50 Books Challenge 2022 Part Four

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fourth thread of the 50 Books 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.

The first thread of the year is here, the second one here and the third one here.

What are you reading?

Hi 👋
Can I join you?
Been an avid reader since young but since covid I've really lost my reading mojo ☹️
I've been on a book buying binge lately and currently have 5 books on my bedside table ☺️
I've read 2 novels in the past week...The Leviathon by Rosie andrews and Give unto others by Donna leon. Enjoyed both.
I've been reading Donna Leon books for years.
I also love my kindle (so sorry about the accident!!) And its great as I can alter the font - I have an eye condition in my left eye which causes blurred vision. Also love the 99p books :)
I'm currently reading traitor in the ice by K J Maitland...enjoying it so far.
I'll read pretty much anything - except chick lit or anything by Jeremy Clarkson!!! - and particularly favour historical ficton and non ficton, biographies, crime, the classics (Jane eyre is one of my favourite books...)
Looking forward to your recommendations 😀

I've probably only read 6 books so far this year...😬

Hi @ChiswickFlo and welcome!

Can I ask a very stupid question everyone? My current/dead Kindle is a Fire and I use it for mindless internet scrolling too. Is a Paperwhite just for reading, with no internet access? Told you it was a stupid question!

Thank you :)

I think a paperwhite is just an e reader

Paperwhite is just a reader but the battery lasts so much longer than the Fire and it's nicer to use outside if it's sunny.

But I do find the store easier to navigate on my old Fire so I buy on that and readon my Paperwhite.

Welcome ChiswickFlo. And thoughts and prayers to Remus. I have a Fire which I use for browsing and library e-books (not Amazon compatible so you have to use an app) then a kindle with a matt screen (probably a paperwhite, honestly I can't remember) which is SO much better for reading on.

Mrs Fielding did this and then a teacup flew out of her knickers and everyone went home ad infinitum

I love you Sol 😂

Channel, Biblio, great to see mention of Margaret Mary. My absolute favourite is The Tricksters, which is spooky and angsty and quite sexy. Caused quite a stir for 13yo me.

Thanks for the info. I think I’ll get a Paperwhite - it’ll force me to just read and not be tempted to scroll!

I have a Paperwhite which is better for actual reading but I agree it’s easier to shop on my phone or laptop.

35. The Editor's Wife by Clare Chambers

I quite enjoyed this tale of the lost love of aspiring writer Christopher Flinders, but it was his relationship with his slightly unusual brother Gerald that I really liked. Not as good as Small Pleasures but good.

I have a kindle - not a paperwhite but I will def get a paperwhite when mine dies (had it since 2015 and still going strong!) - and I love the fact that I can't access the internet on it. I waste enough time mindless scrolling as it is! I go up to bed, leave my phone downstairs and have some dedicated reading time.

I’ve just started reading The Editor’s Wife @MamaNewtNewt so I’m glad to hear you enjoyed it!

Condolences to @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie This is why I have a back up kindle (bought for uninterested DC) and my old Fire on the shelf because I would just cry and cry (in spite of the many unread books on my actual shelves).

I’ve got about 5 on the go at the moment so don’t expect to post anything anytime soon.

Just popped in to note that Philippe Sands' East West Street is in the daily deals today - very highly recommended by me and others as a poignant memoir of his own family history (WW2, grandparents from Eastern Europe), but also dealing with the history of Lviv and the recognition of the crime of genocide in the wake of the war. A fascinating and (sadly) timely book.

I've just finished The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller, one of the Woman's Prize longlist. I found this very compelling, a real page turner that I couldn't put down. It's about Elle, a 50-something woman, who has sex with her oldest friend Jonas at the start of the book, outside their summer house in Cape Cod while her husband, his wife and her mother chat inside. The book then goes back and forth from the 50s through to the present day, exploring the lives of her parents, grandparents and how all the messy divorces impacted on Elle. It's all set against a beautiful backdrop of the Cape with lots of descriptions of water, a theme of swimming and drowning. There were bits that I found frustrating, some characters are mentioned but never explored or just left where I wanted more - her mother's part in Nicaragua, Anna - but the main part is very well drawn. I loved her mother's quote that the two things you never regret are a swim and a baby! I think it would be a good book club read.

I think I liked this more than @FortunaMajor and @cassandre although agree about the downplaying of the abuse storyline.

Thanks for the further commiserations. I'm going to go for a Paperwhite, and hope to track one down in a real, live shop tomorrow. :)

Best of luck Remus, I hope your new purchase brings you many hours of reading pleasure.

27. My Family and Other Animals - Gerald Durrell

A big warm hug of a book.

Still smiled in the same places as the first time I read it (last century!), and I found I got some of the more 'adult' references I missed out on as a child. A book of its time: Gerry was afforded the same kind of freedom that the Swallows and Amazons were, there was a lot of smoking and drinking, and I suspect the Durrells wouldn't recognise the modern day Corfu. Very enjoyable nonetheless.

Stokey I thought it was quite gripping and thrilling, but then felt a bit off at being so entertained by it. I can really see it being made into a film.

Lots of great books mentioned in the last few days that I've enjoyed too 😀 Bryson, Dent, Bilston etc.

And Iceland! I love Iceland 😀

My latest reads:

105 Lost Britain: An A-Z of forgotten landmarks and lost traditions by David Long

As the title says. Interesting collection of short pieces about old traditions, buildings etc.

106 Not Quite Nice by Celia Imrie

I love Imrie as an actress. This book was a bit disappointing. It features a lot of ex pats living in a small town near Nice. Unfortunately there was no real sense of being in France (virtually no French people feature) and all the characters were clichés.

107 In Five Years by Rebecca Serle

Dani has her life all mapped out, then suddenly has a vision of 5 years in the future where she’s living a completely different life. As that time approaches will it come true? I enjoyed this, as the story went in a completely different direction than I was expecting.

108 The Resort by M J Hardy

The story was OK - a group of people think they’ve all won a competition to test out the facilities of a new luxury resort, but was it as random as they thought? However the writing is awful with completely unbelievable dialogue and disappointing characters. Not recommended.

109 Drop The Dead Donkey 2000 by Andy Hamilton and Alistair Beaton

Written in 1994 and set in what was then the future in December 1999 leading up to the millennium. Based on the TV series this was funny and interesting to see what they came up with for what might have happened by 1999 although some of what they came up with was never meant to be taken seriously anyway. Nice nostalgia.

110 The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins

A modern retelling of Jane Eyre. Here, Jane is a dog walker in a rich community in Alabama, when she manages to get herself engaged to widower Eddie Rochester. Needless to say things don’t go smoothly. This was OK except Hawkins has made the Jane character into a scheming calculated person, which I don’t recall from the original!

111 Distress Signals by Catherine Ryan Howard

When Adam’s girlfriend Sarah disappears he ends up on a cruise ship investigating a series of other disappearances. Enjoyed this except for the rather pointless subplot.

112 Twelve Secrets by Robert Gold

Ben’s brother Nick was killed as a teenager twenty years ago, by a pair of teenage girls. Now another murder has opened everything up again and Ben discovers what really happened to his brother. This was very good but there’s a lot of plot strands and characters to keep track of.

@FortunaMajor Agree with your opinion on Gordon Brown. A principled man who was derided because of his physical appearance, "boring" brilliant mind, and the temerity to call an ignorant xenophobe a bigot. I remember his webchat a couple of nights before the 2010 election. He was lovely.

@PermanentTemporary The Sue Barton books were the first more grown up books I ever read. They were in the children's section of my local library and I devoured them. I remember being fascinated by her appendicitis!

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie RIP RemusKindle. One of us. Gone too soon.

@ChiswickFlo Welcome!

@bettbburg The Iceland book was fab! I'm now thinking of starting The Museum of Whales you will never see about bonkers museums in Iceland. And the Icelandic song for Eurovision gets my vote because it's in Icelandic!

I am having a dreadful reading period. I keep starting things, struggling halfway and thinking nope. My latest abandoned book, and it pains me to say it, is Barbara Vine's King Solomon's Carpet. Basically a pastiche of interconnected stories of individuals who find themselves living in the same house for various reasons and who all use the Tube. I gave up when I realised I was more interested in the (very interesting indeed) factoids about the Tube, rather than giving a flying fuck about any of the characters. It's odd too- the characters read like they are 1960s or 1970s people, yet talk about the internet. It feels all anachronistic. Very odd. Doesn't help that some have similar names, half of them are related to each other and just blearrrgh. Billed as her finest work. Hey ho.

37: Murder's Little Sister - Pamela Branch

Vintage green Penguin, first published in 1958, but I'm not entirely convinced it qualifies as a crime novel, as it’s an out-and-out comedy, set in the offices of a failing newspaper, YOU, whose agony aunt, Enid Marley (cordially loathed by all her colleagues), decides to set up a fake suicide to bring her errant husband to heel.

She doesn’t intend for a moment to go through with the deed, but slips from the window-ledge she’s climbed out onto. A handy shop awning beneath breaks her fall and the paper's editor, Sam Egon, immediately starts to spin the story to best advantage, with the help (or not) of the various eccentric staff members, from a tortured Viennese psychiatrist to a chain-smoking cookery columnist. But did she fall…or did someone try to save her?

Pamela Branch wrote 4 of these very amusing books in similar style before dying young in the 60s - it’s really quite surreal in places, in a good way, and it’s entirely my own fault that I couldn’t quite get into the right mood for this. I've got another of her books, The Wooden Overcoat, so I might have another bash when I’m feeling less frazzled by life…

35. The Grand Sophy - Georgette Heyer

I hadn’t read this Heyer before but seem to recall it regularly crops up as one of people’s favourites. Sophy has been brought up by her diplomat father in various European cities and had been given much more freedom than usual for young ladies of her age. When her father is sent to Brazil, Sophy goes to stay with her aunt in London and becomes absorbed into their large family where she makes a big impact as she tries to continue to enjoy her accustomed freedoms (clashing with her cousin Charles and his fiancée, Eugenia, in the process), resolve her cousin Cecily’s romances and rescue her cousin Hubert from his scrape. In the usual way, all ends well after some mad interventions by Sophy. Great fun.

10) The Haunting of Las Lagrimas by W. M Cleese

This is set in Winter 1913

This is about a young English gardener called Ursula who wants to escape her life in Cambridgeshire.

She finds work in Argentina as a gardener but then has an opportunity to have a new job as a head gardener for an isolated mansion in the wilds of Argentina. However no one will take on the job accept Ursula. She does not hesitate and makes the long, arduous journey to Las Lagrimas. Ursula begins work in ernest in preparation for the Don and his family’s arrival. There begins strange happenings. There is a rumour the place is cursed. I found this a very slow paced build up and was going to rate this a below average. The ending though brought this all together and you find out the true story of Las Lagrimas. I would recommend for fans of a good ghost story.

Sorry to hear about your Kindle Remus
I used to have the Fire as well and now have the Oasis, which is quite a lot more than the Paperwhite. I do love it, esp the page turn buttons, which the paperwhite doesn't have. Not sure they are worth the extra money though.

I haven't posted a review here for a while, as have started a new job, which is inconsiderably eating into my reading time.

14. 1979 by Val McDermid
    This was the story of a young female reporter in Scotland, who is trying to gain a foothold in the male-dominated press in the late 1970s. She is frustrated about being left to cover the trivial stories (like a baby born on a train!), while the men get all the good stories.
    Her only friend on the paper asks for help with one of his stories and they become entangled with tax evasion, money laundering and terrorism. The plot was a bit clumsy in places and felt extremely rushed in the end.
    It's an OK easy read, but not really what I was expecting. I've not read this author before, and she has been described as the Queen of Crime, so I was expecting a whodunnit or a big conspiracy. It was a bit of a slow burner, with lots of office politics and what she does day to day.

15. Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
    I thought this was a slightly odd book (I picked it up not realising it was part of a series, ad doubt I will read the rest)
    It's the story of policeman Alan Grant who is stuck in hospital, and as he is bored he starts to read and investigate the truth behind King Richard III and the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower.
    It's very short, barely 200 pages, but if I didn't know the main players in the Wars of the Roses, I think I would have been lost.
    The narrator does a decent job of putting Richard's character in a better light than is traditional, and his arguments are all very logical which I think is the point of the book, but it missed the mark a bit for me. I found it quite boring and I spent a weekend in York last year and totally embraced all the Richard history. I also love a decent whodunnit, so it should have been right up my street, it just wasn't.

16. The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri
    This book has been on my radar for a good while, but I didn't know much about it. It has won prizes, and I don't have a good track record with these, to the point that I have started to avoid them.
    This is the story of a husband and wife, Nuri and Afra, who flee their home in Aleppo in Syria after their young son is killed. Afra has been blinded and she is trying to adjust to her new disability. The narrative switches back and forth between their life in Aleppo, before the war, episodes from their journey through Turkey, then Greece, and eventually to the UK, where they are now living in a halfway house for asylum seekers and trying to navigate Home Office bureaucracy.
    I found the back-and-forth timelines confusing (two timelines don't usually bother me, but I do like a date to help me at the start. I did enjoy the story though and was rooting for Nuri and Afra.

17. London by Edward Rutherfurd
    Sarum is one of my favourite books and I also read his book on the History of Paris recently (Which was OK, but not as good as Sarum).
    London follows the same formula, following a few families through the evolution of the city of London from a small trading settlement at the time of the Roman invasion right up to the present day.
    The families are the Doggets, whose ancestors witnessed the first Romans landing from the Thames where London stands today, the aristocratic Duckets, the Welsh Merediths, the Carpenters, the clerical Silversleeves family, and the Huguenot Penny family all become part of the ethnic melting pot of the city as it grows through the centuries. Some real historical characters popped up as well which I liked, and I enjoyed the way we followed the families through real historical events, such as the Norman invasion and the building of the Tower of London, the leaving of the Mayflower, the Great Fire of London, The Great Exhibition and the Blitz of World War II.
    As with all of these styles of books, I enjoyed some sections more than others, but that is to be expected. It was a bit of a tome at over 1300 pages, so a considerable investment of time, but overall worth it I think.

I'm now reading Barkskins by Anne Proux, and listing to The Man Who died Twice - the second of the Thursday Murder club books by Richard Osman on Audible. I'm off to pick up DD from Uni today, so hopefully will get through a good chunk of it in the car.