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?

Definitely a plan @Terpsichore. Let me know what you think!

Am also going to snap up In The End. While not a huge Beatles fan there are plenty of songs to love and I was randomly given that very vicious biography of Lennon by Albert Goldman one Christmas by my aunt which was fascinating if quite possibly entirely wrong and definitely vile. It gave me a real interest in Beatlemania as a phenomenon and the Beatles as people.

54 Les Cahiers d’Esther: Histoires de mes 11 ans - Riad Sattouf (in French) The second in the series of graphic novels based on the real life of the daughter of a friend of the author’s. I enjoyed the first one more, but it was still quite fun. Also interesting to get some insight into what is now DD1’s school year, albeit from several years ago and a very different school.

We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker

I quite enjoyed this one, with some caveats. A teenage boy goes to prison for killing a young girl, the sister of his girlfriend. Much of the focus is on the children of the grown up girlfriend, and a policeman who was the best friend of the boy. I enjoyed the concept and the characters and some of the descriptions, though occasionally found some of the writing a bit too clipped; I'd love him to learn how to use a semi colon, for example. Very moving in some places, although overall a bit busy. I'd try another of his.

I missed the Booker furore but am also the child of non-university educated readers. I do think the publishing sector has an even worse white, middle class stance than even media. It's so patronising. I'm reading Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart which is testament to what someone from a working class background can achieve.

Thanks for the Booker reviews Fortuna, I definitely want to read the Claire Keegan, and will probably read the Sri Lankan one and Glory but not sure I can face Alan Garner.

Also well done for preserving with The Fortune Men, I don't think I'll go back to it.

That's what I do too.

Here's a Twitter link to the cringeworthy Booker moment. It was Gaby Wood, director of the Booker Prize foundation.

twitter.com/kerrywk/status/1567538031934210054?s=20&t=rEPM-DWqhyIrniV2iz1ggQ

I daresay she's mortified, but yes, it was cringeworthy.

I like Fortuna's advice to read the women on the shortlist. I'm very happy to see Small Things and Strout there; those are the only two I've read. I'm disappointed not to see Magee's The Colony though.

I confess I'm not in the mood to read anything too harrowing at the moment. I have a lot of worthy books lying around but am tempted just to go for more Barbara Pym!

@Stokey My SIL found her face didn’t really fit in literary publishing: she’s solidly middle-class, but not posh, and has brown skin and an Indian name (my FIL is from India). Their loss.

25. The Last Duel by Eric Jager

When the film of this book, starring Jodie Comer and Matt Damon came out, I was initially intending to see it, but then I baulked at the idea of another example of "rape as entertainment", but I had the book by then so here we are.

Though it is about a trial by combat as an affair of honour, it also covers medieval society and politics in France in 1300s which is rare enough as a topic.

I wanted to be able to say look how far we've come since those days when it comes to the treatment of women, but we haven't. Yes, Marguerite faces death if she is decided a liar, but very few rapes in this country 700 years later are actually reported let alone prosecuted with women still afraid to come forward only for their rapist to be given a non guilty verdict or for others to judge that she has cried rape or exaggerated. It seems like its the one crime people feel entitled to sneer at victims of, still.

It was a different sort of thing for me and the writer clearly did his research, but it has a narrow appeal but for the historians among us I think

That's halfway for me. And...NO BOLDS..can I make 50?

I finished Simon Kuper's Chums a few days ago. It's an absorbing book to read about closed circle who lead charmed lives. It doesn't so much focus on Boris and his persona as we all know this but more on the pretty odious club that is the Eton/Oxford / parliament gang. Kuper details the importance of the Oxford Union as a boorish training ground. and there are some shocking anecdotes of racism and misogyny. He says that none of them worked at all hard really and the sense of entitlement oozes from the pages. I do think he overlooks (or perhaps doesn't know) quite how Gove broke into the circle with a far more ordinary background.

There are a few small bits about Labour Oxonians (Keir Starmer dances Northern Soul!?) and their (non) place in the Oxford Union and that's interesting. I do think, despite its clear statement against privilege, Kuper has rather swallowed the line of Boris's brilliant public speaking and charisma/Starmer's dullness. The route out of Oxford to parliament via journalism and how that props it all up is thought provoking too. I am not sure I agree with him that their airy Arts educations are the problem - he does suggest that science students were rather reviled and are somehow better/more earnest and more industrious and the world would be a better place with more science grads in charge. I think there is something to be said about a bunch of humanities graduates push the plebs into the sciences while they debate and opine but Kuper does have a bit of a broad brush approach to that. Some people come out who I didn't know were part of the set - Simon Stevens , for example. And I learnt that awful Toby Young, whose dad got him into Oxford, didn't even make a BBC A Level offer!

The ending details some things that have changed, and some that have not and is semi optimistic whilst making some suggestions about how to break the elitist grip.

It's an eye opener, for sure and does none of the current crop any favours. He didn't see Truss coming though!

Reading this goes rather well with the Booker idea that the their are People Like Us and the rest of us. I went for an interview at Oxford around the time Rees-Mogg would have been there and just after Gove left the very college. I had fun but the place did stink of masculine entitlement and idle arrogance - and that was at a college with a reputation for inclusiveness.

That sounds really interesting, Piggy - I’m not sure my blood pressure could take it, though! Having read Ferdinand Mount’s Cold Cream recently, I was left in no doubt at all (if I’d had any in the first place) about the truth of ‘People Like Us’. It’s interesting that Thatcher was an outlier - not just a woman but famously the daughter of a tradesman - but the Mount book was fascinating about the extent to which so many of the public schoolboys in her party (er….most of them, then) were in thrall to her. It really seemed as though they bought into the whole weird Strict Nanny fantasy.

I'd didn't see it, what happened? 🙄

Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga. Translated by Melanie Mauthner

Our Lady of the Nile is an elite girl's school in the mountains of Rwanda. The story is set about 15 years prior to the genocide and there is a quota of one Tutsi to every ten Hutus. The authorial voice maintains a distance and we see snapshots of the different pupils and the international teachers amidst the rising racial tensions and violence. Beautifully written and unforgettable.

@bettbburg twitter.com/kerrywk/status/1567538031934210054?s=21&t=atkNVP9EQQTslOikcpPhcQ

Have to say I am struggling on with Ink Black Heart. Liking the Strike/Robin interaction but finding the rest of it tedious. Remus you will hate it!

Yes, I think you're right. I'll probably read it at some point, but not until it's a fiver! :)

Janina, I loved Our Lady of the Nile when I read it a few years ago. I'm surprised it isn't more widely read.

Piggy That does sound interesting although I suspect, like Terpsichore, I might find it too much to bear. If you haven't read it already, I would really recommend One of Them by Musa Okwonga about his time at Eton. It was one of my standout reads last year.

I'll look that out. Thank you!

@Terpsichore if you'd like another take on the Thatcher years from someone with a slightly different perspective, People Like Us by Caroline Slocock is really interesting. She came in as the first female private secretary at no. 10 towards the end of Thatcher's premiership and I found her insights about the inner circle and her own perception of Thatcher fascinating. She went on to be Chief Executive of the Equal Opportunities Commission.

50 The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

My first Shelter book club read, a pan-generational account of twentieth century Vietnam. Narrated by Huong, interspersed with her grandmother's story, this book takes you through many of the significant events in Vietnam over the course of the last century, from the Land Reform (in Huong's grandmother's youth, which sees her family lose their farm) to the Vietnam War which plagues Huong's childhood. So many terrible things happen to Huong's family that it becomes a little hard to read, although I am sure that many Vietnamese families did suffer in this way. The book was written in English by the Vietnamese author, and some passages are beautiful, but overall the writing was a little too lush in places for me, and felt a bit stilted in others. These are quite minor cavils, though, I was drawn in by the family's story and wanted to know what had happened to all of them.

Oh yes, and that's my 50!

Thanks for that recommendation @Welshwabbit - I’ve seen Caroline Slocock interviewed a number of times on television in recent years on political matters and her comments have always been a cut above the usual talking heads, and reliably interesting.

Did any TTOD fans watch Millionaire tonight??

72: All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work - Joanna Biggs

This is a great book if, like me, you’re quite nosy and enjoy finding out random details about peoples' lives. Biggs conducted interviews with a wide range of workers in all sorts of different occupations - from sex-worker to care-worker; ballet-shoe maker to footballer; stately home owner to unemployed jobseeker - and transcribed the results into an oral history. It was written in 2014 so it’s nowhere near current, but the issues and problems she and her subjects discuss seem eternal and still completely relevant today, albeit depressingly worse.

No. Why?