My Reading Challenge is complete at last

A few more books I might not have picked up had it not been for the Reading Challenge

It has been a long journey but I have finally completed the Reading Challenge on Shaz’s Jera’s Jamboree blog – I signed up in January 2017.

It’s a way of getting out of your comfort zone of always reading the same sorts of books and I pledged to tick off EVERY box in each section of the challenge. I have logged my progress here. I am continuing to note all the books I read and where possible I have linked in to reviews.

For the record, here are the last half dozen books that have enabled me to tick the boxes…

A bestseller from a genre you don’t usually read

– Stella Gibbons: Cold Comfort Farm
I don’t usually read humour but this is a comic novel published in 1932, about a posh young woman with no income who imposes herself on the Starkadders – her grim rural relatives in a fictional village in Sussex – and changes their lives.

I read this after it was recommended as a “book that made me laugh” by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy in The Guardian here. I was mildly amused.

At least it showed me where the phrase “something nasty in the woodshed” comes from, as Aunt Ada Doom keeps on citing it as a mysterious childhood trauma that now allows her to demand constant attention from the family around her.

A book translated to English

– Andrea Camilleri: The Shape of Water – one of the translations suggested by thelittlebookowl here.

I had seen only one episode of Inspector Montalbano on TV when I read this book, which had a feel of American hard-boiled detective novels, but with a distinctive Italian flavour – including the food. I could quite easily read another in the series.

Having said that, I have watched several more episodes of the TV series since and can’t altogether marry up the characters and scenery of the book and the TV series. On TV Sicily is brightly sunny with pale, dry streets and old buildings, surrounded by sandy beaches.

And there is a lot of humour. I don’t recall that from the first book in the series, which seemed darker in my mind.

ADDED JULY 20, 2019: I am ashamed to admit that when I read the book I thought Andrea Camilleri was a modern young woman. But this week I read the news of Camilleri’s death on July 17 – and discover he was a man of 93. Read the Guardian obituary here.

A book set in a country that is not your birth country

– Henrietta Rose-Innes: Nineveh
I found this a very atmospheric book. Humane pest controller Katya Grubbs is employed by a property magnate to get rid of an infestation of beetles in a luxury apartment development and ponders her relationship with her father, a bit of a rogue, as well as issues of inequality on the outskirts of Cape Town in South Africa.

I’m not sure why the author chose the name “Nineveh” – perhaps because it is remembered as a great lawless and ruined Assyrian city, located on the outskirts of what is now Mosul in modern-day Iraq. Perhaps she sees Cape Town this way.

The Guardian has a review here.

A book someone tells you ‘changed my life’

– Helen Macdonald: H is for Hawk
I had read many reviews of this book, which is about falconry and grief. There is a very good one in The Guardian here.

The book is very insightful, and at the time it made me think more calmly about coping with change and loss, but I don’t suppose it has quite changed my life.

I have always been interested in falconry and the esoteric vocabulary associated with it, so much of the book felt familiar.

But what I hadn’t realised was that TH White, author of The Sword in the Stone, had earlier written a memoir called The Goshawk. His cruel and lonely battles with the bird were disastrous but it was interesting to read about them here, alongside Helen Macdonald’s ultimately more successful attempts.

I also found a web post on the subject of ‘books that changed my life’ here and realised I had already read several of them. I may seek out the others.

A book from the library

– William Goldsmith: The Bind – a nicely-drawn graphic novel about two brothers in conflict over the family bookbinding business.

I have a library card but hadn’t visited recently. I’m afraid my Kindle makes reading books too easy. I don’t usually read graphic novels so decided on this one as part of the Reading Challenge.

Although I eventually read it in one sitting over breakfast, I didn’t take it back for months and finally, when the renewal reminders stopped because of an upgrade of the library computer system, I incurred a fine…

The Bind charts the rise and fall of Egret Bindings, once the most prestigious firm of bookbinders in London.

In 1910 brothers Guy and Victor take on an ambitious commission: a deluxe, jewelled binding of a collection of poems, A Moonless Land. The work triggers their ruin, witnessed by the disapproving spirit of their father. It’s a darkly humorous tale of sibling rivalry.

The cover of the book at the heart of The Bind…

…which epitomises the difference in attitude between the two brothers

Apart from the illustrations above, the book is drawn as a comic strip in those few, subdued colours. Although we can read the brothers’ characters through their actions, and the plot is satisfying, I am still not a great lover of graphic novels.

A biography/memoir

– Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds: Nye: The Political Life of Aneurin Bevan
I don’t read biographies, but as it was the 70th anniversary of Britain’s National Health Service in 2018, I started reading this book about its founder. I didn’t finish reading it until June 2019.

The book belongs to my husband, who has a large collection of political biographies. Little did I realise when I started to read the book that very soon we would have cause to be very grateful indeed to the NHS.

Having been very fit and active, my husband was suddenly struck down with meningitis on Halloween last year and spent four months in hospital, half of this time at The Heath Hospital (University Hospital of Wales), which saved his life, and the other half at the cosier St David’s Hospital, which got him up and around again with care and physiotherapy.

A portrait of Aneurin Bevan, painted by Anna Todd and owned by the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff

Every night I visited him at The Heath I saw this portrait of Nye Bevan at the top of the main staircase and gave thanks.

But back to the book. It is not my kind of book and I found it heavy going. But I am glad I read it, especially as I once worked in Tredegar, where Nye was born, and Ebbw Vale, where he served as Member of Parliament. It reinforced my view that Nye was a great man with a burning sense of injustice.

He saw the effects of poverty on friends and family in the South Wales Valleys and raged against a political and economic system that organised the country’s wealth in such a way as to cause this misery. He was also stubborn, bloody-minded, unpredictable and sometimes insensitive.

One of the most interesting things I learned was that Clement Attlee was a brilliant Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951 and created a post-war consensus aimed at full employment and expanded social services. He was modest and lacked the charisma we seem to demand in politicians today but he was very good at listening to his colleagues when making decisions.

It is funny to think that originally Attlee was going to give Bevan the Cabinet post for Education and to give Health to ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson, who had a shock of red hair and had been one of the organisers of the Jarrow March against unemployment and poverty in 1936. Wilkinson was close to Bevan’s rival Herbert Morrison, who believed hospitals should remain under local government control, while Nye said they should be nationalised with central funding and a salaried staff.

The author of Nye believes Attlee changed his mind over the Cabinet posts because he thought the future of Education had been sealed by the 1944 Butler Act reforming secondary schools and would present little challenge for the crusading Bevan. Meanwhile the political battles entailed in creating an NHS would be far better suited to Bevan’s talents. Indeed, when he took office, Bevan had a long dispute with the British Medical Association, which represented the doctors.

By 1951 the Labour Government was tired and its leaders were falling into ill health. Attlee called a snap General Election and lost to the Conservatives. The rest of Bevan’s political career was as part of a Labour opposition divided against itself and he never made it to the top job. He died in 1960 at the age of 62.

And finally…

Returning to my comfort zone of fantasy novels, I must mention two books I thoroughly enjoyed after they were recommended by Shaz on Jera’s Jamboree…

Read Shaz’s review of The Toymakers by Robert Dinsdale here. It’s set in a magical Emporium in London in 1917 and is very poignant and memorable.

More recently I have read Uprooted by Naomi Norvik. See Shaz’s review here. It’s another absorbing read about a village girl taken away by a wizard to help fight against a malevolent wood. Although I didn’t want the book to end, I found the main battle went on a bit too long in a Game of Thrones kind of way!

Thanks for everything, Shaz – and I will continue to take up your reading recommendations 🙂

You can read all my other blog posts about books here.