50 Book Challenge 2021 Part Eight

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the eighth (and probably final) 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, it’s not too late to and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.The lurkers among you are also very welcome to come out of the woodwork and share with us what you've read!

The first thread of the year is here, the second one here, the third one here, the fourth one here, the fifth one here, the sixth one here and the seventh one here.

How have you got on this year?

noodle, and all other Covid sufferers - sympathy and best wishes. Am peering anxiously at today's LFT as I've got a volunteer shift booked later at a local centre and they are incredibly short staffed.

I agree with you, noodle, about The Dark Is Rising. My teens loved it aged around 11 but I think now they'd be both too young and too old. It's actually a very beautiful and atmospheric book but quite slow moving and reflective in places. Not at all young adult fiction paced, and I suspect they'd just be bored at this point. But so good when you come back to it as an adult.

I'm on The Dark is Rising readalong on Facebook, if anyone wants to join in. First time I've done it. People are posting photos and songs that match the mood. Enjoyable.

64. One Way Only - Gwen Grant Further adventures from the Private Keep Out girl and her family, in which she enters a beauty contest, crashes a motorbike, almost drowns in a frozen-over pond and loses a pet mouse

Mine was the changes in the blood supply to the liver of lampreys during metamorphosis. A bit niche.

My dissertation was on Project Management and its Application in Libraries. Yawn

Mine was ‘The role of the central executive in memory updating’. I do still have the printed bound copy somewhere!

A comparison of international legal remedies for torture.

Thanks for the heads up bibliomania I have been reading the dark is rising according to schedule on my own so I'll head over to the Facebook group

Second Christmassy read : The Christmas Murder Game. Very silly country house murder mystery. An easy enough read. Not as clever as it thinks. Good body count though, and snow. Clichés abound but there are riddles for the reader so that's fun.

I think it's so sad that dissertations languish in a cupboard somewhere for a while and are then thrown out. All that work.

Mine was something to do with the economics/econometrics of migration applied to the local economy. This was early 1980's and it had to be typed - I didn't have a type writer, nor did I know any typists (everyone else seemed to have a mum or neighbour who typed or a dad with an obliging secretary) so I had to go to a secretarial agency to have it done. There were a lot of tables and graphs. It took the typist a long time and a lot of skill. She said she really enjoyed doing it and found it very interesting... but it also cost me a lot of money (around £90 cf. my student rent was £8 a week ) but not as much my friend who was studying Gaelic had to pay as she had to find a typist with a specialist "Irish" typewriter who charged a big premium.

A guy on my course was nominated for some fancy prize as his dissertation was so awesome. Turned out his dad worked for a big Accounting firm and had shown him some industry research papers that he plagiarised. He was caught out eventually but not for several years!

Solinvictus my dissertation was very similar - Compulsory National Service in France. I'm not offering to contrast and compare. I believe mine is suitably irretrievable from a floppy disk...

Have had slightly more reading time over the last couple of days so I'm really hoping to finish a couple more books by the end of the year. Despite finally reaching 50 books last year, 2021 will have been my most feeble attempt since joining this thread! Still love hearing about all your recent reads as always.

Nice to see some other economists on here :) Mine was on occupational segregation by sex in the Youth Training Scheme - not very thrilling, but it helped me get my first job (evaluation and policy research), which was good enough for me. It would have been on a floppy disc, back in the days when it was really exciting to make it into the computer room early enough to get the computer with two floppy drives, so that you didn't have to keep swapping over the disk with the system software and the disk where your document was saved.

Matrix by Lauren Groff is 99p today. I think it’s had lukewarm reviews on here, but I thought I’d give it a go.

Thanks @LadybirdDaphne. A few book people I follow on Insta have been raving about this so am interested to read it although the blurb isn't filling me with confidence. Having done Latin A level, I liked the sound of your dissertation. I did raise an eyebrow when a friend called her daughter Livia.
My undergrad was on Theories of Existence, Being and nothingness. Just a bit of light epistemology. Love hearing the breadth of knowledge on here. I suspect a world ruled by 50 bookers would be a better place but then we may not have time to read

104. Leave The World Behind - Rumaan Alam. This appealed as have just gone away for Christmas and we're staying in the middle of nowhere in an Air BNB with a hot tub. Thankfully that's where the similarities end. I'm not obsessed with my children's bodies or genitalia and my husband's penis is not making yoga salutations as far as I'm aware. The story is about a fault who guess in holiday to somewhere near New York, Hamptons like but not near the beach as they can't afford that. The night after they arrive, the elderly Black couple who own the house turn up on their door step as something has happened in New York. There's a black out, all phones and the TV are dead as its their land line. Although the prose is pretty over written, I actually was quite intrigued by this end of days story but I did find it a bit weird how passive the characters were. Why don't they ever go to a town and try and find out more about what is going on? It also doesn't really have a satisfying ending. Apparently Netflix are making it with Julia Roberts & Denzel Washington. If they stay true to the book, expect lots of Julia's "mons".

The story is about a family who goes

Predictive text fail!

45. The Little Friend - Donna Tartt

Did I just read 642 pages of drivel about the mortally dull lives of some women and the pointless schemes of two dim-witted children? It was well-written drivel, I readily admit, but still...

I was hoping for "the little friend" to be death, or for snakes to be a symbol for something profound but no, I just got hundreds and hundreds of pages on the grazing and grooming habits of the Southern female

Could she not at least solve the mystery and put readers out of our misery? It seems, she couldn't.

Instead, the moral of the story appears to be that children are stupid, adults are dull, and that yours truly should never again read a book written by a female author.

46. Randomize - Andy Weir

Andy Weir of The Martian fame has written this novella to warn us of the fate of Las Vegas casinos when quantum computing becomes a reality.

This was short and sweet, if nothing to write home about, but it hasn't quite quelled my anger at The Little Friend. I think I'll go and read another SF next.

Sadik yours sounds quite interesting- I’m of the age where friends who left school at 16 would have gone into YTS schemes. It seemed to be girls - shops, boys - bricklaying (my brother) or factory work.

To be honest it was a bit rubbish Best - one of those things where I would have done it so much better 5 years later! I remember the main take-away unfortunately was that choosing a sex-appropriate occupation was very much the rational choice for any individual 16 y/o, there was a wage penalty / lower chance of getting permanent work for those who went into the 'wrong' occupations. Even more depressing given that the 'female' occupations were so much worse paid - but young women going into non-stereotyped roles got a really bad deal (as indeed young men choosing childcare / care work etc). I do think for all the problems these days things are somewhat better than the 1980s!

My undergrad dissertation was to do with poverty and children whose work/wage was essential to family survival in the 19th century. I don't have a copy and can't remember anything else about it, though!

On that Dickensian note....

105: The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist - John Mullan

This is a really great book for anyone interested in Dickens, and I'm slightly annoyed with myself for having had it sitting on my kindle waiting to be read for ages. Mullan examines different aspects of Dickens's craft - including 'Naming', 'Laughing', 'Using clichés', 'Drowning', 'Smelling' - and comes up with a genuinely illuminating new way of interpreting the novels. I'll definitely read Dickens with fresh eyes after this.

Some recent reads:

Klara And The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro is an author I have very mixed results with. I love Never Let Me Go but thought The Unconsoled was the biggest pile of tosh I have ever attempted to read. Others of his have fallen somewhere between the two! Klara was….ok. For those who don’t know, Klara is an Artificial Friend (AF) who is recharged by the sun. The book starts with Klara in the AF shop and then she is chosen by and goes to live with Josie, a terminally ill girl. The start of the book was great, where it was in the shop, but I lost interest when Klara went to live with Josie. Nothing much happened and there was too much that wasn’t explained (e.g. there is mention of children being ‘lifted’ without any explanation of what that actually means). I did think the ending was very appropriate for today’s society though (can’t say more as spoilers!). Don’t think this is one I will reread.

Emma by Alexander McCall Smith

This was part of The Austen Project where current authors rewrote Austen’s books in a modern setting (although they only did 4 - never did Persuasion or Mansfield Park). Anyway, this is the version of Emma. It’s a long time since I read the original Emma so I can’t really comment on accuracy, but I thought this was fine. Having said that, it didn’t really feel like too much had been modernised which left me wondering slightly what the point was.

The Bennet Women by Eden Appiah-Kubi

And in complete contrast to the book above, this is a very modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in an American university. Great idea, but it was awful. I thought it must be YA but I can’t find anything saying it is, but I think teenagers are the only ones who may like this. Apart from some names, and the basic plot of ‘boy thinks he’s too good for girl then realises how lovely she is and they live happily ever after’ there wasn’t really a lot in common with P&P. This is firmly in the ‘don’t bother’ category.

I’ve since been doing my usual Christmas rereads - Jeanette Winterson’s Christmas Days, Rachel Joyce’s A Snow Garden, and The Children Of Green Knowe. Hoping to finish A Christmas Carol tomorrow just in time for Christmas.

Where Angels Fear to Tread - EM Forster
After a young widow remarries an unsuitable Italian, her family interfere and later lay claim to the baby who survives her.
Horrible people doing horrible things to one another with horrific consequences.

Tabula Rasa (Ruso #6) - Ruth Downie
Roman mystery series set in Britain, with a Roman army doctor and his native wife solving crimes.
These are great for a bit of mindless entertainment that requires little brain power.

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters - Abigail Shrier
Journalist Shrier explores the very recent phenomenon of teenage girls declaring a transgender/non-binary identity and the devastating toll this has on their bodies when rushed through a medical process of hormones and surgery. She explores how it started, internet communities, what is happening in schools and how the medical community is dealing with it. She speaks to many of those involved including young women and girls at various stages in the process, their families, doctors, surgeons and psychologists.
It is a fascinating exposé of the issue, well researched and very readable.

The Chancellor's Secret (Matthew Bartholomew #25) - Susanna Gregory
Final installment of the series in which a doctor and monk combo solve murders and mysteries in 14th Century Cambridge set around the intrigue and politics of the university and difficult town/gown relationships. As always this was an overly complicated and convoluted plot, where half of the population of the town get murdered and the reader is non the wiser until the big reveal at the end.
I love these characters and will very much miss them, but agree it was time to end the series.

Chessie - "I love Never Let Me Go but thought The Unconsoled was the biggest pile of tosh I have ever attempted to read."

It's all relative NLMG was most certainly one of the biggest piles of tosh I have ever come across.

"Nothing much happened"

Like NLMG then

"and there was too much that wasn’t explained"

Again, like NLMG. Why clone people to then randomly harvest their organs? If you can clone, wouldn't it make sense re tissue rejection risk to keep a clone for each family, for example? And why do they meekly accept this fate when there's not even any brainwashing in their education or daily life? Even the lowliest life form will try to escape danger, let alone death by organ theft. Where is their resistance? Where are their rebels?

@CoteDAzur

45. The Little Friend - Donna Tartt

Did I just read 642 pages of drivel about the mortally dull lives of some women and the pointless schemes of two dim-witted children? It was well-written drivel, I readily admit, but still...

I was hoping for "the little friend" to be death, or for snakes to be a symbol for something profound but no, I just got hundreds and hundreds of pages on the grazing and grooming habits of the Southern female

Could she not at least solve the mystery and put readers out of our misery? It seems, she couldn't.

Instead, the moral of the story appears to be that children are stupid, adults are dull, and that yours truly should never again read a book written by a female author.

OH MY GOD MY EXACT THOUGHTS

LOATHED IT

THIRTEEN READING HOURS I SHALL NEVER GET BACK

We can be friends again

I know there are questions to ask about NLMG, but for me the story is good enough to override all that. In Klara it wasn’t. I think we will just have to agree to disagree on NLMG!

However, I gave up on The Little Friend so I agree with you there!