50 Books Challenge 2022 Part six

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the sixth 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.

What are you reading?

222 The Road To Lichfield by Penelope Lively

A subtle study of a marriage under strain. Good and I liked the period detail.

223 Looking For Emily by Fiona Longmuir

One of DD’s books that I liked the sound of. 12 year old Lily moves to a seaside town and is lonely until she finds an odd museum featuring lots of things belonging to a girl called Emily and starts to investigate who set the museum up and why. I think I would have loved this at DD’s age but as an adult there were too many questions/plot holes.

224 Blurb Your Enthusiasm by Louise Willder

A book about books, this one focusing on how books advertise themselves through blurbs, titles and straplines. The author is an ex-blurb writer. I really enjoyed this, definitely recommended if you like book books!

225 Well Behaved Wives by Amy Sue Nathan

Set in 1960s Philadelphia, a group of young housewives attend etiquette classes but realise that things aren’t always as polished as they appear on the surface.

226 The Apartment Upstairs by Lesley Kara

Psychological thriller about a woman looking into the apparent murder of her aunt. It was fine if you like this sort of thing.

227 Eat Up! by Ruby Tandoh

Ruby was on The Great British Bake Off a few years ago, and this is her manifesto of food, appetite and eating what you want. She writes well about food but doesn’t really say anything new.

228 In The Shadow Of Queens by Alison Weir

A collection of short stories that go alongside her Six Tudor Queens series. Good to add a bit more context/ different points of view to the events in the main books.

to all those having a tough time for whatever reason at the moment.

42. The Maid - Nita Prose

Molly is a maid in a grand hotel who finds a guest dead in his bed, apparently murdered. Molly is non neurotypical - she finds it hard to decode social cues, clings to routine and takes comfort in order and rules. The plot turns on Molly working out who she can trust and finding the courage to take action to protect herself and her friends. It's charming up to a point, but gets a bit repetitive. In fairness this may be because the writer was making a fair stab at writing from the point of view of her neurodivergent heroine, so I'm reluctant to criticise on those grounds. I wouldn't rush to read a follow-up but it was a nice enough read and stays just the right side of twee.

Oh, and welcome @LadyFarquinMark!

Thinking of you @bettbburg and @PermanentTemporary , and anyone else who is going through a tough time.

59 Chanson Douce - Leila Slimani (in French) This was a really fascinating book, which started with a brief scene in which two young children have been killed by their nanny (horrible, I know, but very brief) and then tells the story of the build-up to this event over the preceding months. While it’s a creepy thriller exploring the mindset of a murderer, it’s much more than that too: both a study of maternal guilt (which I can really identify with) and an evocation of the social issues affecting middle-class families and, on the other side of the tracks, their nannies (mostly immigrants - though not in the case of the murderer - and usually with major life struggles which their employers are unaware of). It also really brings the real Paris to life (plenty of similarities with the city I live near too, although it’s much smaller than Paris) - I could really picture the cramped apartment of the family and especially the wintry urban playground.

i thought hard about whether this would get a bold rating from me in my list, because I’m not yet good enough at French to really be able to discern whether a book is truly well-written. Ultimately I decided it deserves the bold rating on the basis that my thoughts keep coming back to it - always a sign of a great book (and the reason I upgraded Alias Grace to a bold a week or so after finishing it). From looking at reviews, it seems that the English translation is good so I’ll definitely recommend it to English readers as well as French.

Hi @DuPainDuVinDuFromage

I read Chanson Douce during the summer. I agree with your review. It's an interesting psychological study into the mindset of a murderer. The nanny's growing obsession with the couple, her desire to be useful that crosses the line when she makes herself indispensable. The relationship between herself and her employers that goes wrong with the interdependency between the three. It was an interesting social commentary for sure. The slowly deterioratioing circumstances going towards that evil act were skilfully written. It had me gripped while reading it, even though I was dreading what was coming next.

I don't always remember a book, but like you, this one left an impression on me and I think it deserves a recommendation as a thought-provoking thriller.

This thread is moving too fast for me to keep up with again; so many interesting messages!

A wave to Cote from someone who is generally well-disposed toward women’s writing and Feelings. I have missed you! 😁

PermanentTemporary, I’m so sorry to hear of the trauma you have gone through. One of the medievalists I follow on Twitter, Rachel Moss, lost her DH in similar circumstances, and has written a lot about being a young widow and a single mum. I find her extremely impressive.

Bett, much sympathy to you regarding your health.
BoiledEggandToast, what a lovely review of A Man's Place. I’m so glad you liked it. I agree that parts of it are quite disturbing and bleak. I’m intrigued that you just read Giving Up the Ghost as well, as that’s on my TBR list!

54. O Caledonia, Elspeth Barker 5/5
    I loved this. Thanks so much to those of you on the thread who recommended it. The black humour is very Scottish. This is the story of a bookish girl who is an avid reader, a lover of language, and emphatically not a joiner-inner. I identified with her a lot.

55. The Owl Service, Alan Garner 4/5
    A haunting, original story and one that will stay with me I think. The way Garner adapts Welsh myth into a tale of adolescent angst in 1960s Wales is powerful indeed. Class tensions play a big role in the narrative, which I hadn’t expected. That said, I was interested by how problematic all the mother figures in the story seem to be. They’re all negative in some way, or else entirely absent.

56. Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, Kathleen Stock 2/5
    I have a lot of thoughts about this book, but MN is probably not the best place to express them (I may write a more substantial review on Goodreads). I wanted to read something by a gender critical feminist, and I did. I have some common ground with Stock, but the way I view the world, gender, and trans people is ultimately quite different to hers.

Fortuna wrote:
^The Summer Book - Tove Jannson
A very gentle book in which an elderly woman takes her young granddaughter to a small island for the summer and they learn to adjust to one another.
This is simply wonderful.^

I read this in my book group some years ago and I 100% agree.

DuPainDuVin, I like your review of Chanson douce, which I read some years ago. I have mixed feelings about Slimani. She's a very provocative writer, but sometimes I feel like she opts for sensationalism over nuance ... I don't know. But Chanson douce is a powerful book in the way it depicts class inequality, and also the guilt feelings of working mothers.

I heard Slimani give a talk once (live streamed on youtube) and one thing she said that stuck with me was that she had come to terms with displeasing people. She said that if she was pleasing people all the time, she was doing something wrong. I liked her for that.

I think she said that in answer to a question about how she managed to be a writer going on tour while also being a mother of young children whom she had to leave behind. The kind of question that only gets asked of women writers, not male ones. 🙄

Haven't been on here for ages, but wanted to share a couple of really good reads:

L'Art de perdre. Alice Zentner Story of three generations of an Algerian family in France and Algeria. Interesting insight into the Algerian war of independence, the role of Algerians in the second world war and their experience as refugees. The question of identity when your parents come from one country but you are born in another is well explored.
(Good reviews in translation too)

Kololo Hill. Neema Shah Two generations of a family in Uganda in the early 1970s. Life under Idi Amin in Uganda seems like it can't get any worse with curfews and people disappearing. Then they are told they have 90 days to leave. The story is told from the point of view of the two female characters, who are from different generations and have different expectations of their role in life.

Hi Taswama! These sound good! I particularly like the sound of L'Art de Perdre.

Thanks Taswama I also like the sound of L'Art de Perdre. Just out of interest, did you read it in translation (my French is so rusty that I would need to)?

Hi Fuzzy Hope you're well. Seeing your post upthread reminded me to post.

I read it in French boiledegg after reading a review in English. I'm half French and prefer to read it in the original language when I can.

Thanks Taswama! All good, thankfully. Too many books to read. That's a good complaint :) I must read another book in French soon.

Thanks Taswama. I'll give it a go in English!

Cassandre I hope you like Giving up the Ghost. It's quite different from A Man's Place but equally powerful in its own way.

40. Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli

Allegedly a member of the "accessible popular physics" scene, but I found much that just went a bit over my head

I much preferred The Order Of Time by the same author

So sorry to hear @bettbburg, hope this thread is a good distraction for you

@FortunaMajor - I love Jilly Cooper, including Octavia, but it's very... erm, let's say of its time. All of her 'name' books are, but some have definitely aged better than others.

@DuPainDuVinDuFromage I read the English translation of

Sorry, no idea why that posted halfway through a sentence! I read the English translation of Chanson Douce a few years ago. I foolishly read it when I had a young baby and found it far too distressing to really appreciate it. No idea why I thought it would be a good read at that time as the blurb is very clear about the nature of the book. Maybe one I will revisit when the children are older so I can try to appreciate the writing over the disturbing content

@satelliteheart it must be very hard to read when you have very small children (and Slimani wrote it when she had tinies and a nanny - I wouldn’t be surprised if she gave herself nightmares!). Mine are now at the age where they are starting to get a bit more independent - DD1 starts secondary next year - and although it’s different from the nanny situation the book definitely made me feel worried about not having them with me all the time. And I read the book as part of a book group - several of the others in the group were not keen on it because of the upsetting nature of the story. I think the worst is the sense of impending doom and the fact that there were so many missed opportunities to get rid of the nanny and change the outcome.

@cassandre yes I see what you mean about the sensationalism - I read an interview with Slimani where she said her nanny story was boring until she read about a real-life murder by a nanny of her charges, which she used pretty much wholesale for Chanson Douce, and that cheapened it for me a bit. But I found enough nuance in the book despite that.

I can understand why that would be too close to the bone @satelliteheart.

I’m on a roll at the moment - just finished another fantastic book:

60 Empire of Pain - Patrick Radden Keene (audiobook) I won’t go into detail as this has been much-reviewed on here, but will just say that I’m very grateful for the recommendation - it was excellent and was made even better by being read by the author, who has a great voice for this purpose (except the odd mispronunciation of British place names 😂). I knew almost nothing about the Sackler family or oxycontin other than a vague awareness of the opioid crisis and hearing about some protests by more politically aware students when a building at my university was named after the Sacklers in the early 2000s, so the book was incredibly informative and shocking. I’ll definitely be recommending this to everyone I know who might show the slightest interest!

Really sorry to read about your health bett x

Slightly embarrassed to be following up several pages of interesting reviews with only the news that I have finally finished September by Rosamund Pilcher to report, but there we are. I seemed to stall somewhat but hoping to pick up again now and should just about manage to reach 50 by the end of the year! September not quite the comforting and escapist read I was after when I picked it up, but I did get quite engrossed by the end.

61 Country Lovers - Fiona Walker Horsy Cotswolds bonkbuster à la Jilly Cooper, but better-written and not dated (yet). Trashy and silly but it was just what I needed 😄

bett