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?

Welcome Fruitstick. You don't have to decide what you are reading at the start (you don't even have to read 50) we just love chatting about books and getting recommendations so we can add to our ever expanding TBR piles!

I loved this book. It's slow and thoughtful but beautiful.

If I were you though, I'd save it for winter.

182 The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen by Cass Grafton

Time travel and Jane Austen, what’s not to like? Well, quite a lot really. This is about a modern day woman who suddenly realises that Jane Austen has developed the ability to travel through time and is living in the flat upstairs. Interesting idea but executed very poorly - the main character is really annoying and Jane Austen behaves in completely unbelievable ways. Not recommended.

183 More Than Just A Good Life: The Authorised Biography of Richard Briers by James Hogg

Does what it says on the tin! I like Ever Decreasing Circles (remember Howard and Hilda in their matching jumpers?) and it was interesting to read that one source of inspiration for Briers’s character was his dog (yes, really).

184 The Final Curtsey by Margaret Rhodes

Memoir of the Queen’s cousin (on her mother’s side). All too nice, no juicy gossip, so rather disappointing.

185 The Killing Boys by Luke Delaney

Average thriller about two child murderers who were given new identities but are now being hunted down. Fine but the author’s later work is better.

186 New Pompeii by Daniel Godfrey

Someone else read this upthread and I think they liked it but I really didn’t! Good idea (a company develops the ability to rescue people from the past who are about to die and bring them to the present, so they recreate Pompeii and then rescue most of the real Pompeiians from the volcano), but it went off on very odd tangents and wasn’t at all what I expected. There is a sequel but I won’t bother (and I don’t think the other poster enjoyed the sequel either if I remember rightly).

187 The Retreat by Sarah Pearse

There is a posh hotel on a remote island off the cost of Devon and suddenly people keep dying there. OK but I just felt like I had read it all before. The plot is very similar to the author’s first book, just in a different location.

188 Heatwave by Victor Jestin

Our local Waterstones has been heavily promoting this recently so I picked it up when I saw it in the library. I’m glad I didn’t buy it as it feels very overhyped. It’s very short, and there isn’t much plot development as a result. A teenage boy is camping with his family in France when he sees another teenage boy kill himself by mistake. Instead of helping or telling anyone he buries the body and then spends the next day gradually falling apart as a result. This could have been good but as it’s so short there’s no real explanation of why he behaves in the way he does and I was left with an ‘is that it?’ feeling.

189 The It Girl by Ruth Ware

Ten years ago Hannah’s roommate at Oxford died, and Hannah’s testimony helped put the killer in prison. Now the killer has died, still protesting his innocence, and this leads Hannah to start questioning what really happened. OK but the ending got rather ridiculous.

190 The Saturday Night Sauvignon Sisterhood by Gill Sims

Pretty much every parenting cliché ever crammed into one book, and several Mumsnet references (hi Gill!). I did like it though, it is good fun and an easy read.

191 Lakeview House by Helen Phifer

Badly written ‘thriller’ about a woman going to live in a remote house to get over a breakup when weird things start happening. All the characters behave in really stupid and unbelievable ways and the ending just didn’t ring true with how things were set up in the rest of the book.

192 To The Manor Born Book 2 by Peter Spence

Novelisation of the TV programme. Not as good as the programme ( some bits just work better visually) but still entertaining.

193 The Last Party by Clare Mackintosh

I really liked her first couple of books, but I found this one a bit of a slog. A couple of detectives are investigating a man found dead after a NYE party. It was quite long and not much happened for most of the book, just lots of flashbacks to the party from different points of view. This is apparently the first in a series featuring these detectives but not sure if I’ll bother with the next one.

194 My Family And Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

Reread of one of my favourite books as I’m on holiday in Corfu and I like reading books set in the place I’m in.

195 The Durrells in Corfu by Michael Haag

The real story behind Gerald’s book.

I’ve seen lots of people recommend A Gentleman in Moscow but the plot has just never appealed to me.

Ooh, thank you fruitstick. That sounds good. I actually need to line up some books for the winter as I'm nearly at the end of my current selection. Also, welcome to the thread :)

@ChessieFL it was me who read New Pompeii. I thought the first one was ok, but the second one was pretty poor. I'm not even checking if there is a third.

Still miles behind but speeding up a little bit, at least partly because I've really enjoyed my most recent reads.

24. The Paris Apartment, Lucy Foley. Masterful. I quite liked The Hunting Party but then dodged The Guest List after hearing that it was very similar - but this feels like a departure, and a very good one. There are lots of characters and a lot of time hopping, but she has all of the strands firmly in her grip and weaves them together brilliantly. I also thought she wrote very well about the feeling of being in the underbelly of a city. Hard to review more without spoilers but it's very well done - there are multiple twists but she lays the clues and groundwork very well so that as each unfolds it makes perfect sense, rather than being jarring.

25. The Book of the Most Precious Substance, by Sara Gran. Oh my word. I've read most of Sara Gran's books so I know that they lean towards noir and often have a slight supernatural element - this was Sara Gran turned up to 11, with extra helpings of very explicit sex scenes. Lily is a writer and book dealer on the trail of The Book of the Most Precious Substance, an incredibly rare book that leaves a trail of destruction in its wake. Part caper, part thriller, part adventure story, this is also a really tender look at marriage, grief and recovery. Absolutely gripping, but probably not for everyone!

Hi all I dropped off the thread after RL got in the way, between school holidays, house selling and other things I've fallen a bit behind with reading, including Woman in White and War and Peace, but will catch up no doubt. I think I'm up to nearly 50 books now but trying not too focus too much on the numbers.

noodlezoodle I read The Paris Apartment recently and agree it's the best of hers so far, first two were OK but as you say, a bit too similar.

I’m reading Still Life by Sarah Winman at the moment. Did anyone who’s read it get used to the lack of speech marks? I’m enjoying it but it jars every now and then when I realise some has spoken mid sentence… If that makes sense

Have been reading the thread, but really behind with reviews. This is the first lot.

68 The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers 1804-2011 - Misha Glenny
A long, depressing but engrossing read. Glenny argues convincingly that much of what has happened in the Balkans is the result of more powerful countries acting selfishly in their own interests, or of power-hungry politicians manipulating nationalist tropes to increase their power, rather than deep-seated feelings/ancient conflicts.

69 Esther’s Notebooks: Tales from my ten-year-old life - Riad Sattouf
Thank you for the recommendation, whoever it was. Graphic novel collecting funny, poignant snapshots of a ten-year-old Parisian’s life.

70 Burial Rites - Hannah Kent
Set in nineteenth-century Iceland, based on a true story, a woman convicted of murder lives with a farming family while her appeal is heard in Denmark. A vivid evocation of a harsh environment (I would have run off to Reykjavik at the first opportunity), although I felt the central character’s identity as a poet/parallels with sagas were under-developed.

71 Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World - Laura Spinney
Fascinating and wide-ranging account of the last modern pandemic. Would perhaps have liked more on actual experiences of suffering/surviving influenza.

I'm on the first chapter and it takes a bit of getting used to. I'm finding j have to focus a bit more than usual!

196 A Devon Night’s Death by Stephanie Austin

Part of the crime series set in Devon featuring amateur sleuth and antiques dealer Juno Browne. This one features an am dram production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as light relief around the murders.

63: Overboard - Sara Paretsky

Paretsky's 21st VI Warshawski novel. I’ve read lots of these over the years though none for a while. This is her latest and bang up to date, with much mention of Covid and mask-wearing.

Maybe it’s just me but the plot/s - revolving around a mystery girl on the point of death discovered by VI; vandalism to a local synagogue; a warring local family and a brutal police detective totally out of control - seemed effortful and waaay too complicated. I couldn’t help feeling the shark had been jumped at the point when Vic sets up an outdoors meeting with a nervous informant who insists he needs to disguise himself in full wig, costume and make-up as an elderly woman, and have a friend posing as a down-and-out alcoholic lounging across a nearby bench for added verisimilitude.

I bought another when it was 99p but I might lay off it for a while until I feel less twitchy at Vic's lack of sleep and food, vitriolic slaggings-off from almost every other character, and enormous expenditure on burner phones.

Catching up with my holiday reads:

37 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. This is set in WW2 and follows a cast of characters in the American air force - the disillusioned main character captain Yossarian, various peers and senior officers, and other characters including the chaplain and the medical staff. I'd heard of this book but didn't know much about it, and at first I was rather taken aback by the darkly comic, irreverent tone (given the seriousness of the material), but I ended up really enjoying it. The women characters are terrible (either nurses or prostitutes), but I guess that's to be expected for a wartime novel written in the 1950s.

38 Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Viable life on earth has ended, and future hope for the human race is centred around the frozen inhabitants of the spaceship Gilgamesh and a terraforming planet (artificially designed to be very similar to earth). But it's not just humans who are laying a claim to this planet... Good plot, with two parallel plotlines that come together at the end, and great worldbuilding. Definitely #TeamSpider!

39 Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch. Picked this up in a charity shop without realising it was one of the 'Rivers of London' book series I've heard mentioned on this thread. A mixture of police procedural (police are searching for two missing 11 year old girls in rural Herefordshire) and magic. Loved it. Peter the main character is great fun.

40 House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries by Alan Bennett. Quite short, a good reminder of the strange times we went through.

41 The Road to Lichfield by Penelope Lively. During the recent Booker chat I realised I'd never read this, her first (adult) novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker, even though I'm a fan and have read lots of her other books. I enjoyed visiting 1977 ("Mum, can I have 25p to buy my friend a birthday present?") and really liked the heroine Anne, who is at a similar stage of life to me (in her 40s, married with teenage kids, worried about her ageing parent), although she's doing it 40-odd years earlier. A really nice reminder of how some things change and some stay very much the same.

42 Erebus by* *Michael Palin. A comprehensive record of the ship Erebus and the men who sailed in her, for her successful Antarctic expeditions and then the doomed Arctic one. Well researched and interesting.

I'll look out for The Road to Lichfield @Tarahumara . Any other of hers you'd recommend?

I'm trying to read The Fortune Men which was shortlisted for last year's Booker, but finding it hard to engage with. Has anyone read it? Tempted to give up.

My favourite of hers is The Photograph @Stokey, and I also loved Moon Tiger (which is the one that did win).

@MaudOfTheMarches I've just read Idol too, my book 41. I've read and enjoyed at least one of Louise O'Neill's books before.

Agree it wasn't great, I raced through it to find out what happened but it was compelling in a kind of bad 80s movie way.

It reminded me a bit of Magpie by Elizabeth Day in that it featured a character with some kind of unidentified mental illness whose symptoms are basically 'delusional', 'believes things that aren't true' and 'dangerous'. Feels very dated but I wonder if it's coming back as a trope for some reason.

@GrannieMainland that's interesting about Magpie. I'm inclined to give Idol the benefit of the doubt as Louise O'Neill is undoubtedly a writer who tries to address serious issue. I have one of her earlier books and will try that instead.

Stokey I've got 5 days to wait for it on Borrowbox. I'll let you know how I get on.

The Manningtree Witches AK Blakemore
In a small English village during the rise of Puritanical ideology, several women are accused of witchcraft and a trial follows.

This was very atmospheric, but something didn't work for me that I can't put my finger on. I wanted to like it more than I did.

Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution - Richard Dawkins
A run through the development of flight from balloon to jet engine alongside a discussion of how flight or lack of evolved in nature.
Interesting but only really goes into things superficially.

197 1996 by Kirsty McManus

A woman discovers a way to go back in time to when she was a teenager in 1996, but each visit only lasts 12 hours. I love time travel books and I’m almost exactly the same age as the main character so picked this up for a bit of nostalgia. However, it’s set in Australia which I didn’t realise so lots of the references were wasted on me, and the story was just OK and rather predictable. It’s the first in a series but not sure I’ll bother with more.

Chessie, I fancy the Stephanie Austin book you mentioned and will give it a go.

I'm currently on p542 of the vast Making History: The Storytellers who Shaped the Past, by Richard Cohen Will report further if and when I live to tell the tale myself.

I agree with you Fortuna about The Manningtree Witches - I was underwhelmed by it!

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith Once I’d waded through the thick layer of marketing on the cover, I liked but didn’t love this novel. There are 3 main stories which alternate: in the 1950s, Ellie, an art historian who restores (and copies) 17th century artworks and Marty, a wealthy collector; and in the 1600s the painter Sara de Vos. There was much to like: behind the scenes glimpses of art galleries and how deliveries of precious works from other museums are handled; details of the processes of forgery; a lonely New Jersey gumshoe. The different time periods and settings are really well conveyed. But the characters didn’t fully come alive for me and it all felt slightly contrived.

biblio start with the first one which is Dead In Devon.

Ta, chessie, will do.