50 Books Challenge 2022 Part Seven

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the seventh and (and probably) final 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, and even though it's late in the year, it’s not too late to join. Please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

How have you got on this year?

277 The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart by Margarita Montimore

Each New Year’s Day Oona wakes up in a different year of her life. Sometimes she jumps forwards, sometimes backwards. This was an interesting idea but there were too many plot holes and things left unexplained, and the characters weren’t particularly likeable.

278 Driving Home For Christmas by Joanna Bolouri

Chicklit about a warring couple who realise over the festive season how much they mean to each other. Not as Christmassy as I hoped but still enjoyed it.

279 Undoctored: The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients by Adam Kay

This is his story of why he left medicine and what happened next. I did enjoy it but it’s not laugh out loud funny (and there’s a very disturbing anecdote towards the end of the book). Also a lot of footnotes which made it awkward to read on a kindle.

280 A Christmas Cornucopia by Mark Forsyth

Non fiction about the history of some of our Christmas traditions. I really enjoyed this.

281 Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono

Bono’s autobiography. This is very disjointed because it’s not told in linear fashion. Instead he takes a song and tells the story of how that song was written/events linked to it etc. This makes it quite hard to grasp exactly how things happened. I found his writing style hard to engage with as well, so much as I like U2 this was a bit of a slog.

282 Cold Christmas by Nina Beachcroft

This was mentioned on Christmassy books threads on here and it sounded interesting. It’s a children’s book about a girl staying in an old house over Christmas when strange ghostly things happen. This was ok.

18.Shiny Pennies & Grubby Pinafores by Winifred Foley How we overcame hardship to raise happy families in the 1950s.

This is about Winifred and her life story but the latter part of her life. She has had her children and marries and up-sticks from London to re-settle back to her roots in the Forest of Dean.
I enjoyed this but did begin to be disinterested when all her children had flown the nest.
It then goes on to book 2 which are short anecdotes of her childhood raised in the Forest of Dean which I enjoyed far more. Her first autobiography is Full Hearts and Empty Bellies and I will seek this out at some point as will enjoy this more.

War and Peace was on my TBR bookshelf for over 20 years before I read it.

In 2010, college student Greer (yes really)

What's wrong with Greer?

283 Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe by Melissa de la Cruz

Spotted this in the library - a modern day retelling of P&P with a Christmas theme. How could I refuse? Well, I read this so you don’t have to. I do like an Austen retelling when it’s done well but this wasn’t. The main character, Darcy (the woman in this book) was so awful I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be anywhere near her, and the rest of the characters weren’t much better. Poor writing didn’t help. Avoid at all costs.

I've done very little reading over the last few weeks as I've been far too involved in the World Cup. (Normal service is almost resumed but I'm still very excited about Morocco, not least because they are my sweepstake draw.) Anyway, I did manage to read and enjoy Childhood, Youth, Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen. I'm sorry I can't remember who recommended this a while back but thank you, I found it a compelling read. I see it's described in the reviews at the front of the book as "autofiction", which I suppose is true, but it is a ghastly word. It follows Tove from the working-class poverty of her childhood in 1920s Copenhagen, through her friendships, loves and hardwon success as an author towards her self-destructive descent into addiction. My only (slight) criticism is that it seemed to finish rather abruptly, but overall it is a great read.

Greer is presumably after the lady herself. As a choice of character name it’s either cleverly wry, or toe-curlingly unsubtle. I haven’t read the book or formed an opinion on the writing so I wouldn’t know.

Another <sigh> DNF.

Harriet Tyce The lies you told

I've romped through all her others recently, quick reads, neither brilliant scary psycho thrillers or ridiculous plotholed guff- but your typical middle class flawed woman meets varied nutters scenarios.

Abandoned this at 30% in on the Kindle (my cut off point) Middle class barrister turns into pathetic useless slummy mummy (cue the shoehorning of the PTA über mummies and their costumes and fund-raising etc etc) There's a backstory which will obviously be hugely relevant later about her own abusive mother and husband she's left in the US.

None of which are the reasons why I ditched it. It's the bullying. Her daughter is relentlessly bullied by the other girls in the new school, the barrister is bullied by the über mothers. It almost reads like one of those dreadful "true stories of shocking childhood" things. But with a hint of gratuitousness about it (like Mo Hayder writes about the things men do to women's bodies) It just felt unnecessary.

I'm guessing our drippy barrister will turn out to have been the school bully herself or will have murdered one . (There's a peripheral best friend who is probably going to be relevant)

But I'm not sticking round to find out. I'm off to Google. 🤣

@ChessieFL I remember enjoying A Christmas Cornucopia

I am dipping in and out of the Little Book of Hygge which is actually better than I thought it would be. Less about candles and sitting under a blanket but lots of little informative snippets about why Scandinavian culture (in general) is so hyggelig.

#TeamMorocco now, but it was nice to hear even the Italian commentators say England wuz robbed for once.

98. The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

The author is a new lawyer working on a Death Row case which causes her to re-examine the abuse she herself suffered as a child.

This was an odd book, both the case and the author's childhood were tragic, but the parallels between the case of a six year old boy who was murdered, and her own abuse, are weak at best. Her examination of the case is superficial and there’s lots of conjecture.

I can see, given the complexities of her family situation, that the author almost needed an excuse to be able to write about her experience but in the end it just felt a bit exploitative to me.

99. No Second Chance by Harlan Coben

Man is shot. His wife is dead. His baby is gone. Standard mystery from Harlan Coben. I used to love this type of book, but I’ve probably just read too many, or my tastes have changed. It was an easy read but the main character is an arrogant arse and the obligatory twists were obvious. As this was written about 20 years ago the technology references were kinda funny - everyone is amazed that you can Google someone and find out info about them and there are pagers everywhere.

100.* In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren*

This festive, Groundhog Day romance was just what I needed as the COVID has finally got me. This didn’t try to be clever, there were no twists, it was just a nice, fluffy, romance.

Presumably you are not refering to actress Greer Garson 😁? I know a few adult women called Greer and always liked it as a name so in this case for me the famous feminist was not my first thought but yes, in that case it's probably toe curlingly unsubtle.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

A reread of a book I last read when my eldest was just 3 months old, no wonder I couldn't only remember the most basic outline and a couple of big set scenes! Great fun, complex plotting (and even with his revisions before novelisation there are still 2 weeks of Anne Catherick's life that are unaccounted for), and the most fascinating introduction in my Oxford World Classics edition suggesting Collins intended to imply a ménage à trois set up for Walter, Laura and Marian (as he himself had).

70 The Lamplighters - Emma Stonex This is a novel about the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from a lighthouse off the coast of Cornwall in the 70s, which flips between the perspectives of the men themselves in the weeks leading up to the disappearance and their wives/girlfriends 20 years later. It’s very loosely based on / inspired by a real-life unexplained disappearance of the keepers of a lighthouse on the Flannan Isles in western Scotland in 1900.

The mystery of the Flannan Isles disappearance is intriguing and I had high hopes for a really engaging mystery story, but unfortunately I found the book a bit disappointing. The writing style didn’t work for me and I never really cared about the characters or bought into the explanation for the disappearance created by the author. It was ok, and I’m sure other people have loved it, but for me it was a bit of a damp squib.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie @JaninaDuszejko exactly that, the book is about a celebrity feminist so one assumes after Germaine! I don't think it added anything much beyond spotting the reference.

Hot on the heels of Piggy’s review, I’ve also finished Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety and feel the same - it’s good, but not up with her best. There’s her trademark wit cut through with darkness, the same wry delivery, pithy remarks and surprises in the writing as in previous books, but maybe not quite as much sentence by sentence, page by page magic. I love KA and it’s one of my reads of the year, if it was written by anyone else I’d have been delighted to discover a marvellous new author to read, but unlike her previous books it didn’t grab me from sentence 1 and read itself for me. In the author’s note at the end there is a bit about the real-life character who inspired the novel, and maybe this anchor weighed things down a bit?

53. Almost Love Louise O’Neil. Our protagonist is a young Irish art teacher dealing with the fall out of a relationship with a much older toxic millionaire. This was really awful. I hated the main character - she treated everyone in her life badly, there was no evidence she’d ever been a decent person and I couldn’t really see any reason to like the older man to explain her decisions. I stuck with it in the hope of some sort of epiphany but there was none.
54. Rachel’s Holiday Marian Keyes. A reread - Rachel is a twenty something party girl who finds herself ‘unfairly’ sent to rehab by her chaotic Irish family. I loved this. I think I read it originally as a straight laced teeenager and to read it again when I’m very much out the other side of my partying days I probably took different things from it. Buy in my experience it’s an accurate portrayal of this type of ‘functioning’ addiction. I read this at the same time as the book above and found it interesting how both protagonists are pretty unpleasant but Rachel is much more likeable than the other one (whose name I’ve already come back too.
55. Again, Rachel Marian Keyes. The sequel showing middle aged Rachel living in Ireland and head councillor at the rehab centre she once attended. A lovely return. I’d forgotten how sexy Keyes’ sex scenes were. Much enjoyment of leather panted Luke.

@CornishLizard @Piggywaspushed

Yeah I agree about the real person getting in the way, I didn't think all of her children were properly fleshed out as characters, and I also thought the 2 random runaways subplot very much didn't fit. I also felt that Gwendolyn was Too Ever So Perfect.

68. The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne

The novel introduces us to Cyril's mother and his illegitimate birth in Ireland in the 1940s, before charting his life, man and boy over the decades running up to almost present day. As Cyril is gay, the changing attitudes to homosexuality in Ireland form an important plot point.

From maybe the beginning of this up to Cyril's first job, I thought this was going to be a bold, I liked the characters and situations and found it quite witty; even though I thought Julian was terribly annoying.

After this the novel becomes a bit "sectional", there's an Amsterdam section, a New York section etc and not all of them were as diverting. I thought the ongoing plot device with his meet cutes with his biological mother was overdone too.

Good. Glad to have ticked it off.

69. A Short History Of Ireland 1500-2000 by John Gibney (Audible)

This was VERY dry, and the narrator had a very gentle voice so it was really hard to focus on and not want to fall asleep.

Probably got more history out of the John Boyne

Like others, I've been picking up books and then casting them wearily aside. I did manage:
130. The Night Visitor, by Lucy Atkins, which is a fairly standard psychological thriller - woman trembles at what a mysterious older woman may unleash - but with a strand of perfidious academia that I rather enjoyed.

Also just finished 77. A Christmas Cornucopia - still on offer for 99p and worth every penny for entertainment value. Best opening paragraph I've seen in ages:

"Picture a man sitting beside a dead tree. He is indoors and wearing a crown. From the ceiling hangs a parasitical shrub that legitimates sexual assault. He is singing to himself about a tenth-century Mittel-European murder victim using a sixteenth-century Finnish melody. Earlier, he told his children that the house had been broken into during the night by an obese Turkish man. This was a lie, but he wanted to make his children happy. Far away, in the high Andes two Peruvians are punching each other very hard indeed."

@LadybirdDaphne You got me with that opening paragraph, just downloaded A Christmas Cornucopia

Me too!

Sold!

I'm also currently dipping in to A German Christmas, which is a mix of traditional and modern stories from Germany, Switzerland and Austria (it says on the cover).

I've just bought A Christmas Cornucopia too. Sounds amazing!

I promise I am not receiving any sort of commission from Mark Forsyth or his publishers!

Another 99p from me - sounds perfect!

A few more from me:

LaRose, Louise Erdrich
Kicks off with a man accidentally shooting and killing his neighbours' son. They then 'give' one of their children, LaRose, to the bereaved family as a sort of atonement, apparently one of the 'old customs' in Native American culture. The rest of the novel explores what this and the shooting has done to the relationships between and within the two families, while also taking in quite a broad sweep of the families' histories and the wider culture.
At points I thought this shaded into poverty/tough-life porn; found myself thinking, 'Yes, I know some of your characters have hard lives and backgrounds and I get it.' It is also quite long and, with the ambitious historical and cultural reach, a bit rambling; at times it was hard to remember who everyone is and how they connect.
But overall I like Erdrich very much; she writes not quite like anyone else and her perspective is unique and original IMO.

The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane
Exquisite writing about landscape and history. He walks 'old ways' including ancient paths in the Himalayas walked by spiritual seekers and, fascinatingly, the 'roads' of the sea traffic around the British Isles and Europe in ancient times.

Shrines Of Gaiety, Kate Atkinson Much reviewed on here already. I agree it’s a good read in that her usual somewhat mordant and sarcastic wit is present and correct, as is the wryness and the sometimes delightfully surprising jokes. But I almost found it a bit TOO clever-clever sometimes, like she was constantly pre-empting the reader's response and making the joke or undercutting the pathos before you could. Trying a bit hard, perhaps. I also agree that the plot was basically a mess and in the end inconsequential. I did overall like the characters, though, and the colour, seediness and glamour of the era.

Christmas book does sound great!