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?

@MegBusset I saw it on website rather than the app so might be worth having a look there? It's a 14 day sale :)

@MegBusset

Do tell *@Terpsichore*!

@TheBuriedGiant I can't find the Audible sale in the app?

Haha, it’s probably not very interesting really but DH grew up in Oxford, where Maxwell exerted a malign influence, and he was always keenly aware of the man's monstrous doings. So after Maxwell died and they announced the gigantic auction of the contents of his London flat, I decided on a mad impulse to go along and see if I could buy some small thing to amuse/surprise DH with on his imminent birthday.

It turned out to be a deeply weird experience....Maxwell's epic fraud had emerged by then and lots of his creditors were there, along with a heavy press presence (and they ended up buying a lot of stuff). Everything from the flat was being flogged off. Huge pieces of furniture, leather Chesterfields and suchlike, started off first, selling for only a couple of hundred pounds, and then people suddenly seemed to go a bit crazy and began paying silly money for smaller, more personal things.

I bought a small portable TV in the end, quite cheaply, one of about 5 TVs in the sale - we did actually need one at the time. DH got a lot of amusement out of telling guests it was 'Robert Maxwell's television', and it was our only TV for several years...then it was our second TV in the spare room when we moved. It lasted us for years in the end.

Terpsichore What a great story! I also have Fall on my running shortlist of books to read next. I remember when he died wondering how you pronounced his daughter's name. Who would have thought we'd all know, thirty years on.

Thanks @SOLINVICTUS that sounds good!

I finished 10. His Bloody Project Graeme Macrae Burne last night. Several years behind everyone else and I’m sure it doesn’t need any recap from me. I read it almost reluctantly, because it had been on my list for so long and because I had to ‘return’ it on the borrowbox app soon, I don’t know exactly why but I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy it - or maybe I wasnt sure I was quite in the headspace for something dark.

Anyway obviously I was wrong, and I thought it was really well done. I felt it lost momentum a little bit when Roddy’s memoir ended, but was still interested in the other ‘documents’ and the trial was quite fascinating. The reliability or otherwise of the various perspectives/ accounts worked so well and it was good to have things come out at trial that made you question Roddy’s account again. As I say I finished this last night and find that I’m still thinking about it on and off today, trying to decide my view of what happened.

Because it was dark, I’ve also been reading Diary of a Provincial Lady alongside. This I picked up ages ago on the strength of lots of mumsnet love for it - not sure now whether it was on these threads or elsewhere on the boards. It’s languished in my ‘unfinished’ folder on my kindle since because when I started it I couldn’t understand the appeal frankly, it did nothing for me. I decided to have another go and am getting on with it better this time, though can only manage short snippets before I start to get bored again. The provincial lady would undoubtedly have been a mumsnetter had it existed back then.

That's a great story @Terpsichore. The auction gets its own chapter in the book!

Meg oh goodness, I shall enjoy that bit in particular, then!

@Gingerwarthog

Cote - Brain on fire? Recommended?

Yes. Definitely recommended

11. Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky Very different to Dogs of War / Children of time, this is classic big picture space opera, & first in a trilogy. There are space battles, aliens, a Big Threat to humanity (that has already destroyed earth), and a lovable and slightly disreputable crew on a salvage ship.
    It took a bit of a while to get going, and for a while I was a little disappointed, but mainly because I have such high expectations of AT. Once I got into it though I did really enjoy it, and I'll definitely read the others when they come out.

6. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
15 year old Kambili lives with her Catholic zealot father Eugene and their family in post-colonial Nigeria. Eugene, a newspaper owner, provides for his family materially yet is harsh and abusive. Kambili finds refuge with her Aunty and cousins, who are struggling financially but allow her to experience normal family life and develop a sense of identity and purpose, as the country begins to fall apart.

As ever with Adichie, the dialogue and characters feel very real and rounded. I found the pace a little uneven, with a slow unfolding of household life in the first part, and a rapidly escalating series of crises in the last few chapters, which made it feel a little rushed. However this remains a complex and moving novel.

Hi

So far I have read
Toast by Nigel Slater - read in a day during Covid isolation
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett - really loved this
The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré - enjoyable but predictable
When we were Orphans by Kasuo Ishiguro- not my favourite by him
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig - ok but nowt special
Greetings from Bury Park by Sarfraz Manson - enjoyed this

Currently reading The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern.

Blimey these threads are moving so fast!

Here’s my latest two
How to Kill Your Family - Bella Mackie
Good fun I suppose. It’s a story about a young girl who decides to wipe out her father’s side of the family. However while it was a light read (yes surprisingly it is) it didn’t give that much motivation for why she did what she did and ultimately had a dissatisfying ending. 3/5

Everything is Beautiful Eleanor Ray
I really enjoyed this book. We start by meeting Amy who is a hoarder. It’s a book with two running timelines and we start to discover what led Amy to where she is now. With a bit of mystery thrown in.
4/5

1979 - Val McDermid whilst I wasn’t overly keen on the actual storyline, I very much liked the central character Allie and the seventies newspaper office background. I guess one of the reasons for setting a story back then is the absence of technology. No googling or tracking mobile phone usage. Mad to think of the phrase ‘period details’ in relation to 1979 - I was 15 and remember it like it was yesterday - but she gets them right. I also liked the list of books and authors at the end and the playlist which included several of my top ten favourites and encapsulated my teenage listening (I have a VERY similar playlist).

11. The Dark Tower: Song of Susannah by Stephen King

The sixth book in the Dark Tower series. Not much I can say without giving stuff away, or that would make sense if you haven't read the others. Epic. Brilliant. I can't stop thinking about it, especially the Bridgton section. That final chapter...!

6: Everybody died so I got a dog by Emily Dean
I've read this over the weekend and it's my first 10/10, 5 ⭐️ book of the year. I LOVED IT
I had heard it recommended on the high low podcast ages ago and had made a note to read it and saw it in the library and it's just the loveliest book
Very funny and very sad- title does what it says on the tin and it's all true.
Emily dean is a radio presenter, podcaster, journalist so there's lots of name dropping and London glamour thrown in as well- which I loved -and she has such a warm and charming writing style
It was a bit Bridget Jones, Richard Curtis in style which for me is a massive selling point with lots about her posh but eccentric childhood in Highgate which was very funny and reminded me of friends my parents had in the 80s and lots about grief but such a positive and warm book .
I'd really recommend this if you want something that's very readable and fun as well as very sad and moving .

Will go back and read the last couple of days posts but just catching up on my list

Book 8
Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

A mutilated body in Crawley. Another killer on the loose. The prime suspect is one Robert Weil; an associate of the twisted magician known as the Faceless Man or just a common or garden serial killer? Before PC Peter Grant can get his head round the case a town planner going under the tube train and a stolen grimoire are adding to his case load. Then Peter gets word of something very odd happening in Elephant and Castle, on a housing estate designed by a nutter, built by charlatans and inhabited by the truly desperate.

This is the 4th in the Rivers of London series and listened to while walking Dave the Dog. I enjoy listening to it, the narrator is great, and the story line is engaging but once i have finished then it doesn't really stick in my head. I am not sure whether this is because I am listening rather than reading or whether it's just the nature of the book. Also the plots are quite challenging to describe. If i had a hard copy it wouldn't be a keeper on my shelves and would give it three stars.

Book 9
Prague Fatale by Philip Kerr
It's 1941 in Berlin and Bernie Gunther is back from the Eastern Front, once again working homicide in Berlin's Kripo. The story starts with the murder of a Dutch railway worker, a foiled attack on a woman late at night and the discovery the next day of the body of her attacker who is a Czech resistance fighter. Bernie is then summoned to Prague by Heydrich for the weekend ostensibly to be invited to be his personal detective. Then Heydrich's 4th adjutant is murdered and Bernie is required to investigate the murder while trying to find out which of the high ranking guests is a traitor.

I haven't read a Bernie Gunther novel for a while and had forgotten how much I enjoyed them. Philip Kerr is a master at combing fiction with fact and I spent half my time googling the characters to find out more about them. Definitely a good read if you like detective stories combined with history.

Next up is The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Dare this is for book club and also found 1979 at Tescos yesterday so a spontaneous purchase. I have not read any Val McDiarmids books before but have come across some radio plays she has done on BBC Sounds

9. Mort by Terry Pratchett

Having now finished this I still don't really get all the Pratchett fuss. It did make me chortle in (quite a few) places and it was a nice easy read, but I think the fact that I don't particularly enjoy fantasy as a genre and thus don't know the tropes meant I felt I was missing half the fun. I still like Death's capital letters though.

35. Death In The Sunshine by Steph Broadribb

The Thursday Murder Club in Florida. Four retired police officers living in a retirement community get together to solve a murder that happened within their complex. This was fine, except I found one of the main characters very irritating, plus three of the retired police officers were from the UK and I didn’t find it that believable that they would have retired to the same retirement village in a completely different country (two of them were married to each other but even so).

36. Saving Time by Jodi Taylor

Third in the Time Police series and exactly what I expected. I did enjoy this but I agree with whoever said upthread that the use of ‘fire truck’ instead of ‘fuck’ does become wearing.

12. The Island of Dr Moreau - H.G.Wells
Edward Prendick is stranded on a pacific island where he meets Dr Moreau, who creates "beast-creatures", a mixture of human/animal who eventually revert to their animal self. This was probably horrifying when it was written in 1896 but I didn't think it was anything special.

13. This Much is True - Miriam Margolyes
I think this has been reviewed quite a lot so I will just add that I enjoyed reading about her earlier life and work, she comes across as a bit spoilt and she has even more stories than she does on Graham Norton.

3. Rosie: Scenes From A Vanished Life by Rose Tremain. An autobiography of writer Rose Tremain's childhood that I picked up when it was 99p on Kindle. Taking her from first memory to 18. Tremain had some difficult times, not in a misery memoir kind of way, but in that uniquely upper class casual neglect kind of way. She had a privileged life, enough money sloshing around, London based socialite parents and loaded grandparents, with the obligatory big house in the country, but not enough supervision and definitely not enough love. Most of the time she and her sister seem to be viewed as an irritating inconvenience by their parents, her father is largely absent, physically or mentally, and she refers to her mother only as 'Jane', their relationship is fraught. Love comes in the shape of a nanny and the girls are sent off to an austere boarding school at the earliest opportunity. This is her evocative description of the morning routine there:

“Our Crofton day started at five past seven, when the matron and the two under-matrons woke us by sticking thermometers into our mouths. These thermometers were housed in little glass tumblers of TCP, and the smell of this medication can still make me gag. Round the dormitories the matrons marched, dressed in white overalls and little starched head-dresses, the tiaras of the school-medics’ world. They stuck the thermometers under our tongues, hurried on to another dorm, then marched back in, snatching the thermometers out again, reading them with practised, laser eyes and passing on to the next bed. There were almost one hundred girl at Crofton Grange and about thirty thermometers, so each thermometer went from TCP to mouth and back again three times every morning. More than the dread of the TCP, I used to fear the taste of another girl’s mouth, stale from sleep, tainted by last night’s supper of macaroni cheese–or worse, by some vomiting that had occurred during the night. Now and again, I tried to cheat the thermometer reading by heating it on my body. In my first year, I’d lost the art of falling asleep at bed-time ... so I began most days feeling tired ... The deception with the thermometer seldom worked, because there wasn’t enough time for the temperature to rise before the tiara brigade returned. So my bedding would be pulled back and I’d stagger around in search of underpants, vest and socks, often feeling almost insane from lack of sleep. Children’s bodies need a lot of deep rest and mine was often so starved of it that I had bouts of hallucination. We had exactly half an hour to wash and dress–in yesterday’s underwear, in the day-before-yesterday’s underwear, in three-or four-day old underwear–because nothing was laundered more than once a week. Hair-washing–done in a basin–was a rationed activity and there were no showers, only ancient baths of stained enamel, with a line marking the permitted height of the water, to which we had access twice a week. I think we all stank like polecats.”

Against all the odds Rose thrives but her mother seems to constantly thwart her intellectual ambitions determined not to have a 'blue stocking' for a daughter.

This has taken me an embarrassingly long time to read but another of its virtues is that it's short, 164 pages and typically 2 hours 47 minutes to read according to Kindle. Definitely one to bear in mind if you're in the slow readers corner like me and want to hit 50 books this year.
I really enjoyed this and I'll be looking out for Tremain's novels in the daily deals.

@Welshwabbit

9. Mort by Terry Pratchett

Having now finished this I still don't really get all the Pratchett fuss. It did make me chortle in (quite a few) places and it was a nice easy read, but I think the fact that I don't particularly enjoy fantasy as a genre and thus don't know the tropes meant I felt I was missing half the fun. I still like Death's capital letters though.

Mort and Reaper Man are my favourite TPs. If you like Death, then the latter is definitely worth a shot.

I'm reading Mort too. I have a soft spot for Pratchett although only got as far as Small Gods when first reading the series many moons ago.

I have just completed Susannah Cahalan's 'Brain on Fire' after a recommendation by Cote on this thread.
This non-fiction book charts her struggle with a rare form of encephalitis. It's terrifying because- as she says herself - she was lucky to be correctly diagnosed and recover when so many are incorrectly diagnosed with a psychiatric illness.
Her boyfriend Steve emerges as a bit of a hero as does her Dad, who fights her corner and refuses to believe she is bipolar or schizophrenic.
Horrifyingly, a leading US neurologist thinks she has just been partying hard and tells her Mother so, even when Cahalan explains she only drinks at most two glasses of wine a night.
This gripped me.
If you ever enjoyed 'House' it's worth a read.

Death on the Nile is 99p today, if anyone is doing the Christie read along, or fancies reading the book before the film come out later this month.

I like Terry Pratchett when you just want some comforting gentle escapism. Good Omens is a non Discworld one that he wrote with Neil Gaiman and is quite funny.

I'm deep in Russia reading wise at the moment. I'm reading A Gentleman in Moscow which I'm enjoying but is quite slow moving, and also doing the War & Peace read along. I've also been listening to The Big Steal podcast which someone on here recommended and is fascinating - really interesting to understand more about Putin and modern Russia.

We had an excerpt from Reaper Man read at DH’s funeral and Death and Binky feature on his MN blanket

@FiveGoMadInDorset, I've sometimes heard those blankets (Woolly hugs?) mentioned on MN and often thought what a lovely gesture they are; women sending a tangible message of love and support to another woman they've probably never met, at a really tough time. I'd like to get involved one day.

I hope it's lovely. I'm sorry you needed one though