50 Books Challenge 2023 Part Ten

I love The Children of Green Knowe - one of my favourite Christmas books and I will be rereading it myself over the next couple of days!

@JaninaDuszejko I was just thinking about The Children of Green Knowe this afternoon. I was trying to think of books to get DD for Christmas. She's not a big reader but we've been reading Charkotte Sometimes together and she's really enjoying it so though that might be a good one. I think I'm going to see I can send DH to town tomorrow to pick it up.

Footnotes and Tangents A Year of Tiny Reads

Someone was asking a while ago about recommendations for short reads for the end of the year, thought this list was interesting.

I snorted my tea at that @MamaNewtNewt but I like your style and may give it a try myself.

The Secret History of Christmas - Bill Bryson A short read on Audible. It was ok, I’m a bigger lover of his writing than I am of his voice and there wasn’t much new in it.

A Child’s Christmas in Wales - Dylan Thomas Another festive short which I love but again, I listened to him read it and I couldn’t get past his posh accent. What I wouldn’t give for a reading by Michael Sheen. It’s lovely and familiar to me though as I live locally so I can picture the places mentioned.

The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett A return to the setting of Hallett’s first book, The Appeal, with the same format of a dossier of evidence. I’d forgotten the details of the earlier plot but that didn’t much matter. This is shorter and funnier than her other books with some genuine laugh out loud moments. I didn’t like the way the food bank was referred to, and found it dragged a little in the middle, but overall an enjoyable and satisfying read to curl up with.

If I have time (which is looking less and less likely) I might try to read The Box of Delights again. I tried to read it last December but just couldn't get into it and gave up after about 30 pages.

The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M Boston

I loved this book as a child (and the BBC series) and it was lovely to revisit and enjoy all the Christmassy scenes. It's low fantasy (just a little bit of timeslip) and a gentler read than those other classic children's Christmas novels but all the better for it. Delightful.

I'm glad my smut reading has caused some merriment 😊 Yeah I live with family. DH fortunately didn't hear me performing The Duchess of Malfi but DD did and wanted to know what I was "jibbering on about". Wait until she hears me have a go at Shakespeare!

@MamaNewtNewt wins the prize for eclectic reading there. Who will be inspired by the smut and who by the Jacobean tragedy?

@MamaNewtNewt hilarious!

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

This is set in an American city in the 1920s, but in an alternate reality where the Aztecs still hold a lot of power. One winter night, two policemen find a body - clearly murder but who did it and why?

I had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, the descriptions of the city Cahokia are brilliant - I had a really good picture in my head of the city and its speakeasies.

However the story itself I found a bit confusing - the author uses three similar terms to refer to different groups of people and I could never remember which was which. I’m still not completely sure of the reasons why the man was murdered.

It is well written though and I can see others will love this.

Murder At Holly House by Denzil Meyrick

Another winter murder, this time set in 1952 and told from the investigating policeman’s point of view. Despite the title and the Christmassy looking cover, this isn’t at all Christmassy - it’s set in December but that’s it. This started well but the last quarter got rather silly and unbelievable.

Aunt Sass - Christmas Stories by P L Travers

Another book pretending to be Christmassy when it isn’t! These were stories that P L Travers wrote as Christmas presents for others, but the stories themselves don’t feature Christmas except the last one right at the very end. Interesting to see where some of the inspiration for Mary Poppins came from but I didn’t really like the other two stories at all - very much of their time and not in a good way.

@MamaNewtNewt I am laughing to myself at your description of reading two smutty books and needing to cleanse by reading a Jacobean revenge play 🤣🤣 do you live with family? What did they think of reading to yourself out loud? 😁

Catching up on a few reviews before I hopefully finish my 150th book!

I mentioned that I had read a lot of rom-coms when I was ill. I can’t remember much about them but not sure if that is a reflection on the books or the fact I felt like crap.

145. The Mistletoe Pact by Jo Lovett

Not good. Man cannot commit and blames it all on his Daddy. Oh, and there’s an accidental drunken marriage.

146. Unexpectedly Mine by Erin Hawkins

Looked like a rom-com. Sounded like a rom-com. Was, in fact, smut. I’m so embarrassed that I actually finished it. 😳

147. Accidentally Ours by Erin Hawkins

I have no excuse at all for why I read this one. The first chapter was included in the previous book and I wanted to know what happened. Spoiler: Smut. And icky smut at that.

148. The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

I needed a bit of a palate cleanser after the previous books, so picked up this Jacobean revenge play that I haven’t read since A Levels. For some reason I took it into my mind to speak all the parts out loud, like some kind of thwarted thespian. It’s amazing how much I remembered and I really enjoyed this. I might have to perform more plays to myself!

149. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston

This is the story of the very last slave brought to America - Cudjo Lewis. It was very slight but I found this really interesting, especially as the focus was most on his life in Africa and his life after slavery.

The Temple of Fortuna - Elodie Harper
Third in the Wolf Den trilogy (Pretty Woman in Pompeii).
Amara is now a powerful courtesan in Rome in the orbit of Emperors, but finds herself back in Pompeii during the eruption of Vesuvius and has difficult choices to make.

Enjoyable fluff. The first is the best, but this rounds the trilogy off nicely.

I finished the last few stories in my Valancourt Book of Christmas Ghost Stories, many of which were not specifically Christmassy but were suitably ghostly.

They were mainly very well written and entertaining chillers. I wasn't sure about the wisdom of including two overtly racist stories (one even warns in advance of its racial slur) - of its time, sure, but there are plenty of other stories out there and neither of these two were fine enough to merit their inclusion really.

A good read overall, though- and , unusually for these story collections, I hadn't read any before.

Fully agree with comments about The Bean Trees. I think I have the sequel somewhere in my TBR pile - you've reminded me to bump it up the list!

61 All Our Hidden Gifts - Caroline O’Donoghue I think this must have been recommended on here, as I would never have chosen it off my own bat. It’s a YA novel set in Ireland, involving tarot, magic and quite a lot of stuff about gender identity and sexuality…all adding up to an enjoyable story. Lots of totally unbelievable stuff about spells and so on, but fun (although I didn’t like the suicide references and it probably needs a trigger warning for that). The ending was fine but it’s clearly set up for a sequel - which I would probably read.

I really enjoyed The Bean Trees @RazorstormUnicorn. I don't think it was a big hit at the time, so I would never have read it if she hadn't become so famous later on and I looked up her earlier books. I agree with you that this made it interesting to read, as it's the sort of book you would usually read at the time rather than many years later from a completely different perspective. I also liked it because you can see her development as a writer- this isn't as powerful as her later books, but definitely showed promise.

65. The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

Taylor is moving away from home in Kentucky to start a new life, and the book focuses on the journey and then the time period as she figures out finding a job and a place to live. In some ways not a lot happens but in other ways loads of things happen. Primarily to me it's about finding friends who become your chosen family.

The book was written in 1988, and has a strong anti racist undertone, I wonder what it was like to read at the time?

I think it's set in the 70s, and feels a world apart from life in 2023. It makes me wonder what the world will be like in 2050, and how different it will feel to the 2000s. Which then makes me understand why older generations can seem stuck in their ways or struggling to accept change.

I love a book that sends me down a new thought path!

@StColumbofNavron it got very good reviews so do not be deterred!

I have form for hating stuff others like and vice versa.

@StColumbofNavron Look forward to hearing what you think of it - I don't really like panning a book that others may find perfectly fine, so I didn't review this at the time.

@GrannieMainland and @MaudOfTheMarches this is one of my Kindle hoard from the other day that I am quite looking forward to, was planning on reading over the holidays.

DD bought me Susannah Constantine's autobiography 'Ready for absolutely Nothing' as an early Christmas present.
I remember her from her What Not to Wear days.
This is a good read which has seen me through a bout of recent insomnia. She says that she makes a point of trying to win people over and she is very charming in print. She is also honest about her previous issues with alcohol (and how she has overcome this) and the fact that she was part of a class and generation brought up to be good wives and mothers with no career aspirations.
Some gems about Princess Margaret.

66. Tripwire by Lee Child Third Reacher book. This time Reacher hooks up with a woman from his past, the one who got away, to unravel a military mystery. I guessed the twist so early on it made the whole book a bit farcical. I'm partly interested in reading on to find out what goes wrong with Reacher's apparent happy ending but equally I don't really care enough.

Going to take Eine's very wise advise and stop my self inflicted punishment and call it a day on Reacher, at least until the new year. I attempted to start a cosy Christmas crime yesterday but wasn't feeling it. Think I need a trashy romance to cleanse my soul from all the gratuitous violence against women