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?

32. Anger is an Energy by John Lydon
Ooh this is interesting. A mix of hugely appealing and off-putting, though always with positive sides - isn't that how it's always been with JL. Reminds you just how brief the Sex Pistols were as a band, because most of it is about other things and fair enough. Holds together well at first but gets a bit frayed at the edges for the last third - I wonder what the ghost writer was up to.

I bought lonely boy, thanks.

50 Eating to Extinction The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino
A good one for reaching no 50 :) This tells the stories of a wide selection of endangered and very local foods across the globe, and uses these stories to illustrate the history of how we eat and how this has changed.
I really enjoyed this. Although it has a serious message, there's lots of great stories, & it made a perfect bedside book as each foodstuff is a short standalone chapter.

51 Frontier Grit The Unlikely True Stories of Daring Pioneer Women by Marianne Monson
12 mini biographies of women in the American West in the late 19th C / early 20thC. The women covered are much more diverse than you might guess from the title, of different races, classes and backgrounds including amongst others socialist agitator Mother Jones, and 'Aunt' Clara Brown, born a slave in Virginia & a successful businesswoman who used her profits to aid others escaping slavery. Absolutely fascinating, and worked really well on audio.

32 The Searcher by Tana French
French's latest is (unfortunately, from my perspective) not a further addition to her Dublin Murder Squad series, which I absolutely love, but a rather slower-paced and more reflective tale centred around American ex-cop Cal, who settles in rural Ireland. Cal is (obviously) a bit damaged after a divorce, and (also obviously) gets rather more excitement than he'd bargained for in the not-so-sleepy Irish countryside. Having sworn to steer clear of detecting, he is pressed to look into the case of a missing local youth, leading him into the heart of a complicated web of local feuds and loyalties. I started this earlier this year and couldn't get into it, but with a bit more time whilst on holiday, I did enjoy it. I liked the portrayal of the community and Cal is an endearingly straightforward character. But I like French's frenetic police ones much more.

Thanks for the reviews Sadik. They both sound great. I'm particularly intrigued by Eating to extinction

Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller
Well, I HATED this! Really wish I hadn't bothered finishing it, because if anything, it got worse. I was bored for quite a lot of the earlier stuff and then it got more and more ridiculous. I guessed several of the twists and by the end it had descended into total farce. It was like a poor man's Shirley Jackson, and I don't even like Shirley Jackson. Utter tosh imo.

43 The tea girl of Hummingbird Lane - Lisa See This was lent to me by my neighbour and probably isn't a book I would have chosen otherwise, but I enjoyed it and feel like I have learned a lot about a culture I was completely unaware of. It is the story of a girl from a minority community in the remote tea mountains of southern China; her upbringing in the 1980s and 90s is extremely primitive but she (and her village) eventually move thoroughly into the modern world. There's lots of meticulously researched historical detail but I didn't feel that this got in the way of the story, and I really liked the ending. The only jarring note were the sections in the voice of the main character's daughter and her peers - I don't think they sounded the way real teenagers speak and were really there just to move the plot along.

I absolutely adored this book, I never make a cup of tea without thinking about it.

@StColumbofNavron it made me feel a bit guilty that the only tea I drink is Earl grey so weak that it’s basically water - it’s not really in the spirit of the book! 😂

Have just read Liza Picard's obituary in the Guardian. What an interesting life. Here

64. The Couple at the Table, Sophie Hannah.

Glad to see her recurring police characters back after a hiatus, Simon Waterhouse, Charlie and the Snowman. I always say that I like her set-ups and am infuriated by her resolutions. I rather enjoyed this one. It's very much in the Agatha Christie tradition - here is an impossible murder, solve for x.

35 Bomber - Len Deighton

Picked up in a Kindle sale somewhat on a whim (it's a Penguin Classic which is usually a good sign), with a vague impression of Deighton being the kind of thriller writer that your dad likes to read. I have to say it was a fantastic surprise to find out how good it is - covering 24 hours of an RAF bombing raid on a fictional German small town, it's utterly gripping and conveys the horrors and pointlessness of mechanical warfare without resorting to sentimentality or gratuitousness. If you are a Robert Harris fan I would have to say this is a far higher quality.

@MegBusset I've been about to read Bomber for 2 years and am inspired to actually buy it now. Thank you.

People Person - Candice Carty-Williams
5 half siblings who share a father, but with 4 different mothers have very little to do with one another as children, but come together as adults in an emergency. They need to learn how to cope with one another despite having very different upbringings.

I warmed to this by the end, but wasn't keen at the start and could easily have abandoned it. It felt like an effort to keep picking it up, whereas if I'd had the audiobook, I think it would be a different experience. My issue is that I was expecting something quite gritty and realistic like Queenie, but this was very different. While the exploration of the relationships was quite interesting, the plot used to achieve this was too ludicrous and farcical for me. I'd be interested to hear what others think. I don't think it was bad, it just didn't live up to my expectations.

Northerners: A History, from the Ice Age to the Present Day - Brian Groom
A well researched and easy to read history of the North and what makes Northern people Northern as an identity. It's got a broad scope and doesn't overly focus on certain areas. It has a light touch and a certain humour, but he isn't as overtly comedic as say Stuart Maconie. Much enjoyed.

The Girls of Slender Means - Muriel Spark
Set in a London hostel for single women this explores how society is changing towards the end of the war as a group of young women find their way in the world.
Short but good. The more I read of Spark, the more I appreciate her writing. This isn't perfect, but she conveys a lot in a short book. All of the 'action' is at the end, but the build up to introduce the characters is worth the wait.

Cold Enough for Snow - Jessica Au
An Australian woman meets her Chinese mother in Tokyo and as they explore the city, she explores her strained relationship with her mother and their different cultural identities. She has put a lot of effort into planning the trip and activities, but the mother is largely indifferent.
Another short one, this is so vividly and evocatively written, the prose is outstanding. Very little actually happens, but the atmosphere it creates is very intense. Simply brilliant. One I'd like to go back to in print to savour the writing more.

Nothing But the Truth: Stories of Crime, Grief and the Loss of Innocence - The Secret Barrister
Another outing of the Secret Barrister in which he explores what brought him to practise law and how his opinion of the criminal justice system has changed since being a naïve student through tales of the cases he has worked on.
These are very eye opening books that leave you in despair at a broken and underfunded system which fails all who encounter it. Interesting.

Tangleweed and Brine - Deirdre Sullivan
Thirteen dark retellings of well know fairy stories from the perspective of the women involved.
I think I would have been better dipping into this rather than listening to it all at once. Well written enough but it didn't really do anything for me.

Really glad you liked The Girls of Slender Means @FortunaMajor. I love Muriel Spark so it gives me a nice warm feeling inside when other 50 bookers like her too. * *

My class once wrote to Muriel Spark about why she gave two characters in GOSM the same name. We wrote in the style of Spark. She replied in the style of the novel ! Sadly I have lost the letter.

Welsh I'm discovering that women of that era who have lasted on the lists of must reads are there for a very good reason. I'm trying to have a catch up.

I tend to read a lot of new releases, but I wonder how many, or more likely how few will be rated as a must read 50-70 years from now.

Spark in is a bit of an odd one. Her work is quirky and unusual and often leave you wondering about them. There's a definite quality to them.

Many thanks for the Liza Picard obit biblio, a life truly lived.

@Welshwabbit @FortunaMajor @Piggywaspushed I notice there’s a programme about Muriel Spark on Radio 3 tomorrow evening. Starts at 6:45.

Thanks terpsichore!

Is The Secret Barrister a man? For some reason I have always imagined it was a woman - but given I have not read the book(s) I don’t know why I think that!

I always assumed a man because of the smug tone!

Tunnel 29
About a group of people who dug an escape tunnel under the Berlin Wall.

I really enjoyed this.

I could have sworn I'd seen something not long after the first book came out where a man revealed himself as the author, but a quick Google shows it's still a very big secret with most speculation guessing it's a woman. I am possibly swayed by the audiobook narrator being male, but it also reads like it's a man, which could all be part of the subterfuge.

Terpsichore thank you, I'll look out for that..

The Story of the World in 100 Moments - Neil Oliver
Recently reviewed up thread. I agree that it leaps around a bit. I found it really interesting and I liked that it was not western history centric.