50 Books Challenge 2022 Part Seven

I DNF 1979 so didn't bother with 1989 despite it being one of the best years of my life 🤣
Val Mc has really gone downhill IMO. The Tony Hill books and the standalones were great but now - nah. Reminds me of Edward Wozzisname with his shoehorning in of Famous People and Events only even tangentially connected.

@bettbburg

That made me smile thank you

I bought it after some thought but I'm not sure about it.
I'll be interested to see reviews.
I'm a bit down at the thought of books I know I will not get a chance to read, there's no point in me buying them, sorry.

1989 - Val McDermid Honestly, this was terrible. It takes much that was bad about the late 80s (Lockerbie, Hillsborough, AIDS, homophobia, Robert Maxwell), chucks in a bit about East and West Berlin and the crumbling of the Eastern Bloc and attempts to shape a thriller out of it.
There were bits I liked but overall I was left thinking that Jeffrey Archer would have done a better job.

Breakfast at Tiffany's is inspired by Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin. I always think it's interesting that two such iconic films were inspired by one set of memoirs.

@PepeLePew I love Breakfast at Tiffany’s - it’s so wistful and lonely and tender. So very different to the film.

Whalebone is not for me. It feels very creative writing class and the present tense was driving me scatty.

Just finished one of my standouts of the year.
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Leah is a marine scientist who, with two others, embarks on a submarine research trip that is supposed to take 3 weeks. Six months later, she finally returns to her waiting wife, but she is irrevocably changed by whatever happened to her. This is a dual narrative- Leah’s notes on the expedition and her wife’s description of what is happening to Leah on her return.

If I’m making this sound like nothing much, then that’s true in the sense that there’s hardly any plot. But it’s all so beautifully written that it just holds your hand and gently keeps moving you to the inevitable ending. It’s a love story and a story of the ocean’s hidden mysteries and it’s sweet and moving. I loved it.

LadyBird, DD loved God: An Anatomy, I may try to retrieve it from her as it is - strictly speaking - my book.

Top reads for me this year are:

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
The Book of Margery Kempe by Margery Kempe
Red Famine by Anne Applebaum
South Riding by Winifred Holtby
Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally
Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O'Hagan
The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

I also loved, though am not sure it qualifies as a "top read", the first of the Crater School books so thank you to whoever recommended that.

92 books this year, 35 non fiction although the success rate was much higher with those than my fiction choices and 52 by women. I would like more non fiction next year.

A few final reviews for the year...

86 Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
An analysis of modern dating habits. Some funny bits and a few cute anecdotes but instantly forgettable.

87 A Christmas Cornucopia by Mark Forsyth
Thanks for the recommendation - I can't remember who made it - as this was a fun easy pre-Christmas read.

88 Forever Home by Graham Norton
Darker than I expected. Carol's partner has dementia and she is forced to leave her much loved home by his children. Her parents buy it for her and they make a sinister discovery in the cellar. I thought this was very good on family dynamics and it was an entertaining if slightly far-fetched plot.

89 Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer
I think I will stop reading any more of these as they really are no sooner finished than forgotten. I didn't care about the plot or the characters and only persisted because I had started. One of my reading resolutions for next year is to stop doing that.

90 Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
Delightful, as always. Hard to believe it's the same person who wrote In Cold Blood. This is just charming if much darker than I recalled. I read it years ago and remembered Holly Golightly as a sort of manic pixie dream girl (which she is) but completely forgot the rest of it.

91 A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Not sure anyone needs my review of this so will just say a) it is very very readable and b) very faithful to the Mupppet version.

92 The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley
I enjoyed this. A slightly preposterous twisty turny plot with some unbelievable characters but as these things go it was good fun.

Hope it's okay to join in, even though the year is almost over? I was part of the 26-Books thread, but as I ended up reading over 80 books I felt I had to stop posting on there!

I've been reading along with this thread all year, but haven't got round to posting. My aim is to join in more next year, so thought I'd start by sharing my 2022 list:

1. The Heart’s Invisible Furies - John Boyne

1. The Pull of the Stars - Emma Donoghue
2. Winter - Ali Smith
3. Watching Neighbours Twice a Day - Josh Widdicombe
4. Rules of Civility - Amor Towles

1. Fifty Fifty - Steve Cavanagh
2. The Dutch House - Ann Patchett
3. Mythos (AB) - Stephen Fry

13 non fiction, 69 fiction
26% by men, 74% by women
1 paperback, 21 audio books, 60 ebooks

Thanks GrannieMainland. That sounds good. I've reserved it on Borrowbox.

I was just looking at The Whalebone Theatre and wondering if it might be my sort of thing. Off to read the sample now!

Thanks @ChessieFL that's the one. And thanks for The Whalebone Theatre recommendation @GrannieMainland

In 6th form, we had to do a film study thingy for General Studies and we did:
Tess (the Polanski one)
Psycho
Planet of the Apes
Apocalypse Now.

Looking back (and my school did many many things wrong) that was a really really good module and despite not being a filmy person (see cinema 7 times post etc) I still talk about it. Probably too often! It definitely made Tess (the book) one of my favourite classics, despite the whole Polanski (shudder) and Kinski thing.

29. The souvenir museum by Elizabeth McCracken
Quirky well written short stories. Really enjoyed these and she has a great turn of phrase, quite witty. Definitely going to try one of her novels next year.
**

30. A year unfolding: A printmaker's view by Angela Harding
Lots of illustrations of the artist's prints with some commentary. Could have done with more words. Beautiful pictures though definitely one to read in colour not on my black and white Kindle.

Nice to end on a round number 😁

Just jumping on to say one of my favourite books of the year, The Whalebone Theatre, is in the 99p deals today!

I don't have strong feelings on Jane Eyre, can I still play? I think I vaguely liked it, but I read it in my twenties when the Mr Rochester type had much more emotional traction for me, both on the page and IRL.

This year I've read 79 books - was hoping to get to a round 80 but not likely now.
Authors: 32 male, 47 female
Format: 27 hard copy, 27 kindle and 25 audio (makes sense as I usually have one of each on the go at a time)
24 fiction, 53 non-fiction, 1 play and 1 poetry collection

Stand-outs were:
Fiction
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (more accomplished than anything else I read by a country mile. Anyone wanting to do an unreliable narrator should read this, and probably weep)
Luster - Raven Leilani
No One is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Circe - Madeleine Miller
Just outside top 5: Mr Loverman - Bernardine Evaristo

Non-fiction
God: an anatomy - Francesca Stavrakopoulou (top NF read of the year)
The Word Hord - Hana Videen (close second)
Invisible Women - Caroline Criado Perez
Putting the Rabbit in the Hat - Brian Cox
Immune - Philipp Dettmer
Also special mention to Drunk (Edward Slingerland) and The Rise and Reign of the Mammals (Steve Brusatte)

Definite New Year's resolution to read more fiction next year!

Storygraph?

Can someone remind me what the clever site is that works out your reading percentages? It's like Good Reads but you can transfer in your good reads list.

Love that clipping @Zireael.
My main memory of the film is not of the film itself but of Anne Bancroft on Wogan.

Loving the Jane Eyre chat. I read it as a child and can't remember much about it apart being quite terrified in parts. Who keeps a woman in the attic, FGS?

35. Purple Hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Most likely my final read of 2022 unless I get a decent amount of reading time over the next couple of days! It took me a LONG time to fall for this one, having loved Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. I appear to have read these in the reverse order of publication which is maybe why Purple Hibiscus seemed less polished but as always with Adichie's work, it packs a punch. In my book there's an essay at the end which is her personal reflections on a return visit to Nsukka and I found it a great way to end the novel.

He's also written The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club

Really glad you enjoyed Manchester Fourteen Miles, @Midnightstar76. If you can bear to hear how Hilda's promising beginning pans out, do read the others. I’m longing to know what happened to Margaret Penn, especially after the end of the final book, and I just can’t find anything at all online - I’ve discovered where her papers are held (in a university archive) and I'm so desperate for closure that I seriously contemplated applying for access to the collection!

Newspaper clipping, from The Times, I think

23 84 Charing Cross Road - Helene Hanff

A book about books, in the form of a 20-year correspondence between a New Yorker and the staff of a London secondhand bookshop. I picked this up secondhand myself a while ago based on recommendations from this thread and whilst I enjoyed it, I didn't love it.

Interestingly, a newspaper clipping from the '80s fell out of the pages about how real life at 84 Charing Cross Road was quite different to the books portrayal. The son, Leo Marks, of one of the bookshop owners tells some home truths which rather took the shine off for me.

Last post, the War & Peace readlong has morphed into the Anna Karenina readalong for 2023 for anyone who would like to join us.

Off to mark my place for The Old Curiosity Shop.