50 Book Challenge 2022 Part Three

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the third 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 and the second one here.

What are you reading?

@Stokey I read She Wolves by Helen Castor which was great, but nonfiction.

Someone here might have read the Elizabeth Chadwick novels about Eleanor of Aquitaine?

I can’t read anyone mentioning Louis de Bernieres and not say I love his books. He is very marmite though - people tend to hate him or love him. The War books are definitely his most traditional I would say. They are also far superior to the Cazalets imho

X post!

Thank you so much all. I’ve sent all of these on to her and she’s snapped up a few. Knew I could rely on you guys. I still think the Century Trilogy would be perfect, but I think Follett would get a stern letter about the bosoms so perhaps best she steers clear.

@Palegreenstars. RF Delderfield's books about the residents of a street in outer London covering the 20's, 30's and 40's is really good - The Dreaming Suburb (sometimes listed as The Avenue 1) and The Avenue Goes to War.

Susan Howatch's Penmarric, Cashelmara, The Wheel of Fortune and The Rich are Different are big family saga's based loosely on older royal dynasties like the Plantangents.

I read all these books when going through an illness and treatment several years back. They all rolled along nicely for a brain that couldn't deal with anything too taxing.

@StColumbofNavron I love LDB too but preferred his South American books which would be way too woo for my mother!

Thanks @PermanentTemporary and @highlandcoo for the Eleanor recommendations. I'll may try both the fiction and nonfiction.

@Stokey - you have read two of the three Elizabeth Chadwick books about Eleanor of Aquitaine and would recommend. Elizabeth Chadwick has written lots of books about that period and does it well. Very readable.

I have read not you have read!

@Stokey the South American trilogy are in an altogether different league. Senor Vivo is one of the best things I have ever read.

Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett
Can't remember if I'd read this before or not. It would have been a very long time ago if so. It was okay. Definitely not one of his best.

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov. Translated by George Bird

Viktor is a journalist who writes obituaries for a paper in Kiev (spelling in the novel) and lives alone with the penguin Misha he adopted when the zoo shut down. However his job is not quite as it first appears to him and he is drawn into a situation he cannot escape from. This is a black comedy by Ukraine's most famous novelist, it's tightly written and worth reading.

Ooh @JaninaDuszejko I got death and the penguin for Christmas but hadn’t realised it was Ukrainian - a good time to pick it up. Especially as I’m pretty sure I often rate your recommendations.

18. The Mission House - Carys Davies

Loved this. A depressed former librarian from Surrey, Hilary Byrd, takes a room at a mission in Ootacamund in the hills of Tamil Nadu, after travelling to India in a last-ditch attempt to get his life on track.

Mr Byrd finds a place in the household of the Padre and his adopted daughter Priscilla and begins to see how he might build a new, simple life for himself. Hilary hopes this might involve Priscilla, for whom the Padre is keen to find a husband. All the while Hilary is taking daily drives with Jamshed, a local driver without much family of his own, and the two develop a touching, if awkward, relationship, which seems to benefit both even though they can't communicate very well.

For most of the book it reads like a heartwarming story with the possibility of redemption. However, the outcome is not happy for all the characters. It's not often that a book makes me cry, but this one did. At times it reads a bit like Alexander McCall Smith in the simple moral certainty, but it is more complex and beautifully written.

Overall, strongly recommended but if you need a light read, maybe save this for another time.

22. The Cold Moon by Jeffery Deaver

One of the Lincoln Rhyme series. 'Twas ok. Although every time I though it was done there was another twist. It was like watching Return of the King.

23. Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

I was in two minds about starting this one. I loved Olive Kitteridge but could not stand My Name is Lucy Barton. This fell some way between the two for me. It started off strongly and there were definitely some people I’d have loved to spend more time with (Angelina, Patty, Tommy) but I felt it trailed off with a series of weaker characters.

I'm behind posting reviews (as usual), but will just post this one of the book I read last night:

1. The Paper Palace, Miranda Cowley Heller 3/5

From the Women’s Prize longlist. A fast-paced, readable book that I read in one go. Lovely descriptions of Cape Cod, and some amusingly convincing scenes of family life, but on the whole I found this rather slight. Essentially it’s the story of a 50-year-old woman deciding which of two incredibly hot men she should have sex with: her perfect husband or her childhood flame. Also, she is supposed to be an academic teaching literature at NYU, but in no way does this detail seem believable. (The career of her artist lover is not very developed either, but at least he turns up now and again with paint on his clothes.) What does come across quite powerfully in the book, however, is how grimly selfish the older generation of rich East Coast Americans can be; the heroine’s parents both pursued their love lives first and looked after their children second, and the costs of this to their children were quite high.

14. The Magician: Colm Tóibín DNF

I read 'Death in Venice' in college and I have read two of Toibin's books recently, which I enjoyed, so I borrowed this from the library. After 119 pages, I returned it. I just didn't get into it. I found it very linear, very much like a biography, 'What Thomas Did Next' and I just am not interested enough in Thomas Mann to find out what Thomas will get up to at the end of page 666. I found the prose very dull. Maybe it's just me and my frame of mind at the moment, but there was no magic in 'The Magician ' that I could see.

@IsFuzzyBeagMise

14. The Magician: Colm Tóibín DNF

I read 'Death in Venice' in college and I have read two of Toibin's books recently, which I enjoyed, so I borrowed this from the library. After 119 pages, I returned it. I just didn't get into it. I found it very linear, very much like a biography, 'What Thomas Did Next' and I just am not interested enough in Thomas Mann to find out what Thomas will get up to at the end of page 666. I found the prose very dull. Maybe it's just me and my frame of mind at the moment, but there was no magic in 'The Magician ' that I could see.

It's not you! I carried on, but could easily have dropped it at several points. Someone else on here read it around the same time as me and said the same.

I felt there was no scope for the reader's imagination. It was all laid out and not very interesting.

I went digging back to see what I'd said about it.

This was broadly ok about a fascinating life, but at times I found the style a little dry and distant. It felt a little like Robert Harris writing a 3 part novelisation of Cicero's life knowing a biography wouldn't attract the readers. Unlike Harris, I didn't feel Tóibín could breathe life into the person and Mann came across as a cardboard cutout while the history did the work. It wore its research very heavily at times.

@FortunaMajor

I went digging back to see what I'd said about it.

This was broadly ok about a fascinating life, but at times I found the style a little dry and distant. It felt a little like Robert Harris writing a 3 part novelisation of Cicero's life knowing a biography wouldn't attract the readers. Unlike Harris, I didn't feel Tóibín could breathe life into the person and Mann came across as a cardboard cutout while the history did the work. It wore its research very heavily at times.

Interesting! Yes. I felt it was going to be a slog and I just wasn't engaged enough to commit to it.

I also have Death and the Penguin on my shelf, it was one of the books recently recommended for readers wanting to understand Ukraine (www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/04/beyond-war-books-understand-ukraine-invasion-putin-gogol-oliver-bullough)

On a slightly incongruous note (sorry), I see that Georgette Heyer is the featured Deal of the Day kindle author today. I know lots of you go to her for comfort reading. Is there a particular book you'd recommend to someone (me) who has never read her before? I really do feel like some escapism!

@JaninaDuszejko

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov. Translated by George Bird

Viktor is a journalist who writes obituaries for a paper in Kiev (spelling in the novel) and lives alone with the penguin Misha he adopted when the zoo shut down. However his job is not quite as it first appears to him and he is drawn into a situation he cannot escape from. This is a black comedy by Ukraine's most famous novelist, it's tightly written and worth reading.

This sounds good! I'll look it up. Thanks for the review.

stokey I would recommend Captive Queen by Alison Weir

She's an historian who has moved into fiction so her stories are more accurate than many historical fiction although still some artistic liberties. She's a good writer and her characters are very relatable

Thanks @satelliteheart. I've heard good things about Alison Weir though never read her

On another unrelated note, has anyone read Space Opera by Catherynne Valente,? I started it last night looking for a light hearted book, but am finding it almost unreadable. Each sentence has so much shoved into it, I can't work out what she's trying to do. Typical sentence below. It's exhausting.

"It’s a song as old as recorded sound, and you already know how it goes: given that there are billions of people on the planet, and that a really quite unsettling number of them are musicians, and the suicide-inducing low probability of paying even one electric bill via the frugal application of three chords and a clever lyric, and that such musicians, if they can produce anything good, have a high likelihood of getting around to it sooner or later, and the breakneck speed at which a digitally entangled global population fueled by faster-than-instantaneous gratification consumes units of culture, then being the biggest rock star in the world is highly likely to be a short-lived gig with no snacks served at intermission, and even at the absurdly primitive crawl of Earth’s collective attention span, any successful front man is guaranteed, sooner or later, to wake up on the floor of his flat with a sucking black hole of a hangover and a geologically terrible haircut asking: Where is everybody?"

Ooh @VikingNorthUtsire, lots of good Georgette Heyers! I haven’t read loads of them but ones I really liked are The The Grand Sophy, The Toll-booth, Frederica, Bath Tangle… I’ve also read and enjoyed one of her 1930s murder mystery books - A Blunt Instrument. Happy reading - it really is proper escapism!

Speaking of escapism, I’ve finished my next book:

21. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - JK Rowling The second in my re-read of the HP books, a really fun one with an exciting story and lots of funny lines. Way better than book 1!