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?

Am now googling single malts...

University crushes. Ah yes. Mine was studying French and had a thing for Albert Camus. I used to nod adoringly while he droned on about existentialism. I don’t think he knew I existed.

Black curls and leather trousers, Sol. We mostly drank K or snakebite in the park.

His name was Barry which he hated and didn't fit the image. It was all fine until he read me his poetry one day at which point the scales fell from my eyes and the allure evaporated.

These young men. What are they all doing now, I wonder?

There was another one who was into skateboarding and philosophy who wrote beautiful poetry and wonderful shy letters hinting at his affection for me. He used to buy me books he thought I would like. I googled him and he's now - implausibly - a Silicon Valley tech bro type.

This made me laugh 😂

I had to read Heart of Darkness for the IB at college. Hated it! Think I read the first chapter which took me several hours despite being short and gave up/blagged my way through the assignment.

Oh lord it was. It just took a long time to recover from! He's still in my list of 2 that it would be for the best never to clap eyes on again, just in case.

@TheTurn0fTheScrew yes! I feel vindicated (and also like maybe I should sit and write utter drivel BUT IN A VERY SERIOUS WAY AND SAYING LIMINAL A LOT, then I can give up work and go to Finland as well.)

Mine writes "content" for blogs. <big eye roll>
I do love the fact that we are the Facebook generation so can find all of them.
Another one (the cause of me splitting up with boyfriend -from-home in first term) and referred to as My Little Miner (it was 1984 and due far more to him and far less to my heritage as a miner's daughter, granddaughter etc etc would get up at 3am and go to the picket lines)) teaches in Sweden but is as left as he ever was, unlike me who these days cba to go to the bins if it's raining let alone the Lancashire picket lines.
Hey ho.

my list of 2 that it would be for the best never to clap eyes on again, just in case
😂
I only have one of those, but I suspect he's either dead or ravaged by drink and drugs, so I'd probably be able to contain myself.

@TheTurn0fTheScrew

Yes, I also found the end of Transcription odd, rushed and unbelievable.

My uni crush was called Joe. He was better pleased with what he saw in the mirror I think, and I once had to endure a party for which I arrived overdressed and then had to listen to him shagging someone else upstairs. Fun times.

We had a shameless blagger on my course, very wellspoken, and new all the right buzzwords and would often just hold forth with a good sounding critique whilst boasting to the rest of us he hadn't read it.

Oh the joy when one of the Tutors let him talk about a Thomas Hardy poem for a good few minutes and then simply replied :

No.

He was a smug twat and I bet he's the bane of his colleagues lives an insufferable know it all.

I'm enjoying the descriptions of crushes from university days. I had two. The first, a softly-spoken clever guy who was nice but really wasn't into me. The second, a softly-spoken French guy who played the violin. He may or may not have been nice as he was softly-spoken and my French was extremely nul, so even if he was into me, I never knew what he was saying anyway!

"I knew KM in a former life. I need you to know that your impression of her is entirely accurate."
Things like this are one of the reasons I love this thread so much!

Also loving all the descriptions of university crushes - I found a photo of mine the other day when tidying. You'd have thought in retrospect the fact that he was wearing a "Queer as Fuck" t-shirt might have given me a bit more of a clue that I was wasting my time. I did get a first on one paper in my finals due to our late night study-and-angst sessions though I ran into him a year or so back, and he is still very charming, and now has what I think is probably a very high powered job in Brussels.

If it hadn't been for the Queer as Fuck t shirt, I'd have said "oh, I know him!" as well 🤣. Not a crush (he was the leader of the lib dems as opposed to my Little Miner verging on Trotskyite fella) but the cleverest guy on our course went to be something big in Brussels (though FB tells me he's now something big in NY.
The photos are hilarious I find. The most gorgeous human beings to my blinkered eyes have my DD and her friends rolling in the aisles with laughter. Hmm.

Wintering woman now going on about school classes being a "toxic soup" and her child being pulled out and homeschooled.

Oh dear. Is she my mother? 😁That detail alone is enough to put me off the book. Though if her child is anything like me, they will grow up to be shockingly ungrateful for having been pulled out of school to be home educated, and will spend the rest of their lives utterly determined to mingle with the great unwashed.

I'm super behind with reviews (though I haven't managed to read much over the past couple of months anyway). However, I'm still lurking and am another person greatly enjoying the anecdotes about pretentious uni boyfriends.

I've read 98 books this year so far. Was aiming for 140 by the end of the year as last year I manage 138. But don't think I will make it. 115 is more likely. My favourite this year is The End of Us Colleen Hoover.
I've just finished I Let You Go Claire Mackintosh which was a sad book but had a good twist.

56. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

This is a trilogy about a super soldier called Takeshi Kovacs. I know Cote liked these. I benefitted from having seen the Netflix series because I immediately understood the stacks and sleeves concept.

Basically, in a very distant future humanity has evolved into

a) interplanetary life
b) chemically enhanced lives
c) the ability to store oneself and ones memories onto a kind of hard drive called a "stack"
d) Bodies are conserved and repurposed as "sleeves" and you can basically download your stack into any body, including the bodies of other peoples loved ones. If rich enough you can just keep cloning yourself, poor and you have to make down payments on someone's body to get it back

Takeshi has been summoned to serve as an investigator by Laurens Bancroft. Bancroft is a very rich man who thinks he has been murdered, but everyone else says it was a suicide. As Bancroft has many sleeves and stores his mind in a cloud, a suicide is an ultimately pointless act.

I thought this was quite good and moved on to Broken Angels the sequel, but it's really not holding my interest and I'm plodding through, so I think I am going to end the trilogy here. When you just aren't looking forward to your reading time, it's a sign

Welcome @autienotnaughty

@Gingerwarthog Belinda Bauer is fantastic and you won't be disappointed with Snap, although Exit is even better. Both are on offer for £4.50 for the paperback on Amazon and the kindle versions are on offer too.

@mum2jakie
Thank you so much!
I will get the paperbacks ASAP.
Definitely my new favourite writer.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit Thank you. I think I posted last year around this time but that was probably a few chats ago!!

@autienotnaughty I have just discovered Clare Macintosh (after getting increasingly frustrated with "page turning thrillers" that turn out not to be. Hers really are. I Let You Go is the only one I haven't read so far.
@Gingerwarthog agree also re Belinda Bauer.

Started The Maidens last night. Good enough story, dreadful writing. "She did this, then she did that" clearly written as author muttered "mustn't write long sentences or people will be cross". No mate, you're fine. We're not expecting iambic pentameter even though we are wandering round pretend Cambridge colleges.

I studied science so my boyfriends weren't pretentious, we just got drunk, listened to the Pixies and shagged.

Hi @bettbburg!

Haha love the pretentious boyfriends chat.

although I have to admit I was pretty pretentious myself and ticked many of the boxes here, Camus, Existentialism, whiskey in a mug. Many, many protests. I do cringe at myself back then now. I want to tell her to just like what you like, not try so hard to impress.

52. A Promised Land by Barack Obama.

I loved this audio book that follows his campaign and first few years in office. I’ve seen it criticised for being overly long and going too much into the history. However, I was glad of both those things. It was lovely hearing the quirks and detail of life in the White House and his relationship with Michelle.

I found his description of the financial crisis and the actions he took really interesting. I was less enamoured when he was describing his actions on climate change, with his daughters asking him daily if he had saved the tigers his approach seemed so much more defeatist than on the affordable care act.

I think on many issues he feels like he did his absolute best and his hands were tied but it can come across as arrogant and I didn’t find he was particularly willing to talk about his own failures. 5* though - he’s a great writer.

onto Rachel’s Holiday reread now which I know is well liked here.

Sounds perfect.

I studied Ancient History but have consistently dated computer science geeks my whole life, perhaps to balance me out in some way. My uni boyfriend was the determinedly working-class rather than pretentious - refused to go to the theatre as it's for posh people. Luckily my long-term partner now is more civilised (despite being a software engineer).