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.

Thanks for posting the Elizabeth Strout article @SapatSea, it's really interesting. I read Lucy Barton recently and wanted to know more about what was going on with her and William, which is barely touched on.

@Palegreenstars we did Lustre for a recent bill club too. I did find discussing it made me appreciate some of the humour now, like when she sings Phil Collins and the whole Comic Con saga. I do agree about the older man, I definitely found the character of the wife far more intriguing, and better drawn. The man could have been pretty much anyone.

*book club, predictive fail.

@elkiedee

The later ones after Anne and Gilbert marry are very dodgy but I was past caring I was addicted

I keep falling off the thread a bit. Half way through Luckenbooth but rapidly going off it, after a decent start.

Meg - Hope you're okay.

Adds Bookworm, Material Girls, and Beautiful World plus rereads of Absolute Beginners and Anne of Green Gables to the TBR pile. Sigh, you lot are not helping my book hoarding tendancies.

88. Doing Time by Jodi Taylor
89. Hard Time by Jodi Taylor
93. Another Time, Another Place by Jodi Taylor

I have finished my great St Mary's audiobook listen, encompassing the Time Police books, which I have really enjoyed. Honestly I have embraced the audiobooks in a big way this year, there's something so relaxing about having some read to me and it is great that they have loads of books available for members to listen to on Audible now.

90. Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton

The three hours of the title refers to the length of time a school in the south-west of England spends being held hostage by a gunman (or gunmen). I've read a couple of Rosamund Lupton books before and enjoyed them, but this one fell flat for me. There was a decent amount of tension building throughout, and the motivation behind the shooting was kind of an interesting approach, but was let down by the flat characters and plot. The reveals were fairly obvious, I'm not sure they were meant to be big twists or anything, but it didn't help. A major problem was that a lot of it just didn’t ring true to me at all, particularly the fact that a rural English school would be so prepared for a shooting incident, as well as the reaction of the shooter's mother which underwent such a speedy u-turn that any politician would be proud.

91. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Hamnet is inspired by the death of Shakespeare's 11 year old son and explores the impact of his death on his family. I really enjoyed the historical elements, but thought it was a good choice to have Shakespeare as more of a supporting character, in fact I don't think he is mentioned by name once, his role is in relation to his family and he's referred to as 'the husband / father etc'. I loved the character ofAgnes, who managed to be an unusual, greatly in tune with nature, without crossing the line into the cliched, odd-ball, medicine woman. The time spent setting the scene and introducing us to the characters and the rhythms of family life, was time well-spent, and Hamnet's death, and the grief felt by those left behind was haunting and beautifully written. The impact of grief on the Shakespeares' marriage was also well done, and I found the story of the inception of Hamlet really emotional. This is by far the best fiction book I have read this year, I absolutely loved it.

92. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

When Kya is abandoned by her family, one-by-one, she is forced to fend for herself in the marshes. The Marsh Girl, as she is known, is looked down upon by most of the town as 'swamp trash' and when one of the town's most beloved son's is killed, Kya is the prime suspect. As the mother of a small girl I found the story of Kya's early years incredibly sad. I can't say I have a particular love of marshes but the habitat really came alive and I found it very interesting to hear about the wildlife etc. I loved how Kya ultimately becomes successful on her own terms and while I half guessed the ending that didn't spoil things one bit.

34. Snap Shot by A J Quinnell

This was another great espionage story by the author of Man on Fire, on the events leading up to June 7th 1981, when Israeli Jets destroyed the Iraqi nuclear factory in Tammuz. I love the author's style: A slightly lighter Frederick Forsyth, mixing a good spy story with politics, strange and a history lesson.

Recommended.

51. It’s Not About the Burqa Edited by Mariam Khan.

Audiobook. A collection of essays by female Muslim writers, giving voice to their individual experiences and reading their own work. A range of topics, some essays are better than others, but important to hear these voices rather than often one-tone depiction of Muslim women in the media. Of course, this is a self-selecting population of educated Muslim writers but I thought still covered enough ground to be well worth a read/listen.

52. The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton.

An author mentioned several times on this forum. I have Hangover Square waiting on my Kindle but decided to give this a go on Audible. Miss Roach, a single women in her late thirties, is forced to move to a small town outside London and take residence in a boarding house after her house is bombed and demolished during The Blitz of WW2. We meet the characters of the boarding house, a frenemy and an American lieutenant Romeo. A character study, looking at loneliness, conflict and resolution with perfect descriptions of the routine of life (and drinking sessions!). Quality writing.

53. Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney.

I got in early and managed to borrow this from the online library. Waves to Stokey. I’ll preface by saying I enjoyed Sally Rooney’s previous two books and agree with Stokey that there are close similarities. Again she focuses on a small number of characters, two women and two men in their late twenties/early thirties and their relationships with one another, anxieties and outlooks on life. They are passive about their worries, but aren’t most people like that? The majority of “us” are not activists.

I enjoyed the narrative style; short chapters written as one long paragraph, some of the chapters are emails that the women write to one other. I will continue to read her work and am curious to see what she writes next.

54. Winter by Ali Smith.

Encouraged to read this by recent reviews of the last book and, thus, quartet. I borrowed this book from the library and was not disappointed. Modern England with Brexit, activism and family as central themes; will definitely read the next.

elkie - re: short stories - that’s very interesting. I’ve only started reading short story collections in the last few years, usually because DH gifts them to me. Do you have any stand out favourites? I’ve enjoyed Amy Hempel, George Saunders and Eileen Chang.

I was having a bit of a reading block, but I took an armful of unread books back to the library, which has freed me up to pick up things I actually feel like reading.

96. Consumed: A Sister's Story, by Arifa Akbar
A family memoir revolving around the author's sister's death from TB in her 40s. The author reflects on how siblings can have such different experiences within the same family - her father was wonderful to her and cruel to her sister. She muses on the experience of immigrating from Pakistan as a child, and the shifting power dynamics within the parents' marriage, but she's keen to avoid stereotypes: her sister asked if she could have an arranged marriage when she was 18, and her mother refused outright, and discouraged her daughters away from domesticity. She tries to understand her sister through her sister's art. There are also digressions on TB, from the death of Keats to the romanticized portrayal of consumption in 19th century opera. I thought this was honest, intelligent and dignified, and an engaging read.

On the last few pages of 97. One Man and His Bike, by Mike Carter

Travel writing - the author takes off one day on impulse to cycle around Britain. I've been reading this in short sections during my work lunch-break and it's given me some delightful moments of escape every day. Like a lot of travel-writing, it's about the joy of doing something different with each day, and really living your life, as opposed to plodding along in the same old routine. I'm hoping to drag dd out for a long bike-ride over half-term, but this let me at least do it vicariously.

Sorry I dropped off the thread again! Have been thinking of you @Tanaqui

75. Living the Dream, Isabelle Dupuy

This starts in an affluent yummy-mummy London setting, with a children's party and the awkward, charged conversation between the mothers, full of barely-hidden snobbery, racial discomfort and status anxiety. So far, so Motherland (except with Rolexes). However, the book takes a different turn. Dupuy, who lives in London, is from Haiti, and her two main characters are from Haiti and Colombia. Neither of them takes their affluence for granted, and as they start to crack under the pressure to keep up with the constant push for ever greater wealth, both women, feeling increasingly alienated, are haunted by cultural ideas of malediction, curses and magic. Quite a strange read, deliberately discomforting.

76. The Mission House, Carys Davies

Another one that seems like one thing, then reveals itself to be something else. A middle-aged Englishman arrives by train in a hill town in India, where he is offered lodgings by the local padre. He finds himself charmed by the town and its inhabitants, healing what we gradually learn has been a long deterioration in his mental health back in England. However, the story is more subtle than you think, and what sounds like a nostalgic colonial daydream is slippier, and sadder. I loved the beautiful and evocative descriptions of the damp town up in the mountains with its faded British architecture.

77. Heartburn, Nora Ephron

I thought I'd read this so I'm grateful to someone here who reviewed it and made me realise that I hadn't read it after all! A witty, wise-cracking New York story about heartbreak, based on Ephron's real-life experience of being left by her husband (the journalist Carl Bernstein) when she was seven months pregnant. Full of great, funny quotes about life and with the added bonus of recipes (Ephron's character is a food writer - I haven't tried the recipes but they read like real ones, not like the weird ones in The Sea, The Sea)

That’s the catch about betrayal, of course: that it feels good, that there’s something immensely pleasurable about moving from a complicated relationship which involves minor atrocities on both sides to a nice, neat, simple one where one person has done something so horrible and unforgivable that the other person is immediately absolved of all the low-grade sins of sloth, envy, gluttony, avarice and I forget the other three.

78. Lightseekers, Femi Kayode

Detective/police procedural set in and around Port Harcourt in southern Nigeria. Three students have been killed by a mob; our protagonist Philip agrees to spend some time there and investigate as a favour to his father, who is connected to one of the victoms's families. Philip is an academic, a psychologist more accustomed to investigating crimes through the pages of books than on the ground. But when he gets to the small town where the murders took place, he starts to realise that there is more to this situation than the locals are letting on, and despite the danger to himself, he determines to get to the bottom of what really happened.

I really enjoyed this as a portrait of Nigeria, and an exploration of some of the social/political issues in Nigerian society, all of which were new to me.

79. Victoria Park, Gemma Reeves

Loosely-structured novel set in contemporary Hackney, where each chapter follows a different resident of the area around Victoria Park in East London. Explores the social changes in an area previously inhabited by immigrants but more recently gentrified almost beyond recognition, as well as the issues that divide and unite different generations. I thought this was OK, it was an easy read but, while it wasn't cliched, equally I didn't think it had anything particularly ground-breaking to say.

I also DNF-ed The Truants. I really thought I was going to love it. I loved Secret History and got completely engrossed in the awful one about the Yale academic who is a witch, despite its awfulness, so I thought The Truants would be a great book to curl up with now that the evenings are getting darker. A couple of chapters in, I started to doubt myself, and by about chapter 6 I couldn't read any more. Awful tosh - I went back and read @PepeLePew's review from a couple of threads back and can't add anything to the perfect way she has summed up how and why it is so dreadful.

Eep, Viking, sorry you wasted your time and money. Oddly, I was just coming on to rant about another sub-par Secret History rip off in the form of The Furies by Katie Lowe, which I hated for all the reasons I hated The Truants. Four girls get invited to elite study classes without any seeming purpose beyond a vague "feminism through the ages" theme at their day school for a reason that completely passed me by as none of them seem that interested in academic stuff. Some people die horribly, lots of drugs are taken and there is so much teenage angst but god it was boring and went on for page after page. Any editor accepting a manuscript that claims to be "just like The Secret History" needs to take a long hard look at themselves.

46. The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman
Previously reviewed on here, this is billed as a book about happiness for people who don't like positive thinking. I listened on audio and found some sections quite complex and theoretical (which the author does acknowledge) and would have quite liked to have had a paper copy so that I could skim those sections and dwell on/return to the parts that were most meaningful to me. It won't change my entire life but I did have at least one lightbulb moment that will stay with me and I thought it was good overall.
47. Greenwood by Michael Christie
Loved loved loved this novel! We start in 2038 in a world where very few trees remain and only the richest tourists can travel to visit the few old growth trees that still stand. We meet Jake Greenwood, a tour guide struggling to make ends meet and with no close family around. Back in 2008, we meet Liam Greenwood, a carpenter. In 1974, Willow Greenwood is an eco-protester whose priority in life is to protest and take direct action against logging. Our 1934 storyline centres on Harris and Everett Greenwood, one a timber tycoon and the other living a reclusive existence tapping trees for maple syrup. In 1908 we go as far back as possible in Harris and Everett's lives, before travelling forward again in time through each time period, as if we have travelled through the trunk of a tree from one side the other stopping at these specific rings as we move through to the older growth and onward through the newer rings to the other side. This had everything for me - characters I was rooting for, historical contexts I was learning about, landscapes I could picture and would love to visit, family secrets revealed over time that made me smile as different plot threads come together. I was so swept along by the brilliant writing that I can forgive the elements of the plot that didn't go where I wanted and loved the repeated references to wood and trees and forests throughout the book. One of my very top reads of the year.
48. The Day The World Came To Town by Jim Defede
A short non-fiction book, I listened to this on audio in less than 24 hours. It's the story of what happened in Gander, Newfoundland on and after 9/11 when 38 passenger planes were forced to land at Gander Airport, leaving somewhere around 7000 people stranded in a small town with a resident population of 10,000. The foresight of some of the "characters" who reacted quickly to the situation and could identify what could be done to help was fascinating, and the kindness of strangers was heart warming. For me, this was a really good read and a lighter accompaniment to The Only Plane in the Sky which I read in the summer and thought was incredible.

@ShakeitOff2000 I first started to really get into short stories just through reading lots at university many years ago. I wasn't very happy with what was on offer from the English department and in my second year someone suggested a really interesting course in Comparative Literature on the Novel of Adolescence and Self Development. In my final year the only Comparative Lit course available was on the short story, and I could do my dissertation there and be assessed on that rather than exams for that component of my degree. I just read loads of collections by women writers and constructed a madly ambitious dissertation, but I did get a good mark for it, and I think I was way out of the tutor's comfort zone.

I have lots of favourites, and I enjoyed Amy Hempel too, earlier this year.

A few recommendations:

Katherine Mansfield, early 20th century New Zealand writer who died quite young of TB - she set her work in New Zealand, England and several European countries
Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, My Love and a second collection
Mavis Gallant - Canadian writer who spent a lot of her life in Canada
Alice Munro - Canadian, still alive and still publishing collections of short stories
Elizabeth Taylor and Muriel Spark - better known as novelists but there's a Collected Stories volume available for each of these
Shena Mackay - several collections as well as novels
Margaret Atwood - several collections as well as novels
Jane Gardam - several collections as well as novels
Petina Gappiah - two collections I think
Helen Simpson - 6 collections
Colette, I had/have a Penguin selection in translation
Angela Carter - several collections as well as novels - especially The Bloody Chamber
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

A few token men - Patrick Gale, Colm Toibin, Roddy Doyle have all published some good stories alongside their novels

Anthologies

ed Angela Carter, Wayward Girls and Wicked Women - has been available cheaply on Kindle for ages - and I followed up quite a few of the writers whose work I came across here as well
ed Hermione Lee, The Secret Self and The Secret Self 2
I have lots of old anthologies from Virago, Penguin and other publishers, some focused on women's writiing or writing from one country, writing by black women

ed Sinead Gleeson, The Long Gaze and The Glass Shore are collections of work by Irish women writers and Northern Irish women writers respectively - have recently read the first and am now reading the second of these

Some anthologies

I hope you are OK Meg.

42. The Appeal by Janice Hallett Thanks to everyone who has reviewed this, I wouldn’t otherwise have known about it and I loved it! The setup is that 2 trainee lawyers are presented with a dossier of emails and messages between a group of characters in a case that the boss thinks has led to a wrongful conviction. You read the dossier alongside the lawyers, interspersed with messages between them. Not having got on with gimmicky whodunnits Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle or Hunting Party I wondered if this would take me the same way, but this one worked brilliantly for me and I was hooked in a just-a-few-more-pages, don’t-care-where-my-phone-is kind of way. Combines the joy of an honest closed cast list mystery by an author courteous enough to call the dog Woof, the gogglebox-like pleasure of comparing your own reactions with the lawyers’, and a satisfying ending. Some very funny moments too. One warning though, one sense of the ‘appeal’ is a fundraiser for a very sick child.

43. The Five by Hallie Rubenhold Late to this one, a non-fiction about the lives (not the deaths) of 5 women who became victims of Jack the Ripper in 1888. Really interesting detail about all sorts of working-class and underclass experience, from distinctions between servants (responsibility for the horses came with significant kudos but nevertheless having to live with the smell of the stable), to addiction and the brutality of the workhouse. I hadn’t realised that for many people the workhouse wasn’t a permanent residence but somewhere for a couple of nights here and there when in dire straits. I didn’t have much knowledge about the murders and it was a surprise to me how old many of the victims were - most in their 40s - and that most were likely sleeping rough and perhaps killed in their sleep. Also examines the folk wisdom that the women were prostitutes. I read the first part of the book in paperback but switched to library audiobook which I found worked better - so much of the womens’ experience was so relentlessly grim - and it was more manageable as a listen while active than a sit-down read.

Two non-fiction books to add to my list:

51. Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman by Richard Feynman. This is not an autobiography, more a collection of stories from different parts of the life of the Feynman, the US physicist. There's no doubt that he was an interesting man who was open to new experiences (there is surprisingly little about physics) and some of the stories are funny, but it was spoilt for me by the casual misogyny. I accept that he was from a different era, but some bits are pretty awful. If I was going to recommend a scientific biography it definitely wouldn't be this one - I much preferred the biographies of Dirac, Einstein and Turing.

52. Happy by Derren Brown. I thought this started badly (castigating other self-help books), but it was worth persevering. The funny thing about the book is that I think of myself as a very happy person, and I agreed with almost everything he said. So, I guess that means it works! It was a bit strange to find my instinctive approach to life written down in black and white.

A little example of the misogyny mentioned in my review above. Once Feynman was phoned up by a US university and offered a big pay rise to move there. He told them that if he earned that much he'd want to spend it by getting himself a mistress, and that wouldn't be at all good for his marriage! So he turned down the enormous pay rise. Ha ha ha! All very amusing and what a jolly good chap he is.

37. The Girl From Widow Hills, by Megan Miranda. Hmmmm. When Olivia was a child, she vanished during a flash flood before being rescued 3 days later. Having changed her name and moved far away to avoid publicity, she finds that as the 20th anniversary of the incident approaches, strange things are happening.

This was very well written, atmospheric, and tightly plotted, but in the end I just didn't find it at all credible. I did absolutely love the relationship between the protagonist and her elderly neighbour, and the portrayal an oppressive small town was excellent.

Getting a bit fed up of mysteries or thrillers that have continual twists, but perhaps I'm just being grumpy.

Losing my reading mojo so popping in to placemark.
Have finished The Only Plane in the Sky which needs no further review beyond what I said when I had first started it.

I am 3/4 of the way through Daphne du Maurier The Loving Spirit and getting very very bored. Part DH Laurence (creepy weird mother-son relationship) part Thomas Hardy (but the "ooo arrrrr" interjections are from seafarers not rural farmhands) and part Dickens (evil money counting Uncle) this is very early Daphne (iirc her first?) and it shows. Beautiful use of language but willy-nillies hither and yon with mainly unlikeable characters and no real reason behind the plot other than to the the story of 3 generations. I'm making myself read 3 (mercifully short) chapters a day.

Rereading Down Under by Bill Bryson which is as Bill as they come.

Started some psycho thriller last night picked up on a 99p. Got through 10%. It's so good I've already forgotten name and author but it's what I wanted for a day or so. Get quickly through some nutjobbery involving People Turning Out To Be Weird.

Absolute Beginners is my second favourite Bowie song after Starman. I think I read the book back when the film came out but am ordering it on the back of the thread!

46. Rosemary’s Baby - Ira Levin

Diabolically good (boom boom tish, I’m here all week). I’m sure everyone knows the basics of the plot: young wife Rosemary and her husband move into a New York apartment building with a dubious past, and things go downhill from there. Even if you know the final reveal (which actually comes quite last in the novel), Levin is expert at building tension, and the deceptively simple prose style makes Rosemary’s life and conversations seem very real. It’s the sort of book you race through for the plot and then want to read again to work out how the author did it. Just… don’t read it if you’re pregnant.

(Apparently Levin wrote it during his wife’s pregnancy and I think it could be read as encoding masculine fear about the primordial capabilities of the female body and especially paternity uncertainty.)

47. Fear-Free Children - Janet Hall

Short book on helping children address their fears - some useful tips and some bizarre and cruel-seeming recommendations (to wean your child off a comfort blank, gradually cut it up into smaller and smaller pieces… wtaf??).

I love Ira Levin. IMO Rosemary's Baby is the best, but The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil are amazing too.

LadybirdDaphne

(to wean your child off a comfort blank, gradually cut it up into smaller and smaller pieces… wtaf??).

That’s….. monstrous. Surely very upsetting for the child attached to the comfort blankie!

The thought of my DC’s reaction if one of their favourite blankies was treated like that makes me shudder.

62. The only plane in the sky: An oral history of 9/11 by Garrett M.Graff

Can’t add any more to the previous reviews except to say I’m very
glad I read this.

63. Nomandland by Jessica Bruder
    Non-fiction about mostly older people nearing retirement in America living in mobile homes and surviving (quite often hand to mouth) its certainly a different look at the ‘small house’ movement which is very Instagram able. Instead there are people who have suffered the effects of the financial crash and forced to live in sometimes freezing conditions which picking beets or Christmas gifts from an amazon warehouse while well into their 70s. Eye opening.

64. Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
    A mothers is suffering from memory loss in her old age and her daughter in in conflict when she has to care for her mother but at the same time remembers how cruel her mother was to her as a child. Looking at goodreads this has very mixed reviews (incl lots of DNFs), I personally liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

65. Summer by Ali Smith
    Some wonderful passages in the final quartet – my preference for these in order – Winter, Summer, Autumn, Spring

66. Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin, translated by Hildegarde Series
    There is abit of something for everyone in here I think. Sometimes tragic and other times it reads like a heart-warming, cozy read. Violette is a cemetery keep whose husband has left her years previously, she tends to the garden, makes tea for the gravediggers which there are constant flashbacks detailing how she ended up in her current position. I don’t tend to read a lot of books like this but I found it enjoyable.

67. Plainsong by Kent Haruf
    Set in a fictional town of Holt, the book follows some of the residents including a pregnant teenager, a teacher in the local school whose wife is suffering a mental breakdown and two brothers who live on a farm on the outskirts. This reminded me a lot of The heart is a lonely hunter in tone, this will definitely be one of my top reads of the year.

Thank you @VikingNorthUtsire.

96. I'm going to make 100 this year, that will be the first time! Totally due to corona lockdowns, with help of a lot of light reread. Their Finest by Lissa Evans. I didn't enjoy this as much as the V for Victory trilogy, but it was quite enjoyable. Also set in WW2, it follows 3 different main characters who tangentially intersect when making a film. It was originally published as Their Finest Hour and a Half, presumably relating to said film- but apparently it was truncated when made into a film (I haven't seen it but it has Bill Nighy in according to the front cover picture). I quite enjoyed it but wouldn't particularly recommend it.