50 Books Challenge 2023 Part Four

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fourth 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, the second one here and the third one here.

What are you reading?

@PepeLePew I adore the Wolf Hall trilogy. For me it was a new way of writing historical fiction - no 'forsooth' or 'my liege' type nonsense, just straight in with people speaking and thinking in a way I found recognisable and relateable. I liked that it was very psychological and showed how the characters were navigating and controlling events. The second one especially felt like a thriller.

I'm now in a reading slump. I started Joan by Katherine Chen but it's not really gripping me and is in hardback anyway so I need something on my kindle to carry round. But despite having many, many books downloaded I don't want to read a single one of them. Woe is me.

I'm going to read the second book in the Wolf Hall trilogy this year. I thought the first book was very cleverly written and I enjoyed the intrigue once I got into the story. It presented a really vivid picture of the time. There was so much attention to detail, it was impressive.

I'm nearly finished The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, with just a few chapters left. This was very good, particularly Helen's narrative. It is a strong statement on marriages of convenience and how women bore the brunt of men's bad behaviour and dissolute lifestyles and the powerlessness they experienced. Helen is a wonderful heroine. Very pious, very strong-willed, absolutely no nonsense about her.

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh

Good to see a new member of the Tenant fan club

Definitely! I should have read it years ago.

22 Master Georgie - Beryl Bainbridge

Oh, I absolutely loved this. Covering eight years in the life of ‘Master Georgie’ of the title, in the run up to the Crimean War, through the eyes of various people in his life, it’s subtle and sparing but very, very effective and moving. She’s right up there with Mantel for quality of historical fiction imo and it’s outrageous that this didn’t win a Booker.

Thank you for the good health wishes all. I've managed to make it out of bed today and with any luck will be okay for college tomorrow. 🤞

@SweetSakura I have cerebral palsy and suspected fibromyalgia and have had a couple of really bad flare ups because of it. I'm trying to study a CIPD diploma at the moment, which I've been finding so hard with everything going on. At least I can still escape into reading!

So, to my recent reads:

30. 'The Other Eddie Trimmer.'- Jacqueline Wilson.

JW was the first author I ever read, so her books have a special place in my heart. This book is about a young girl who travels to the Victorian era where she had to fend for herself as an orphan. I found this a easy, escapist read. And the historical detail is on point.

*31. 'I'll Never Tell.'- Philippa East
*
This is a psychological thriller about the a so called 'Perfect Family.' Comprising Julia, a workaholic lawyer, Paul, her stay at home husband who's sole purpose seems to to be propelling his daughter,Chrissie, a talented violinist, into stardom. Well written with lots of twists and turns, which lots of well known characters.

Currently reading 'White Teeth.' By Zadie Smith.

I hope you make it to college tomorrow @ICrunchCrispsNotNumbers . It's tricky juggling study with health. There's a diploma related to my work that I would like to do but I am not sure my health is stable enough yet. I might just be being a coward though - it's so long since uni and I am secretly worried I have forgotten how to do exams! I admire anyone brave enough to study

I'm glad to hear that ICrunchCrisps!

Thanks to Southeast for new (or now not so new) thread. I'm behind with reviews as usual but here a few recent ones.

7. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, 5/5
   I haven’t read Dickens since I was young, but I wanted to read Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (a retelling of David Copperfield) and so I decided to read the Dickens first. I loved it. I had forgotten how much humour there is in Dickens. I think at some point I decided he was a syrupy sentimentalist and went off him, but in fact he’s more complex than that, and he can do biting satire. The first part of this novel is particularly funny. Even if some of the women characters are far too one-dimensional (Emily and Dora and Agnes), the portraits of characters like Betsey Trotwood and the Micawbers are amazing. I was upset that Emily as a ‘fallen woman’ was so self-flagellating and so full of self-hatred. But in general, I really enjoyed the first-person narration and David’s ‘retrospectives’ on his past, filtered through the haze of memory. Btw @@ChessieFL I'm with you on the love for the marauding donkeys!

8. Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver, 4/5
   I suspect my reading of this novel suffered due to the fact I’d just read the Dickens and enjoyed it so much. Kingsolver has written an original and moving book, and I admire her ingenuity in reworking the Dickens story of poverty and hard times. It was fun to pick out the characters and episodes she reworked – I feel like there should be an internet chart somewhere, ha, that lays out all the parallels. One example of an episode that worked really well was the portrait of two young addicts in love trying to run a household (a riff on a young married couple trying to run their own household in Dickens, and doing it very ineptly). That said, I never fell in love with the narrator (even though I admired the consistency of his voice), and I was disappointed in the way some of the complex characters in Dickens (Steerforth, the Micawbers) were much more straightforwardly unpleasant in Kingsolver (Fast Forward, the McCobbs). So some of the nuance was lost. Also, while I think Kingsolver’s focus on the opioid crisis is a stroke of genius, I found some portions of the novel to be too heavy-handed and didactic. In short, though, I’ve been a fan of Kingsolver for many years, and this is an ambitious and interesting addition to her body of work.

9. Homesick, Jennifer Croft, 5/5
   A beautifully written novel/memoir, short enough to read in one go. I find it hard to separate out my own subjective response to the novel from a more intellectual objective one, because I identified with this story a lot (being home schooled in middle America, going off to a state university young, studying foreign languages as a way of finding freedom and expanding one’s world). As @FortunaMajor noted, the UK version of this book is different to the US one, shorter and with simpler narration I believe (the US one has a kind of double narration). Perhaps the UK version is even more powerful because it’s simpler? I don’t know. However, I was gripped by the book enough to order the US version as well, which has photographs rather than just descriptions of photographs. Croft has made an interesting move by focusing on the childhood relationship with her sister instead of the relationship with her (clearly somewhat wacky and inadequate) parents. Incidentally, Croft is a famous translator who is married to another famous translator, and they have recently had baby twins, and the photos on Twitter are super cute!

10. Lucy by the Sea, Elizabeth Strout, 5/5
    I always find myself gripped by Strout’s novels, and this latest one is no exception. It’s about the pandemic, and people’s loneliness, and the connections they manage to make with one another nonetheless.

@SweetSakura I hope so too. I used to work in admin/customer service and am retraining in HR. I've already got my certificate and now studying for my diploma. I've missed a lot of college and haven't been able to submit all my assignments yet, which I've been upset about. My tutor has been fantastic, though.

I want to study a degree too. I've wanted to study English literature since I was young, but haven't had the opportunity to do it yet. As thinking about doing it though the OU, but won't be able to do it until early next year, as I want to get fully better. Keep your degree in mind, but wait until you get fully better so you can get the best out of it ❤️

I am so glad your tutor is being good - flexibility and understanding is the key. And OU sounds like a good idea for a degree, they were very good at getting my friend through her law degree despite illness.

You are right - I need to be patient!

@cassandre I have read a couple of Elizabeth Strout 's books and loved them. I think I might need to order Lucy by the Sea now

I'm also a big fan of the OU!

SweetSakura, I hope you enjoy the Lucy book if you do read it! I know some people on the thread prefer Strout's Olive Kitteridge books to the Lucy books, but I like both. Lucy is someone who lived through a very difficult childhood and came out the other side. If she were on MN, she would probably be on the Stately Homes threads, ha!

Someone on these threads, I forget who, was asking about books that feature older people as protagonists, and Strout definitely fits the bill. She writes about older women really well. I think Lucy is in her 60s in this book.

Just looked it up@cassandre I have read my name is Lucy Barton, is it best to read oh William too first, or does the book work as a stand alone?

I did read Oh William! first, and I really liked that one too, but I think Lucy by the Sea also works fine as a stand alone.

If you want to start from the very beginning, the first Lucy book is My Name Is Lucy Barton, where the primary focus is on Lucy's difficult relationship with her (dying) mother.

The second Lucy book is Anything Is Possible, but that one is a collection of interlocking short stories, with Lucy as an occasionally appearing secondary character.

However, any of the four books can be read on their own.

Ah fab thanks Cassandre

@SweetSakura yes, I am too. She's been great 👍 I'm hoping to apply to the ou in the summer to start next February. That's very good news about how they dealt with your friend. That gives me hope 🙂

I hope your health gets better so things can get back on track and you can do your degree. Sending ❤️ and

It was me.and ive read them.and loved Lucy. It was just so straight.no big Harrah,plot or twisty bits for the sake of it just the telling of a really normal but therefore really interesting ladies life and all that came with it.

Mary Lawson may be another one to try if you like Elizabeth Strout. I really liked A Town Called Solace, one of the main characters is an old woman who makes friends with a young girl. It's beautifully written.

I went to uni part time at 28 to get my degree and only left last year (early 40s now) when my PhD stuff didn’t work out due to bereavement, pandemic and other boring stuff. It is hands down the absolute BEST decision I ever made. I genuinely felt that I got a piece of myself back after having kids and stuff and felt a sense of accomplishment I hadn’t felt in years. I’m still involved because I cannot quite leave and go to the odd seminar etc and have continued to talk research with various faculty members.

What I’d love is a good online OU type offering for Comparative Literature as I’d like to branch out from the English Language canon, even if in translation.

Total digression.

In book news I managed to get work book club to vote for My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier for the coming month which I am very excited about having love Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek a year or two ago (the latter will go down as one of my favourite reading experiences ever).

I have a few of the Elizabeth Strout books too, but not sure where to start, is it Olive Kitteridge?

24 The Wilderness Cure by Mo Wilde
Read (very well) on audible by the author, this tells the story of her year from November 2020 living on wild foraged food.

I was interested to listen to this one (recommended by @agnesmartin earlier in the thread) & to compare to The Wild Life by John Lewis Stempel which I read last year, in which he recounts a year living only on wild food caught or foraged on his 40 acre farm. (Summary: he ate a lot of rabbit and was rather glum.)

Wilde's book is more interesting, in that she uses the project much more explicitly as a way to explore what hunter gatherer peoples in her part of Scotland might have eaten through the year. Unlike JLS she doesn't restrict herself to her very immediate local area, though on the whole she doesn't travel far - but she goes to the coast at certain times of the year to gather seaweed, to the woods when mushrooms / berries are ready etc. She's a bit on the cosmic side (lots of talk about Gaia), and when she veers off into politics I was less impressed (even though I'd agree with her opinions, she absolutely is guilty of cherrypicking statistics to support her point). But when she talks about foraging, and the way that diets would have varied over the year, she's fascinating.

Adds Frenchman's Creek to my Wishlist.

Yes! Making a note of Frenchman's Creek too.* I must read that Lucy book too at some stage. *

I picked this up a couple of weeks ago in my second hand book haul. Think I’ll bump it up the TBR list after reading your review.