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.

POTENTIAL SPOILER

The fall through the air of the true wise friend called Piggy makes me sob.

Hence my user name. Poor Piggy. he didn't fall though, Ralph

I do find Simon a bit dull/ unsettlingly odd but, oh my word, the pig slaughter is horrific.

I have bought The Last Duel, it had an interesting review in the Times

I wasn't sure whether your sad face was about the character eine or apologising to me for not liking the book!

I have an alternative David Copperfield inspired username which occasionally gets an outing and a Boxer and a Lennie themed name but Piggy has stuck to me like glue!

I seem to root for the innocents and the bullied!

Simon is supposed to be unsettlingly odd though. But that bit after THE BIT, where Golding says something along the lines of, 'They could see how small a beast it was and how its blood was spreading in the sand' makes me howl, and the later bit with the sea creatures. :( :(

I still remember having to do a GSCE essay on the last line in LOTF. So good.
A friend just recommended the audible book.

44. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

So I am not really a fan of classic literature. I know it's discussed on here a lot, but being forced to read Far From The Madding Crowd for GCSE put me off for decades.

But this rated so highly in this threads top reads ever discussion I thought I'd give it a go.

I really really loved it! What I dislike about other classics is the very long descriptive passages, and I was so surprised this was nearly all dialogue.

I was so entertained by how focused everyone is on looks and money earned and the connections a family has.

I'm so pleased I read it, and will be picking another classic to read in a few months

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie

I just felt I wasn't its audience. I read that it was so seriously edited that Golding ended up being quite unhappy with it. I also read that Simon was meant to be like a prophet figure who was epileptic and having visions of God.

And @Piggywaspushed - I finally get your username - yes I meant the character

But Ralph as well, just trying to be a good Navy child - sucks to Jack Merridew

@RazorstormUnicorn

It must have been your teacher, please try Madding again, I LOVED it.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit really? I remember it being really boring. We didn't even manage to finish the book as it was so big. I was so envious of the set below me who got to do Of Mice And Men

I'm not promising, but I'll think about it

We were not Setted (if only) at my very bog standard comp with a teacher who insisted on reading OMAM in a forced US drawl, nightmares!

@Sadik I loved Kitchen Confidential earlier this year and got very excited about Japanese / German knives for a while. I’d really recommend his show No Reservations if you’ve not seen it.

So pleased you enjoyed Pride and Prejudice, RazorstormUnicorn! One of my all time favourites

Eine I nearly got pitchforked off the thread for disliking Lord of the Flies a few years ago. I was disappointed with it too.
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I've been having an easy reading phase of catching up with my next installments of the Ruth Galloway and Simon Serailler series'. I haven't really got the concentration for anything better at the moment.

@FortunaMajor - Elly Griiffiths' books are always a priority for me - the next Ruth Galloway (#14: The Locked Room) is due on DS2's 13th birthday in February, and I've been wondering whether I can justify pre-ordering it as a present to myself to celebrate the anniversary of his birth.

I am collecting her newest book, (The Midnight Hour - Brighton series #6, set in the 1960s) published on 30 September, from a library reserve shelf this afternoon, along with the new Sarah Hall, Burntcoat.

And I found it hard to concentrate on reading for most of last year. The Postscript Murders was one of two or three books that really helped me to get back into reading at about this time in 2020.

I've quite enjoyed the Thomas Hardy books I've read, including Tess of the D'Urbevilles and Far From the Madding Crowd, though Jude the Obscure is well written but so GRIM. There was a radio adaptation recently and I nearly turned it off before the bad bit but then didn't.

In one of my favourite Jane Gardam books, A Long Way from Verona, set in the 1940s North East of England, a fairly young girl has managed to get access to the adult fiction shelves in the library though it's against the rules, but sh/reade is discovered reading Jude the Obscure. ALWFV is interesting as it's one of several Jane Gardam novels that were originally published as children's books but were reissued in grown ups' editions when her other books became better known. I normally buy kids' books in children's editions on principle but have Verona and Bilgewater with a nicely matching collection of Abacus eidtions (not all bought as a set but for once they coordinate) on the shelves in front of my desk downstairs (kids' books in my bedroom).

I hated Charles Dickens at school because we got so many extracts from his work for comprehension, but have softened on him in my old age. I'd say get a free or very cheap edition to try and forget how you felt at school. Don't worry about reading it all at once, try aiming for a chapter a day and read more if you feel like it. Listen to it Oh, and Miriam Margolyes's work on radio and audio has probably made me look at Dickens again.

Whispers to Fortuna "It's YA before YA was a thing" (whistles innocently)

Bilgewater was one of my favourite books as a teen, elkie. I remember that one minor character was an elderly teacher who used to fall in love with the youngest boys in the school, although it was emphasised that he never did anything about it. Not sure he would be looked on so tolerantly these days.

49. Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket by Meg Wolitzer
How could I resist a title like that? This is a book of short stories mostly originally published in the 1960's and 70's.They are rather of their time. I used to read a lot of short stories when I was younger but they seem to have gone out of fashion a bit. The first (title) story and the last story "The Great Escape" were the best. Several of the stories are about Paulette, Howard and their family (I kept thinking I bet Elizabeth Strout has read these). I found it all a bit hit and miss. Most of the stories started really well but kind of petered out or just didn't go anywhere. I'm glad I read them, but I didn't find them stunning.

Finally reached it:
50. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell I haven't read this in a long, long time and recalled it as a zippy, snappy read . It wasn't. Some of the passages were tortuous but I still enjoyed it. I have the 2005 BBC 4 parter with Daniela Denby Ashe and Richard Armitage in the lead roles and the stunning factory scenes in the world's last working steam powered loom room lined up for this evening - Bliss.

49. Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket by Meg Wolitzer Correction this should read by Hilma Wolitzer not sure where I got Meg from.

elkiedee I like Thomas Hardy too. When I was a teen I lost out on a p/t job because of Jude the Obscure. The interviewer asked what book I was currently reading and being young and naive I told him the truth (Jude the Obscure). He said he couldn't possibly offer a position to someone who would read " something so morally repugnant and depressing."

Goodness SapatSea - what was the job?!?!

Thats very odd!

Surely you don't know if a book is like that BEFORE you read it

@FortunaMajor

Eine I nearly got pitchforked off the thread for disliking Lord of the Flies a few years ago. I was disappointed with it too. . . . I've been having an easy reading phase of catching up with my next installments of the Ruth Galloway and Simon Serailler series'. I haven't really got the concentration for anything better at the moment.

Surely a stick sharpened at both ends rather than a pitchfork??!

Well done to those reaching 50!

45. Beautiful World, Where are You? by Sally Rooney I’d enjoyed Rooney’s 2 previous books enough to reserve this and was expecting more of the same: beautiful young people who feel they think and love more intensely than anyone else raking through their emotions and sex lives in great detail, which should be insufferable but is somehow made effortlessly readable with just a bit of eye rolling. The beginning of this one felt like it was heading the same way but then I found myself mostly uninvolved until close to the end. As other reviewers have said you are held at a distance from the characters, whose physical movements are often described in detail but without giving you access to what they are thinking. I was often tempted to DNF but then there would be a really good observation or conversation that would persuade me to carry on. The long sections of emails between the characters are particularly self indulgent, and I wondered sometimes how I’d have reacted to the book if I’d read it at a younger age - whether I’d have felt more lonely for the lack of friends who’d let me email them in the early hours of the morning about such matters as whether the world ‘ceased to be beautiful after the fall of the Soviet Union’.

Despite some good moments and a beautiful library hardback, for most of the book I was debating with myself whether to continue. I think I’ll wait to see what the consensus is here before I reserve any future book, which will likely be about characters who are having, or whose friends are having and who are having issues with them having, babies for more rarefied reasons than other parents have babies.

[quote EineReiseDurchDieZeit]@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie

I just felt I wasn't its audience. I read that it was so seriously edited that Golding ended up being quite unhappy with it. I also read that Simon was meant to be like a prophet figure who was epileptic and having visions of God.

And @Piggywaspushed - I finally get your username - yes I meant the character

But Ralph as well, just trying to be a good Navy child - sucks to Jack Merridew[/quote]
Golding resented the fact that it got so much more attention than his other works, I think.

Yes to Simon as a kind of doomed prophet, but his visions are of Satan rather than God.