50 Book Challenge 2022 Part Two

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the second thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2022, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, it’s not too late to join, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

If possible, please can you embolden your titles (and maybe authors as well) of the books you've read or going to read? It makes it much easier to keep track, especially when the threads move quickly at this time of the year.

The first thread of the year is here.

What are you reading?

StColumb Ooh, good call! I'm ploughing through Vanity Fair and Hamnet, both of which I'm enjoying, but I needed some light relief.

@ChessieFL @LittleDiaries @SapatSea another recommendation from me for the other Lissa Evans books, especially Old Baggage! As well as her usual humour it had some really interesting things to say around trauma and police brutality, which is something I'd never really thought about in relation to the suffragettes.

Yes, another vote for Lissa Evans here too. I've only read Crooked Heart so far but it was lovely but doesn't shy away from reality. Mattie is a great female character.

I wasn’t impressed with 1979 I’m afraid - I found it boring. However for 99p it’s worth a try.

1. The Wee Free Men - Terry Pratchett I’ve been reading this to the DDs (aged 9 and 7) and finished it tonight. I had been looking forward to introducing them to Tiffany Aching and Discworld for ages, and it was so fun to read aloud! I had a good go at the Nac Mac Feegles’ accent 😂 I’m very pleased to say they really enjoyed it - I’d recommend it for all kids around 9+ (to read themselves; more like 7+ if you’re reading it to them as I did).

@BadSpellaSpellaSpella I have Eileen on my TBr pile, I started to some years ago but couldn’t get to grips with it so will restart sometime this year hopefully.

Book 6
Whispers Under Ground - Ben Aaronovitch
The third in the Rivers of London series. More magic, more deaths, and the introduction of more new characters. I am listening to this on audible and to be honest although I did enjoy the book to be honest I could quite happily listen to Kobna Holdbrook-Smith read the phone directory

Book 7
The Man in the Brown Suit - Agatha Christie
Reviewed numerous times, nothing much to add except I thought it was OK up until the Falls and then it felt like it was ended very hurriedly

Next up is Broken Homes - Ben Aaronovitch on Audible and catching up with Bernie Gunther in Prague Fatale -Philip Kerr in book form.

@DuPainDuVinDuFromage I’ve been thinking about Terry Pratchett once we have finished the Eerie on Sea books and he live Unfortunate Events last year but he is a very reluctant reader even though he is 10 so I might try these as I have no idea about Pratchett at all.

To add a bit more detail to my #3 - 1979, by Val McDermid. Sigh, for me, absolutely perfect. This was authentic, well plotted, with great characters, and some really pleasing nods to real life titans of tartan noir and art. Brilliantly satisfying, and v excited to hear this is the first of a series. More please!

Chessie I was interested that you found it boring because I have a definite bent for slow and character driven writing. One of the things I loved about this one was all the period detail.

I've enjoyed most of the Val McDermid books I've read. I'm not vastly keen on Kate Brannigan but I like Lindsay Gordon, Karen Pirie and love Jordan and Hill although I agree that some of them are way too violent. But my favourite is the standalone A Place of Execution, which I think is brilliant and would recommend to you all.

So many books, so little time! Must hunt down my Iain Sinclairs - am sure I own both London Orbital and Lights Out for the Territory and have never read either despite walking both the London Loop (nearly the M25) and the Thames Path.

8 The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski
Thanks to Terpsichore for this recommendation, which had been on my TBR list for a while. Her review is spot on - hard to say too much without ruining it but wow, what a punch this short book packed. Really readable, really spooky, really disturbing. Am eyeing the antique chair DP brought home the other day in a whole new light now.

I bought 1979 too, I quite like the Vera books and some of the Wire in the Blood books too, enough to give this series a go anyway.

I haven’t read Frenchman’s Creek but loved Jamaica Inn so might have to give that a go too! I cannot keep up with the books I want to read from this thread

Just remembered the Vera books are not by the same author! At least I caught myself before I mentioned the Shetland series

@StColumbofNavron Pratchett is definitely worth a try - his books are so clever and funny, as well as thought-provoking. You could try the Wee Free Men or The Amazing Maurice as a starting point for your DS.

I met Terry Pratchett once, at a book signing. He was very nice

14 - Wonder by RJ Palacio (audiobook)

Selected for a topic with my class on friendship and kindness.

Lovely story about a child with a rare genetic condition who begins middle school after being homeschooled due to the amount of yearly surgery he requires. Told from different perspectives so you get an idea of the experiences of the child living with the condition, impact on their sibling, parents and family. Not much in the way of a story other than character development and the effect of kindness on him as he progresses through his first year of middle school. A lovely, heart-warming read with some funny bits. Looking forward to reading this again with my class after Easter.

1. Motherwell by Deborah Orr

I liked this a lot. She was a few years older than me, but her childhood tv memories were the same as mine. We grew up in very different places, though - her in Motherwell, me in the Home Counties.

As a memoir, it was very good. She had an often difficult upbringing with difficult parents, feeling she never quite met parental expectation. It was, at times, unbearably sad, reading how she felt controlled by her parents, even past the age of 18, how they were so against her leaving home to go to University, critical of so many aspects of her life even into adulthood, how she felt unable to talk to them about traumas she had experienced, knowing they would find a way to make it her fault. Recommended, but not if you're looking for something uplifting. Triggering also for rape.

9. Hurdy Gurdy, by Christopher Wilson
It's 1349, and a young monk recovers consciousness to find that his brothers are dead of the Plague, so he must go out into the world. The story has a comic edge as the naif encounters rogues and pigs and Women (I enjoyed the Women), snatching at life when surrounded by death. It didn't quite come alive for me and I never really felt immersed in the world it created, but it did feel refreshing to read something a bit different.

7. Nine Nasty Words - John McWhorter (Audible)

An entertaining look at the history and current use of the nine strongest profanities in American English, brought to life by McWhorter's lively wit and personal charisma in the audiobook version. I was very amused by some of the (false) etymological acronyms found lurking on the internet: Ship High In Transit (allegedly referring to the necessity of shipping manure above the water line) and Fornication Under Consent of the King, anyone? Also fascinating was his discussion of the n-word (McWhorter is a black American), which he believes is essentially two distinct words: one ending -er being an unacceptable racial slur, the other ending in -a which can be used (but only by black people) in a self-referential and comradely way.

This is very American-centric, which is particularly clear in the 'cunt' chapter: in the US, this is a highly unacceptable slur lobbed at women, reducing them to their reproductive parts, whereas in the UK (and NZ where I am) it can be used aggressively - usually against a man - but it can also be used by blokey mates as a term of derogatory endearment.

NZ is a pretty sweary place anyway. Today I got my Covid booster shot and the nurse explained the possible side effects with, 'you might feel a bit shite...'

8. You're Doing It Wrong - Kaz Cooke

An Australian-centric guide to 'bad and bonkers advice' given to women down the ages. I bought this on the strength of Cooke's Up the Duff (called The Rough Guide to Pregnancy and Birth in the UK), which kept me very amused in between bouts of morning sickness a few years back. There's plenty of her trademark humour here: the vagina is a 'self-saucing pudding', so there's no need to waste your money on the expensive and potentially damaging intimate wash products that have been marketed to women for decades. But she doesn't shy away from the darker side of women's history: the section on the enslavement of Indigenous Australian women forced into domestic servitude was heartbreaking.

I would recommend but not sure it will be published in the UK as a lot is very specific to Australian history. Also, it was quite poorly edited - paragraphs sometimes seemed out of order, and the meaning of sentences was occasionally unclear - as if it had been rushed to print, which was a shame.

Terry Pratchett's estate have just given permission to Jack Monroe to use the words Vimes Boots Index for the work Jack is doing on poverty and food price inflation. That passage is something that really stuck with me when I read it, and explained so much about so many things - many of our political leaders would do well to reflect on it. It was true when he wrote it and true today. I think it's great the estate just said yes, without a million legal reviews or restraints.

"“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

So much good stuff in Pratchett, @PepeLePew! I think some of his books should be on the curriculum.

@LadybirdDaphne I read another book by John McWhorter recently - The Power of Babel. It was excellent, really interesting (if linguistics and the history of language doesn’t bore you…) and well-written so it wasn’t a chore to read.

I wish I could get into Pratchett. So many people can’t be wrong.

1. The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson

This is one of the best SF books ever written, and I just had to reread it after the big ball of hot air that was Doomsday Book.

The story takes place in the near future, in the age of nanotechnology. "Feed" enables production at the point of necessity, so there is no more transportation of services. Basic needs are meta data "Phyles" (tribes) regardless of geographical position have taken the place of countries.

With this background in place, a wealthy "equity lord" ponders upon the question of what kind of experience and education makes a person great, and requests an interactive book to nurture, educate, and accompany his young granddaughter. The engineer in charge of the project copies it for his own daughter, and another copy falls in the hands of a young mistreated girl in abject poverty. We then follow the trajectory of these three girls over the next 12 years or so, with much deliberation on how the book and its actor/narrators have influenced them in their coming of age stories.

I read this book for the first time before I had my children, then when they were little, and several more times since then, always finding it amazing and fascinating, even challenging and informative. The questions it raises about social systems, politics, morals and hypocrisy, education, parenting, and many others so rarely discussed in fiction such as Confucian philosophy raises this book head and shoulders over most other books, even those considered high literature.

I am not exaggerating when I say that this is one of the best books I have ever read, in any genre. Please read it, even if you have no interest in SF.

Just finished perfect by Rachel Joyce and found it meh
In 1972 two seconds, were added to time. Byron knows this as his best friend James told him.
Byrons mother, late for the school run, makes a mistake and Byrons perfect world is shattered.

This was sooooo slow and I really couldn't connect with it - the twist was kind of obvious - it was OK but definitely damming with faint praise 😊

@CoteDAzur - would you recommend The Diamond Age before other Stephenson books? I read Seveneves a while back and really loved it. I have a copy of Cryptonomicon on the shelf which is dauntingly long. Am very up for really good sci-fi but wondering how to prioritise.

@BestIsWest what Pratchett books have you tried? And what kind of thing do you like reading normally? My recommendations for where to start always depend on the person’s interests as there are different groups of characters and different styles as he developed his writing over the years…