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?

@LeniGray thanks - I've spotted G+P in the 99p deals too so will start there as it seems popular.

28. The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson. Set over one weekend, this tells the story of Roy Hanrahan, a bit of a has been artist and a bully, who has gathered his large family to see his big come back exhibition. The family are naturally eccentric and all have their own secrets. I'm normally a fan of this kind of book but it didn't quite work for me. It was never clear quite why Roy was so vile, and the passivity of his wife and children stretched credulity a bit. I've liked all her earlier books so a bit of a disappointment.

I haven’t read the others in the series purely because they aren’t 99p, but I have them on my watchlist.

Catching up on the thread after life got in the way. It's getting in the way of reading too.

32 All the Devils are Here* by David Seabrook
I don’t know quite what I was expecting but I got a dark psychogeographical meander through the coastal towns of Kent. It was odd but diverting and quite alarming in places.

33* Peggy of the Chalet School* by Eleanor M Brent-Dyer
I think this must be one I hadn’t read twenty times as a child but no surprises nonetheless. Not sure it warrants a review.

34* A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian* by Marina Lewycka
Humorous but not “wildly funny” as described. I missed this when it was first published and came to it via a second hand book fair. Picked it up to learn a bit more about Ukraine, which I did in a roundabout way. I enjoyed it while I was reading it but found the storyline about the aging father’s exploitation by his new partner deeply sad.

35* Lessons in Chemistry* by Bonnie Garmos
I know this has had good reviews but it left me mostly unmoved. Even though it had a lot to recommend it - feminism, humour, science, a clever dog. But it was just a bit too self-consciously cute.

36* To the Island of Tides* by Alistair Moffat
Moffat walks St Cuthbert’s Way, across Northumberland to Holy Island. It’s less about the walk itself and more a pilgrimage to reconcile himself to aging and dying. Having just returned from this part of the world I thoroughly enjoyed this, and learned a lot about the history of the area. It’s made me want to rush back to Lindisfarne and spend time there just walking the beaches and listening to the birds.*

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller
I enjoyed Our Endless Numbered Days even though it’s YA and a bit obvious. This one is painted with a very similar brush. Slightly odd people on the fringes if society and with family secrets. I liked most of it, but thought it lost its way towards the end and I just didn’t like where she took one of the central characters. I thought it was unnecessary and unsubtle.

Would read more by her, but definitely wouldn’t buy full price.

Is Our Endless Numbered Days YA? I’ve only ever seen it in adult sections of bookshops and I certainly didn’t think it was YA when I read it. Maybe I need to reread it! I loved OEND and also really liked Unsettled Ground.

Agree with @ChessieFL. Claire Fuller's debut, Our Endless Numbered Days wasn't published/marketed as YA and I didn't read it as such. One of the main characters is, I think, a child (not a teenager) but it's not a children's book either.

And a different issue. Obviously not everyone will like the same books but I don't understand the idea tagging a book YA is in itself a way of saying it's of lesser worth. There are books very clearly written for a commercial teen market the way there are books churned out for crime readers and readers of other genres in a way I find offputting, and I'm very much a fan of crime fiction but there are books and ways of talking about those books which really appeal to me and others which really turn me off. I do sometimes choose to reread kids' books or those written for teenagers. I also think there are books that weren't written for teens but might resonate with some younger readers, but then there are books I loved at 16 which I don't believe I could have possibly been seen as the target readership!

I didn’t say anything about YA being of lesser worth. I used to read lots of YA, although not as much in recent years.

46 Chums by Simon Kuper
Subtitled "How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK" and does what it says on the tin. I wasn't sure that there was much new here - but I guess it's useful to restate the overwhelming dominance of a certain class of Oxford (specifically so, rather than Cambridge) educated arts graduates within our political system. Perhaps more depressing than enlightening.

47 Lambda by David Musgrave
I've been visiting dd in the city, so took the opportunity to go to a big Waterstones for a browse. As I read so many ebooks these days I'm always drawn to attractively designed books to buy in paper, hence picking up this SF novel from an author I've not run into before. (In fact on further investigation he's mainly a visual artist, & this is his first novel.)
This is set in an alternate present day, where a class of aquatic human-relatives, the lambdas, live amongst land-humans. The lambdas have become city dwellers, living in flooded basement apartments, and doing data entry jobs & the like for low pay. There is also legal recognition of personhood for sentient AI driven household goods (including a toothbrush) and extreme class segregation of the economy.
Overall a good read, with lots of interesting ideas and plot strands. It lost its way a bit at the end and reads more like the start of a series than a standalone, but I was still pleased I picked it up.

48 The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton
Much reviewed on here - I found this a bit slow going to start with but then really got into it. I thought there was a lot more to it than Daisy Jones & the Six (which I also liked but was definitely fluff), though I wouldn't have thought it was a prize-winning type of book. (Actually, that might mostly be because I rarely enjoy books that win literary prizes!)

44. Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
    A short memoir based on Fisher's one woman show. It's written in a very conversational style and touches on various aspects of her life, including her unusual childhood, career, mental health and addiction. It's mostly light and entertaining.

45. The Boy at the Back of the Class by Onjali Q Rauf
    A children's book. When a mysterious new boy arrives in the class the narrator of the book and friends are immediately curious and want to befriend him. When they discover he is a refugee and his parents are missing they come up with a plan to try to help him.
    The topics of war and asylum seekers are covered in an age appropriate way for primary school children and although there is sadness in the book there is
    humour. It's also about the importance of friendship and acceptance.

46. By the Light of My Father's Smile by Alice Walker
    It's hard to describe this book. An American family lived for years with a remote tribe in Mexico and now the father's ghost is watching his adult daughters. It's beautifully written and its short chapters give it a dreamlike feel.

118 Never Go Back by Robert Goddard

Another great story from one of my favourite authors. A group of ex RAF men meet for a reunion but things turn dark when the men start dying in mysterious circumstances. Who is killing them and why?

119 Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

A Chinese-American family deals with the death of one of their children. Told partly in flashbacks and partly dealing with the aftermath. I didn’t really like any of the characters here - I don’t always have to like characters but here I think you’re meant to, and the fact that I didn’t meant it was hard to care much what happened.

120 The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen by Lindsay Ashford

This was terrible! It’s based around the idea that Jane Austen didn’t die of natural causes and was poisoned by someone. This book is told from the point of view of a governess who suspects the poisoning and investigates whodunnit. Reads like bad fanfiction, avoid!

121 Dust by Mark Thompson

A coming of age story about two boys growing up in the 1960s in one of the dust bowl states. I really enjoyed this.

122 When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

A detective in the 1930s tries to solve the mystery of the disappearance of his
parents in Shanghai twenty years ago. This started well, but towards the end the main character becomes obsessed with his case and it starts becoming very unclear what’s real and what isn’t. This is written in the same slightly formal style as Remains of the Day, and like that book I feel like this is one that I may get more out of on a second reading.

123 Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Set in 1983, this features a party thrown by model Nina, the daughter of legendary singer Mick Riva, after which nothing will be the same again. Enjoyed this, good fun.

124 The Birdcage by Eve Chase

Three half sisters meet again at their childhood home which brings back memories of a summer twenty years ago. Something happened then which is gradually revealed. This started well and I liked the setting, but the reveal was rather underwhelming and two of the sisters were really irritating.

125 The Authenticity Project by Claire Pooley

An elderly man writes in a notebook that he’s lonely and leaves it in a cafe. The book gradually makes its way round others who also write in it and they all become friends. It’s all very unbelievable, but I found the characters engaging so I did enjoy this.

126 A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon

I really enjoyed this. Linda lives quietly with her husband now following a traumatic event in her childhood. However there have been murders locally and her husband’s started keeping odd hours. Linda becomes obsessed with the woman who used to live in her house, and thinks that if she can just become friends with Rebecca then everything will change.

127 Mean Baby by Selma Blair

Autobiography of the actress. I’m not a particular fan but DD loves Legally Blonde so wanted to know what Blair said about that! In the end, not much. Blair now suffers with MS and it was interesting to read about that, but overall this is quite disjointed and jumps around quite a lot with no real explanation of some anecdotes.

128 Out Of The Sun by Robert Goddard

Middle aged man Harry discovers he has a son he never knew about, but he’s on life support after a fishy sounding overdose attempt. Harry becomes convinced his son was murdered and goes to track down those responsible. Another great story from Goddard.

Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca is on Kindle Daily Deal. I recall one or two people enjoying this recently?

Crazy busy at work recently but now back in the reading zone.

29. QualityLand - Marc-Uwe Kling, trans. by Jamie Lee Searle

Really enjoyed this. SF/satire based in the near future where everything is run by algorithms.

If Douglas Adams was writing about a world where your life was calculated by major online retailers and social media platforms, this book would be the result. A genuinely funny, but actually pretty scary insight into what the future may hold in a country where people are ranked by level, goods turn up before you know you want them, and even if you don't, you must do because the system is always right, right? Interesting ideas about algorithms creating an echo chamber of an individual's political, social, retail and romantic needs, and what happens when the computers get it wrong. Didn't see the twist at the end, similar to Set my Heart to Five.

Recommended.

37. Operation Mincemeat - Ben MacIntyre

I read this having been to see the film at the cinema as I was interested to know how faithfully the film had stuck to the facts and to get a bit more detail. For those who have not seen the film or read the reviews or the book, it’s the story of the intelligence operation which sought to mislead the Germans during WW2 as to the location of the Mediterranean attack by the Allies so that the Germans moved their forces from defending Sicily. The misinformation was planted on a body which washed up on the Spanish coast. To be fair the film is relatively faithful to the book although some additions in the film to Cholmondeley’s role that seem to not be based on fact. It was interesting to learn more about the minor players (in the film) who were critical to ensuring the misinformation passed into Spanish and then German hands.

40 The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco It’s taken me weeks to get through this, it was an absolute slog. I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t “get” Eco, after having also struggled through The Name Of The Rose about 20 years ago (I’m not even sure if I finished it). The premise of The Prague Cemetery is that it follows historical events in Italy and France in the 19th century, weaving together real-life events by way of a fictional character who manages to have a finger in every political pie over the course of a 60-year period.

It was interesting to learn about a historical period I previously knew virtually nothing about (I learned plenty about the Victorians but not about what was going on across the channel at that time!), and in particular I recognised a lot of Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch (one of my favourite Discworld books) in the description of the establishment of the Paris commune.

However, the problem was that there was no enjoyable story or likeable characters, which made it very hard to care. The main character is horrible - misogynistic, sociopathic, ragingly anti-semitic, with no redeeming features. I nearly didn’t finish it but there was a mystery relating to the main character which kept me reading (the resolution of the mystery was not worth it…). I would much rather have read a non-fiction history of the period!

Something I should have added - I know the nastiness of the main character was part of the point, and the book is all about the build-up of unfounded and irrational hatred of jews leading ultimately to the Holocaust…but that didn’t make the story any better as far as I am concerned, and again a non-fiction approach would have suited me much better.

Sad about all these Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell non-finishers - I loved it and have reread twice which is oddly the same no of times I have read LOTR - and I did give up on that initially and came back to it later. It's a hard book to sell to people - my fantasy devouring brother never took to to it nor did my historical appreciating Mum (she did appreciate Sorcery & Cecillia by Patricia Wrede though). Piranesi is excellent too in a different way.

Joining in with the Jonathan Strange non-finishers! The TV adaptation came on a year after I DNF'd the book, but despite being a fan of the two main actors, I never fancied it. I remember @CoteDAzur saying more than once she grieved after the book ended, as I did after reading The Goldfinch.

Be Yourself and Happier: The A-Z of Wellbeing - Will Young. A kind of personal development book, accessibly and sensitively written with lots of empathy. I loved this, and his previous book is also terrific.

DuPain I am full of admiration that you managed to finish The Prague Cemetery - I just could not get through it. Generally, I do persevere with books but this and Jonathan Strange are two I have failed with…

Yes, I meant to come on earlier and signpost this! Definitely recommend.

Jonathan Strange is the novel that’s lingered longest on my kindle and I’ve never got round too.
I checked and it was purchased in April 2011! Maybe now is the time.

If anyone hasn't read Stasiland, I know that many on here have. It's 99p today and one of my favourite books.

www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005ERMKSO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

I have no idea how many books I read in a year, but every night I go to bed and read for 1.1/2 hours. I love Ann Tyler books and at the moment I am reading the Engrightb Will

The Paper Palace (long listed for the womens' prize for fiction) is 99p on Kindle. Looks like it will be a good half term read!

Finished Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason.
Was reading it on the beach with tears streaming down my face at the end.
I was infuriated by the narrator at times but was totally absorbed in her story and felt very emotional at the end (won't give spoilers).

@RomanMum I really enjoyed Qualityland - I'm surprised it's not more popular in the UK (a casualty of people not reading fiction in translation maybe?)