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?

@Stokey Old Filth is excellent.

@MaudOfTheMarches I'm sure someone recommended Empire of Pain. I heard it serialised on the radio, but that could have only been extracted highlights. What I heard was quite shocking but also impressed me that I'd like to read the whole book, and possibly listen it on audio. I've been able to borrow both, but think I might have to return and then borrow again at some point, as it is just very, very long. Quite a good one for Borrowbox rather than Libby as an app, as one of the differences is that if there isn't a queue you don't have to wait until 3 days before the due date and you can extend your loan period when you're worried that a book is a bit long to gallop through in 2 or 3 weeks. (Library ebooks go back automatically unless renewed, so there's no option to keep a book for longer and pay a fine if someone else is waiting for it, so you have to be organised).

26. Still Life By Sarah Winona

I had heard mixed reviews about this book, with some people loving it and some people being decidedly underwhelmed. And there's not speech marks.

However, I really enjoyed it. I'd read When God Was A Rabbit and Tin Man and thought both were OK, but I enjoyed this far more.

It's warm, funny and moving with an eccentric cast of characters. The fact that it's set largely in Florence, with a lot of Room With A View references made it more enjoyable.

I'd say if you like John Boyne or John Irving's style of writing, you'll probably enjoy this.

Obviously Sarah Winman.

Bloody autocorrect.

@elkiedee Yes, there was definitely a review on here. (Frustratingly, the search is now so bad that the top result for "Empire of Pain" in inverted commas is a post about empire-line dresses.) Despite it being long, the story is gripping and the characters are vividly drawn, so I would go for it. I had no idea of the Sackler family history and that they were instrumental in the early marketing of Valium as a cure-all, nor that they founded a data firm (in the 60s, I think, possibly earlier) which ultimately enabled them to target Oxycontin at the most profitable users and the most unscrupulous prescribers. I could go on, as you can tell.

47. All that Remains - Sue Black

Memoir of a forensic anthropologist. Fascinating stuff: part memoir, part science lesson, I learned a great deal. The book goes through her career, and confronts many aspects of death from archaeological bone analysis to victims of natural disasters, war crimes and murder. Having said that, while harrowing in places it is still an uplifting read.

48. The Kids - Hannah Lowe

Completely different. Poetry, mostly in the form of sonnets, reflections of her life in teaching and looking back on her own education, as well as family and heritage. I don't normally read poetry, but this was fun stuff, and it forced me to slow the reading process down to really appreciate the poems.

48 The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo

Enjoyable (looong) family saga - the joys, trials and tribulations of the Sorensen family; parents who are still madly in love with each other and their four girls. There were some interesting characters, some decent writing and occasional nuggets of wisdom but unfortunately (for me at least) not more than the sum of its parts. I liked reading it, but I won't remember it in a few months' time.

I was also struck by the fact that literally everyone was straight. I think I must have been reading quite a lot of books with LGBTQ characters lately (and am just embarking on another with Sarah Winman's Still Life) but I really noticed it.

The new 'search' function is epically, catastrophically bad. By dint of a patient trawl through previous threads I found my review of Empire of Pain from June (so yes! It is there, 'search function' which can’t find it, even when asked to search under my username in 'What we're reading' with the search term Empire of Pain'!)

Horrifying exposé of the secretive Sackler family and their role in the opioid crisis in America. It’s very well done and readable but gutting (if unsurprising) to find that even when finally brought to some sort of account, the family were able to use their vast wealth and legal resources to achieve the outcome of their choice. Plus ça change, I guess.

I do remember not writing a long review because there had been much better and more eloquent ones before me.

55 Medieval Myths and Mysteries - Dorsey Armstrong
'Great Courses' audiobook spanning King Arthur (probably real), Robin Hood (almost certainly not), the Black Death, maps and dragons. Lots of fun from a very engaging lecturer - I'll be looking up more of her courses on Audible.

56 This is Your Own Time You're Wasting - Lee Parkinson and Adam Parkinson
Follow-up to Put a Wet Paper Towel On It, this was a collection of funny things primary children and their teachers have got up to - not all the stories quite rang true but it passed a gently amusing few hours.

52 Vango: Entre Ciel et Terre - Timothée de Fombelle (in French) The first novel I have read in French since A-levels! It was suggested as the inaugural book club read in a local anglophone Facebook group I’m on, and I’m glad I took up the opportunity to push my boundaries a bit - I have avoided reading for pleasure in French because I don’t find it enjoyable to have to keep stopping to look things up in the dictionary, but as I’m expecting to be living permanently in France I should really start embracing the language a bit more! The book was chosen because it is a YA adventure story, and should therefore be reasonably easy in terms of vocabulary and not too complex in terms of storyline. It delivered - the story was an exciting race around the Europe of the 1930s, following 19-year-old Vango, a boy whose background is shrouded in mystery, and a few other teenage characters whose lives intersect with Vango’s. There are baddies from Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany, a bewildered police detective in Paris, and nice evocations of southern Italy and northern Scotland (interesting to see that from a French author’s point of view!). In amongst the drama there were lots of funny bits, and I enjoyed reading the book overall. It ends on a cliffhanger and I am quite keen to read the sequel to find out how it all ends…

Having done a bit of googling since finishing the book, it seems to have received good reviews, and is also available in English. I’ll have to try not to give into the temptation to read the sequel in English!

Very belated thanks for this, Terpsichore! You must have been one of the people who recommended Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts. I did love the Chaucer chapter, and it inspired me to start reading the Canterbury Tales (even though that project is going slowly; I have other books on the go as well). My original impression is that I can't believe how raunchy the language is 😁 It really is like reading the Old French fabliaux, which are replete with references to cunts and fucking (!). But the collection is also quite hybrid, because the first tale is quite a courtly one, so I was unprepared for the following tales to descend so dramatically into the fabliaux world. Fascinating stuff.

Welshwabbit, I agree with your review of The Most Fun We Ever Had. It was very readable, but I lived for awhile in Chicago where it's set, and I thought the Chicago the book depicted was remarkably undiverse, and lacking in political and social context. Just weirdly bland in a way. I didn't notice the absence of LGBT characters but that fits with my impression of the novel.

The new 'search' function is epically, catastrophically bad. God yes, Terpsichore. I don't want to keep ranting about it, but I miss advanced search so much. The new search function is like adding insult to injury; it would almost be better if MN just had no search function at all instead of PRETENDING they have one. Grr. Sometimes I wonder if they made it so useless on purpose so posters couldn't advance search one another and find inconsistencies on threads. 😕Who knows but it's frustrating as hell.

This is why I always add my list at the start of every thread. It allows me to find things that the search function fails to do.

I'd love to know how much it cost in terms of time and money to make the site worse. The android app is woefully bad.

Eitak The new Cormoran Strike was released today. Quite a few friends have issued a "do not disturb" notice for the next few days.

I still need to the listen to the one before, but all will have to wait as I have 3 Booker nominations left to read before the 6th Sep and I think I'll just make it. (Not that anyone is waiting for my opinion 😂) I just like choosing my shortlist and winner without being influenced externally, and then having an indignant rant that they chose the wrong books.

I for one am looking forward to your opinion, Fortuna!

@FortunaMajor I saw it today half price but as it is a massive hardback I may hold off plus i also need to read the one before it. Definitely catching up this year with reading.

Maggie O' Farrell just plopped trough my letterbox! That's quite hefty too but not in the JKR league.

Original Sins by Matt Rowland Hill I read this memoir on the strength of the guardian’s rave review which said: ‘Depending on where your knowledge gaps lie, you will either learn how to inject yourself with class A drugs or be able to reach for Titus 2 verses 4 and 5 every time you need a reason for snapping off the car radio. I have gaps in both areas and loved this book. It’s a memoir of a childhood with bickering fundamentalist Christian parents, a scholarship to a famous boarding school, a loss of faith that because of his upbringing became a loss of identity, a descent into addiction, and several attempts at getting clean with the help of various people and settings, most movingly a rehab unit with a very different Christian ethos to the one he grew up with. The writing is brilliant - it’s funny, fascinating, very honest and deeply humane. Highly recommended.

I don't know what the timeline is, but I volunteered to help test a new and improved advanced search and it was excellent, in fact better than the old one.

So I don't know when it's coming, but it's coming.

Thank goodness for that, noodle!

Noodle, that sounds amazing. Dare I dream?!

Checking in - work has been busy and been making the most of the good weather, so not really keeping up with the thread.
I've finished a couple of books though, the first of which I've had on the go since before the summer

70 Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

I picked this up when I was visiting dd so in a proper city bookshop, mostly on the strength of the title and the pleasing cover design. The idea of FALC (or variations, often Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism) has been around for a while. It starts from the frequent prediction that AI / robotics / ANother technology will shortly make many early 21st C workers / their jobs redundant, and then asks why we see this as a bad, rather than a good thing. The last industrial revolution has brought us leisure time and a quality of life unimaginable to - say - your average citizen from the early 18thC. Why can’t the new technologies move us even further towards a utopia of fulfilment for all.

Bastani works his way through a number of technologies - renewable energy, non-agricultural food production, space exploration / mining & others with the potential to provide a ‘post scarcity economy' as the backdrop to his thesis. It’s easy to pick holes in his enthusiasm, and unquestionably many (maybe all) of his predictions are unlikely to come to fruition. The latter part of the book I found much more interesting, where he looks at the alternative political possibilities. Clearly on our current path, the likelihood is that the benefits of technological progress will be privatised by a small group. Although his route to an FALC-style future is (sadly) not that obviously straightforward, he does make a reasonable stab at suggesting political approaches. I thought his concept of Universal basic services, instead of Universal basic income (essentially supplementing universal free healthcare & education with housing and food) an interesting one.

Overall a well worth while read, particularly right now. Obviously it feels like we’re heading rapidly in the opposite direction, but it’s useful to imagine a 2022 where we’d spent the past 10 or 20 years tackling climate change through things like building renewable energy capacity, improving the UK housing stock both through high insulation / quality requirements for new builds and support for retrofitting the existing stock, and building strong public services.

71 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Reviewed by lots of others. I’ve enjoyed all of TJR’s books that I’ve read, ideal easy summer reads, and this one didn’t disappoint. (Plus I liked that Mick Riva showed up.)

Encouraging news about the new search noodlezoodle. Like Fortuna the only way I have been able to find my historic reviews is by using my lists at the beginning of threads but no chance of finding anyone else’s reviews and recommendations.

61. Detransition, Baby - Torrey Peters

This was recommended by a friend and isn’t something I would have picked up otherwise. The author is a trans woman and the story is about trans women. Apologies in advance if I use any terminology incorrectly - no offence is intended. The book is set in New York and the main character, Reese, is a trans woman who has had top surgery and is saving for bottom surgery (this seemed to be the case for all the trans women in the book). She has relationships with men but then Reece meets Amy, another trans woman, and has a long-term relationship with her. Amy detransitions and becomes Ames (after her relationship with Reece ends) - not because she isn’t a woman/doesn’t want to be a woman but finds it too difficult to deal with all the problems that come with being trans. Ames gets back in touch with Reece when an issue arises in his relationship with a cis woman. I won’t give away any more of the plot. It was interesting to read and very much outside my usual oeuvres and I certainly learnt more about living as a trans woman and some of the issues they face. A lot of it was sad particularly when Reece felt like a real woman because she had been hit by a man. The storyline had an inconclusive ending which annoyed me but perhaps was ultimately better than a neat ending.

I'm away from home without much to do except read, so I’m racing through things at the moment.

66: All Made Up - Janice Galloway

I really wanted to read this after the wonderful first volume of Galloway's memoirs, and by a lucky chance I dropped into Skoob books in Brunswick Square and hey presto, they had a copy. Even better, when I opened it on the train home, out fell a postcard written to the original owner of the book by….Janice Galloway. So that was a nice bonus.

Anyway, I completely loved the continuation of her story, which covers her progress from watchful, anxious child to music-loving, book-enthralled teen. Boyfriends arrive on the scene and life's possibilities begin to unfold before her. None of this pleases her vengeful, terrifyingly unpredictable sister Cora, who - within the first few pages - has headbutted young Janice for the crime of repeating an innocent phrase heard on the TV, and continues to be a hovering menace in the family home, prone to going off like a bomb for no apparent reason. Once again, this is brilliantly well-written, touching, sad and hilarious.

67: Bad Actors - Mick Herron

The latest outing for Herron's bunch of failed spies. Highly enjoyable if you like these. River Cartwright disappeared at the end of the last book, fate unknown, and doesn’t feature here at all, but Herron likes playing these games so I haven’t written him off quite yet.

21. Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Former tennis star Carrie Soto comes out of retirement when her record is challenged.

So, you've all heard me praise TJR so this take may come as a surprise.

On the plus side :

This came out today and I've read it, so it definitely retains the page turner quality of earlier novels.

Negatives :

It would take a better writer than TJR (and potentially not even then) to make endless tennis practice, strategies and match discussion, diverting or different enough to not be repetitive.

Javier Soto, Carrie's Dad is a Spanish speaker, I'm not, little to no effort is made in translation of what he says, and it's often not basic enough to just broadly infer. I have had this issue with other novels.

HERE'S AN UNSUBTLE AND FORCED REMINDER THAT THIS BOOK TAKES PLACE IN THE NINETIES

And finally, I'm oddly here for TJR's self referential "universe" this character is connected to Nina Riva and Malibu Rising. I mean it's not like she needs a literary universe, it's hardly Game Of Thrones she's writing, but I quite like it, it makes it feel more real. What I'm absolutely not here for is shameless product placement in the middle of a novel, when Carrie Soto picks up a copy of Daisy Jones.

Of the four I've read : This, Daisy, Evelyn and Malibu, Carrie Soto is easily the weakest unfortunately.

Oh lots of interesting reviews to catch up on.

@Piggywaspushed I'll read anything by Maggie O'Farrell so can't wait to hear what the new one is like!

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit and others reading TJR at the moment... I think she's great fun. The book Daisy Jones turning up in Carrie Soto is hilarious.

I also agree with the reviews of The Most Fun We Ever Had. I read it a couple of years back and remember almost nothing but 'adult children return to the family home, secrets are revealed, chaos ensues' is maybe my favourite type of book.

I can but dream of a better search function.

Grannie If you like that sort of thing then Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread has a very similar feel, as does Ann Patchett's Commonwealth.