to save the life of her husband was right up my street. One of the things I enjoyed about this was the idea that going back in time might not be as appealing as we think, as our perceptions are altered by our experience. I didn't really like the main character, not sure if he just had some issues writing a female character and I also felt like he had a bit of a list of themes he wanted to get across, such as girls can like karate and not be lesbians (!) but some of it just felt a bit forced. However it was the ending that was the real kicker, it was just so bad that it over-rode any and all good points. It made literally no sense, not even in an 'out there', stretching perceptions kind of way. I'm sad to say I didn't like this at all as I was really hoping to.

Thanks @Sadik i just picked up The Code Breaker, it sounds really interesting.

Just on the Elena Ferrante books, I really struggled with My Brilliant Friend, and it took me a good few attempts to get through it but I really enjoyed the later books.

Glad to finish White Ivy by Susie Yang. Was recommended to me by a friend but would not recommend. Just bought The Code Breaker. Thanks for the heads up on the kindle deal.

Great review @SOLINVICTUS made me chuckle.

I've just finished:
Such a fun age - Kiley Reid. I think I've come late to this and it was much reviewed last year. A young black woman Emira is working as a babysitter for a white family. They call her one night while she's at a party and ask her to come and take their 3 year old Briar out as someone has thrown an egg through their window. Emira takes Briar to a shop where she gets accosted by an older woman and security guard who think she's kidnapped Briar. This all gets sorted out but acts as the catalyst for the rest of the story. The mother Alix decides it is her job to befriend Emira, and show her how "woke" she is. The white liberal saviour part of the book is done very well. Alix thinks she knows what's best for Emira and is desperate for Emira to know how cool she is. The ending was a bit rushed and didn't quite convince me. Although quite a lot of the book is written from Emira's POV, I felt like Alix was the character I got a stronger sense of, maybe bring a middle class white liberal myself. An interesting read.

Second Place - Rachel Cusk. This is the third Rachel Cusk book I've read this year after Outline and Transit. Those two were part of a trilogy and followed a similar pattern. They have the same protagonist who listens to anecdotes each chapter from different people. While not in the least plot driven, I liked the writing and foumd them evocative.
This latest one has some of the hallmarks of those but is quite different. It's written in the form of a narrative to an unknown "Jeffers" who sends aware of some incidents that are alluded to but we never discover. The narrator, a writer M, lives in a house by a marshland with her partner Tony. They have a cottage on the land, the Second Place of the title, that they invite artists to stay in. This helps M cope with the isolation and lack of culture in her life. It seems like it's set in the pandemic, although Cusk would never overtly state this. But M's daughter and boyfriend are staying with them and there are references to the difficulty of travel. M invites an artist L who she's been obsessed by since seeing his work in Paris 15 years ago to come there, and when he does it changes the dynamic of the house. As all the Cusk books I've read, it's a bit naval gazing. The characters have deep philosophical and psychological conversations in a way that doesn't personally ring true in real life - maybe I'm just to caught up in the mundane. But the whole story here left me a bit perplexed, until the footnote at the end where you find out it is loosely based on another book written 100 years ago. Part of me is tempted to go and read the original text but I don't know whether I am that interested to bother! It's short and quite odd.

82: All Together Now - Gill Hornby

Picked off the shelf when I was staying away from home and needed something to read. In the nowheresville village of Bridgeford, the community choir languishes after its leader is hospitalised in a road accident. Staunch member and indefatigable organiser Annie encourages a couple of reluctant newbies to join and gradually wears down their resistance - discovering in the process that they have sensational voices. But can they fight off a takeover attempt and get good enough to compete in the county choir championships?

Chick-lit on a somewhat elevated scale, presumably written off the back of the Gareth Malone choir programmes a few years ago. It was intermittently amusing, although the plot meandered and there was a big saggy middle bit that almost persuaded me to give up. I soldiered on to the unrewarding end, however.

72. The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald

I know this has been really popular here. I admired the writing but generally didn't love it. It's one of those very poised, rather strange English novels which combines sharply observed, plausible black comedy along with stranger strands such as the supernatural, Shakespearean mix-ups and coincidences, and just annoyingly unrealistic plot elements which are neither useful nor funny. It just didn't work for me, but I appreciate that I'm in the minority, and I wish I could enjoy these sort of books more.

73. Throw Me to the Wolves, Patrick McGuinness

What do you get when a poet writes a police procedural? The answer, well, one answer, is this book, partially based on the real life murder of Joanna Yeates and the arrest of Christopher Jefferies, her landlord. Jefferies is a retired teacher, and McGuinness was one of his students, and he builds this, only lightly fictionalised, into his story. A young woman has been murdered, a neighbour, an eccentric retired teacher, is arrested, the senior detective on the case is an ex-student. He intersperses the detective story with flashbacks to the time that the two men spent as teacher and pupil - the early 80s, a boarding school with bullying rife, particularly from certain teachers towards their youngest and most vulnerable students.

McGuinness pulls in an awful lot here: not just the power of the press and their role in distorting justice, not just the legacy of bullying and of trauma, but Brexit, Operation Yewtree, anti-Irish racism, internet trolls, online misogyny and more. Generally he does a good job with all of this content - he's prodding at painful questions to do with power and vulnerability, the ways that they can shift, how the powerful person isn't always the one supposed to be powerful. At times it can be a really painful read, particularly in the earlier chapters where in the back-to-back chapters from the two different narratives we see the arrested suspect and the newly arrived schoolboys having their bravado, their protests, their humanity crushed and stripped away in a series of humiliations.

There are two things keeping it from being a misery-fest though (because a misery-fest would not have kept me reading). Firstly, it's lovely - the language, the imagery, the things you would expect from a poet writing a novel. And secondly, against all odds, it's genuinely funny - McGuinness's detectives have a line in banter which is witty and clever, and he picks their jokes and obsessions carefully so they add to the whole as well as providing overall relief (there's an ongoing story about a giant turd-studded fatberg on the news, which acts as a massive stinking metaphor for the flushing away and subsequent re-emergence of things people want to keep secret).

DNF Dear Edward, Ann Napolitano

And on the subject of misery fests..... I couldn't do this. I knew it was about a 12 year old boy who is the only survivor of a plane crash, and that it was based on a true story. I didn't know that it would start with the boy and his family going through security, the little tensions of a tired family at an airport, the awkward unbreakable love between two teenage siblings, the guilt of the working mum who sits separately to her family so she can get some work done........ All this and you know what is coming. I just couldn't.

48. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

A joint Audible (narrated by David Horovitch) and physical book (translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) venture. I loved it. Loved the portrayal of different relationships, Russian society and the multifaceted characters; I even enjoyed the farming chapters. Philosophical debates on government and society, musings on anxiety, love, life and death. The parts on hunting were my least favourite 🥱.

An engrossing Classic that I keep thinking about.

49. Sing to It by Amy Hempel.

DH bought this collection of short stories for me, some of which are only one page in length. Clever and well written.

50. Weather by Jenny Offill.

Reserved and borrowed this from the library after hearing Jenny Offill on the Womens Prize for Fiction podcast. The unconventional narrative style won’t be to everyone’s taste but was right up my street. Written in choppy paragraphs (reminding me of Maggie Nelson and Olivia Laing), the protagonist of the story, librarian Lizzie Benson, shows us her life. The story reflects the current anxious times - climate change, mental illness, relationships, impending doom - and appealed to my half-glass empty worldview, but is saved from depressing and negative thanks to the warm and witty tone of the novel. This was a surprise hit for me.

““Of course, the world continues to end,” Sylvia says, then gets off the phone to water her garden.”

I loved the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan Quartet; the second and third books are my stand-out favourites. The first book was a slow scene-setter.

74. I Couldn't Love You More, Esther Freud

Freud's anglo-Irish novel is definitely more Maeve Binchy than Sally Rooney, and from me, that's a compliment. This is an emotional family saga about mothers, daughters, secrets and heartbreak and I was going to suggest that it was perhaps a wee bit cliched (you've certainly read about these young Irish women before, with their cruel convent schools, their yearning to escape country life, their flights to England on the ferry, their jobs in Soho, and their traumatic unplanned pregnancies) until I found out that this is, like many of Freud books, rooted in her own family history. Her mother was a young Irish catholic who fell pregnant by a rackety artist, like the book's Rosaleen, and Freud explains that this novel grew as a sort of "what if" exercise - what if her mother had reached out for help and ended up in the wrong hands?

As I say, I like Maeve Binchy, and I like a good old weepy family saga. I liked the flashes of wit and the background characters. I liked the grit of the three main women, despite their universally terrible taste in men, and I liked the pacing and the way things turned out.

ShakeItOff, I have an Amy Hempel book which appears to be a Collected Stories up to the time it was published, The Dog of the Marriage - this is rather confusingly also the title of one short story, and I think of one of the collections contained in it. I think I bought it in 2012 (charity shop and paperback) and read a couple of stories, but finally went back to it and read it properly just this year.

I was going to ask whether Sing to It is a newer collection but then I decided to stop being too lazy to Google. I think that the book I read this year contains 4 volumes of her work, and confusingly shares the title of one of them, and was published in 2006 (presumably US date). Sing to It is from 2019. I suspect that none of the libraries I use regularly will have it though, because short story collections often don't get requested or borrowed as often as novels.

I did a course on the short story at university and have collected single author collections and multi author anthologies ever since. Over the last two years, I've been making a conscious effort to read them, both from my own collection and also some that I've had out from the library. I've just finished the last story collection that I've had out from the library since (well) before this year - I'd taken it back and got it out again several times. It's a very short book by Andrea Levy, Six Stories and an Essay - interestingly, each of the stories is offered with an introduction on why it was written, including a few commissions. Several are inspired by stories from Levy's mum, or from her research into family histories. She also points out that she didn't necessarily find these pieces easier than writing her 5 novels.

96. The Mercies by Kiran Milwood Hargrave

In 17th Century Norway, an entire community of fishermen is wiped out in a storm, and a new commissioner whose reputation precedes him is called upon to take charge.

A difficult one. Some really nice prose. Sense of place and atmosphere are done really well and there are times when you can smell it.

Equally, the characters are believable and well drawn and not hard to be in the company of.

But the plot goes nowhere, the descriptors in the blurb suggesting it's reminiscent of Handmaid's Tale are completely hyperbolic

Nothing much ACTIVELY happens in this book until around the 70% mark and then its all massively rushed in a way that sort of ruins the earlier slow and steady tension.

Also this is #1 in Witchcraft on Amazon and there's no real witchcraft in it just suspicion thereof

Eine I've just started Cunning Women which definitely has witches, but I have a feeling it's going to go all swirly gothic on me.

Not forgetting the Whale - John Ironmonger
A naked man washes up on a Cornish beach bringing tidings of doom. He's a programmer who's predicting a global ecomomic collapse and tries to get the locals onside to weather the coming storm.

This is brilliantly done and eerily relevant to recent events despite being written in 2015. If you can cope with pandemic/ collapse of supply chains/ lack of electricity and shortages of food in your fiction as well as reality then this is well worth a read.

I'm 75% into Dogs of War and struggling to finish. I don't think real sci-fi is for me, so it's back to Ishiguro et al I go. Soz, I did try.

Has anyone seen 'Olive Kitteridge' on Sky? Brilliantly brought the book to life. All the casting was spot on but particularly Francis McDormand as Olive.

I gave up on the Barbara Pym - fussy adoration of curates and canons not being my bag. I read Excellent Women years ago and wasn’t overwhelmed by that either.
Now reading Americanah - thanks to Piggy for reminding me I’d been meaning to read this for years, much more my thing.

Americanah is one of my best books ever. Enjoy, Best !