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?

112. Saving Time by Jodi Taylor

The most recent book in the Time Police series. It’s a spin off from The Chronicles of St Mary’s series.

Matthew, Jane and Luke are now fully fledged Time Police officers, and of course are about to face more deadly threats, both to themselves and to the timeline.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, as I did the previous books in the series.

Although the spreading use of “fire-trucking” instead of an expletive is starting to get a bit tiresome.

Snap, Stitches - currently reading and enjoying Saving Time. Total escapism.

110. Starlight, by Stella Gibbons
Picked it up in the library after mentions on here. This is an odd little number, as if Barbara Pym and George Gissing bonded over a boozy pub lunch and decided to write The Exorcist together. Three older people are alarmed when a slum landlord buys up the house where they live and installs his wife in the house. But the threat comes from an unexpected source. A warm-hearted book, featuring lots of little acts of kindness, which seems incongruous considering some of the stranger plot points.

I've been wanting to read Starlight, a friend said she preferred it to Cold Comfort Farm.

99. Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi. This is incredibly ambitious following 2 strands of a family over 300 years. It starts off with 2 sisters who are separated at birth in modern day Ghana. One Effia the Beauty ends up marrying a white man who is commander of a fort that ships slaves across the sea, and the other is one of the slaves that gets sent to America. Each chapter follows a descendant of the two sisters either in America or Ghana. I thought this was fascinating and very well constructed. I guess my main criticism would be that I sometimes wanted more of the stories and the 20 pages or so that each character gets felt a bit short. I also felt more interested in the older stories, the more modern ones felt a little rushed. Still an amazing book and one I'd definitely recommend.

Another War and Peace fan here. I read it in the garden one summer when I was unemployed and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's definitely on my reread list. It's one for the kindle tho - you don't want to be lugging that thing around!

I also like Anna Karenina, but not as much as W&P. The problem is the main characters are all so unlikeable!

I think the key with both is to get a good translation - the Penguin Classics ones are excellent.

CluelessMama

I found lean stand fall very mixed. I wasn't convinced by the antarctica section at the beginning and almost put the book down at this point - it almost felt like the authors heart wasn't really in it and he wasn't great at writing what I think was meant to be an exciting adventure part full of tension.

However it really picked up for me when the book changed to Anna's pov and I liked how she went from being a very independent woman who's husband is away for months at a time to being a full time carer. The descriptions of some of the drudgery of the routine she found herself in were quite affecting. I would have liked this section to have been longer really.

Thank you BadSpellaSpellaSpella!
The first section was very different in style to the other books I have read by Jon McGregor. Perhaps he was on slightly more familiar territory once he had moved beyond the more action filled start to the family life afterwards. I agree about the later sections, the descriptions of how the couple's roles/routines/lives changed are the parts that have stayed with me since I read it.

115. The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

Otto Silberman is trying to raise funds to leave Germany when the knock rounding up Jews comes to the door. Running into the night he embarks on a descending spiral of madness and despair as his grasp on an exit strategy becomes ever more futile.

I believe the USP of this is that it is rediscovered, having being written in the late 30s by a young Jew, who being German was interred in the UK and then Australia before dying on a boat journey.

It is believed to be one of the few contemporary accounts of Kristallnacht around.

I struggled with it because of what I believe may be a really poor translation. The dialogue is so wooden and clunky its really off putting. A shame.

I was just coming to ask if anyone might want to join a very slow moving War and Peace read along in 2022, and find the discussion has already (almost!) started. I think I could manage a chapter a day to read it over a year, if it's true that the chapters are manageable.

Anyone else fancy it?

News just in direct from the horse's mouth. Strike 6 is finished, to be released next year. I'd better start catching up with the others.

@FortunaMajor

News just in direct from the horse's mouth. Strike 6 is finished, to be released next year. I'd better start catching up with the others.

I'm not sure if I will be able to cope with it. I really liked the last one, until the ending which totally spoiled it for me.

194. Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie
     A modern retelling of Antigone set in a British Muslim family where the brother is radicalised. This has been taunting me from the bookshelf for years, but I'm glad I picked it up shortly after reading The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes as it refreshed the Antigone story for me. I thought it was brilliantly done, told from different POV and detailing the dilemma of whether and how far to integrate, attitudes to Muslims and radicalisation. I feel like it's ages since I've read such a good novel.

195. Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year - Allie Esiri
     Lovely Shakespeare anthology with 365 passages arranged to fit the date or season. Well introduced and beautifully read on audio by an all star cast. A great mix of excerpts from plays and sonnets.

Had my covid booster today, invite, booking and appointment all took place in under 3 hours.

Viking, I would have definitely have been up for that if I hadn't read W&P this year, but having said that if you get a read along off the ground I might well join in just for the discussion.

Remus quite a lot of people were dissatisfied with the last one. I've still got a few to go, so not on that wavelength yet. I always felt a bit more drawn in by the Jackson Brodie books, so never really went for these and need to catch up.

Saw a thing today that Ian Rankin posted from the Times about how to read between the lines of publisher's blurbs with one about being too successful to edit. It made me smile and I thought of JKR and the comments here.

@FortunaMajor

Remus quite a lot of people were dissatisfied with the last one. I've still got a few to go, so not on that wavelength yet. I always felt a bit more drawn in by the Jackson Brodie books, so never really went for these and need to catch up.

Saw a thing today that Ian Rankin posted from the Times about how to read between the lines of publisher's blurbs with one about being too successful to edit. It made me smile and I thought of JKR and the comments here.

Yes. She definitely needs editing!

I gave up on the Brodies. Too many really convenient coincidences.

@VikingNorthUtsire

I was just coming to ask if anyone might want to join a very slow moving War and Peace read along in 2022, and find the discussion has already (almost!) started. I think I could manage a chapter a day to read it over a year, if it's true that the chapters are manageable.

Anyone else fancy it?

I would be very up for this, yes.

@FortunaMajor. I loved Home Fire too. My 17 year old babysitter is doing it as one of her optional texts for English A-level this year which made me very happy. It would be a great book to study.

Stokey I can see it being a really good book to study. So much in there and interesting too. I bet there are some cracking essay questions on it.

I know we are not quite ready for the yearly round ups, but that will stand out by a mile for me. I don't think I've had that many wow books from fiction this year. I tend to rate the non fic I read much higher. I don't know if it's the novelty, or a hint I should read more. I feel quite jaded by fiction at the moment.

@VikingNorthUtsire

I was just coming to ask if anyone might want to join a very slow moving War and Peace read along in 2022, and find the discussion has already (almost!) started. I think I could manage a chapter a day to read it over a year, if it's true that the chapters are manageable.

Anyone else fancy it?

Ohhhhhhhh yes please!! Count me in!!!

52 Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney continues to delight and infuriate me. This is basically the love stories of two couples and there is a lot of sex in this book, literally every second chapter ends in a sex scene. The chapters alternate between a conciously external view of events (we don't get told what the characters are feeling and there's some 'the woman looked up and appeared to acknowledge the man who had just walked into the coffee house') and very long emails between the two women that weren't believable in their length and content but read realistically boringly, although I did enjoy the joke about looking for the loo in an art gallery. I much preferred the external viewpoint chapters where you had to infer what was happening and, as a PP said, things got better when all four characters were together and we didn't get the emails and Felix, who I didn't see the point of initially, became the catalyst for the action (not that there's really much, this is a very slight story really). And yet despite all the annoyance and deeply irritating characters (we have yet more beautiful and brilliant humanities graduates who seem incapable of actually saying what they really think) there are moments that are beautiful and catch you and I like that she's experimenting with the form of literary romances.

On W&P, I read it about 18 months before the recent BBC version and really enjoyed the adaptation. I read it at lunchtime at work (short chapters work well for that) and one of my male colleagues said he liked the war chapters but wasn't fussed about the romance. I think I was the opposite but found the descriptions of the slow death from war wounds fascinating, it was a good reminder that before antibiotics hospitals were basically 50 % infection wards for people dying of sepsis. I remember reading somewhere that Anna Karenina is much easier to get into, I enjoyed it when I read it in my 20s but glad I read W&P in my 40s when I could appreciate it more (Sally Rooney, take note, life is not over after your 20s).

I’m up for a W&P readalong - I’ve never read it but have always felt I should. Don’t worry Piggy, I’ll still do Hard Times too!

I would be up for a W&P readalong. I've never read it and have been meaning to for years!

I'd be be for a W&P readalong too. I've read it before but a long time ago, and it's definitely on the reread pile.

I'd be up for it too.

@ editing needed. Since Goblet of Fire I'd say. I gave up on Strike at Silkworm which I loathed. Should I try again? I do love crime which also has storytelling (Reginald Hill, some Elizabeth George (though am half way through one of her later ones at the moment- of which later- and the cracks in the "having researchers who live in the place when you don't" thing are as big as the one on Amy Pond's wall)

I've never been a JK Rowling fan due to get utter wordiness. I actually found Harry Potter quite painful to read aloud when the DDs were younger. My 9 year old gave up on the Goblet of Fire which even she realised needed editing - she's a strong reader otherwise!

I've never made it past the farming but hear the start of W&P so could give it a go. I think Anna Karenina is actually a surprisingly easy read, although there is a bit of arable stuff there that I may have skimmed.