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?

Just thinking again about Understood Betsy, I think what made that story so powerful for me is that the child wasn't very happy living with her mother, and is much happier once she gets away from her mother. I had a difficult/suffocating mother and so the book was probably liberating for me in that regard.

However, I've just remembered that my mother herself loved that book as a child, and gave it to me to read. And HER mother (my maternal grandmother) was an even more difficult person. So maybe my mother found solace in the story for the same reason I did

I have sons not daughters and they are unlikely to want to read a 1916 novel, so even though I'm an imperfect mother as well, I guess the generational saga stops here.

Oh gosh sorry I've just looked at a summary of Betsy and it's not the mother who was suffocating and over-anxious, it was an aunt. Betsy was an orphan. How crazy (but telling) that I misremembered it as the mother!

I will spare you all any further autobiographical analysis, ha.

cassandre, if you have a kindle some of the Deborah Levy books come up relatively regularly in the monthly or daily deals - I have bought one and two for 99p over the last couple of years.

11. Listen to Me, by Hannah Pittard. Short novel in which a couple take a road trip from Chicago to his parents' home, but get caught up in a storm. He hates the internet and is exasperated with the way his wife constantly reads bad news stories, which he thinks makes her more anxious after she has been mugged. We hear a lot about their interior thoughts, punctuated occasionally by minor events and then by a deeply upsetting event. Various reviews described it as a gothic portrait or a psychological thriller; it didn't seem like either to me. I loved some of the writing in this, but even with my extremely high tolerance for lack of plot and unlikeable characters, this was a bit of a challenge.

Cassandre I loved your story of different generations of women reading the same book, and the way it resonated with your own childhood. I was having a conversation just yesterday with a friend about the ways in which we are like our mothers and grandmothers. My mother and I have a good relationship but we are very different personalities. Interesting stuff!

23. The Starting School Book - Sarah Ockwell-Smith
24. Can I Tell You About Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome? - Ruth Fidler and Phil Christie A couple of books to help with DD - she's now enrolled with a new school and will be starting after Easter

25. Wild Magic - Tamora Pierce
Saw this YA fantasy in the 99p deals and bought it on a whim because I loved Pierce's Alanna books as a 13ish year old. I didn't realise this series featuring Daine, a teenager with a magical gift for connecting with animals, carries on directly from the Alanna series. Daine uses her powers to help the knights of Tortall as they face attack from the Carthaki empire. I think this is my ultimate comfort reading, and I immediately went to the library (children's section, not even Teen Space) to get the next two out

30. The Distant Echo by Val McDermid

31. A Darker Domain by Val McDermid

The first two Karen Pirie books. I love a good cold case crime book so I really enjoyed these and thought the back and forth between the dual timelines worked really well. The first is set during the 70s and involved 4 students discovering the body of a young women. The second is set during the 1980s in a mining community during the strike, with a second crime involving the kidnap of a rich woman and her son around the same period.

Finished Index, A History of the, Dennis Duncan
This was patchy; some was very interesting, fun, quirky; other parts a bit technically heavy and slow. A few appalling editing/proofreading errors, unfortunately in a book about close detail...!
Would recommend, but may be best approached with an understanding that parts of it will grab you/make sense and others may not.

Also realised I never updated when I finished The Corner that Held Them, Sylvia Townsend Warner
Covers several decades of the 13th century and is all about the lives of the inhabitants of a nunnery in remote rural Norfolk. Basically a soap opera/saga about all the lives/deaths/rivalries/resentment/politicking that goes one both between the nuns themselves and when the world intrudes on their lives.
It's very immersive; I have such a clear picture of what they and their surroundings all look like.
It is very witty and dry at times, and there is outright comedy too. I've never read anything else quite like it.

Still on Dissolution, which is cranking up nicely, and The Sewing Circles of Herat, which I'm discovering I do best with if I read it in bits and focus on the people and situations as described, rather than worry too much about not knowing the history or politics.

Hope the school works out well for your dd, Ladybird.

cassandre, lovely story about the same book resonating with three different generations. I read my mother's copy of the Little Women books but felt she was most unsympathetic when I burst into tears in the kitchen over Beth. Dd flicked through them unenthusiastically and never finished them. There endeth our familial literary history.

37. How Words Get Good, by Rebecca Lee. Non-fiction about publishing, from ghost-writers and agents, through copy-editors and proof-readers and so on to printers. What I want from this kind of non-fiction is for it to tell me something I don't know. Her references are all to fairly mainstream books about literary history, so a lot of her anecdotes were already familiar to me. Yes, yes, Hemingway's wife left his manuscripts on a train, yes, there was a controversy about publishing Go Set a Watchman. I mildly enjoyed it but didn't find it very satisfying.

One of her references is to the the Dennis Duncan book just reviewed by DameHelena, of which I have a library copy waiting to be read, so thanks for the review. I also need to have another go at The Corner that Held Them. I was enjoying it but found it slow-going. I put it down and somehow haven't (yet) gone back to it.

I realised I hadn't posted an update since last month. Still reading (slowly), still recovering from covid (also slowly). Poor DH still has a nasty cough. DS was rather poorly with it too.

Anyway, the books:

28. Twisted 26 - Janet Evanovich. More Stephanie Plum bounty hunter/thriller. Comfort reading, not much brain power needed to follow the plot, which was just as well.

28. The ABC Murders - Agatha Christie. Enjoyed this one a lot. One of her better Poirot novels.

29. Cat Among the Pigeons - Agatha Christie. A bit thin, one of her later Poirot novels, set in a private boarding school where several teachers get murdered and parents don't seem that bothered . He didn't show up until well over half way through, and felt like AC only decided to shoehorn him in at the last minute. Not a good one.

30. Britt-Marie Was Here - Fredrik Backman. Quite an interesting story. 60ish Britt has to start again after her marriage breaks down, finds a job running a community centre in a run down depressed village but makes a go of it, making new friends and becomes coach to the youth football team despite knowing nothing about football.

32. Why Didn't They Ask Evans? - AC again. Another good one. Standalone, no Poirot or Marple. Good plot, lots of twists and turns. Enjoyed it.

33. Some Kids I Taught, and What They Taught Me - Kate Clanchy. I wanted to find out for myself what the fuss was about. Yes I can absolutely see that she caused offence through racial stereotyping, and appearing to be somewhat of a white saviour in some situations. I can see that that she made huge mistakes in believing she was merely being descriptive rather than offensive. I'm not about to gaslight anyone who was offended by this book at all. It is what it is. There were some lovely bits in there where she worked hard with her students and got some amazing results. But on the flip side, where she couldn't relate to a student, who didn't respond to her teaching, she was incredibly dismissive and unpleasant.

Thanks all for the get well wishes. And for some great reviews, I will come back later to join rfe discussion. In the meantime here are a couple of reviews from me:

19. The Couple at Number 9, Claire Douglas

Read for book group. A young couple are doing renovations in their cottage when builders discover two bodies buried in the back garden. Who are they and how does what happened to them relate to the current residents' family history?

Plot wasn't bad, writing was pretty awful. Don't read this if you dislike people "padding" around without shoes.

20. Fleischman is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner

I'm going to try to avoid spoilers on this one. It's not that it contains a twist as such but there's a definite point about 2/3 way through which changes the reader's perspective on the book and its characters, and makes you re-evaluate everything you've read up to this point.

The first part of the book is a skilful, funny modern take on a very familiar story - a rich, clever, New York Jewish couple are splitting up. Here are Woody Allen, Philip Roth and Nora Ephron mixed together and given a 21st century twist - imagine Portnoy if he'd had access to dating apps and sexting. Toby Fleischman is our protagonist, and we're drawn into his anxieties, his resentment and anger, and his practical issues as he discovers that his ex-wife has unexpectedly dropped their kids (sulky tween Hannah, sweet trusting younger brother Solly) on him and turned off her phone.

Toby hadn't dreamed of great and transcendent thing for his marriage. He had parents. He wasn't an idiot. He just wanted regular, silly things in life, like stability and emotional support and a low-grade contentedness. Why couldn't he just have regular, silly things? His former intern Sari posted a picture of herself bowling at a school fundraiser with her husband. She'd apparently gotten three strikes. "What a night", she'd written. Toby had stared at it with the overwhelming desire to write "Enjoy this for now" or "All desire is death". It was best to stay off Facebook.

There's a lot I'd like to say about this take on male resentment, heartbreak and sexual frustration and how it compares to reading Roth's American Pastoral last year, and where I think that Brodesser-Akner has been very clever and where I think she's missed the mark - but it's impossible to do that without spoilering the things that she does later in the book, and I don't want to do that because if you're planning to read it I think it's much better to go in blind.

One problem I had was that the book felt overlong (as did American Pastoral!). I loved the beginning, I enjoyed the sharp, funny writing and the explorations of class, gender roles, parenting and modern manners. Then I started to get a bit bogged down by Toby's self-regard and the lack of action in the plot, and when the (clever) non-twist happened it was already a bit too late. I should have enjoyed reading the second half of the book more but I was flagging and getting a bit bored of the characters and their rich people problems. I wish she'd twisted it a bit earlier - but then maybe it wouldn't have had the same impact.

26. Wyrd Sisters - Terry Pratchett

Sixth Discworld novel, and one of the very best imo - a clever plot weaving in Macbeth and the Marx Brothers, the fabulous witches and loads of great jokes.

@MegBusset

26. Wyrd Sisters - Terry Pratchett

Sixth Discworld novel, and one of the very best imo - a clever plot weaving in Macbeth and the Marx Brothers, the fabulous witches and loads of great jokes.

I love Wyrd Sisters

biblio, for me what worked withThe Corner that Held Them was to read it in quiet large chunks, so I got involved in the everyday activity and wanted to keep following it. It IS undeniably slow!

Good tip, Dame. Because I own the book, it ends up less likely to be picked up, as I'm either prioritizing a library book that is due back or I'm on a train and reading my Kindle.

@bibliomania

Good tip, Dame. Because I own the book, it ends up less likely to be picked up, as I'm either prioritizing a library book that is due back or I'm on a train and reading my Kindle.

I know what you mean! The advantage of library books is the deadline. Maybe you could promise it to someone, then you might feel guilted into finishing it quicker

Also, I meant 'quite' large chunks, not quiet
Although I suppose 'quiet' is not incorrect either

More nunfiction - excellent! Thank you DameHelena

@TimeforaGandT

More nunfiction - excellent! Thank you DameHelena

Enjoy it!

LittleDiaries, there's a film of Britt-Marie Was Here, it's been on iplayer (not sure if still there).

@JaninaDuszejko I didn't know there was a film. I'll see if I can track it down. I love a good film

8) The Midnight Library - Matt Haig

Loved this book, it was the first I have read from Matt Haig but will definitely be reading more of his. Very though provoking.

Forever Young - Hayley Mills. A cosy memoir, nothing too revealing, from the former child star, this was an easy read with interesting insights on what it felt like to be a child actress in the 60s but I would have preferred more detail on the dark side of her family she often alludes to. Overall, pleasant but a bit too glossy for me.

That was my third book of the year, btw (I'm trying to finish my Masters so doing a lot of reading just not finishing any textbooks so not counting them).

New thread here:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/what_were_reading/4528324-50-Books-Challenge-2022-Part-Four?watched=1