50 Books Challenge 2025 Part Three

4. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I'm reading extremely slowly this year but this one has taken forever, especially considering it's not even 200 pages. That's my issue not the book's, though perhaps made a bit more so by its very disjointed structure. I haven't read any other reviews of it so that I can try and give an honest view, but might have to go and read more about it so that I have some idea what I've read! It's very 60s - reminds me a bit of the acid trip scenes in Easy Rider, a little bit of Philip Roth, a bit of Robert Heinlein. Vonnegut seems to have been driven to write about his experiences in the firestorm of Dresden as an American prisoner of war in WWII, but expresses it as fractured, sidelong glances at the unbearable. Billy Pilgrim is his protagonist, and he explicitly says Billy is both not him and is him by putting himself in as a minor character, shadowing Billy at every step but separate from him. Billy lives and dies repeatedly through the novel, marrying the disappointingly fat but bearable Valencia, annoying his bossy daughter Barbara, dancing backwards and forwards through time and into and out of an alien other world where he is taken to make babies by the Tralfamadorians with the pneumatic Montana Wildhack. (As you can see, the names are great). It's so sexist that it kind of comes out the other side, you either accept it as part of a novel which lives entirely in the heads of men traumatised by being forced to endure other men's unimaginable and machine-like violence, or you stop reading. It has great funny sequences as well. I'd recommend it, it's kind of a bold. So it goes.

@MegBusset Is this the one that’s pretty new? If yes, it’s on my list!

25. Food Isn't Medicine - Joshua Wolrich (Audible)

Interesting listen, written and narrated by a doctor and nutritionist, debunking "nutribollocks".

14 A Fever In The Heartland - Timothy Egan

Interesting and shocking account of the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan in America. Wouldn’t say it was the best writing, but I learned a lot (I hadn’t realised how widespread their political influence was at its height) and there are unavoidable parallels with the recent rise of MAGA.

Yes I meant to say this when I reviewed it. I think it probably got changed due to the Walter Tevis book of the same name being adapted by Netflix

19. When the Dust Settles - Lucy Easthope

Bought in the deals recently along with everyone else. I’m profoundly relieved that Lucy exists and that her experience, care, meticulous planning and thought is being brought to bear on some of the worst things that can happen to human beings. She tells her story vividly and with a righteous anger in places - but I have to say I found this quite a harrowing read. Concentrating on so many stories of horror (I'm profoundly and forever grateful that I was in exactly the place where that bus was blown up in Tavistock Square, at pretty much the same time, but on the day before it happened) was undeniably tough. But she tells it well.

Oh look, the 99p book fell into my amazon checkout...

(I might watch the film of Firebrand on Prime too)

I enjoyed Elizabeth Fremantle's first novel when I read it a few years ago - Firebrand was originally published under the title Queen's Gambit.

I've just downloaded Middlemarch based on the recommendation above (sorry can't remember who it was.

15&16: The Satsuma Complex and The Hotel Avocado by Bob Mortimer

A good easy listen on Audible, a bit dark in places and some good characters including a squirrel who is Gary's inner voice.
Gary is a boring solicitor who lives alone and likes his boring life. He gets dragged well out of his depth into a conspiracy when an acquaintance passes him a thumbdrive just before he is murdered. Gary is then pursued by fake policemen and various other baddies while still having to look after his neighbour Grace and trying to flirt with his new girlfriend.
It worked as an audio book for me as Bob Mortimer's narration gave it a dry turn of phrase that I think I would have missed if I was reading it. Not great literature, and a bit silly in places, but enjoyable enough.
The sequel Hotel Avocado is more of the same.

17: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson

I've just re-read this, having read it for the first time in 2012 - so getting on for 13 years ago. I remember it being a complete page turner the first time around (I was sitting on the beach reading it). Obviously less of a page turner the second time around, as I knew what happens in the end, but enjoyable none the less, and I had forgotten some parts of the story. It has a very Scandiavian feel - very measured and precise details.

Don't judge the book on the rather awful movie with Daniel Craig as Blomkvist (And I say that as a Craig fan)

I've also nearly finished A Single Thread by Tracey Chevalier which I think was recommended on here - will post a review this weekend but it is one of my bolds so far this year - very enjoyable

23. Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Sayers
This was raved about on another thread, and I had it on my kindle, so got stuck in. Lord Peter Wimsey infiltrates an advertising agency to look into a suspicious death. Dorothy Sayers herself worked in advertising in the 1920s, and has a lot of fun with her portrayal of petty office dramas and the oddities of the advertising industry. All very sprightly.

My list so far...
(1) The Nurse by Valerie Keogh
(2) The Wrong Child by Julia Crouch and M. J. Arlidge
(3) The Perfect Parents By J.A. Baker
(4) Darkest Fear, written by Harlen Coben
(5) Old Filth by Jane Gardam
(6) The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam
(7) Last Friends by Jane Gardam
(8) American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins -

Latest Book....

(9) The Housemaid by Frieda McFadden (Description taken from Amazon)

"Welcome to the family," Nina Winchester says as I shake her elegant, manicured hand. I smile politely, gazing around the marble hallway. Working here is my last chance to start fresh. I can pretend to be whoever I like. But I'll soon learn that the Winchesters' secrets are far more dangerous than my own . . .

Every day I clean the Winchesters' beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up to eat alone in my tiny room on the top floor.

I try to ignore how Nina makes a mess just to watch me clean it up. How she tells strange lies about her own daughter. And how her husband Andrew seems more broken every day. But as I look into Andrew's handsome brown eyes, so full of pain, it's hard not to imagine what it would be like to live Nina's life. The walk-in closet, the fancy car, the perfect husband.

I only try on one of Nina's pristine white dresses once. Just to see what it's like. But she soon finds out... and by the time I realize my attic bedroom door only locks from the outside, it's far too late.

But I reassure myself: the Winchesters don't know who I really am.

They don't know what I'm capable of . . .

I flew through this book - easy to read and had me hooked.
I did not realize that it is the start of a series but I am on a book buying ban.

Really enjoying this challenge.

Onto the next...!

13 The Wide Wide Sea - Hampton Sides

This was a bit of a punt (came up as an Audible suggestion) but I’m really glad I went for it. A brilliant, gripping account of Captain James Cook’s third and final voyage, which took him in search of the fabled North West passage from the Pacific Ocean side, and ended with his death at the hands of native Hawaiians. Heartily recommended for fans of nautical peril, This Thing Of Darkness etc. @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie think you’d enjoy this one!

I’m still to read TROTD so can’t pass comment on the Bloody Boring Butler but really didn’t like NLMG. It’s years since I read it so can’t remember exactly what pissed me off about it but I do remember the characters being so passive annoyed me.

Does anyone use Bookbeat? I'm trying it as an alternative to Kindle as attempting to give the Tech bros less money. Not as good a selection but there's a 30 day trial for free, and then £6.99 a month for 20 hours so pricing is similar.

A couple of recent reviews:
22. Theory and Practice - Michelle de Kretser. Interesting experimental novel from Australian writer. It starts off as a conventional tale but then the author says she got stuck writing that. It then moves to a story about the author as a young academic in Melbourne in the 1980s, writing about Virginia Woolf - "The Woolfmother" as she's called throughout - and working through different theoretical ideologies of the day, particularly feminism. I enjoyed it as evocative of a time and place. I did English at uni a few years after the book is set but still recognised some of the things she's gently poking fun at.

23. Bewilderment - Richard Powers. This was part of my Kindle backlog and I think was longlisted for the 2021 Booker. I read Playground by the same author last year and liked it enough to try something else. This is narrated by Theo, an astrobiologist living with his 9 year old neurodiverse son Robin. Theo's wife Alyssa has recently died and both are trying to come to terms to living without her. Robin struggles with school and has severe meltdowns. Theo doesn't want to medicate him so instead enrolls him in experimental neurofeedback therapy which involves mapping to his mother's neural pathways. This is set in a near future with an increasingly authoritarian Trump like president. Theo and Robin are vegans who are increasingly traumatised by the treatment of animals and the demise of species, while Theo is also searching the skies for signs of alien life. It's loosely based on Flowers For Algernon, which I would say I preferred. I find Powers a bit overly didactic, and there are parts of the book where they explore different possible planets that I just found a bit dull. I'm not sure that I'll read more of his books.

I feel like Boring Butler is just straight down the middle divisive, NLMG has a few more on the fence.

I haven’t read Butter so am unable to confirm if it’s as bloody boring as The Bloody Boring Butler.

That was a fail. I thought for a minute that the author had written Butter.

Surely you mean I can't believe it's not a different author Butter ?

@Castlerigg

NLMG is just as divisive as the Butler. As I recall I was neither yay or nay and couldn't take a side

I think we might!

Are we going to need more fights about it? It’s been a while!

Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro) is on Kindle Daily Deals today for £1.19. I've read it twice, I really like it. I'm rubbish at reviews so I'll leave it to you guys. Hard to believe that this and the Bloody Boring Butler came out of the same brain.

33 Henry VIII: The Heart and the Crown - Alison Weir

Like @EineReiseDurchDieZeit I ended my day with Katherine Parr 😀

Weir writes both fiction and non fiction; this is the former. It follows on from her Six Queens series (and she thanks her editor for reading 3000 pages of those books to check for inconsistencies)

I read this on kindle but suspect it is a doorstop in paperback.

This is That Bastard Henry’s life as fiction, from childhood to kingship to husband of 6. It’s a pretty sympathetic portrait of Henry as a man deeply affected by the loss of his mother when he was young. Some clunky insertions of real history (eg the full text of a documented speech)

I think there are better books out there - I do know an awful lot about the period though.

As I have said here before, Weir’s history is stronger than her fiction and I won’t be buying any more of her fiction for a bit.

40. Firebrand by Elizabeth Fremantle

Tells the story of Sixth Wife, Catherine Parr, from the death of her second husband Lord Latymer through her marriages to the King and to Thomas Seymour.

It was good, and I don't know what it was about it but it took me much longer than my usual pace

It repeats the idea I've read elsewhere that Thomas Seymour bedded the Virgin Queen when she was a teenager and I'm really not sure that rumour is true.

The fate of Mary Seymour is not guessed at, just that she will be taken in by a family of the same rank.

This was 99p when I bought it and worth it at that price, but not a massive stand out to be honest.

The only Eliot I have read was Adam Bede but I have a penchant for the tragic and a minor obsession with the crime that is committed. Trying to not be spoilery.

Talking of our theatre discussion, I took a decadent day of annual leave and indulged my Chekhov love to The Seagull at Barbican, so thinking now is the time to finish the set of short stories I have been half way through for approx 2.5 years.