50 Books Challenge 2022 Part Seven

I’m taking a firm stand and ignoring the Christmas Cornucopia.

I started The Dark is Rising last night. I’d been saving it, but needs must.

54. Roger Daltrey: My Story. Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewight
I needed something undemanding to read as my Mum is ill. This fitted the bill; a gentle canter through Daltrey's life story. Curiously opaque even while he's opening up; Daltrey always did seem like a bloke's bloke who happened to have an amazing performing talent and the most incredible look. But I did find myself listening to Who tracks, and I was quite touched by the portrait of his own family life and his London working class background.

Really pleased you enjoyed it, biblio.

Had to laugh about The Christmas Cornucopia; completely coincidentally I stumbled across it a couple of days ago, saw it was 99p, and was dithering about buying it. Then all the posts popped up on here, so I've bought it too.

Ha, having said it's memorable, I remembered the name wrong. Should be The Dancing Bear.

131. The Black Bear, by Frances Faviell.. Recommended by Terp recently, this is an account of Berlin immediately after WWII. I thought this was fantastic - frank about the horrors, but not gratuitous, and redeemed by its steady compassion and willingness to recognize decency. It's a cliche, but it really does bring history to life. Memorable.

70. The Somnambulist by Essie Fox

As I said downthread this has been on my Kindle for 10 years and never got past a few pages. My thought was that it was trying too hard to be Sarah Waters, and that is still true, but :

Phoebe Turner falls on hard times after the death of her Aunt and is sent to the country as a ladies companion. There is general mild intrigue.

I found it such a page turner and did half in one sitting, and I was really surprised at myself and the book considering.

It was definitely going for bold, until the last third, when it goes downhill and feels rushed and a bit forced.

Good if you like period stuff with country houses and secrets.

Delighted to see I already nabbed The Christmas Cornucopia as a 99p deal - must crack on and read it at a suitable time otherwise I won't bother til next winter.

Christmas book does sound great!

A few more from me:

LaRose, Louise Erdrich
Kicks off with a man accidentally shooting and killing his neighbours' son. They then 'give' one of their children, LaRose, to the bereaved family as a sort of atonement, apparently one of the 'old customs' in Native American culture. The rest of the novel explores what this and the shooting has done to the relationships between and within the two families, while also taking in quite a broad sweep of the families' histories and the wider culture.
At points I thought this shaded into poverty/tough-life porn; found myself thinking, 'Yes, I know some of your characters have hard lives and backgrounds and I get it.' It is also quite long and, with the ambitious historical and cultural reach, a bit rambling; at times it was hard to remember who everyone is and how they connect.
But overall I like Erdrich very much; she writes not quite like anyone else and her perspective is unique and original IMO.

The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane
Exquisite writing about landscape and history. He walks 'old ways' including ancient paths in the Himalayas walked by spiritual seekers and, fascinatingly, the 'roads' of the sea traffic around the British Isles and Europe in ancient times.

Shrines Of Gaiety, Kate Atkinson Much reviewed on here already. I agree it’s a good read in that her usual somewhat mordant and sarcastic wit is present and correct, as is the wryness and the sometimes delightfully surprising jokes. But I almost found it a bit TOO clever-clever sometimes, like she was constantly pre-empting the reader's response and making the joke or undercutting the pathos before you could. Trying a bit hard, perhaps. I also agree that the plot was basically a mess and in the end inconsequential. I did overall like the characters, though, and the colour, seediness and glamour of the era.

Another 99p from me - sounds perfect!

I promise I am not receiving any sort of commission from Mark Forsyth or his publishers!

I've just bought A Christmas Cornucopia too. Sounds amazing!

Sold!

I'm also currently dipping in to A German Christmas, which is a mix of traditional and modern stories from Germany, Switzerland and Austria (it says on the cover).

Me too!

@LadybirdDaphne You got me with that opening paragraph, just downloaded A Christmas Cornucopia

Also just finished 77. A Christmas Cornucopia - still on offer for 99p and worth every penny for entertainment value. Best opening paragraph I've seen in ages:

"Picture a man sitting beside a dead tree. He is indoors and wearing a crown. From the ceiling hangs a parasitical shrub that legitimates sexual assault. He is singing to himself about a tenth-century Mittel-European murder victim using a sixteenth-century Finnish melody. Earlier, he told his children that the house had been broken into during the night by an obese Turkish man. This was a lie, but he wanted to make his children happy. Far away, in the high Andes two Peruvians are punching each other very hard indeed."

Like others, I've been picking up books and then casting them wearily aside. I did manage:
130. The Night Visitor, by Lucy Atkins, which is a fairly standard psychological thriller - woman trembles at what a mysterious older woman may unleash - but with a strand of perfidious academia that I rather enjoyed.

68. The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne

The novel introduces us to Cyril's mother and his illegitimate birth in Ireland in the 1940s, before charting his life, man and boy over the decades running up to almost present day. As Cyril is gay, the changing attitudes to homosexuality in Ireland form an important plot point.

From maybe the beginning of this up to Cyril's first job, I thought this was going to be a bold, I liked the characters and situations and found it quite witty; even though I thought Julian was terribly annoying.

After this the novel becomes a bit "sectional", there's an Amsterdam section, a New York section etc and not all of them were as diverting. I thought the ongoing plot device with his meet cutes with his biological mother was overdone too.

Good. Glad to have ticked it off.

69. A Short History Of Ireland 1500-2000 by John Gibney (Audible)

This was VERY dry, and the narrator had a very gentle voice so it was really hard to focus on and not want to fall asleep.

Probably got more history out of the John Boyne

@CornishLizard @Piggywaspushed

Yeah I agree about the real person getting in the way, I didn't think all of her children were properly fleshed out as characters, and I also thought the 2 random runaways subplot very much didn't fit. I also felt that Gwendolyn was Too Ever So Perfect.

53. Almost Love Louise O’Neil. Our protagonist is a young Irish art teacher dealing with the fall out of a relationship with a much older toxic millionaire. This was really awful. I hated the main character - she treated everyone in her life badly, there was no evidence she’d ever been a decent person and I couldn’t really see any reason to like the older man to explain her decisions. I stuck with it in the hope of some sort of epiphany but there was none.
54. Rachel’s Holiday Marian Keyes. A reread - Rachel is a twenty something party girl who finds herself ‘unfairly’ sent to rehab by her chaotic Irish family. I loved this. I think I read it originally as a straight laced teeenager and to read it again when I’m very much out the other side of my partying days I probably took different things from it. Buy in my experience it’s an accurate portrayal of this type of ‘functioning’ addiction. I read this at the same time as the book above and found it interesting how both protagonists are pretty unpleasant but Rachel is much more likeable than the other one (whose name I’ve already come back too.
55. Again, Rachel Marian Keyes. The sequel showing middle aged Rachel living in Ireland and head councillor at the rehab centre she once attended. A lovely return. I’d forgotten how sexy Keyes’ sex scenes were. Much enjoyment of leather panted Luke.

Hot on the heels of Piggy’s review, I’ve also finished Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety and feel the same - it’s good, but not up with her best. There’s her trademark wit cut through with darkness, the same wry delivery, pithy remarks and surprises in the writing as in previous books, but maybe not quite as much sentence by sentence, page by page magic. I love KA and it’s one of my reads of the year, if it was written by anyone else I’d have been delighted to discover a marvellous new author to read, but unlike her previous books it didn’t grab me from sentence 1 and read itself for me. In the author’s note at the end there is a bit about the real-life character who inspired the novel, and maybe this anchor weighed things down a bit?

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie @JaninaDuszejko exactly that, the book is about a celebrity feminist so one assumes after Germaine! I don't think it added anything much beyond spotting the reference.

70 The Lamplighters - Emma Stonex This is a novel about the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from a lighthouse off the coast of Cornwall in the 70s, which flips between the perspectives of the men themselves in the weeks leading up to the disappearance and their wives/girlfriends 20 years later. It’s very loosely based on / inspired by a real-life unexplained disappearance of the keepers of a lighthouse on the Flannan Isles in western Scotland in 1900.

The mystery of the Flannan Isles disappearance is intriguing and I had high hopes for a really engaging mystery story, but unfortunately I found the book a bit disappointing. The writing style didn’t work for me and I never really cared about the characters or bought into the explanation for the disappearance created by the author. It was ok, and I’m sure other people have loved it, but for me it was a bit of a damp squib.

Presumably you are not refering to actress Greer Garson 😁? I know a few adult women called Greer and always liked it as a name so in this case for me the famous feminist was not my first thought but yes, in that case it's probably toe curlingly unsubtle.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

A reread of a book I last read when my eldest was just 3 months old, no wonder I couldn't only remember the most basic outline and a couple of big set scenes! Great fun, complex plotting (and even with his revisions before novelisation there are still 2 weeks of Anne Catherick's life that are unaccounted for), and the most fascinating introduction in my Oxford World Classics edition suggesting Collins intended to imply a ménage à trois set up for Walter, Laura and Marian (as he himself had).

98. The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

The author is a new lawyer working on a Death Row case which causes her to re-examine the abuse she herself suffered as a child.

This was an odd book, both the case and the author's childhood were tragic, but the parallels between the case of a six year old boy who was murdered, and her own abuse, are weak at best. Her examination of the case is superficial and there’s lots of conjecture.

I can see, given the complexities of her family situation, that the author almost needed an excuse to be able to write about her experience but in the end it just felt a bit exploitative to me.

99. No Second Chance by Harlan Coben

Man is shot. His wife is dead. His baby is gone. Standard mystery from Harlan Coben. I used to love this type of book, but I’ve probably just read too many, or my tastes have changed. It was an easy read but the main character is an arrogant arse and the obligatory twists were obvious. As this was written about 20 years ago the technology references were kinda funny - everyone is amazed that you can Google someone and find out info about them and there are pagers everywhere.

100.* In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren*

This festive, Groundhog Day romance was just what I needed as the COVID has finally got me. This didn’t try to be clever, there were no twists, it was just a nice, fluffy, romance.