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?

I think I am going to have to withhold judgment on Sue Palmer's (of Toxic Childhood fame) 21st Century Boys until I have read the Girls version. For the meantime , I would say it is cliched, classist mostly marketing as baddies tripe with some hidden gems about our early education system which I do agree with her on. I think some of her stuff on gender and nature are probably very up for debate and her stuff on autism and ADHD almost offensive (she draws on Simon Baron Cohen's research which I think is even offensive to some). Published in 2009, it may not be ageing well.

Welcome BooksnDreams :) I've finished a few books I've had on the go for a while:
52 Spoon Fed by Tim Spector
I was expecting to find this annoying as I find TS irritatingly self promoting. However, though the subtitle ("why almost everything we’ve been told about food is wrong") is rather overstating matters it's actually a perfectly sensible run through of what's wrong with much current dietary advice and some alternatives.

Michael Pollen still has the best simple answer IMO ('eat food, not too much, mostly plants') but for those who find things a bit more complicated than that this is probably worth a read.

53 Made in Scotland by Billy Connolly
Short autobiographical book by the famous comedian. He seems to have also written a longer autobiography - this one mostly covers his early years, with some anecdotes from later in his life (plus some slightly random rather long dialogues with different people, most of which I skimmed). Nothing momentous, but (unsurprisingly) entertaining and very funny in places.

54 Woodston: The biography of an English Farm by John Lewis Stempel
Does what it says on the tin - traces the history of Woodston Farm (which the author has family links to). Not my favourite of his books, but still a good read - I always enjoy his mix of natural history and farming as a bedtime choice. (Currently on offer at 99p for anyone else who likes this type of book!)

13 Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner

This was interesting. Takeaway is be scientific with the data and you might notice some interesting stuff. Mumsnet's baby names posters should read the relevant section.

I was less delighted than I thought I would be. Despite the quotes on the front it didn't feel like a phenomenon, non-stop fun or even particularly brilliant; though the brilliance may lie in the approach to life in the first place. Maybe it was just too much America all in one go?

Fiction next. Book Thief, Curious Incident, JS&MN, or Harold Fry? Or a comfort reread of Frederica or something?

I've never been that impressed by the Freakonomics pair Merryhouse I much prefer Tim Harford's columns who I guess is a kind of UK equivalent (I thought How to Make the World Add Up, his most recent book, was a pretty good read.

I agree - I would definitely rate How to Make the World Add Up above Freakonomics. Although the bit about charging late fees for nursery pick ups was really interesting.

Just finishing 70. The Seven Ages of Death, Richard Shepherd
Second book by forensic pathologist detailing cases he has worked on. As the name implies, it starts with the youngest individuals and ends up with the oldest. This means that you are straight into babies' autopsies, so it's probably not a read for when you're feeling any way fragile. But I thought the structure works very well as a way to illustrate the main risks facing us at each age. I found him more likeable than in the first book, discussing his own smoking and drinking habits and unwillingness to face up to the health issues that come with aging. Very interesting.

47: Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel García Marquez

Terrific novella - very short - looking back on the events that prefigured the grisly murder of Santiago Nasar in a small Colombian village years earlier. The unnamed narrator adopts a quasi-investigatorial tone, although it gradually becomes clear that he's far from being an outsider and knows all the parties intimately…including their motives, thoughts, events and conversations. So a rather slippery narrator, this one, but Marquez in a master storyteller and weaves the whole together to create an utterly convincing, living and breathing world, bursting with energy and colour, in just a few pages.

The Seasons: June 'Barcarolle': Tchaikovsky.

The pendulum swings back to melancholy today :) Lovely and wistful.

Sorry folks. Right section, wrong thread!

That was the thing with Freakonomics - it was all very interesting. It just... I dunno. Maybe I'm too hidebound and want it to be cohesive. Or maybe I was annoyed by the several occasions where I wanted it to note the difference between the US and the UK and obviously it didn't.

39 My Phantoms - Gwendoline Riley

Not quite sure how I felt about this. Very, very well written - describing a young woman's dysfunctional relationship with her parents, in excruciatingly lifelike detail. But all three characters are so unlikeable that I couldn't really describe it as an enjoyable read.

143 Laughing Gas by P G Wodehouse

Wodehouse is always funny, but this wasn’t one of his best. A man and a Hollywood child star end up in each other’s bodies after a trip to the dentist. Chaos ensues!

144 Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

A reread ahead of watching the TV adaptation that was on recently. Brilliant.

145 Summer Fever by Kate Riordan

An overwrought story about two couples in a villa in Italy. I think it’s meant to have a sultry atmosphere but all the characters are so unlikeable it’s hard to understand how or why any of them might be attracted to each other so none of it rang true. Nice setting though.

That's disappointing, Meg. I have My Phantoms ready to go after I've finished a couple of books I have on the go and I was really looking forward to it.

I think others on here have really rated it, @PepeLePew , and she's certainly a very talented writer. Just for me, there was something missing at the heart of it. It's not that I think protagonists have to be likeable but this felt to me like describing a dysfunctional family (albeit very well) rather than the writer engaging with it - if that makes any sense.

44 The Prince of the marshes: and other occupational hazards of a year in Iraq - Rory Stewart yes, that Rory Stewart. I noticed this on a shelf in a library in a nearby town (a novelty, as my local library doesn’t have any English-language books on the shelves and I have to search the online catalogue) and thought it would be interesting based on what I already knew of Stewart - posh but seemingly decent Conservative politician with principles.

My expectations were well-founded - it was a very interesting account of his year working for the western coalition government in Iraq between the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the handover of power to a new Iraqi government. I got the impression that Stewart worked extremely hard and achieved a huge amount, mostly thanks to his unusual character and background - he’s a privileged upper-class Scot who is clearly a natural adventurer in the style of colonial explorers from a hundred years ago, and goes out of his way to communicate with and understand the Iraqis.

It was interesting to see the situation through his eyes - in particular the way he tries to reconcile the coalition’s aim to pass power back to the Iraqis and not act as a colonial ruler, with the fact that the coalition (and therefore Stewart himself) has absolute power during the period covered by the book and wants to use that power to shape the future Iraqi government. There were lots of funny moments, and some quite shocking bits too, and plenty of exasperation at the actions taken by both the coalition members and the Iraqis. I felt the narrative didn’t quite flow in the way that it would have done if it had been written by someone who was primarily a writer but i really enjoyed it and learned a lot.

Definitely recommended - and I understand the audiobook is read by Stewart himself so that may be even better than reading the book (I don’t listen to audiobooks as I prefer to read, and listen to podcasts instead, but I think I would have happily made an exception for this one).

Bad Actors by Mick Herron I’ve always enjoyed this Slow Horses series and it just gets better and better, even having reached brilliance several books back.

Trademark comic third-class spy misadventures plus biting satire which often takes the form of just saying it like it is. Lamb, the slow horses and Taverner are on great form. Not recommended for fans of Dominic Cummings.

"Not recommended for fans of Dominic Cummings"

How many of those are there around?

Death and the Penguin has been mentioned here a few times recently - I also really enjoyed it a few years ago. It's a Kindle Daily Deal today.

There are also a couple of freebies - I don't know how long for. I only bought Shadow of Death by Alison Joseph for 99p the other day - have just returned it for a refund and then "bought" it for £0.00. I'm taking the chance to replace paperbacks, some of which I'm not sure I can find. This is a slightly later book in one of my favourite series, some of the others are also quite cheap though sadly the real #1, Sacred Hearts, doesn't seem to be on offer on Kindle. This is nunlit - Sister Agnes is an amateur sleuth but in her role as a nun working in the community - various social work type projects - she is coming across things in the course of her work.

The other current Kindle freebie was longlisted for the Booker last year, An Island by Karen Jennings.

(Info from Kind of Book email by subscription and ereaderiq's UK website which has various views - I usually look at price drops to a maximum of £3 in the last 24 hours, though I normally go up to about £2 - if there are just too many at £2.99 you can set a lower limit to view etc. You can import your own wishlists as well.)

55 Janesville by Amy Goldstein
The story of the American city of Janesville, Wisconsin, and what happened when the General Motors assembly plant that was its major employer closed as a result of the 2008 recession, leading to the domino closure of many other businesses.

Goldstein follows the fortunes of the city for five years after the closure, drawing particularly on the stories of a number of individual families, from high school students whose parents lost jobs, a GM worker who takes up the offer of work 400 miles away & commutes weekly, a job centre worker, through to business people involved in regeneration projects.

This is an absolutely wonderful book - it's won lots of prizes, & I'm not at all surprised. It's quite a quiet book, but brings together the stories of these diverse residents to make a really engrossing picture of a community responding to a major hit over the longer term. I listened to it on audio & it was also very well read.

I found it particularly interesting as I lived very near to a steel town that closed when I was a child in the 1970s, & much of the aftermath felt very familiar, particularly the shortage of well paid full time jobs & much lower family incomes even as employment recovered.

Once big difference of course is that at least in the UK lack of health insurance wasn't an issue - I did notice also that redundancy payments weren't mentioned in Janesville, I don't know if they exist in the States?

36. Murder, Mystery and my Family - Karen Farrington

Accompanying the BBC true crime series, a set of five case studies of women who were hung for murder in the 19th and 20th centuries. Touched on social history as well as their stories and the efforts of descendants to gain some restorative justice, not always successfully.

In other news, still testing positive - eight days in. Peed off. Catching up on TBR pile so I guess every covid has a silver lining.

Free nunfic! You've made my day, elkie!

Riders - Jilly Cooper
Jill's Riding Club got a little out of hand.

I think Specsavers quite like the publicity they got.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan Thanks to those who recommended this novella (sorry I can’t say who - I used to enjoy going back and comparing notes, but can’t find previous reviews from the search function any more). It’s stunning. In the 1980s Ireland of Magdalen laundries, a thoroughly decent family man wrestles with the memory of his own childhood and with the presence of the convent and laundry in the town. In 100 pages we understand his life and background, and also the precariousness of the lives of the people in the community and the hold the convent has. I’d wondered if it would be a difficult or dispiriting read but it isn’t, because of the goodness of the man whose viewpoint we take. Deeply moving and profound. And the timing of my reservation coming through on the day Roe v Wade was overturned has added to my shock on that front.

29. The Fell by Sarah Moss

I thought I'd try and read at least some books when they are current so I can join in the general discussion!

I am torn on this one. On one hand she captured my feelings about the lockdowns exactly. Wanting to do the right thing, but feeling cooped up, it being pretty awful, but not wanting to complain as actually I was locked down with a loving husband and in a warm house.

On the other hand, I hated the style of stream of consciousness and how little punctuation there was. I found it hard to read.

Are all her books like that? Is that her writing style? I'd be interested to read more of hers but only if I am not reading some paragraphs three times.

**