50 Books Challenge 2023 Part Two

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the second thread of the 50 Books Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2023, 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.

What are you reading?

Bringing my list across and adding a couple of new reads:

1 - Cloud Cuckoo Land/Anthony Doerr
2 - The Plot/Jean Hanff Korelitz
3 - We All Want Impossible Things/Catherine Newman

The two new ones are:

4 - His Secret Daughter/Melissa Weisner. Got this one in Kindle Unlimited and couldn't put it down. A very emotional quick read, and definitely not high-literary fiction, for those who prefer that, but tugged on the heartstrings and kept me turning the pages. I really enjoyed it.

5 - The Family Remains/Lisa Jewell. I love Lisa Jewell and loved this one. A sequel to her Family Upstairs, but I had forgotten most of the details of that and this did a good job of reminding me.

I am laughing at some of the posts about On the Road. I absolutely adored it as a teenager but suspect it would be very boring and disappointing if I tried again now...

@Natsku Fully agree about Leave the World Behind. Great start and set-up, really disappointing ending.

@Boiledeggandtoast funnily enough, I was in a bookshop earlier and picked up a compilation of entries from Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, the definitive text when it comes to first hand accounts of the period. It reminded me just how fantastic a writer and reporter he was. Have you read it? It’s heartbreaking, strange and gripping simultaneously.

Years and years ago I bought a 4-volume facsimile complete set and I’ve never got round to doing more than dipping into it - I must make 2023 the year I read the whole thing properly.

@womanwithbooks I've got TFR on my tbr pile too! ❤️

I've finished a couple of books over the weekend:

8 A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe
I bought this after the glowing reviews on the previous thread and it didn't disappoint. William has just qualified as an embalmer as the Aberfan tragedy happens and he volunteers to help prepare the children's bodies for their families. His time in Aberfan, together with events from his childhood, have a traumatic and lasting effect on his life that he struggles with for years.

9 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak
The book begins with Leila, a prostitute in Istanbul, who has recently been murdered and her body dumped. Each minute after her death she recalls a different memory from her childhood - her birth, family, friends, food she ate, how she became a prostitute and ultimately, her death. I loved this part of the book, the descriptions of her village and later life in Istanbul were rich and the characters well drawn. The final third however was a let down. The author moves away from Leila's 'Mind' and focusses on her 'Body' with her five friends desperate to give her a decent burial. This part became almost farcical with one friend off their head on vodka, another on prescription meds, a police chase etc etc. For me, the two parts of the story just didn't gel together.

@Terpsichore London Labour is well worth a read, it's so well written and the descriptions stay with you. I did have Vagabonds on my TBR but may resist (for now).

I'm afraid The Reading List was a DNF for me, at the moment anyway. I might come back to it later this year but it didn't grip me beyond the prologue.

Glad @JaninaDuszejko and @womanwithbooks have nice comments about On The Road - me "loved it"

everybody else "boring and pretentious"

Me getting a complex :

I think we had a discussion last year about "reading to impress boys", didn't we? I was in love with a boy who was in love with Jack Kerouac. It was never going to work out, but I read and made notes on On The Road one week in the summer holidays and memorised quotes then turned up at a party ready to chat about it and found him kissing my mate in a cupboard.
Don't feel inclined to go back to it. I still wish I'd hurled the quote about the world not healing until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness at him as I left but - as always - it only occurred to me at 3am then next day.

You're welcome, @coolmum123. I hope you enjoy it 🙂

Many thanks Terpsichore. Mayhew's work was oft cited in Vagabonds and sounds a much better bet. I've added it to my wish list.

RomanMum If you do get round to Vagabonds I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts!

Oh dear, I seem to be well behind on the discussions already.

Anyway, I’ve finished:

8. The Beautiful Visit - Elizabeth Jane Howard
Read for the Rather Dated Book Group. Another author I hadn’t read before, and, again, I’ve clearly been missing out. Very accomplished for a first novel. The narrator, living in genteel poverty, tries to find a purpose (and an income). A bit episodic, maybe, and I was surprised by the ending.

Now reading Spare, but I think I’m going to have to alternate with something else. Clearly not On the Road or Labyrinth.

His loss @PepeLePew!

@PepeLePew we did indeed.
(Heart of Darkness seemed to be a favourite of pretentious wankers who made us cry iirc)

I've started Anatomy of a Scandal (thanks to my random number generator on the Kindle tbr mountain)

@CoteDAzur I love Baroque music too. And I am frequently amazed when listening to the Kings Singers on Youtube - David Hurley has the most incredible voice

3/50 A month in the country by J.L Carr.

This is a short novel that I'd had on my TBR pile for some time and would probably never have picked up had it not been for this challenge and the fact that it is only 100 pages long! I found it quite hard to read in places, and quite dated (it was written in 1980) but I'm really glad in the end that I did.
The book is set in 1920 but told by the narrator and main character years later, in old age. Tom has been in the trenches in the war and is suffering from shell shock, what we would now call PTSD. He's told not to talk about it, and time will heal. He receives a commission to spend a summer in a village in the Yorkshire dales, uncovering a medieval wall painting. The book is about the people he meets and the work on the painting, and the incredibly happy time he has, that he thinks back to again and again throughout his life. It includes lots of church details (nave, transept etc) and descriptions of inks and tints that would have been used in 15th century England. Both Tom and another man working in a field by the church are clearly deeply traumatised. A book written now would make so much more of this, so in many ways the book typifies how men were supposed to deal with shell shock - by not dwelling too much on it. There is a wonderful conclusion to the story at the end, which I wouldn't want to give away.

7 The Suspicions of Mr Whicher - Kate Summerscale I had always assumed this was fiction, but it’s actually a non-fiction account of an 1860 murder and the subsequent detective investigation. A small child is killed in a country house and all the inhabitants are suspects; the Mr Whicher of the title is one of the first police detectives, who is sent by Scotland Yard to investigate when the local police make no progress.

The book covers a lot of wider background in addition to the case itself, and one of the things I found most interesting about it was how the case, and the detectives, informed the literature of the 19th century - Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and others. I learned a lot and it helped put the 19th century novels I have read into context (not to mention Vimes’ Ankh-Morpork, for Discworld fans).

Overall, although it was good, it wasn’t quite good enough for a bold, as it was a bit of an information dump at times and never quite fulfilled my expectations. Worth a read though, if you’re at all interested in murder mysteries or detective fiction.

Agree re information dump. I thought she wore her research heavily and there was a lot of padding.

I really enjoyed Mr Whicher @DuPainDuVinDuFromage but be warned! The Haunting of Alma Fielding by the same writer is abysmal.
There was an 80s mini series docu-drama on Constance Kent that you can still see bits of on YT.

Cool - a fellow Baroque fan!

I had not heard about Listen Davies, but I'll check him out now. My current favorite is Damien Guillon, who often sings with his group Le Banquet Celeste.

Thirded on Mr Whicher being an information dump. Expected to love it, but found it duller than it had any right to be.

Glad it’s not just me! I’ll avoid the Alma Fielding one, thanks @SolInvictus !

@dontlookgottalook there's a movie version of A Month in the Country starring Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh. I saw it in the cinema back in the '80s. I've never read the book though.

@dontlookgottalook A Month in the Country is one of my favourite novels. It was the first book I heard discussed on the Backlisted podcast, back in 2018 - and discussed on this thread that year too I believe.

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein

The fourth book in the quartet. Loved this series, although in the last two books there were bits of 'must fit this in well known event so my characters can react' so we have Lenù returning to Naples in time for the earthquake and Lila refuses to let the children play outside because of Chernobyl. But generally it was both intelligent and excellent on the complexities of a long lasting friendship while still managing to be compulsive reading.

I read The Suspicions of Mr Whicher a couple of years ago. At the time we were living just a few miles from Road (or Rode as it is now) and I know the area quite well, so it added another layer of interest for me. I found it fascinating and got the feeling that Constance was very much not the guilty party in that family. She lived an incredibly long life in the end.

It was the first book I heard discussed on the Backlisted podcast, back in 2018 - and discussed on this thread that year too I believe

It was the very first Backlisted book too, @Waawo. That was podcast No 1 - they’re on 177 now!

Re Mr Whicher, I remember harrumphing a bit when it came out that all the publicity trumpeted it as a 'forgotten case' - but it wasn’t. The Constance Kent case is one of the best-known Victorian crime mysteries and there have been a couple of TV adaptations and at least one fictional version of it (Act of Darkness by Francis King). I was less than impressed by the Summerscale book as I was expecting it to reveal some stunning new piece of research that proved definitively that Constance did or didn’t do it (I have my doubts too), but all she did was rehash the known facts.

Amazing that Constance lived until 1944, though. I wonder if she ever told anyone what really happened that night.