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.

@Tanaqui 💐

I am so sorry Tanaqui, there are no words.

I'm glad you are back.

I'm so very sorry Tanaqui

Tanaqui Such awful news.

Comfort reading is a small help. Anything that can take you away from the awfulness of life even for a short time is good.

@Tanaqui

I've been off the thread today, so just seen your post. My heart goes out to you. Having lost a close family member myself in the last year, I found that comforting reading was about all I could manage for a long time. But as magimedi says, that is a positive if it helps in the slow process of dealing with everything. My very best wishes

@tanaqui, so sorry for your loss. I have at least one of the HIlary McKay books on my Kindle, but I don't have an eleven year old to try them out on. I do know what you mean about wondering whether some children's books are better suited to sentimental adults. I missed out on reading Michelle Magorian at that age - well, I think she'd only published one novel when I was 10 and it's taken me some decades to get to it.

I’m so sorry Tanaqui.

DD is 11 and I think has read some Hilary McKay so I will report back!

Oh Tanaqui, I'm so very sorry for your tragic loss. Take care of yourself

Tanaqui I am so very sorry for your loss

I’m so sorry to hear about your loss Tanaqui, sending love your way

Tanaqui I'm so sorry to hear your news. I can't imagine what you're going through. My thoughts are with you and your family.

That's so sad Tanaqui, every parents worst nightmare. I can't even begin to understand what you and your family must be going through but my thoughts are with you

I'm so sorry for your loss Tanaqui, much love to you and your family and glad to hear you are getting some small comfort from reading x

I am so sorry to hear of your loss Tanaqui and cannot begin to imagine how you and your family must be feeling. I am glad are able to take some small comfort from your reading and endorse the easy and familiar reads such as Agatha Christie at such a difficult time.

How awful Tanaqui, I'm so sorry for your loss

I'm very glad you are back and felt able to share with us, and glad that you're able to get a little comfort from reading.

I am so sorry for your loss, Tanaqui

I only catch up with the thread every week or so and am so sorry to read about your loss, Tanaqui. Much love to you and your family at this difficult time. 💐

I have just finished The Great Godden, a YA offering by Meg Rosoff. It's a coming of age style story set in the summer by the sea as you do. I have read lots of long hot summer coming of age texts and this is bland. Not much happens except a very handsome boy destroying people with his handsome magnetism and sex appeal. It has chapter endings that imply that something exciting will happen. Then it doesn't.

97. The Corner Shop by Babita Sharma

Was all prepared to like this memoir of what it was to grow up as an Asian Shopkeepers Daughter (window into another world etc)

Unfortunately it is very repetitive, and she has a massive hard on for Maggie Bloody Thatcher, shoehorning mentions of her into every chapter sometimes thrice, which just wasn't tolerable for this unrepentant Northern Lefty.

I have been thinking of you Tanaqui and send you my love.

39. Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers Thanks to everyone who recommended this, I really enjoyed it. Jean is a single middle aged journalist, living a drab 1950s existence with her demanding ageing mother, when she is drawn into the family life of a woman who approaches Jean’s paper with a claim that her daughter is the product of a virgin birth. Good on period detail - frighteningly, although I’ve always thought of the 1950s as distant pre-history, the book has brought home that my childhood was in fact closer to the 1950s than it is to now. My mum used to make clothes using the tissue-thin Simplicity patterns a character in this book uses, and I well remember the discomfort and tedium of having to stand, arms out, for fittings. As others have said, the ending seemed unnecessary - but being forewarned I treated it as an alternative ending I could disregard.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I'd very much describe myself as an "unrepentant Northern Lefty" and think I read Babita Sharma's references to Margaret Thatcher rather differently from you. I read Sharma's memoirs as being quite critical of the Thatcherite policies of the 1980s towards retail. Despite Thatcher's presentation of herself as a grocer's daughter who grew up in a corner shop, and the Tory rhetoric about the need to be hardworking and entrepreneurial, businesses like the corner shops run by the Sharmas were undermined by the relaxation of Sunday trading laws, the expansion of out of town supermarkets and the lifting of restrictions on them.

I remember being dismayed in the early 1990s when I realised that one of the local Asian shops I went to most reguularly had a plaque up saying it had been officially opened in a ceremony presided over by Heseltine. I then discovered that most evenings a guy I went to school with was running his family's shop nearby, on top of a full time office job and studying in the Business School in the local 1992 university (the one that was a Polytechnic previously). So I started buying my chocolate fix and having a chat with him instead.

I really did see the constant Maggieing as "Maggie Was My Idol, I will compare us as much as I can"

83: The Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories of Mystery Illness - Suzanne O'Sullivan

O'Sullivan is a neurologist with an interest in exploring how devastating and debilitating illness can result from what might once have been dismissed as 'hysteria' - the term 'functional neurological disorder' is now more commonly used, and she's at pains to explain that these illnesses are not 'faked' or to be classed as 'malingering'. She meets several groups of sufferers and their families, including the 'sleeping beauties' of the title: the young daughters of Yazidi refugees in Sweden who have fallen into inexplicable, unresponsive states and can't be roused, despite all tests showing no medical abnormality. This and other stories in the book essentially confirm that the brain is a strange and powerful thing which we still don't fully understand, and that the cultural and social expectations at play in our lives can be a central factor in the illnesses we suffer. Very interesting and engagingly written.

I have had that on my Amazon shopping list for a while (waiting for the paperback). Looks really interesting so I am glad it is!

Piranesi is on the daily deals today if anyone’s been waiting.

Thanks to all here who recommended 26. Hungry Grace Dent. This was just a wonderful food memoir about Grace’s life growing up in Carlisle and subsequent London media career. Joy at reading her experiences from experiencing the Big Shop at an Asda for the first time, to the variety of cuisines available in London is intermingled with her personal grief about her fathers gradual decline into dementia. Highly recommend.