50-Book Challenge 2010: Books 11-20
Books 1-10.
11. Garden Spells, Sarah Addison Allen - small-town American romance tinged with fantasy; lightweight fluff, but sweet, and a nice, easy read. It does bear mentioning, however, that the story and tone are very, very similar to Practical Magic - not the book, but the film - perhaps a little too much so for comfort.
12. What Would Barbra Do?, Emma Brockes - an amiable saunter through the world of Hollywood musicals by an author who's still young and aspiringly cool enough to be slightly embarrassed about enjoying them. She wins Brownie points from me for her disdain for Andrew Lloyd-Webber, but loses them again for a lack of appreciation of Sondheim. Her joy at having hugged Julie Andrews alone makes up for any other shortcomings.
13. The Suicide Shop, Jean Teulé - this is yet another foreign language title that reads as if it had been translated using Babelfish: flat, humourless, and entirely lacking in nuance. I should like to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that it reads better in the original, but as the entire novel is pretty much a one-note joke and ends with an ironic twist of a punchline that I guarantee any reader will see coming from page one, I suspect it probably doesn't.
14. Dancing with Dr Kildare, Jane Yardley - Jane Yardley is a good, quirky, offbeat and virtually unknown author (something should be done about that - at least, about the last part) who specialises in novels based in the 70s and 80s - revisiting my own past, in other words, which may account for my fondness for her - and with a music-based theme. This is her fourth novel, in which the protagonist, on the death of her father, finds herself drawn into the mystery of his past via a music manuscript that may or may not be a lost Sibelius symphony and an act of violence dating back to the Second World War. Throw the 80s recession, a gay best friend with a penchant for turning his love life into best-selling porn, and an obsession with the tango - very popular in Finland, apparently - and you have a novel not quite like any other. Which is what you want in a novel, really.
15. Tower of Silence, Sarah Rayne - it would be easy to dismiss Sarah Rayne's thrillers as shabby little shockers. They do, indeed, tend toward the overly gruesome, and they rely far too heavily on extreme coincidence - in this one three woman, all affected in some way by an act of horrific violence in India in the late 40s, all end up in the same small village in Scotland in the present (she even acknowledges this coincidence at one point in the narrative, and tries to handwave it away), but they're compelling reading nevertheless. Thrilling, in fact and, again - that's what they set out to be.
16. The Winter Ground, Catriona McPherson - this is the fourth 1920s-set Dandy Gilver mystery (not the third, as Amazon would have it), and the series is unfortunately falling prey to the law of diminishing returns. The first was excellent, the second okay; the third was pretty meh, and this one isn't much better. The story's dull and muddled and so, to be brutally honest, is Dandy's detective work. There's one more in the series and I'll probably read that but, if there's no improvement, after that I shan't bother.
17. When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson - there are an awful lot of eggs in this pudding. Some might say too many. It includes, just by way of example, a family murder uncomfortably similar to the deaths of Lyn and Megan Russell, gangsters, kidnapping, extortion, more murder, a massive train crash, a honeytrap embezzlement, a homicidal ex-husband stalking his former family, yet more murder, arson, suicide, and I may have missed a murder or two - all, apart from the first event, taking place within the course of a few days and a few square miles. Oh, yes! And a cancer death, and an accidental drowning … It's a credit to Kate Atkinson that it never seems excessive or, worse, ridiculous; in fact, it all starts to feel uncomfortably plausible. This is partly because she's a good writer whose flow picks you up and carries you along without pause for question; part of it is because she creates interesting characters with whom you're happy to spend time (the ones who're still standing at the end, that is).
18. The Alchemyst, Michael Scott - promising-looking but ultimately rather blah YA fantasy featuring not only Nicholas Flamel (and the missus), but Dr John Dee too, both alive and well and living in modern San Francisco. Clunkily written - I complain about clunky writing so often that I can only assume that nobody but me cares about it - and rather too full of state-of-the-art technology that will look as quaint as anything out of Enid Blyton in a few years' time. The first few pages alone are littered with references to Bluetooth earpieces, Goth music, trendy coffee shops, computer games, Shrek, and David Copperfield (not the Dickens one, the other one). And heaven forbid that the young female protagonist would just wear a denim jacket: oh, no, it has to be vintage denim. The story itself is a hotchpotch of pretty much every scrap of mythology you can imagine all jumbled up together, up to and including Atlantis (to say nothing of the goddess Hekate living inside Yggdrasil). Part one of a trilogy, and I don't think I can be bothered with parts two and three.
19. Gentlemen and Players, Joanne Harris - part Gormenghast, part Down With Skool!, this is an engaging mystery set in an all-boys' private school which finds itself suddenly at war with an unknown assailant - a war whose general is the elderly Classics master, and which it seems inevitable it will lose. Very different from Joanne Harris's other books; absorbing, riveting, and clever. It's slightly marred by a plot twist which, as with almost all plot twists, most readers will see coming, but, other than its chess-game theme, which is rather wasted on a non-chess player, that's really the only quarrel I have with it.
20. Enough to Make a Cat Laugh, Deric Longden - cosy anecdotes of life in Huddersfield with Longden, his sight-impaired wife, and their eclectic array of felines. Caveat lector: they have four cats when the book begins and only two by the end. Some may consider this a spoiler; I consider it a courtesy warning. I cried. So there.
11. Garden Spells, Sarah Addison Allen - small-town American romance tinged with fantasy; lightweight fluff, but sweet, and a nice, easy read. It does bear mentioning, however, that the story and tone are very, very similar to Practical Magic - not the book, but the film - perhaps a little too much so for comfort.
12. What Would Barbra Do?, Emma Brockes - an amiable saunter through the world of Hollywood musicals by an author who's still young and aspiringly cool enough to be slightly embarrassed about enjoying them. She wins Brownie points from me for her disdain for Andrew Lloyd-Webber, but loses them again for a lack of appreciation of Sondheim. Her joy at having hugged Julie Andrews alone makes up for any other shortcomings.
13. The Suicide Shop, Jean Teulé - this is yet another foreign language title that reads as if it had been translated using Babelfish: flat, humourless, and entirely lacking in nuance. I should like to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that it reads better in the original, but as the entire novel is pretty much a one-note joke and ends with an ironic twist of a punchline that I guarantee any reader will see coming from page one, I suspect it probably doesn't.
14. Dancing with Dr Kildare, Jane Yardley - Jane Yardley is a good, quirky, offbeat and virtually unknown author (something should be done about that - at least, about the last part) who specialises in novels based in the 70s and 80s - revisiting my own past, in other words, which may account for my fondness for her - and with a music-based theme. This is her fourth novel, in which the protagonist, on the death of her father, finds herself drawn into the mystery of his past via a music manuscript that may or may not be a lost Sibelius symphony and an act of violence dating back to the Second World War. Throw the 80s recession, a gay best friend with a penchant for turning his love life into best-selling porn, and an obsession with the tango - very popular in Finland, apparently - and you have a novel not quite like any other. Which is what you want in a novel, really.
15. Tower of Silence, Sarah Rayne - it would be easy to dismiss Sarah Rayne's thrillers as shabby little shockers. They do, indeed, tend toward the overly gruesome, and they rely far too heavily on extreme coincidence - in this one three woman, all affected in some way by an act of horrific violence in India in the late 40s, all end up in the same small village in Scotland in the present (she even acknowledges this coincidence at one point in the narrative, and tries to handwave it away), but they're compelling reading nevertheless. Thrilling, in fact and, again - that's what they set out to be.
16. The Winter Ground, Catriona McPherson - this is the fourth 1920s-set Dandy Gilver mystery (not the third, as Amazon would have it), and the series is unfortunately falling prey to the law of diminishing returns. The first was excellent, the second okay; the third was pretty meh, and this one isn't much better. The story's dull and muddled and so, to be brutally honest, is Dandy's detective work. There's one more in the series and I'll probably read that but, if there's no improvement, after that I shan't bother.
17. When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson - there are an awful lot of eggs in this pudding. Some might say too many. It includes, just by way of example, a family murder uncomfortably similar to the deaths of Lyn and Megan Russell, gangsters, kidnapping, extortion, more murder, a massive train crash, a honeytrap embezzlement, a homicidal ex-husband stalking his former family, yet more murder, arson, suicide, and I may have missed a murder or two - all, apart from the first event, taking place within the course of a few days and a few square miles. Oh, yes! And a cancer death, and an accidental drowning … It's a credit to Kate Atkinson that it never seems excessive or, worse, ridiculous; in fact, it all starts to feel uncomfortably plausible. This is partly because she's a good writer whose flow picks you up and carries you along without pause for question; part of it is because she creates interesting characters with whom you're happy to spend time (the ones who're still standing at the end, that is).
18. The Alchemyst, Michael Scott - promising-looking but ultimately rather blah YA fantasy featuring not only Nicholas Flamel (and the missus), but Dr John Dee too, both alive and well and living in modern San Francisco. Clunkily written - I complain about clunky writing so often that I can only assume that nobody but me cares about it - and rather too full of state-of-the-art technology that will look as quaint as anything out of Enid Blyton in a few years' time. The first few pages alone are littered with references to Bluetooth earpieces, Goth music, trendy coffee shops, computer games, Shrek, and David Copperfield (not the Dickens one, the other one). And heaven forbid that the young female protagonist would just wear a denim jacket: oh, no, it has to be vintage denim. The story itself is a hotchpotch of pretty much every scrap of mythology you can imagine all jumbled up together, up to and including Atlantis (to say nothing of the goddess Hekate living inside Yggdrasil). Part one of a trilogy, and I don't think I can be bothered with parts two and three.
19. Gentlemen and Players, Joanne Harris - part Gormenghast, part Down With Skool!, this is an engaging mystery set in an all-boys' private school which finds itself suddenly at war with an unknown assailant - a war whose general is the elderly Classics master, and which it seems inevitable it will lose. Very different from Joanne Harris's other books; absorbing, riveting, and clever. It's slightly marred by a plot twist which, as with almost all plot twists, most readers will see coming, but, other than its chess-game theme, which is rather wasted on a non-chess player, that's really the only quarrel I have with it.
20. Enough to Make a Cat Laugh, Deric Longden - cosy anecdotes of life in Huddersfield with Longden, his sight-impaired wife, and their eclectic array of felines. Caveat lector: they have four cats when the book begins and only two by the end. Some may consider this a spoiler; I consider it a courtesy warning. I cried. So there.