50 Books Challenge 2025 Part Three

@cassandre yes the bad French and Latin translations really irritated me (having done Classics at uni and living in France, I couldn’t be blissfully unaware as I would have been with pretty much any other language!). And it makes you doubt the accuracy of everything else, as well as being pretty ironic when so much of her message is about western people failing to understand Chinese culture and language! I feel bad being so grumpy about it though! Anyway, I’m now onto my next BorrowBox book and it’s properly enjoyable, phew 😄 pretty sure my next review will be much more positive!

3# Girl Woman Other Bernadine Evaristo
I think this has had mixed reviews on this thread, but it is a definite bold for me. I waited a long time for the reservation on borrowbox, but it was worth it. In the first section, we meet Amma a black lesbian woman engaged in radical theatre. After struggling in her early career, she will go on to success. The book then spirals outwards with each section introducing a different character's story. I loved the structure (that reminded me of Anything is Possible by Strout). The links between the women are not always immediately obvious, but they become apparent. We get to see people and events through different eyes. Some of the stories resonate more than others, but they all tessellate together to make a whole. Humane, hopeful and humourous it kept me engaged throughout.
I listened to this as an audiobook and for the first half hour i thought 'Im not going to get on with this', but i couldn't have been more wrong. Persisting paid off. It reminded me why i love reading (even if it is only the third book ive finished this year 🙂).

Glorious Exploits does sound good.

#7 Death of a Lesser God, Vaseem Khan.
It's a bold for me, still loving this series.

OK, I’m sold, I’m adding Glorious Exploits to my TBR list!

This is a very late reply, @inaptonym, but many thanks for the recommendation of Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes. I feel a bit obsessed with her at the moment. Her books are provocative but the ones I’ve read so far have really stayed with me.

@elspethmcgillicudddy I’ve read Thomas More’s Utopia and found it hard going. I say that as someone who loves the 16th century (if I had to choose one favourite century of the past for literature, the 16the would win hands down. Montaigne, Rabelais, Louise Labé, Marguerite de Navarre). The book is interesting and important due to More forging the concept of utopia, but his ideal society certainly isn’t one I’d want to live in. It has slavery and everything!

Incidentally, I hardly ever see live theatre (to my shame), but I saw A Man for All Seasons this month, about Thomas More. The set and costumes were impeccable, but the show somehow lacked oomph overall. It was just too straight. Martin Shaw was starring and he is 80… somehow I think he’s just too old to make the role truly charismatic, even though I admire him for the effort! The play was a reminder though of how controversial a figure More is. In the play, More is a Great Hero and Thomas Cromwell is a villain. After reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, I have another model of More and Cromwell in my head, with the hero/villain roles reversed. I’m sure the reality lies somewhere in the middle. More was both a great humanist who made sure that his daughters received a wonderful education, AND a religious bigot who could be absolutely ruthless to his enemies.

@PepeLePew I am so so envious that you saw the medieval women exhibition at the British Library! I’m gutted I missed it. I meant to go to London to see it before it ended. Woe. I will just have to look at the online stuff. I read Marion Turner’s Wife of Bath last year and really enjoyed it.

@RomanMum n thanks for the review of Thunderstone: another addition to my TBR list. I used to live in Jericho in Oxford and am quite fascinated by the culture along the canal.

@DuPainDuVinDuFromage, I’ve read Babel and Yellowface and while I liked them much more than you did, I agree that Kuang is anything but subtle. I was just thinking the other day about how when there were French and Latin sentences in Babel, the translations were WRONG. In multiple instances. Which I know makes me sound like a pedant, but I’m still surprised that someone as academically well-connected as Kuang couldn’t have found some linguists to proofread her work (when it came to languages she didn’t know herself). Harrumph.

Finally, I agree with @bibliomania that Six handles its material sensitively and well. I went a couple of years ago with low expectations and thought it was great. My DS (year 7 at the time?) also enjoyed it. It’s true that it’s woefully short. However, it was originally written by a couple of uni students, and it has that freshness and energy that perhaps only the young can bring.

Watching Prima Facie and am coming unstuck as to what's going on because of the breakneck speed of the monologue, don't know how she's doing it.

Thrilled to hear the love for Glorious Exploits!

I'm about a third of the way through Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar - really* *enjoying it, it's a bit different but also hard to put down.

@AlmanbyRoadtrip im so happy to see someone love Glorious Exploits as much as I did. It was my favourite read of last year. It reminds me a little of the movie (on a massively different topic) La vie est Belle (Life is Beautiful) in which a father tries to protect his son from the horrors of the holocaust by pretending it’s a game. There’s something about humour done properly for me that makes tragedy even more tragic.

Glad it wasn't just me@Terpsichore I hated Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter? Incredibly disappointing ending (not worth waiting for).

14 Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

The perfect example of why I need to stay on these threads. I would probably not have picked this up at all if it weren’t for the reviews (good and bad) on here. Certainly not on the strength of the cover, that’s for sure! Is it a nod to the Natalie Haynes ancient world book covers?
Anyway, cover aside, this was AMAZING. I had to close it several times as I could tell I needed to do justice to what was coming next. I had to close it several times while I blew my nose and tried to stop snivelling. Beautiful and brutal - I can see why some might not like it - it brings Ancient Sicily to life with an uncompromising lens on what humanity is capable of doing to each other. That we’re still doing it to each other today is an abject horror. I don’t see the jokiness as a bad thing, because it hides the helplessness the main characters feel. It’s when characters stop talking and start doing that their true natures are revealed.
In a nutshell: Lampo and Gelon are unemployed peasants who decide to make prisoners of war put on a play.

The hearts of men are alike wherever they are. The rest is scenery

A bold. A double bold.

Me too! I wonder why they left such a short gap this year? It reduces the window for those that aren’t shortlisted to get some extra sales and attention too. I hope they change it back next year.

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

Latest Book....

(8) American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins - Description stolen from Wikipedia

Lydia Quixano Pérez lives a comfortable life in Acapulco, Mexico, with her journalist husband, Sebastián, and her eight-year-old son, Luca. Lydia runs a bookstore and one day befriends a charming customer, Javier, who appears to have similar interests in books. However, Javier is revealed to be the kingpin of a drug cartel.
Sebastián publishes a profile exposing the crimes of Javier, who then orders the slaughter of Sebastián and his family. Lydia and Luca escape the massacre, but are forced to flee Mexico, and attempt to enter the United States illegally, taking a treacherous trip via the route known as La Bestia north of Mexico City.

This book was easy to read and immensely enjoyable - I fell in love with the characters - it even made me cry - overall a brilliant book which I highly recommend.

Onto the next....

I'm looking forward to the women's prize in fiction longlist tomorrow. At the same time I know I'll never be able to finish the longlist before the shortlist comes out (a mere month or so later), so I'm hoping I will already have read some of the books on the list...

I still want to reply to a lot of previous posts, but for the moment, here are some quick reviews:

8. Cold Earth, Sarah Moss 3/5

I’m a big fan of Moss so decided to read some of her earlier novels, which I hadn’t yet read. This is her first novel, and while it’s gripping and intelligent, I didn’t love it. It’s about a group of archaeologists on a dig in Greenland. The story becomes very bleak and dystopian. I normally find dystopian/horror narratives hard to get on with, so I’m not the ideal reader of this novel. I do think that Moss’s later novels are much more polished and focused than this one. But it was still an interesting and thought-provoking read.

9. These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson, Martha Ackmann 3/5

A gift from a friend, this book was interesting but a bit patchwork-like, and rather journalistic in style. I think I would have got on better with a more traditional biography of Dickinson. However, reading it did make me want to get to know Dickinson’s poetry better. I was also filled with admiration by her decision to withdraw from public life and only see the people she wanted to see, and write to the people she wanted to write to. It must have been a lonely life in some ways, but it was very much a life of her own choosing. I was also struck by how much the trauma of the American Civil War influenced her personal history.

10. Butter, Asako Yuzuki, trans. Polly Barton 4/5
    I had very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, the characters seemed flat to me and I found the book surprisingly difficult to finish. On the other hand, the portrayal of misogyny in Japanese society was as interesting as it was disturbing. Due to the policing of women’s bodies, eating rich foods without worrying about the calories turns into an act of rebellion for women. I liked the homoerotic subtext and wished it had been developed further.

11. The Trees, Percival Everett 4/5
    This novel was lent to me by a friend who told me it was better than James by the same author, and I agree with her. The focus of this novel is the intolerably brutal lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. Someone (or something?) is taking revenge on the descendants of Till’s murderers. There are many darkly funny moments, but the satire is merciless. Almost a bold for me, but not quite, because the book was just so damn grisly.

12. Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit [I Remain in Darkness], Annie Ernaux 4/5
    This is a very short read, almost a novella, that consists of diary entries made by Ernaux over a period of a couple of years when her mother had Alzheimer’s. Ernaux writes with her customary lack of sentimentality, and the result is moving, but quite difficult to read. It was a relief that the book was so short.

@highlandcoo @lifeturnsonadime

I used to go to the theatre loads but then COVID hit and my local theatre isn't what it once was in terms of high quality productions, I feel bad because I should support it but it's expensive too. I recently saw Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club in London and it was absolutely fantastic

18. The Last Days of Kira Mullan - Nicci French

I reserved this on Borrowbox a few weeks ago and got a message saying it wouldn’t be available to read until July! However, it dropped into my account pretty speedily so either people are reading it fast, or they’re giving up.

Actually, after a pretty dismal recent few books (looking at you, Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter?) Nicci French seem to have recovered form a bit. This outing is another case for newish character Maud O'Connor, Met detective battling against the usual problem of boorish, aggressive male colleagues who do their best to undermine her.

The main focus, though, is on Nancy North, whose recent psychiatric breakdown has brought her life to a temporary halt. Her protective partner, Felix, takes charge and moves them to a flat in a new house, where bad things soon start to happen. But will Nancy be able to make anyone agree that she really has seen what she thinks she’s seen?

This was a quick read and it’s business as usual for NF's trademark plotline of one character struggling to get anyone to believe them - but at times it was genuinely quite scary, especially in the chapters set in a psychiatric unit.

At Wicked, the family in front brought in McDonalds during the interval and sat there eating it through the second half!

@lifeturnsonadime yes I agree live theatre is brilliant (apart from people munching food these days ... why?? Can't people last for an hour and a half without eating and drinking?) however depending on where you live, and the cost too, the opportunity isn't always there.
My most memorable theatre experiences have been live. I've been lucky to see Black Watch, Mark Rylance in Jerusalem, Helen Mirren in The Queen, and Ballet Shoes was lovely recently, but NT@Home has given me the chance to see productions I would have missed otherwise.
There's a middle way, which is to watch live streamed NT productions at the cinema. That works really well. It's not the same but it's worth giving it a go I think.

I was a bit disappointed by Lehman's after all the rave reviews. But I did see it live and 4 hours in a theatre is too long in my book.
I'm a big fan of the Greek adaptions as they're normally an hour and a half with no interval - home by 10 😂

@lifeturnsonadime I would go live if I could. Very few of the decent productions come to my local city and getting to London to see them would require a weekend away including flights and a hotel so not something I can do all the time.

@lifeturnsonadime I go to live theatre once a month usually, for me this is like the Kindle vs Real Book. For me, they are complimentary - I still read hard copy as well as Kindle. I could never afford or find the time for everything so this will enable me to see more. They do feel different though, I agree.

It's interesting that so many enjoy NT at home, I have really resisted that kind of thing because, for me, being in a live audience is part of the experience.

I can see that for people who are unable to get to the theatre it is really worthwhile.

It's a me thing, I'm probably missing out for being so set in my ways!

I'm looking forward to Michael Sheen in Nye and there's lots more to go at.

Nye is fabulous, that and The Lehman Trilogy are the best NTLive plays I've seen. Clearly I like plays based on reallife!

"I hope you enjoy it. Last time someone read a book based on my review they didn't, so I'm nervous. "

I'm about DNF an awful book so I'll read it next and it's bound to be better

@bibliomania thanks; I will probably give Six a go at some point.

And thanks all for the Prima Facie opinions and especially @EineReiseDurchDieZeit for pointing out it's still available until Wednesday! I've just signed up for a month and I think £9.99 for PF alone will be well worth it. I've heard nothing but good things. And I'll make a real effort to watch some other productions too. I'm looking forward to Michael Sheen in Nye and there's lots more to go at.