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2019 50 Book Challenge

California Dreamer

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55.The One From The Other by Philip Kerr
56. A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr


Both of these books run consequentially in terms of the narrative exposition In their Noir and political characteristics. Bernie Gunther Berlin Police Kriminal Ober-Kommissar is embroiled in a murder investigation against the backdrop of ascendence of the Nazi plague in 1932-33 amidst the social and cultural decline of the Weimar Republic. A lust murder propels Bernie into the seedy depraved underworld of Berlin. Which brings forth the internal conflicts and morality and entrenched fascism of the Police. This narrative combines with Bernie in post war Munich trying to establish a life, which is highjacked by the CIA in their attempts to use former SS scientists in the coming Cold War.

The second book finds Bernie on the lam after being framed and in Argentina amidst the SS vermin who were granted residence under the Peron regime, where he is coopted in the search for a killer and Nazi millions.

The interesting this about this series is that Kerr uses historical vermin such as Eichmann, Gobbles who is being treated for the clap, amongst others and the political machinations of the USA in enlisting former SS, Gestapo and Nazi scientists to craft a combined Noir thriller with a condemnation of the politics of expediency, where the end justify the means.
Got to get into Kerr; he sounds right down my alley.
 

Geoffrey Firmin

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LonerMatt

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1. The Broken Kingdoms
2. The Kingdom of Gods
3. Semiosis
4. Bridge of Clay
5. Blackwater City
6. Bullshit Jobs: a Theory
7. Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire
8. The People vs Tech
9. The Outrun
10 Ancillary Justice
11. Words without Music
12. Digital Minimalism
13. When Rivers Run Dry
14. The Uninhabitable Earth
15. Do we need inequality?
16. Carbon Ideologies: No Immediate Danger
17. The Secret Life of Trees
18. Educated
19. River of Doubt
20. Holy Sister
21. A War in Crimson Embers
22. Ancillary Sword
23. Ancillary Mercy
24. One Way
25. The Raven's Tower
26. Dark Emu
27. A Memory Called Empire
28. A Forest of Wood and Steel
29. Makers
30. Pink Mountain on Locust Island
31. The Summon Stone
32. Fallen Gate
33. Senlin Ascends
34. Howling Dark
35. Arm of the Sphinx
36. Fall, or Dodge in Hell
37. The Hod King
38. Boy Swallows Universe
39. Ancestral Night
40 Inappropration
41. Ordinary People
42. 21 lessons for the 21st century
43. There There
44. Stumbling upon happiness
45. Dark Matter
46. Children of Time
47. Middle Game
48. Recursion
49. Convenience Store Woman
50. Black Friday
51. White Girl
52. Photowork
53. The \boy behind the curtain

53. The boy behind the curtain


Collection of Tim Winton essays - I especially liked the ones about his father (a policeman), sharks (truly, truly excellent) and working to protect the Ningaloo reef. Great stuff.
 

mak1277

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40. The Innocents by Michael Crummey
(fictional) story of two pre-teens orphaned in Newfoundland in the 1850s and their struggle to make a life.
 

Fueco

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121. The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

the story of Hiram, a son of a slave and her owner in Virginia in the years before the Civil War. The first person story follows Hi (as his friends call him) on his travels around the South and into the North as a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
 

California Dreamer

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1. Andy Kaufman: The Truth, Finally, by Bob Zmuda and Lynne Margulies
2. Illustrado, by Miguel Syjuco
3. Kill 'Em All, by John Niven[
4. The Black Monday Murders, volume 1: All Hail God Mammon, by Jonathon Hickman
5. Bad News, by Edward St. Aubyn
6. Education, by Tara Westover
7. Europe: A Natural History, by Tim Flannery
8. No Tomorrow, by Luke Jennings
9. Scrublands, by Chris Hammer
10. The Kingdom, by Fuminori Nakamura
11. The White Darkness, by David Grann
12. Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa's Deluge, by Yusuke Kimura
13. The Black Monday Murders, Volume 2: The Scales, by Jonathon Hickman
14. Dark Echoes of the Past, by Roman Diaz Eterovic
15. Acute Misfortune, by Erik Jensen
16. The Low Road, by Chris Womersley
17. Steve Smith's Men: Behind Australian Cricket's Fall, by Geoff Lemon
18. River of Salt, by Dave Warner
19. City of a Million Dreams, by Jason Berry
20. Nagaland, by Ben Doherty
21. Queen of Kenosha, by Howard Shapiro
22. Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid
23. Saga, Volume One (Eps 1-3), by Brian
24. The Forest of Wool and Steel, by Natsu Miyashita
25. The Waiter, by Matias Faldbakken
26. Manchester Happened, by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
27. This body's Not Big Enough For Both of Us, by Edgar Cantero
28. The Erratics, by Vicki Laveau-Harvie
29. Saga Book 2, by Brian Vaughan
30. Murder in the Crooked House, by Soji Shimada
31. The Brewer of Preston, by Andrea Camilleri
32. Eight Lives, by Susan Hurley
33. Fu Ping, by Wang Anyi
34. N, by John A. Scott
35. Adele, by Leila Slimani
36. Gretchen, by Shannon Kirk
37. An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones
38. The White Girl, by Tony Birch
39. The Trauma Cleaner, by Sarah Krasnostein
40. The Ballad of Captain Kelly, by Jonathan Wicken
41. Grief is the Thing With Feathers, by Max Porter
42. Dark Emu, by Bruce Pascoe
43. A Keeper, by Graham Norton
44. Saudade, by Suneeta Peres da Costa
45. The Murder Farm, by Andrea Maria Schenkel
46. Gallows Court, by Andrea Martin Edwards
47. Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan
48. State of the Union, by Nick Hornby
49. Being Black 'n Chicken, and Chips, by Matt Okine
50. Rather Be the Devil, by Ian Rankin
51. Forbidden Harbour, by Teresa Radice
52. The Grade Cricketer: Tea and No Sympathy, by Dave Edwards
53. A Fist or a Heart, by Kristin Eiriksdottir
54. There Was Still Love, by Favel Parrett
55. Bury the Lede, by Gaby Dunn
56. Eggshell Skull, by Bri Lee
57. The Yield, by Tara June Winch
58. Heida, by Steinunn Sigurðardóttir
59. My Life As An Alphabet, by Barry Jonsberg
60. Babylon Berlin, by Volker Kutscher
61. Too Much Lip, by Melissa Lucashenko
62. An Orchestra of Minorities, by Chigozie Obioma
63. The Cold Summer by Gianrico Carofiglio
64. Shamus Dust by Janet Roger

65. If You Tame Me by Kathie Giorgio

* I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this book. *

Single department store manager Audrey has just turned 55 and is wondering where the life she thought she would have went. She would like a relationship with a man but does she actually need one, like a fish needs a bicycle. She decides it is time to make more of an effort and goes to a pet shop seeking an animal to share her time with. Deciding that a cat would be just too stereotypical, she comes home with an iguana and starts to focus her care and attention on it.

Audrey’s neighbour Frank is a 60-something widower who has dealt with the loss of his wife by raising parakeets and treating them as family. He has seen Audrey around and quite fancies her. When he notices her iguana, he starts to think that might be a way to strike up a friendship, and maybe more.

The plot of this novel promises to be a fairly typical rom-com, but there are elements that lift it above that. The age of the main protagonists allows Giorgio to explore themes of loneliness and loss after separation from and the death of loved ones. She also, through Audrey’s Gloria Steinem obsession, explores some issues relating to feminism and what it means both to younger women and to the former radicals who have now reached middle age. I quite liked this book; the only jarring note for me was Frank’s regular chats with the ghost of his dead wife, which we are apparently mean to take at face value. That was just a bit too Hollywood-sequel for my tastes.

66. The Rosie Result by Graeme Simsion

The final novel in the Don Tillman series sees Don, Rosie and their son Hudson back in Melbourne. Don is a Professor of Genetics teaching at a uni, while Rosie is working in medical research, battling with her supervisor Judas for the right to be taken seriously as a senior researcher. Meanwhile Hudson is struggling in primary school, and his teachers want him tested for autism. When done is stood down after a complaint about racism, he takes the opportunity to commence the Hudson Project, and resolve his sons social, academic and sporting challenges.

In the previous novels, Don’s personality traits have been central to the plot, narrative voice and characterisation, but Simsion has never actually specified any cause. In this novel, autism is front and central, with the medical and social controversies attached to it put under the microscope. What does it mean to label an 11 year old as autistic, especially when the labellers are not qualified to make that call. Do presumptions about a person become self-reinforcing, with behaviour attributed to the condition which might be passed off as normal in other children? As Don comments at one point, neurotypical people say that those with autism lack empathy, but how many of them try to develop greater empathy towards the autistic?

As always, Don’s narration of the story is brilliantly done, and there are quite a few laugh out loud moments along the way, but Simsion is concluding his series by making some serious points about the mentally ill and how we treat them, albeit in the nicest possible way.

67 The Singing Bones by Shaun Tan

The Singing Bones is Shaun Tan's take on the folk tales of the brothers Grimm. For each of 75 stories, Tan selected an excerpt and created a sculpture to illustrate that excerpt. The sculptures were then photographed to pair with the text.

Some of these illustrations are haunting, even creepy. The lighting is done extraordinarily well and captures the mood of the story well; sometimes sunny and optimistic, sometimes scary. The book is an interesting way to breathe new life into very familiar material, and will likely inspire some readers to revisit the original stories, rather than the sanitised versions in popular culture.

68 Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Keiko starts life as a socially awkward, perhaps autistic, child. When she takes a temporary dead-end job in a convenience store, she finds an environment perfect for her, and never wants to leave. Years later she is still there, thriving in an organisation that tells her exactly what to do and how to behave every day, and never asks more of her than that. Her family and friends urge her to either get a more fulfilling job or to become a wife and mother, but she fobs them off with vague stories about illness.

When a rebellious young man gets a job at the store he starts to challenge Keiko's complacency. While finding him objectionable, Keiko also sees a way that she can use this young man to her benefit.

This was a curious novel, with a stilted awkward central character who nevertheless projects a sort of self-confidence in her understanding of what is right for her and her bemusement at the rest of the world and their idea of what she should be doing.
 

Geoffrey Firmin

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57.The Twentieth Man by Tony Jones

Jones is by trade a journalist and political commentator with the ABC and this is his first novel.

Jones adapts his historical source material, the facts behind the Croatian Ustasha troubles of the late 60’s and early 70’s. And applies it to a political thriller set in the transition period between the demise of the Liberal Country Party conservative government and the election of the Whitlam Labor government which finally saw Australia enter the 20th Century.

Jones has a cast of notable and colourful characters who propel the narrative forward and include some fascinating historical events, the Attorney General‘s raid on ASIO, the Australian Security service, headquarters and gives it an interesting interpretation. The scenes set in the Sydney CIB are well true to form when it comes to NSW Police. He further uses some very familiar media characters to add colour, all journalists are drunks and the impact of first wave feminism to good effect.

The Coratian anti communist politics are interesting and form the basis of the action of the narrative. I remember reading a few articles in the Sunday papers about terrorist training camps in the wilds of NSW as a teenager in the early 70’s. Jones quotes a familiar trope about how the SS were appalled by the Ustasha militants behaviour in their extermination of Serb Orthodox citizens of Yugoslavia during WW2.

Overall an interesting romp but I have to say I felt it was let down by the ending. I picked this up from the book exchange and thats where its going back.
 

California Dreamer

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57.The Twentieth Man by Tony Jones

Jones is by trade a journalist and political commentator with the ABC and this is his first novel.

Jones adapts his historical source material, the facts behind the Croatian Ustasha troubles of the late 60’s and early 70’s. And applies it to a political thriller set in the transition period between the demise of the Liberal Country Party conservative government and the election of the Whitlam Labor government which finally saw Australia enter the 20th Century.

Jones has a cast of notable and colourful characters who propel the narrative forward and include some fascinating historical events, the Attorney General‘s raid on ASIO, the Australian Security service, headquarters and gives it an interesting interpretation. The scenes set in the Sydney CIB are well true to form when it comes to NSW Police. He further uses some very familiar media characters to add colour, all journalists are drunks and the impact of first wave feminism to good effect.

The Coratian anti communist politics are interesting and form the basis of the action of the narrative. I remember reading a few articles in the Sunday papers about terrorist training camps in the wilds of NSW as a teenager in the early 70’s. Jones quotes a familiar trope about how the SS were appalled by the Ustasha militants behaviour in their extermination of Serb Orthodox citizens of Yugoslavia during WW2.

Overall an interesting romp but I have to say I felt it was let down by the ending. I picked this up from the book exchange and thats where its going back.
The number of political "journalists" getting into fiction these days is a disturbing reminder of what they have been doing in their day jobs.
 

jeradjames

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Don't think I will quite make it to 50 this year.

39. Sorrows Of Young Werther by Goethe
40. Glass Bead Game - Hesse
41. Steppenwolf - Hesse
42. Rosshalde - Hesse
 

Geoffrey Firmin

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Don't think I will quite make it to 50 this year.

39. Sorrows Of Young Werther by Goethe
40. Glass Bead Game - Hesse
41. Steppenwolf - Hesse
42. Rosshalde - Hesse
Glass Bead Game is one of my all time favourite books. I read while at Uni in the 80’s that T.S.Elliot took HH to test cricket game at Lords where England was playing Australia. Don Bradman was playing and HH supposedly got the inspiration for GBG from watching the strategy of the game unfolding during test.
 

LonerMatt

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1. The Broken Kingdoms
2. The Kingdom of Gods
3. Semiosis
4. Bridge of Clay
5. Blackwater City
6. Bullshit Jobs: a Theory
7. Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire
8. The People vs Tech
9. The Outrun
10 Ancillary Justice
11. Words without Music
12. Digital Minimalism
13. When Rivers Run Dry
14. The Uninhabitable Earth
15. Do we need inequality?
16. Carbon Ideologies: No Immediate Danger
17. The Secret Life of Trees
18. Educated
19. River of Doubt
20. Holy Sister
21. A War in Crimson Embers
22. Ancillary Sword
23. Ancillary Mercy
24. One Way
25. The Raven's Tower
26. Dark Emu
27. A Memory Called Empire
28. A Forest of Wood and Steel
29. Makers
30. Pink Mountain on Locust Island
31. The Summon Stone
32. Fallen Gate
33. Senlin Ascends
34. Howling Dark
35. Arm of the Sphinx
36. Fall, or Dodge in Hell
37. The Hod King
38. Boy Swallows Universe
39. Ancestral Night
40 Inappropration
41. Ordinary People
42. 21 lessons for the 21st century
43. There There
44. Stumbling upon happiness
45. Dark Matter
46. Children of Time
47. Middle Game
48. Recursion
49. Convenience Store Woman
50. Black Friday
51. White Girl
52. Photowork
53. The boy behind the curtain
54. Walking

54. Walking


This is a small but strong book by Erling Kagge, who was the first to walk to the South pole, the North pole and Everest. In it he writes about the value of walking and what it does for him and for others. It's not a flashy book, he doesn't write about his struggles or adventures, focusing instead on how walking helps him overcome little, niggling problems, how it breathes energy into his day to day life.

Really reassuring, really romantic without being cloying, simple writing that isn't grand and is enriched through its humility.
 

mak1277

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41. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (did not finish), Anita Loos
42. Train Dreams, Denis Johnson


The former was recommended as something that I'd find funny. It failed to deliver and I failed to keep reading after about 100 pages.

The latter was barely longer than 100 pages, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. A novella about a day laborer/hermit in the early 1900s in Idaho. Funny, sad and well written.
 

California Dreamer

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I enj
41. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (did not finish), Anita Loos
42. Train Dreams, Denis Johnson


The former was recommended as something that I'd find funny. It failed to deliver and I failed to keep reading after about 100 pages.

The latter was barely longer than 100 pages, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. A novella about a day laborer/hermit in the early 1900s in Idaho. Funny, sad and well written.
I enjoyed Train Dreams too. Have you read Tree of Smoke?
 

California Dreamer

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1. Andy Kaufman: The Truth, Finally, by Bob Zmuda and Lynne Margulies
2. Illustrado, by Miguel Syjuco
3. Kill 'Em All, by John Niven[
4. The Black Monday Murders, volume 1: All Hail God Mammon, by Jonathon Hickman
5. Bad News, by Edward St. Aubyn
6. Education, by Tara Westover
7. Europe: A Natural History, by Tim Flannery
8. No Tomorrow, by Luke Jennings
9. Scrublands, by Chris Hammer
10. The Kingdom, by Fuminori Nakamura
11. The White Darkness, by David Grann
12. Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa's Deluge, by Yusuke Kimura
13. The Black Monday Murders, Volume 2: The Scales, by Jonathon Hickman
14. Dark Echoes of the Past, by Roman Diaz Eterovic
15. Acute Misfortune, by Erik Jensen
16. The Low Road, by Chris Womersley
17. Steve Smith's Men: Behind Australian Cricket's Fall, by Geoff Lemon
18. River of Salt, by Dave Warner
19. City of a Million Dreams, by Jason Berry
20. Nagaland, by Ben Doherty
21. Queen of Kenosha, by Howard Shapiro
22. Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid
23. Saga, Volume One (Eps 1-3), by Brian
24. The Forest of Wool and Steel, by Natsu Miyashita
25. The Waiter, by Matias Faldbakken
26. Manchester Happened, by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
27. This body's Not Big Enough For Both of Us, by Edgar Cantero
28. The Erratics, by Vicki Laveau-Harvie
29. Saga Book 2, by Brian Vaughan
30. Murder in the Crooked House, by Soji Shimada
31. The Brewer of Preston, by Andrea Camilleri
32. Eight Lives, by Susan Hurley
33. Fu Ping, by Wang Anyi
34. N, by John A. Scott
35. Adele, by Leila Slimani
36. Gretchen, by Shannon Kirk
37. An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones
38. The White Girl, by Tony Birch
39. The Trauma Cleaner, by Sarah Krasnostein
40. The Ballad of Captain Kelly, by Jonathan Wicken
41. Grief is the Thing With Feathers, by Max Porter
42. Dark Emu, by Bruce Pascoe
43. A Keeper, by Graham Norton
44. Saudade, by Suneeta Peres da Costa
45. The Murder Farm, by Andrea Maria Schenkel
46. Gallows Court, by Andrea Martin Edwards
47. Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan
48. State of the Union, by Nick Hornby
49. Being Black 'n Chicken, and Chips, by Matt Okine
50. Rather Be the Devil, by Ian Rankin
51. Forbidden Harbour, by Teresa Radice
52. The Grade Cricketer: Tea and No Sympathy, by Dave Edwards
53. A Fist or a Heart, by Kristin Eiriksdottir
54. There Was Still Love, by Favel Parrett
55. Bury the Lede, by Gaby Dunn
56. Eggshell Skull, by Bri Lee
57. The Yield, by Tara June Winch
58. Heida, by Steinunn Sigurðardóttir
59. My Life As An Alphabet, by Barry Jonsberg
60. Babylon Berlin, by Volker Kutscher
61. Too Much Lip, by Melissa Lucashenko
62. An Orchestra of Minorities, by Chigozie Obioma
63. The Cold Summer by Gianrico Carofiglio
64. Shamus Dust by Janet Roger
65. If You Tame Me by Kathie Giorgio
66. The Rosie Result by Graeme Simsion
67 The Singing Bones by Shaun Tan
68 Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

69 Bowraville by Dan Box

In remote Bowraville, over a few months in 1990-91, three aboriginal children were killed. The youngest victim, Evelyn Greenup, was just four years old. The other two, Clinton Duroux and Colleen Walker, were 16. Two of the bodies were found along the same back road; Walker's has never been found, only her clothes.

From the outset, the crimes were treated as missing persons cases, with the police claiming that the two older victims had just "gone walkabout". When an investigation was mounted, it was headed by a detective who had never investigated a homicide. A local white man (given the pseudonym James Hide by Box) was identified as a suspect and arrested.

Hide was eventually charged with the murders of Greenup and Duroux. In a decision that was to give rise to decades of agony, the judge refused to combine the cases and prevented evidence about one murder being used as probative in the other. Evidence of similarities between the two murders was inadmissable. Hide was found not guilty in the Duroux trial, and the Greenup trial was abandoned.

The families and the lead homicide detective refused to take that decision lying down. They fought for years to get justice for their children, resulting in a trial on the Greenup case, where Hide was again cleared. This meant the end of the road, due to double jeopardy.

Except that the families still fought, going through the coroner, local MPs, Parliament, the press, the Attorney-General and the Premier. Their fight ultimately led to legislation overturning the principle of double jeopardy in NSW, potentially creating another opportunity to get the not guilty verdicts overturned and putting Hide on trial for all three murders.

This is a story about a decades-long fight for justice for people who were treated appallingly, considering that their children had died. Box makes no bones about the fact that the murder or disappearance of white children, or even foreign backpackers, warranted investigative teams of more than 100 detectives, whereas three indigenous children only warranted two or three part-time investigators with almost zero supporting resources.

This book is a very hard, confronting read and you can't help but feel sorry for these families. At times it feels just like a sickening gut-punch; one is constantly reminded of Cory Booker's saying that "our legal system is not a justice system".
 

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