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?

@DameHelena Sounds good! I will PM you if you can bear with me till the weekend - I'm not at home this week so not online much.

Sure 🙂

The Drowning Pool by Ros Macdonald
Obviously inspired by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett this is a noir hard-boiled whodunnit, with plenty of those who've been dun and plenty of unpleasant folk who could've did it. Not quite as slick as Chandler, but I liked this a lot. One moment lapsed a little too much into James Bond territory for me, and, inevitably I suppose, their were some cliches, but I was pleased to get to know the private eye, Lew Archer, and now intend to start another one immediately.

56 The Picts and the Martyrs - Arthur Ransome (read to the DCs) Another of my old favourites, and a sequel to the two previous books I’ve read to my DDs. A lovely evocation of interwar childhood holidays in the Lake District with excitement and funny bits - a great story, although Winter Holiday beats it to first place in the series for me.

32. Acts Of Desperation by Megan Nolan

Young Irish girl becomes obsessed with a beautiful but arrogant man, and they become entangled in an abusive full circle.

Kept reading to see if it went anywhere, it doesn't.

Pretty much whole book is the protagonist naval gazing about her feelings and in quite repetitive prose. I did think it was an interesting depiction of abuse though.

Last year on the year before I reviewed Lisa Taddeo's Three Women saying basically that I would have probably loved it in my twenties but the relationship observations feel a bit entry level now.

I do feel about this that its one for women in their 20s maybe?

There is also a strong whiff of "the Sally Rooneys" going on.

A strong whiff of the Sally Rooneys - Yuck. The stench of pretentious, boring, middle class twattery. Smells like bleak spirit.

Eine From your review I could have sworn I'd read that book. Turns out I was thinking of Promising Young Women, plus a Sally Rooney short story, both of which have almost identical plots.

42. Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
Non-fiction centred on the disappearance of Jean McConville in Belfast in 1972, and looking at the wider story of the Provisional IRA, The Troubles, Sinn Fein and the peace process in Northern Ireland.
Thank you very much to PepeLePew and everyone else who has reviewed this on the 50 Books threads. It was absolutely fascinating, the kind of audiobook that had me looking for longer walking routes and more chores to do just so that I could eek out some more listening time. Apart from recognising a few names, I knew very little of this recent history - I now feel far more informed and interested. I know this book will stay with me and contribute to how I understand the world.

Couldn't have put it better myself

23. The Island - Victoria Hislop I read this several years ago but having visited the island of Spinalonga while I was in Crete this summer I felt it was due a reread. Family saga based around the island's leper colony which ceased to exist in 1957.
    I've just reserved the sequel from the library...

Ooooh, just finished Maggie O'Farrell's latest , The Marriage Portrait and it's a corker. It's a reimagining of the famous Browning poem, My Last Duchess, a favourite of GCSE anthologies. The poem is sinister enough, the book renders the sinister tangible. It has two time separated plot strands which converge, seemingly inexorably towards a conclusion. The author ,of course, focuses on the imprisonment and abuse of women and this is horrifying. It puts women at the centre of the tale, as we would expect from the writer of Hamnet. The latter was sad; this one is chilling.

A tiny criticism: please stop using minuscule repeatedly, Maggie. Well done for knowing how to spell it but you don't need to keep showing us!

Remus

I need to stop listening to Book YouTubers, they are all quite young, and I think I was myself more easily impressed and charmed when I had read less of a wide spread of adult fiction

That sounds good Piggy

I'll be all over that Piggy, we had to learn it and I can still recite it 26 years later.

I love the poem. It's great to read when you know it because you can see where she slips in the references.

That sounds good, Piggy! I'll put it on my ever-growing list!
I started Wolf Hall a few days ago so I'm up to my eyes in intrigue for now 😅 * *

My Last Duchess is one of my favourite poems. In fact, I'm teaching it this week. However, I disliked Hamnet so intensely that I don't think I dare try another of hers.

Have finished Companion Piece by Ali Smith and have been completely absorbed by it.
It is about living through lockdown but also about an earlier time in England when there was another plague.
I find her use of language and the way she plays with language 'curlew' and 'curfew' compelling.

57 A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel

This was great. You know it's a good, off-kilter book from the beginning when you're thrown into the middle of a funeral with plenty of domestic intrigue. The main characters are actually slightly off centre at this point, but come into focus gradually. Ralph and his wife Anna are professional do-gooders, with a large family. We meet them in the novel's present, 1980s Norfolk but for two long sections of the book we are taken back to their past as missionaries, first in South Africa and then in Bechuanaland, now Botswana. We know from quite early on that something bad happened whilst they were abroad, but precisely what only becomes apparent as the story goes on. I'm not always a fan of flashbacks but these are well done. The final section of the story in Norfolk is quietly devastating. It doesn't really need saying, but Mantel was a beautiful writer. The family is well observed, and there is a clarity to the ideas she develops, which are never allowed to be clunky because they emerge naturally from the story she weaves so well. You know someone's good when you read a book constantly thinking yes! How does she know that? Is she in my head? This book has that in spades. How sad that we will see no more novels from her.

Remus, I was scared when I wrote a glowing review. I kept thinking 'Remus might read this, and she might hate it, and it will be my fault ' 😁

I've just read the first few pages. I'm already wishing he'd just kill her so I don't have to endure any more of it.

You're safe. I won't be touching it with even the longest, most protracted or drawn out of barge poles (incidentally, those adjectives all describe her writing style imo).

And seeing the use of present tense has reminded me of Cote. I miss her.

Yes,but I didn't mind it in this book.

😅

Where is Cote?

When reading Acts Of Desperation I thought of her because there was such an emphasis on feelings