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?

Oh @DameHelena and @Owlbookend I really liked Crow Lake. So deceptively slow, but I found the emotional reveal at the end really affected me.

46. The Stranding by Kate Sawyer. A young woman travels to New Zealand in the wake of a bad relationship break up and ends up surviving a nuclear war by hiding inside a dead whale. Yes, really. The book goes on to switch between her life in London beforehand and her experiences as a survivor. Despite the mad set up I thought it covered some interesting ground on women's choices as to partners, pregnancy etc in different contexts. It probably bears some comparison to Station Eleven which I know is controversial round here so be warned!

@FortunaMajor if you are considering other Steve Cavanagh’s ‘13’ is the best by a country mile. I started with that and none of the others have worked as well saddly.

Thanks Palegreen. I'll try that one next.

Just a random thought regarding me being evangelical about libraries. If you are part of an in person book club, check if your library has reading group sets. Mine does and has 300 titles with 6-10 books in the set which book clubs can borrow. Usually they will show up in the catalogue if you search 'reading group set'. They will all show as unavailable to borrow, but the staff will be able to explain how to borrow them. We had a few people drop out of ours due to cost and this means they can come back. I work there and only discovered this a few weeks ago when covering in another branch where they are stored.

Yes, despite my slight misgivings I do want to read more of her; it's certainly very immersive.

50 The Five -Hallie Rubenhold

I'm sure this will have been much reviewed on here, so won't add too much except that it feels like a really important, necessary story of five vulnerable women who were let down by a society that had stacked the cards against them, and stereotyped and trivialised after their murder by Jack the Ripper.

And that's my 50 - the first time I've made it in several years! Thanks both to Audible and the great conversations that happen on this thread 😊

Congrats on making it to 50, Meg!

More of my backlog:

Under a Pole Star, Stef Penney About a 9th-C girl, daughter of a whaling captain, who becomes an Arctic explorer herself. Largely it's about the rivalries between her team and another, plus her romance with a member of the other team.
This is a long novel and I sometimes found it hard to remember and keep track of who's in which 'camp' and who's slighted whom and who's seeking revenge for what, etc. Maybe because I read it over quite a long time and in small snippets; I think if you were able to sit and read it properly over a few days it would be more immersive and easier to follow.

Good writing though, and I loved the protagonist, who is no-nonsense and capable, while also being flawed. And it has genuinely erotic sex scenes that miraculously avoid the sense of being in line for the Bad Sex Awards.

The Manningtree Witches, A. K. Blakemore Reviewed on here by others. I have to say I agree with those slightly lukewarm reviews. On paper this is right up my alley in terms of subject and setting, but despite some really startlingly original and excellent writing I was a little underwhelmed.

Winter Counts, David Heska Wanbli Weiden Thriller by a Native American writer, about a Native American local enforcer, Virgil Wounded Horse, on a reservation in South Dakota.

The thriller element is, broadly and briefly, that Virgil’s nephew becomes involved in drugs and he sets out to find and stop the dealers/suppliers.

But mainly this was fascinating for the insight into reservation life and the position of Native Americans (basically, they really do have local enforcers, because federal police don't act on more minor crimes on the reservations and tend not to bother with the more serious crimes they are meant to police; so inhabitants don't see much option apart from to seek justice on their own).

There is also much detail on the poverty/social deprivation on reservations and among the wider Native community, and why it came about and persists. And there's good stuff on how Virgil largely distances himself from Native tradition and his own Native identity, and how he starts to re-embrace it as the novel goes on.

Recommend this one. It's a good pacy thriller and a fascinating look at a world I really knew little about. Virgil is rather endearing and often funny. I hope the author writes more.

Winter Counts sounds good, Dame - looks like they have it in my library so I'll give it a go.

Will be interested to hear what you think!

73: On the Side of the Angels - Betty Miller

I really loved this. Betty Miller was the mother of doctor, satirist and polymath Jonathan Miller, but also a very fine novelist. This Virago reprint is, I think, one of only two of her books currently available (Persephone picked up Farewell Leicester Square - now on my want list). Set in, and written during, WW2, it zooms in on the small Gloucestershire village of Linfield, where young mother Honor Carmichael and her husband Colin - a prissy small-town doctor now serving in the RAMC - are billeted.

Colin is obsessed with his CO, the tedious and capricious Col. Mayne, while Honor is drippily in thrall to her husband. Her sister Claudia, a much sparkier personality, observes all this but is nevertheless drawn in to the life of the base and finds herself fascinated by the tall, dark Captain Herriot, a glamorous visiting Commando. To complicate matters, Claudia is engaged to Andrew, an embittered local solicitor discharged from the army on health grounds.

Miller's writing is pin-sharp and her descriptions are fabulously visual. She evokes the whole atmosphere of this small group of people struggling with complicated emotions as though she was putting them under a microscope and showing every tiny detail - her daughter explains in the foreword that a lot of the setting was based on Miller’s own experiences when her husband, a doctor, was called up to the RAMC . Really marvellous writing. Very sadly, she developed Alzheimer’s and died at only 55.

Fairy Tale by Stephen King
Billed as the novel King wanted to write during the pandemic to help him to feel happy, there's actually quite a lot in here that's a bit depressing! Charlie is a high school student who's had to deal with rather a lot in his life so far. When he helps an injured old man, he'll have a lot more to deal with.

I really liked the first half of this, when we're learning about Charlie and his family, and then when he gets involved with the old guy and his dog. Charlie then ends up in another world (not a spoiler) and it was there that I thought the novel was a bit flawed and derivative. Having said that, I still enjoyed Charlie's story and some of the people he encounters. I was sad that several of them were essentially just there as spares to be killed off though.

I’ve reserved Winter Counts, thanks Dame.

Burntcoat by Sarah Hall I read a review which compared this favourably to Sarah Moss’ The Fell which I really enjoyed so hoped to enjoy this, but I didn’t greatly. It’s about famous artist Edith’s life from a child with an incapacitated mother through to art school, an unhealthy relationship, an artistic apprenticeship in Japan, and a pandemic with a kind and interesting new partner. Whilst I admired much of the writing I was only on-and-off engaged with the book which is told in fragments, about one or two blocks of text per page, which was a rhythm that didn’t work well for me. Also the pandemic is more lethal than the covid one and there’s a certain amount of world-building where you’re working out what is going on. I’m the sort of reader who is more interested in the real world as it is or was from different perspectives, rather than tweaking the parameters of the pandemic we’ve just lived through, so didn’t love this.

Rather late to the party, I have read Into Thin Air. It was interesting enough, but I didn't find it as compelling or gripping as I expected. I don't think it was because I hate even walking slightly uphill...

I very recently read it as well, thought it was good not great and thought the extensive arguing about differing accounts near the end was a bit unseemly.

I gave up halfway through the postscript because the bickering did bore me a bit.

Great cliffhanger though!

Don't mind me. I was talking about TWIW 😊

Seemed to fit the into Thin Air discussion though!!

Darn it! Should have said nothing!!

64. The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

I’m not 100% sure what I thought of this book. As I was reading it I was really enjoying it, but once I was finished I found myself feeling a bit dissatisfied and I'm struggling crystallise in my mind exactly what this book was about. It’s a fantasy book, and with a few notable exceptions, that's not a genre I’m generally keen on. There were a lot of interesting main characters, and I particularly enjoyed my time with the damaged (physically and spiritually) Inquisitor Glokta. It also helped that the author didn't go into too much detail with the world building, just giving the info that was needed to make the story flow. This was very much the first book of a trilogy and I liked it enough to want to read the next two books and to judge this as part of a trilogy, rather than in isolation.

65. The Sealwoman’s Gift by Sally Magnusson

Before reading this book I had zero idea that the slave trade was so widespread, I naively though that it was pretty much restricted to Africans being kidnapped and sold as slaves to Westerners, as awful as that is, I didn't realise that Europeans were kidnapped and sold as slaves in North Africa. I was also surprised by the descriptions of social mobility and 'opportunities' for slaves, although this was obviously balanced out by the harsher realities, especially for the women. This was an interesting, but harrowing read, especially as a parent. I enjoyed how the Icelandic sagas were interwoven through the story but I liked, rather than loved this book.

66. The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison

A crime novel featuring 'The Gardener' who has build a beautiful, enclosed garden to house his collection of butterflies, which are in reality young girls / women who he has kidnapped. I found this to be a page turner and liked the main characters, and the family that the girls make for themselves, but the ending let this one down. Too big of a coincidence, which I could have dealt with had it been handled better.

67. Mrs England by Stacey Halls

This is the first book I’ve read by the author, although I have the others in my massive kindle TBR pile. I think that the consensus is that this is the weakest of her books. Ruby May is a Norland nurse who takes a position as the nurse for four children in the wilds of Yorkshire where she gradually realises that something is very wrong. Again this keep me reading, the ending was a bit weak and the whole back story of Nurse May felt like a bit of a non-event, but I did enjoy the book overall.

28. Frankenstein In Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

In post war Baghdad, Elishva grieves a son long dead, Mahmoud is a journalist on the hunt for a story, and Hadi is a junk dealer thought of as a liar. Baghdad continues to be an unsafe place, with car bombs and suicide bombings.

Traumatised, Hadi collects body parts and sews them into a corpse, only for it to come to life, seeking vengeance for the former owners of its limbs.

I really did admire the effect of how this magical realism device works, juxtaposing the all too underrepresented real world horror that Iraqi life must have been for such a long time against the fabulist horror of the idea of this reanimated corpse.

It also reflected for me as a sharp metaphor, the hopelessness and anger that the ordinary Iraqi feels about acts perpetrated upon them for which hoping for justice is futile.

Genuinely original and thought provoking, I admired and respected it a bit more than I actually enjoyed it.

Finally finished a book (and tamed my pile even more by DNF-ing my two e-library books)

72 The Microdot Gang The Rise and Fall of the LSD Network that Turned on the World, by James Wyllie

Operation Julie was the police code name for the 1970s investigation into a massive LSD drug ring, resulting in 120 arrests in England & west Wales. There’s been many books about the police investigation (and a Clash song), and recently a musical. We went to see the latter as a bit of a giggle, my DP is from mid-Wales, & it’s very much part of local legend there. It was actually really very good (I guess a 1970s prog-rock musical about a drugs bust is no more random than Hamilton ), and it inspired me to pick this up to learn more about the background to it.

In fact, the Welsh part of the story takes up a relatively small part of the book. The whole thing is really quite remarkable – the chemists looking to change the world by making acid available to the masses, the CIA’s dabbling in acid (I really hadn’t realised that the MKUltra project referred to in Stranger Things was an actual thing, though obviously - at least one hopes - with no actual monsters), the links with the Red Army & other far left groups.

Basically fewer funny stories about Tregaron, and a whole lot more weirdness than I’d expected, but a good read all the same.

The Last Kings of Sark by Rosa Rankin-Gee
An earlier novel by the writer of Dreamland. This is a sort of coming of age novel. The first half describes a long summer on Sark, where three young people are thrown together and don't really find themselves but do find each other. It's all very tender and bittersweet and she writes like a dream.

The second half is deliberately disjointed, with the three living their own lives after that summer. For me, this worked much less well as a narrative. However, if you view it as almost a series of scenes written in beautifully poetic language, then it's still worth a read. I actually think overall though, a novella of the first half would have been enough.

Posting as I’m in danger of falling off the thread. I’ve slowed right down reading The Library Book as recommended on here. (I thought I’d made a note of who recommended it but obviously not - Sorry and thank you to that poster). Really enjoying it but I’m very slow when reading non-fiction so have stalled a bit.

‘Twas me, Alias. Glad you’re enjoying it! I find I do that too - I romp through fiction in a day or so then spend weeks on one non-fiction…