50 Books Challenge 2023 Part Ten

Merry Christmas guys.

I see some book shaped things under the tree, I’m reading in bed with a tea and my husband’s just suggested a trip to my fave book shop in Alfriston in between Christmas and New Year. Bliss. Although I’ve not mentioned I’m on book 5 of 32 of the Moorland Dynasty so unlikely to actually read anything else for a while.

Hope there’s plenty of books and reading for you all today. X

Happy Christmas all! Wishing you all lovely piles of books and the time to read them 🎁🌲⭐

My holiday reading has kicked off very nicely with Burntcoat and the Lost rainforests of Britain - reviews to follow when I'm not on my phone.

MERRY CHRISTMAS GANG

Merry Christmas everyone! Dh went out on a limb for my stocking this year and bought me 4 of the Never After books. We'll see what I make of them. Off to the in-laws for lunch later and they are normally pretty good at picking some books from my wishlist so hoping for some good presents

@MamaNewtNewt storygraph gives you all sorts of stats on your reading, I love it

Merry Christmas 50 Bookers!

Merry Christmas to all 50 bookers

Merry Xmas to you all - hears hoping for lots of books for everyone. Looking forward to seeing everyone's treasures !

Happy Christmas all!

I'm DNFing The Thursday Murder Club (can't be arsed section). Maybe if I gave it another chapter I would be into it, but as it is, it reads like a clunky selection of old cliches bolted together. Replacing it with British Railway Disasters, my present from dp ❤

Merry Christmas everyone, hope everyone gets lots of lovely new books.

Happy Christmas - I know I mainly lurk, but I L O V E this thread. Nicest place on the internet.

Happy Christmas 50 bookers!

Merry Christmas everyone! Here’s hoping for lots of books under Christmas trees today. Looking forward to see what everyone gets!

Happy Christmas everyone!

62 Just One Damned Thing After Another - Jodi Taylor Well this was not quite what I was expecting. I thought it would involve lots of time travel by academic types and I suppose that’s what I got, but it was crazy, all-over-the-place, suspend your disbelief sort of time travel instead of the measured, gentle, Miss Marple-style historical investigation which, for some reason, I thought it would be. Lots of fun as long as you don’t let your brain ask too many questions, and as long as you are ok with plot trumping character. I’ll definitely read the next in the series.

Now I absolutely have to sleep before the kids bounce out of bed ready for stockings…

Merry Christmas everyone! Enjoy the holidays 🎅🌲🎁📚

Merry Christmas one and all. Here’s to a good book haul. Raising a large G&T to you
all.

Merry Christmas, you wonderful bookers.

Our Hideous Progeny is on my wish list, so I look forward to the review.

Merry Christmas @LadybirdDaphne!
Is the turkey in the oven yet? Great presents 📚

Just finishing No.66 which I'll review after Christmas. Merry Christmas one and all.

40. The Party Crasher by Sophie Kinsella
I haven't read a Sophie Kinsella for a long time, and picked this up at a charity shop. She's the uber-chick lit writer to me. Distinctly better than I expected, but if you don't like this sort of thing, it's very much this sort of thing. Effie's parents are splitting up and her dad has a new girlfriend. There's a party at the family home Effie grew up in, but she's not invited. However, she won't be kept away.

Merry Christmas @LadybirdDaphne - your DP has done well!
19 - Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia by Hadley Freeman. Freeman explores her history with anorexia, from the onset of the illness as an early teen to how it affected her as a young adult who swapped recreational drug use for self-starvation.

I thought that this was sensitive and nuanced. While Freeman describes an off the cuff remark from a classmate as a significant trigger for her eating disorder, she notes that this is not the same as the cause, and looks at how for most people there are multiple predisposing factors that most likely in and of themselves would not lead to illness. There are interesting discussions about links with brain chemistry, heritable factors, and autism. This is also a kind book, with Freeman taking a gentle and sympathetic approach to both people with anorexia and their families.

Merry Christmas everyone! (It’s already Christmas morning here in the Upside Down, and DD has been awake since soon after midnight .)

At least DP followed the detailed instructions about which books to buy…

39 Abyss: World on the Brink - the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 by Max Hastings

I'm very unlikely to make 50 but at least 40 looks realistic (I blame the literal months I spent on Oppenheimer tbh). But this is a bold all right. As I've said before, Hastings is excellent at a strong journalistic account of the post WWII conflicts, stripped of the soupy reverence he sometimes has for the Great Generation. And surely this is one of the great journalist's stories of the 20th century. The scale of the potential horror and the forces pushing in that direction are astounding. JF Kennedy comes out particularly well, balancing on a knife edge and keeping a clear focus on his objectives. The portrait of RFK here is a useful counterpoint to the near-sanctity he sometimes us given in recent articles. A balloon-puncturing clarity from Hastings though pointing out American assumptions about what they had the right to do in other countries.

A Village Christmas- Laurie Lee

This is a collection of his later writings and really only the first is about Christmas. Quite a few about his London life. Still enjoyed them though.

Christmas Pudding Nancy Mitford
In true Nancy style a load of bright young things and eccentric older ones gather in the country. People fall in and out of love,
propose, drive their motor cars and generally have a good old time. It’s an early Mitford I think, but has all the wit and charm of her later novel(la)s.

74. Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad - Daniel Finkelstein
Haven't got time for a detailed review but I thought this was wonderful. Finkelstein's family biography is fairly unusual in that he had grandparents from both Germany and eastern Poland, so the story picks up both major strands of WWII. Finkelstein's maternal grandmother started out in Berlin, fled to Amsterdam and ultimately was sent to Belsen with her daughters, while his paternal grandmother was born in Lwow (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was deported to Kazakhstan with her son. His grandfathers had equally compelling journeys, separated from their wives and children after being forced to leave their home countries. I had no idea of Finkelstein's connection to the Wiener Holocaust Library, which was founded by his grandfather who, from the early 1930s, saw the importance of documenting the rise of the Nazis. What stood out for me, though, was the overwhelming efforts of Finkelstein's grandmothers to keep their children alive and to get them out of the other side as decent, educated human beings. Highly recommended.

46. Bone by Bone Sanjida Kay Squeezed in another before the year end (to be fair I did skim some of the incredibly boring bits in the middle). Helen moves to Bristol where her young daughter is bullied, acting rashly she pushes the perpetrator over causing him to gash his head. This mildly interesting set up quickly petered out into boring predictableness. Nothing seems believable and Helen is infuriating. In the end her daughter moves to a lovely private school so everyone can live happily every after away from the psychopaths and uncaring staff that inhabit the local state 🙄