50 Books Challenge 2022 Part Five

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fifth 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, the third one here and the fourth one here.

What are you reading?

@bettbburg Sorry to hear of your health issues and thinking of you. Will miss you on here, and would welcome news of you, yours (even if offtopic) and any reading/listening you do feel able to share, or if you want to just say hi.

I'm on holiday at my aunt's house near the sea in Deal, Kent. The high street is a bit run down but this means it has a lot of charity shops and the Oxfam Bookshop here is amazing. I think I'm restrained these days normally compared to my pre-Kindle days (that's up to 2011, wow, 11 years) but we've missed two years entirely, the Oxfam Bookshop was closed for a few days on one visit, and on some previous holidays other family members have determined how our time is used to an extent.

My rules -

Good+ condition
Rarity value - less likely to be available in the charity shop next door, on Kindle, the Works for the same or less now or in the next few weeks
good reasons to buy - harder to find elsewhere, allows me to return current loans on a book I expect to be a keeper, something I loved from the library and won't just get somewhere else, something I can give to my dad or sister or the kids or share.

Sticking fairly close to those rules I spent over £70 but there are definitely more I think I probably averaged around £2 per book - most cost that, at least 10 books cost 99p-£1.49, and there were some children's poetry collections including a childhood favourite with a nice condition dustjacket. The fiction included 6 Best American short story (annual) collections and several other anthologies and several interesting indie publishers like Bitter Lemon (international settings and authors in English language original and translations)

Betty

I read Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers a few weeks ago via Netgalley, and have noticed that it is a 99p Kindle Daily Deal today.

I found this recently published novel very interesting but disturbing and sometimes quite upsetting. It is a near future speculative novel about Harriet, a Chinese-American single mum trying to hold on to a professional job (academic) and maybe future prospects, who makes a terrible mistake when she just can't think straight, under pressure, leaving her baby daughter alone in their flat.

Social workers take her baby daughter off and, after court hearings, baby is placed with the ex husband who left then-pregnant Harriet for another woman, and she finds herself sentenced to a year's full time re-education programme as a condition for even considering reunification - forget that job! Harriet is living with other women under full time observation, scrutiny and criticism, all having to look after a kind of artificial reality doll baby with regular awful tests which are not designed to help women succeed. Harriet has to work out how to get along, or just deal with, her peers from a range of backgrounds, and there is much how class and race affects perceptions and judgements of women's behaviour.

I saw aspects of what was likely to happen in advance, but by no means everything. The story was rather harrowing and made me sad and angry many times when reading.

12) How to Find Your Way Home by Katy Regan
This looks at the fragility of family and how relationships can be broken but the possibility of hope and what is broken might be mended. It looks at the siblings Emily and Stephen. Stephen is homeless and Emily accidentally finds him years later.
This was an incredibly emotional book and I would recommend it. I found it easy to follow and was pulled into the story straightaway. I was taken to the marshes of Canvey Island and Stephen is taken in by the wild beauty of birds, which is his saving grace for the future that awaits him. A terrible accident happens one day in June and both their worlds come crashing down around them. Yes a good read.

Agree with all of this.

I think she's a good writer, but never quite delivers as much as I think she could.

@bettbburg Wishing you love.

Betts unmumsnetty hugs to you.

You know where we are when you feel able to come back.

1. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

The author is invited on an Everest expedition, in part, to give operating tour companies publicity. Not knowing what to expect, Krakauer flies out to Nepal, and becomes an eyewitness to one of the biggest single catastrophes in the history of climbing the mountain.

Though it does become riveting in the last third, I found all the different cast of characters and potted histories near the start a bit dry and hard to keep track of.
There is a very lengthy postscript at the end in which Krakauer defends his narrative against the memoir of a different climber who was there. It really only detracts from his book and I'm surprised it is still included in later editions, it changes the ending of it from tragic but bittersweet to sour and childish, IMO

1. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Keiko is a neurodiverse woman who after growing up feeling "not normal" has found her calling working in a 24 hr grocery/newsagents. Even though Keiko is very happy, society, via her friends, family and colleagues, lets her know she is still found wanting.
This was really engaging, and almost but not quite my first bold this year. Really interesting look at the quite rigid conformity expected of people within Japanese society. Short, but worth it.

10. Foster by Clare Keegan

A little girl in Ireland is sent away when her mother is pregnant

This was raved about on one of this years threads but I can't remember who. Once I saw it was only 90 pages, I didn't expect too much and found it a little slight as I went along...

Christ, thanks for the utter gut punch to the feelings, fellow 50 Booker!

Who was it? <narrows eyes>

@bettbburg

Best wishes @bettbburg , take care and I hope you are well enough to come back soon.

Sending good wishes to @bettbburg, @PermanentTemporary, and to anyone else struggling recently .

18. A Change of Circumstance by Susan Hill This time our Simon is tackling county lines, as the problems associated with hard drug use and criminal exploitation of young people hit Starly (but not lovely Lafferton, thank heavens). As ever, the investigation is a side issue compared with his real estate dilemmas, love life regrets and family woes.

These are literary McDonald's for me. I know they're bad, I sometimes feel a bit disgusted with myself after finishing them, but I gobble them up regardless and an hour later could quite fancy another. The bit where his GP sister visits one of her patients on an NHS ward and is so shocked at the staffing issues that she writes to the secretary of state was a particular cringe.

Just finished Tidelands by Phillipa Gregory.
Absorbing read and great for creating a sense of the time (1648) and place (Sussex marshlands)
I ordered the sequel straight away.

Sorry to hear that bettbburg and PermanentTemporary sending love💐

42. Small Things Like These: Claire Keegan.

The story is set in Co. Wexford in the mid 1980s. Bill Furlong is a hard-working, happy family man. He had a difficult start in life owing to the fact that he was born to an unmarried mother and he's aware that if it hadn't been for the kindness of Mrs Wilson in the Big House, his life could have been much more difficult.

One day as he delivers coal to the convent before Christmas, he sees something that disturbs him. He has to decide if he should ignore it or not.

This is a well-written, thought-provoking book that really packs a punch even though it's quite short. Highly recommended.

I've just hit my 50 book goal! Impressed that I've done it before I've even gone on my summer holiday!

Top reads so far:
Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart
Big Sky - Kate Atkinson
A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Difficult Women - Helen Lewis
The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett
My Dark Vanessa - Kate Elizabeth Russell
Mr Norris Changes Trains - Christopher Isherwood
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

And my absolutely do NOT recommend list:
How to Kill Your Family - Bella Mackie Lazy clunky retelling of Kind Hearts and Coronets/Israel Rank, which misses the subtlety of the ending of those works by removing any ambiguity about whether the protagonist's real crimes are discovered. Narrative randomly interrupted by rants about instagrammers/north London liberals/nepotism kids/women who get lip fillers, which felt like it was trying to be feminist, but in a very "pick me/I'm not like other girls!!" way. Plus it's hard to take any of the themes about class and privilege seriously, when based on the quality of this writing, you suspect very strongly that Bella Mackie's writing career owes a large debt to her father being Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian when she first began writing for that paper.

Come Again - Robert Webb A disjointed mess - the first section being a realistic and quite moving portray of grief, moving into science fiction time travel, and then into a Kingsman style spy thriller. Pick one and stick with it!
Sister - Rosamund Lupton Three Hours* *was a perfectly fine thriller if you aren't looking for anything taxing. But this had so many twists at the end that go beyond the bounds of credulity, I was just angry at the end that I has wasted a couple of days on reading it.

Magpie - Elizabeth Day I think the author expected readers to sympathise with [SPOILER] the couple struggling with infertility who effectively imprison their surrogate who has bi-polar disorder and stops taking her medication during the pregnancy to make sure they end up with a baby. I did not.

For the rest of the year, going to focus more on reading classics and mid century fiction, plus more non fiction, and less on hyped up recent fiction.

Eine Guilty as charged for Foster; I've been flagging it up on this thread for a few years and I'm delighted it has finally caught on as it is one of my favourite books ever (although I suspect it was on the back of the more recent Small Things Like These rather than anything to do with me). It is deceptively simple and stands up very well to frequent rereads.

@TheTurn0fTheScrew yes, Cat’s ‘don’t you know who I AM’ moment was magnificently gruesome, wasn’t it? I’m sure the Sec of State pulled his socks up after being taken to task by a Very Important representative of Concierge Medical 😂😂

I am blushing profusely as I tell you I have just finished Moby Dick, but somehow had it confused with Jonah and the Whale and was waiting for a plot twist that was never coming. BIt of an anticlimax really.

Any other classics I can horribly disappoint myself with?

The Serrailler books really are insufferable, but I always go back for more. I don't know how she does it. Are there some secret subliminal messages in them?

Love this!

Somebody I know once confused Macbeth and The Godfather and it makes me snort with laughter every time I remember it.

Oh Fortuna, that is hilarious!

Fortuna 😅

Remus I can see that as quite a good crossover.

I did have a very confused Google at the end of it, wondering where I'd got it from. Obviously didn't pay enough attention in primary school assemblies.

@FortunaMajor

And Moby Dick is bloody hard work at the best of times.