50 Books Challenge 2023 Part Ten

Just dipping in to add my last read of 2023 - I wanted to finish this as it brings my total to a satisfying round figure, but also because it’s a token of commitment to reading all of In Search of Lost Time, which I’m still persisting with along with DH and a couple of friends. It’s not a quick read, for sure! But anyway, this is volume 4 (of 7) done.

90: Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust

In which our narrator makes the shock discovery that the self-regarding Baron de Charlus - one of the grand personages met with thus far in the most elegant drawing-rooms of Parisian society - is in fact making assignations with other men. It’s not actually a total shock to the reader, but marks a point of transition and darkening of the narrative in the novels….also a degree of impenetrability. I’m relieved that, on doing a bit of online digging, I’m not alone in finding this volume a struggle. Onwards and upwards!

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride is on the kindle deals for 99p. I just bought it in hardback 2 weeks ago for £20 so a good deal. It’s getting a lot of attention in best book of the year lists by American newspapers and YouTubers and is tipped for the Pulitzer.

Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers

Read by what seems like pretty much everyone on here already. I loved it, thought she captured the feel of those 'slightly dated' mid century novels we all love about women with 'small lives', although I do think now being a journalist would be seen as more aspirational than being a housewife. I enjoyed the science, particularly the description of electrophoresis as complex. 60 years later it's such a simple technique my daughter did it during her work placement in Y10.

76 American Royals - Katharine McGee
America has a royal family, installed in Washington Palace after the war with the British (or something like that - it's not very clear but neither does it matter). Princess Beatrice has to decide between marrying for love or duty, wayward heirs Samantha and Jefferson grow up in public, Sam's best friend Nina wonders whether she can handle a relationship with Jefferson, and social climber Daphne Deighton gets in the middle of it all. Fun YA froth, totally inconsequential.

Belated happy Christmas to you all! I have some nice crime novels to get stuck into. Enjoyed seeing everyone's festive hauls.

69 Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller by Nadia Wassaf

Interesting non-fiction account of how the author, her sister and a close friend established the Diwan bookshop (and later additional branches) in Cairo. The author is engaging and I found the sections on the types of books their customers wanted, the difference between the Arabic and English sections and the difficulty of operating as a female entrepreneur in a man's world fascinating.

70 The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper

Annual re-read before Christmas. I enjoyed this even more than usual this year. I love the story but I think Cooper writes a family Christmas better than anyone else and that's what makes this the best in the series.

71 Still Life by Val McDermid

6th in the Karen Pirie series, I thought this was one of McDermid's better novels. A good main plot with a nice art theme, enjoyable writing and a nice new character (a DS shoehorned from another investigation - McDermid clearly getting a bit bored with Jason Murray). There was a fairly pointless subplot that petered out at the end and could have been left out entirely but overall, a good read.

What excellent hauls! I only got one book but I'm very pleased with it - the new edition of Helene Hanff's Letter from New York.

I'm off work until the New Year so am determined to do a lot of lolling about and reading and very little else.

Winter People and The House of Doors are also 99p today

The latest Sophie Hannah Poirot is 99p at the moment, for any fellow masochists.

Sorry to hear about KM Peyton - I loved Flambards too, and Pennington.

Wishing everyone who has been unwell a swift recovery, and enough energy to read in bed if not to get up. Enjoying the book hauls vicariously, none to report here but debating treating myself to The Bee Sting after enjoying your reviews.

My latest is Wheels within Wheels by Dervla Murphy, having read Full Tilt last year and A Place Apart earlier this. WwW is her autobiography covering her childhood, the years she spent nursing her mother, and, though it doesn’t cover the journey described in Full Tilt, it ends with the success of that book on her return. I loved this - fascinating to read about how this incredible woman was shaped, her family life and her friendships, her joy in the landscape and her capacity for life. A Place Apart remains my favourite and I’m glad I read that and one of her travel books first, but I preferred this even to Full Tilt. Will read more of her books - any recommendations on where to go next?

House of Doors is also in the deals today and I've picked that up.

I just picked up Tomorrow x3 for 99p. I get the feeling I’ll either love it or DNF it!

Oh no, I hadn't heard that. I loved the Flambards books too.

Kindle deals are all over the place at the moment, but mine are showing Tomorrow x3 and Happy Place as 99p today which might be of interest.

I've just seen that KM Peyton died a few days ago, aged 94. I loved her books as a teenager - Flambards, of course, but also the Pennington series.

Oh that's very interesting @Sadik! Good to know that Sadie Jones captured the atmosphere well.

Happy Christmas to all and I'm sorry to those who are ill.

Great to see all the book hauls! I only got a couple - The Future by Naomi Alderman and short stories by Camilla Grudova. I seem to have picked up a lot of things for myself recently though so plenty of new things to read in the new year.

@GrannieMainland & others who've enjoyed Amy and Lan might be amused to know that I bought it for dd for Christmas to see what she thought of it. She agreed it really caught the experience of living in community as a small child spot on.

(She did say that perhaps the children in the book were more aware of the adult dramas than IRL - but I have a suspicion that in fact it's because we all spent rather more time in meetings discussing house maintenance & milking rotas, & rather less time in relationship angst )

Hurrah, so pleased you enjoyed Modern Ranch Living @cassandre!

I've kind of fallen off the thread so just dumping everything I've read since I last posted before going back to see what everyone else has been reading.

105. The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper
     In a future where civilisation has been destroyed by "the convulsions" men and women live mostly separately. Boys are sent to live with the warriors (all men) at the age of five, but have the option of returning to the women at fifteen to act as servitors. The book begins with Stavia learning that her son has chosen to remain with the warriors, then most of the novel is set during Stavia's teenage years, the daughter of her town's medical officer, and the choices she makes, and the secrets that some are guarding.
     Feminist sci-fi that feels a little dated but still makes a pretty good story.

106. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
     This is more or less the life story of 28 year old Gifty, who is experimenting on mice for her neuroscience PhD and caring for her ill mother, a Ghanaian immigrant in the US.
     It's told non-linearly, and is a subtle look at racism, immigration, broken families, trauma, and religion and science. I liked reading this, though it is quite a sad book.

107. The Stationery Shop of Tehran by Marjan Kamali
     Sixty years after their ill-fated romance that started in a Tehran stationery shop Roya and Bahman meet again and so we are whisked back to the 1950s to watch it play out.
     Easy to read, though Roya is a bit too passive to make a strong protagonist.

108. One of Us is Next by Karen M. McManus
     Sequel to One of Us is Lying. The pupils of the same high school are forced into a giant game of truth or dare. Not exactly plausible but it's an ok YA thriller.

109. Deceived Wisdom: Why What You Thought Was Right is Wrong by David Bradley
     Quite a short book about things like why it's not true that if you wear your coat inside you don't feel the benefit when you go out. Fairly interesting but nothing mind-blowing.

110. A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson
     Seven year old Clara keeps watch by the window, waiting for her missing older sister to return. She sees a man move into the home of her elderly neighbour, Elizabeth, and the story of these three lives is told from each of their viewpoints; Clara in turmoil but observant, Elizabeth thinking about her past, and Liam at a crossroads in life.
     It's a quiet book written in in unshowy prose that draws you in.

111. The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
     After Frida leaves her two year old daughter, Harriet, at home alone she is made to leave Harriet with her ex husband and his new partner for a year while she takes part in a program to learn to be a good mother.
     It's a good idea for a dystopia, the way the mothers are treated, and the how they are forced to learn to be better parents. Frida is an interesting character in some ways but difficult to warm to. I think I liked the idea of the book more than I liked the book.

112. The Orchard on Fire by Shena Mackay
     April and her parents move to a small Kent village to run a tea room in the 1950s. April is quickly befriended by Ruby, whose abusive parents run the pub, and is groomed by a local man.
     A subtle coming of age novel, nicely written.

113. Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov trans. Boris Dralyuk
     Beekeeper Sergeyich lives in the grey zone between Russian occupied Ukraine and the rest of the country in the 2010s. His tiny village is almost deserted, the only other inhabitant remaining is his childhood enemy, Pashka.
     It's a surprisingly gentle for a book set in a war, though there are snipers, bombs food shortages etc, and this gentleness comes from Sergeyich who is rather detached from everything except his bees.

114. Midnight in Everwood by M.A. Kuzniar
     In the early twentieth century Marietta longs to be a ballerina but her wealthy parents want her to stop dancing and marry someone they deem suitable, possibly the mysterious new neighbour Dr Drosselmeier. Then as the clock strikes midnight at the start of Christmas Day she enters a strange world and will have to find a way home.
     Fantasy romance based on The Nutcracker. Perhaps there was a good story in there somewhere but it was dragged down by purple prose and mostly anodyne characters.

115. Christmas Days by Jeanette Winterson
     A collection of short stories and recipes with a Christmas theme. I liked the ghost stories best.

116. The Ickabog by J.K. Rowling
     In the kingdom of Cornucopia there is a legend of a terrifying monster called the ickabog. Vain, foolish King Fred is manipulated into using this legend against his people.
     This is darker than I expected, with murders and executions. It's a sort of children's 1984, with the ones in power making up t
     heir own reality and suppressing the truth.

Ah yes, StColumb, I should have said that the Rivard book was only available in French, duh! I wish it could be translated into English, though I think it's unlikely. It won a prize in Canada, and a French-Canadian colleague lent it to me, but when I looked for it on Amazon, thinking I'd like to own a copy myself, it wasn't even available to buy. So it's pretty obscure in the Anglophone world I think. I've actually thought of ordering it from Canada. I had mad crushes on a few of my uni professors as well, and I'm grateful that they never attempted anything remotely untoward!

86 This is definitely my last of the year! I had a surprise hour to myself on the sofa this afternoon so finished The Bothy by Trevor Mark Thomas
This was….interesting. On the face of it very sparely written with some shockingly violent scenes, but it had a captivating depth to it that kept me reading.
Tom is on the run, helped by his friend Gary to escape the vengeful family of his deceased girlfriend, who blame him for her death. He reaches a remote bothy/pub, run by another gangster, Frank. The bothy doesn’t have any customers. It’s not really a place you’d want to accidentally stumble across, even if you’re desperate, but fortunately heavy snowfall means that only the most determined will make it up there.
All Tom has to do is a bit of maintenance but it’s not long before tensions rise between him and Frank’s henchmen. The attentions of Cora, Frank’s girlfriend don’t endear him to the deeply unpleasant Braudy, Tucker etc.
There’s a lot of gritty description, much of it extremely unpleasant. Some gut-churning violence. Remnants of trafficking and prostitution litter the knocked-up rooms and you absolutely don’t want to find yourself in the room lined with plastic sheeting. At some points I wondered if it was an allegory for Purgatory but Thomas keeps his authorial feet firmly on the ground.

Not for the faint hearted but had a strange air of redemption and facing banal evil head on.

@cassandre I have a total fascination with the whole university academic/student relationship from my own crush on a lecturer once upon a time (you’ll be pleased to know he was never anything but very professional), sadly it doesn’t look like Rivard’s book is easily accessible in English.

Books I’ve read more recently (maybe the last books I’ll finish this year!)

71. If I Survive You, Jonathan Escoffery 4/5
    Booker Prize Shortlist. Some of these interlinking short stories are brilliant, but the quality is a little uneven overall, as others have remarked. The first story is particularly powerful; it’s about race and identity in America and the pressure to find a label so that people can file you into the right ‘box’ (regardless of whether said box actually fits). A powerful contribution to Jamaican-American literature.

72. Quartet in Autumn, Barbara Pym 4/5
    Quite different to the other Pym books I’ve read, and frankly rather bleaker, this story is about four older people and their struggle to maintain a sense of autonomy. It reminded me of Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. Melancholic at points, but also very funny in its trademark Pym exposure of human quirks.

73. The Bee Sting, Paul Murray 5/5
    Booker Prize Shortlist. I loved this and devoured it over the course of a weekend. It would have been my pick for the Booker. A family saga told from the perspective of different family members (teenagers and parents) in turn. Brilliant characterisation.

74. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein 5/5
    I don’t read much non-fiction, and I wasn’t expecting to be as blown away by this book as I was. I picked it up originally because I was interested in the Naomi Wolf scandal (how someone who was once a reputable feminist writer became a conspiracy theorist and general laughingstock), but this book is about much more than how Klein was repeatedly mistaken for Wolf. It’s about the whole world of conspiracy theory and the North American right. Klein is fiendishly intelligent, and compassionate: she’s interested in understanding people with toxic views, not just othering them. One especially moving chapter is about crackpot theories of autism (she has an autistic child). I came away from the book determined to try to be more politically active.

75. The Fraud, Zadie Smith 4/5
    Clever, self-reflexive and entertaining, like all of Smith’s books. This is an ambitious historical novel that incorporates a varied cast of characters, storylines and time periods, but it’s relatively easy to read as the chapters are so short. I’ve also been reading Black and British by David Olusoga, and this book fits brilliantly with that nonfiction account of Blacks in 19th century Britain; the world that Smith depicts is a convincingly multi-ethnic one and a powerful corrective to the traditional Victorian novel. I was very taken with the two main characters: the housekeeper Eliza Touchet and the ex-slave Andrew Bogle. On the other hand, the novel’s many strands never quite came together for me (though maybe the fragmentation is part of the political point; 19th c. Britain is made up of paradoxes and contradictions). By the way, I read an insight-packed review of this novel in the LRB by the wonderful Colin Burrow. He points out that in the end, there is something earnest/moralistic/didactic about the narrative, which makes it less transgressive than Smith’s other books. Even so, I find it fascinating to see what Smith makes of Victorian England.

76. Modern Ranch Living, Mark Poirier 4/5
    Big thanks to @Terpsichore for recommending this novel! A distinctive, original and very funny story set in Arizona. Memorable characters, especially the teenage Kendra, bodybuilder and poet despite herself. A pleasure to read.

Catch-up reviews of some books I read in September or so (cough cough) and never actually got round to reviewing:

67. An Unsuitable Attachment, Barbara Pym 4/5
    Very enjoyable if not in my top rank of Pym novels. There’s an amusing interlude where some of the main characters visit Rome.

68. An Academic Question, Barbara Pym 3/5
    Reread for the Rather Dated book thread. This is the weakest Pym novel I’ve read (left unfinished, it was published after her death), but it does have some good moments.

69. Augustown, Kei Miller 5/5
    A rich and thought-provoking novel by the Jamaican poet. I especially liked the way the narrative wove in the story of historical figure Andrew Bedward, an early 20th c. Jamaican preacher who promised his followers that they would fly up to heaven. I would like to reread this one day.

70. Aimer, enseigner, Yvon Rivard 5/5
    A beautiful, meditative collection of essays by a Québécois writer and retired literature professor. He takes Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Evening over Sussex’ as a starting point and goes on to reflect on the teaching of literature and on the student-teacher relationship. The essays explore a number of different literary works dealing with sexual desire between teachers and students, like Coetzee’s Disgrace. Shocking revelation: sleeping with your students is both an ethically and pedagogically bad idea. I would like to come back to this book in future; it makes a powerful argument about why studying and teaching literature are worth doing.

I'm enjoying seeing the book hauls! Happy Boxing Day to all, and sympathy to everyone who is feeling poorly.

My book haul this year was small (silly me, putting Things That Were Not Books on my wishlist, ha). I did receive Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett, which I've been wanting to read for some time, and Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell (I'm hoping DS2 will also want to read the latter).

Books I gave to other family members:
For DH, Demon Copperhead and The Russian Album by Michael Ignatieff.
For DS1, Babel (because he read Yellowface and declared it a masterpiece, somewhat to my bemusement, but hey, I'm glad to see him enthusiastic about a book!), Penance by Eliza Clark, and The Bell Jar (because every teenager should read The Bell Jar). I'm hoping to read Penance myself before he goes back to uni.
For DS2, who is a Louis Sachar fan, two books by Sachar, Small Steps and The Boy Without a Face. I hope they're good as I haven't read them myself yet!

The clever thing about gifting books to your family is that you can give them stuff you want to read yourself, and look generous in the process 😂

139. The Plague and I, Betty MacDonald
Mentioned on here recently. An account of a stay in a TB hospital in mid-20th century America. The endearing thing about this author is her willingness to laugh at herself - she is funny about her own occasional descent into self-pity. Again, an interesting period piece.

140. The Whispering Knights, Penelope Lively
Deeply lethargic and couldn't concentrate, so this children's book was all I could manage. Three children inadvertently summon Morgan Le Fay and must find a way to best her.

141. Yestertime, Andrew Cunningham
Time-slip novel. We sample life in the Wild West. Not very well written but was enough to keep me turning the pages. Don't think I'll bother with the sequels though.

142. a Gentleman in Moscow, Amos Towles
Having said previously that this didn't pull me in, I gave it another go and this time I really enjoyed it. Aristocrat is sentenced to house arrest in a Moscow hotel but his life remains full of interest. Occasionally hovered on the age of twee and there is some obvious straining for aphorisms, but I liked the characters and the determination to savour life even under unpromising circumstances.

I read 144 books last year - might just pip that this year, especially as I'm nearly through A Year of Wonder.