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?

I sometimes think I am the only person on this thread who liked The Casual Vacancy. I am enjoying Still Life, though, so hopefully you won't all kick me off.

Thanks for that Noodle, I haven't read a good family saga type book for ages.

Welsh you are not alone, I really liked The Casual Vacancy.

I have sets of books that I read in tandem for some unknown reason, so if I read a Ruth Galloway, I'll have a Serrailler chaser. I did the same with Jackson Brodie and Strike. I found when read so close together that I much preferred the Strike books (probably sacrilege on here). I agree they could do with a good edit, but they are excellent immersive and escapist entertainment. If nothing else, at least they are good value for money for the non discerning as she delivers a brick of a book every time. It's a free upper body workout with every hardback.

On a completely different tack, is anyone well versed in Murakami? Is there one that would be best to start with?

I don't know why but I had never heard of these Susan Hill books until the other day. Have also never heard of the Ruth Galloway books. I can't tell whether the 'chaser' is the lighter read there, or vice versa fortuna? I am quite fussy about my detective/mystery books. I think most of them are pants! But will give them a go. I love Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vines and have liked the few PD Jameses I have read. Love Jackson Brodie. Haven't read a Vera but not much of a fan of the telly programme. As aforementioned hate the Strikes. Not sure what the common thread is there!

Piggy the Ruth Galloway series is pants but I read them when I haven't got any brain left for anything more taxing. I have enjoyed some of the author's other work. The Serrailler series is annoying and like everyone else on the thread, I don't understand why I keep reading them. I also read an ancient Roman army doctor series which is the worst of them all. I read the first LJ Ross book, but thought it was dire. Vera also doesn't appeal. I believe the various different Denise Mina detective series are meant to be quite good, but I wasn't that keen on two of her standalones that I have read. I've had a library colleague recommend Steve Cavanagh and Cara Hunter so I will give those a go. I'd love to find another author as good as Susie Steiner

The police procedural/ detective/forensics/thriller type genre is one I really struggle with. The sexual assault and murder of anyone, especially women and children used as a form of 'entertainment' doesn't really sit right.

I will never read Susan Hill again. IMO she is a dreadful writer, completely self-obsessed and some of her views are dubious in the extreme, I believe.

@magimedi yay! I hope you enjoy it! We can compare notes on our progress with French 😄

Just putting in a word for the Denise Mina books which I think are standout - her 'Garnethill' trilogy plus three other novels featuring Paddy Meehan, a (female) Glasgow journalist. They're earlier in her writing career and she’s moved in a very different direction now but those were the books that made me a fan of hers, and they’re wonderful.

I agree, though, that she’s been a bit variable in recent years. I haven’t loved everything of hers for a long while.

Thanks @noodlezoodle I haven't read an Anne Tyler in ages but I do like her a lot.

43. The Lie by Helen Dunmore. I was inspired by the recent Helen Dunmore chat here and spotted this in our local book swap. It follows Daniel, a traumatised WW1 veteran, returning to Cornwall and grappling with the loss of his best friend in the war. He reconnects with the friend's sister, the three of them having had an intense and unsettling relationship growing up. This was beautifully written and very sad, maybe just slightly too ambiguous.

44. Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton. Read in short bursts on my kindle after I quite enjoyed the TV adaptation. I'm the same age as DA so liked the descriptions of the mid-00s London flat shares and parties, even if it all feels like a very distant memory to me these days! What struck me as odd was that the two biggest events in the book were objectively tragic things that happened to her best friend, but told from the perspective of how they affected the writer, which felt a bit uncomfortable to me.

On the subject of crime, my most recent reads are:

101. The Midnight Hour, by Elly Griffiths
Not a Ruth Galloway book, but part of a series by the same author set in the 1960s. I think Elly Griffiths is writing too much, too fast, so the characters and settings lose their flavour until you're left with the memory of the original flavour, like chewed gum. That said, I liked the references to the frustrations of being a woman in the police force in the 1960s.

Not finished yet but
102. The Glimpses of the Moon, by Edmund Crispin
Published in the 1970s but part of a crime fiction series started in the 1940s, so we get that arch mid-twentieth century humour, the Rector dressed as a gypsy fortune-teller in the village fete. It's like Angela Thirkell with corpses.

I had a bit of a Crispin phase a few years ago. Must have a look and see if there are any I missed.

I read The Moving Toyshop last year. I thought it was enjoyable. I haven't* *read any others though.

@Piggywaspushed I am a big crime fiction fan and recently read all the Vera books, which I really enjoyed. I don't often get hooked on a series that is new to me (and couldn't really get into the Ruth Galloway ones) but I thought those were great. That said, I am also a hate-reader of the Serailler series. Quite apart from anything else, it really bothers me that I still don't know how to pronounce his name.

Or spell it, it turns out 😂

Serrailler

@FortunaMajor on Murakami, my favourites are The Wind-up Bird Chronicles and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World. Avoid IQ84 at all costs.

You do need to have a tolerance for a bit of magical realism and undefined endings though.

Thanks Stokey. He's written that many that it's hard to know where to start. I've a feeling they won't be my cup of tea, but want to try at least one.

I really enjoyed the wind up bird chronicle but after reading a fair bit of his catalogue I got sick of the manic pixie dream girl stuff. I recently re-read Norwegian Wood which I had loved and though it was utter, creepy garbage

Out of action for a couple of days, and lots to catch up on.

@FortunaMajor was the Roman army doctor "Medicus"? The blurb sounds good enough to buy/borrow to try out, but you weren't impressed? Most importantly how does it stack up to my absolute fave Marcus Didius Falco?

Sitting on the beach reading Once Upon a River. Sadly my copy has a slightly sticky cover (the material it is made of, not my poor hygiene) and the sand keeps sticking to it.

I was someone else who loved Empire of Pain earlier this year. I'd read anything Radden Keefe writes. I found my review in my own files, not via the so-called "search" function!

13 Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
I do love a piece of thoughtful non-fiction written by a New Yorker journalist. This is the story of the Sackler family, beneficiaries of the billions of dollars that their pharma company, Purdue Pharma made from Oxycontin. This is not – for the most part – a scientific narrative and it doesn’t really try to detail the pain and suffering that Oxycontin unleashed on communities across North America although the shadow of it looms large in the last half of the book. This is more about the family – how they made their money, how they spent their money
(on vast philanthropic gestures – museum wings, medical schools, libraries etc) and how they made sure that the money kept pouring in to Purdue Pharma even as the warning bells rang loud and clear. In his telling there is no question of culpability – they knew that Oxycontin was addictive, and they went to great lengths to ensure that doctors would continue to prescribe it even as the evidence mounted that this was far from the low-danger, addiction-free drug they chose to portray it as. The dynamic between the three brothers – Arthur, Raymond and Mortimer – was particularly interesting. Arthur was the driver behind the initial family dynasty, and although he was a doctor he made a fortune in medical advertising, particularly in pushing Valium to the post-war generation. He used that money to help his brothers buy Purdue, and although he never had any involvement in Purdue, the lessons he learned were clearly taken to heart by the brothers and adopted across the business.

Towards the end, he quotes from The Great Gatsby – “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”. And this sums it up – as told in this book these are bad and careless people who didn’t trouble themselves with the little people, or the consequences of their actions.

Trying to stay on top of reviews from here to the end of the year and therefore taking a short lunch break to update.

60 Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera

I was expecting this to be more scholarly and less personal, but it was none the worse for it. Sanghera’s parents arrived in the UK in the 1960s and his account of the impacts of the British Empire is framed through his experiences growing up as a Sikh in Wolverhampton. As a result, it’s a particular point of view and he doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive in his views or coverage. I found the historic content really interesting – astonishing how little I was taught at school about it (which is one of his points). I have a particular interest in immigration and the chapter on this – called “We are here because you were there” – makes a really important and overlooked point about how much migration into the UK came about as a result of UK policy in the centuries that preceded it.

61 Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Read

As most of you promised, this was a light and undemanding read, but highly entertaining. I didn’t love Daisy Jones and the Six but did really enjoy The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. I can’t say I want to spend much time with Carrie Soto who I believe is the subject of her new book but her writing hits the spot and I really loved the Riva children, in particular Nina, who was a deeply sympathetic character. And I could smell the hills and beaches of Malibu – say what you want about her writing but she can conjure up images very effectively.

Reviews of some holiday reading (the first two Barbara Pyms I read quite awhile ago, when the uni term was just ending and I was desperate for something light):

41. Barbara Pym, Excellent Women 4/5
    A reread that I enjoyed very much.

42. Barbara Pym, Prudence and Jane 4/5
    A satisfying Pym novel though not my favourite. I particularly liked the opening scenes: a reunion of women alumnae at an Oxford women’s college. I also love the way Pym’s characters pepper their speech and thoughts with lines of poetry (in this case, a lot of 17th c. English poetry).

43. Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels 5/5
    Not one of Pym’s most successful novels apparently, but I found it thoroughly engrossing: a satire of academics working in African anthropology. Pym drew on her own experience working for a journal of African studies. The character of Catherine is particularly good: a romance novelist who views the self-conscious male anthropologists with a refreshingly cynical eye.

44. Annie Ernaux, La Place 5/5
    One of Ernaux’s most famous novels. I first tried to read this slim book when I was living in Paris as a grad student in 1998, and I didn’t make it far (I can tell because I found a 1998 Paris cinema ticket a short way in as a bookmark). I can see why I didn’t finish it then, because the opening pages are quite bleak, but this time I persevered and became much more engrossed in the narrative as it moved along. I was perhaps too young to appreciate the book in 1998, because it’s about the woman narrator losing her father, and her subsequent reflections on his working-class life, which she has left behind. Now that I’m middle-aged and have lost my own father, I can identify with the narrative much more viscerally. I think this is the first novel where Ernaux explicitly articulates her style of writing: ‘flat’ writing or ‘écriture plate’, an unadorned and straightforward style, which is meant to correspond to the working-class world she grew up in, and which is a kind of mix of autobiography and sociology. It’s very powerful but also a bit alienating if you’re unfamiliar with Ernaux’s world.

45. Natasha Brown, Assembly 4/5
    A very short (100 page) novel, beautifully crafted, that deals with a young woman’s experience of everyday racism in modern Britain. There were many passages that reminded me of Frantz Fanon. Definitely worth reading but quite chilling in its depiction of the financial and upper-class world.

Gah!
Afternoon all.
Placemarking (and very belatedly thanking @Southeastdweller for what is very much not a new thread!) Been awol as usual over July and August as was working on summer residential course and didn't finish a single book!
Back now, and aiming to catch up.
Will save my list for next thread and just add:
23 Slow Trains Around Spain by Tom Chessyre. Nice travelogue doing what it says on the tin. I was on very slow trains in Castille for a week so related enormously.
24. Blood Orange- Harriet Tyce. Last person in world who reads crime to read it, so no review needed. Also did what it said on the tin.

Hope everyone is OK! Will now go backwards and catch up with you all!

Granniemainland, I also picked up Helen Dunmore's The Lie in a book-swap recently and whilst I admired the way it was written I didn't engage with it in the same way I have with the other novels of hers that I've read.

Solinvictus I've been eyeing Slow Trains Around Spain because taking slow trains around Spain is high on my holiday wishlist. However, I have just DNFd Tom Chesshyre's Gatecrashing Paradise, about the Maldives, because it was incredibly dull. I suspect it's just because I'm not interested in the Maldives, though.

Roman yes it is the Gaius Ruso series by Ruth Downie. I would definitely try to get a free copy over buying it to see how you feel. They are quite cheesy and they don't live up to the standard of Falco. They pass the time if you have nothing else or have no brain space. The first one wasn't too bad, but I don't feel they hold up as the series goes on. That said, I am still slowly working my way through with about 2 per year regardless.