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?

I liked Hear No Evil too @Passmethecrisps , with the same reservations as you. The signing was well done, until it wasn’t, but I too put that aside because the story was a good one.

20 All The Murmuring Bones by A G Slatter.
Have had this on my kindle for a while and had a choice of 3 mermaid-themed books to see me through this awful cold I’ve got. Glad I plumped for this one because it was marvellous!
Miren is the last of the O’Malleys, a secretive, once powerful family now near poverty, their seafaring riches diminished. The days when choosing one of your children, not naming them and sacrificing them to the Mer are gone, hence the downturn in the family’s fortune. Miren does not want to be a pawn in the family game and resists her grandmother’s efforts to marry her off to secure the future.
In the hands of a lesser writer this might have been swirly-covered rubbish, but Slatter has a wonderful way of making the extraordinary seem reasonable in her alternate universe. We meet the Mer, corpsewights, kelpies, gallowsghosts, werewolves, automatons with a spark of soul. Human nature is portrayed as more menacing than those creatures, as at least the latter has some sort of honour code Miren can work with. Men and harsh, scheming grandmothers on the other hand…….
I’ve only read short stories by the author previously and probably bought this novel because of one of them. Have ordered a print copy of A Path Of Thorns so I can dive into this world again.

@BoldFearlessGirl I’ve done a few courses with the Australian Writer’s Centre and Angela Slatter is one of their tutors (not for any course I’ve done though) so it’s good to hear her book is worth a read.

@BaruFisher she has a style that clicks with me, like Leigh Bardugo, Catriona Ward, Frances Hardinge and Laura Purcell. Writing in the same genre as Susanna Clarke, Stacey Halls and CJ Cooke but I can’t get on with them.

i love Catriona Ward too!

Having a pretty stressful week so I've given up on my Joan of Arc book for a while. Instead I read book 23, Beach Read by Emily Henry for some light relief. January and Gus are both authors and former rivals from their creative writing degree. She writes rom coms and he writes Serious Literary Fiction. They end up spending the summer in the same beach resort. They both have writers block so agree to swap genres and see if they can write like the other one. What could possibly happen?! Emily Henry is very much part of that slightly strange tik tok contemporary romance boom, but I do like her books, they tend to be quite knowing and self referential as well as fun and cute.

@TattiePants Lemn Sissay is very active on
social media if you want to keep up with him! I saw him speak at an awards ceremony a few years ago and he was brilliant.

Beach Read sounds like great fun @GrannieMainland

It is! I recommend Book Lovers by her too, very much in the same vein - a publisher and a literary agent end up spending the summer in a small town famous for featuring in a bestselling romance novel. They're both sworn off relationships. What could possibly happen?!

@GrannieMainland Joan was a DNF for me last year.

Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny - a collection of short stories by the author of Standard Deviation and Early Morning Riser based loosely around relationships of all types. For example, visiting an aged parent who mistakes his tiny hearing aid for a cahew nut. A "great husband" who is taking acting classes in the evening to pursue his dream job . These were all very easy reads and surprisngly consistent in quality. I often find contemporary short stoy collections dull so tend to avoid them but these were light and frothy and well crafted. Great for me as I have had a run of books I've read the first 4 chapters or so of and decided to give up on as life is just too short!

7. Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova
A bunch of grubby, deadbeat folk work in a grubby, deadbeat cinema. They generate a lot of semen, urine, blood and vomit in the process, and clean up aforementioned semen, urine, blood and vomit, as well as the semen, urine, blood and vomit of their customers. Some people die, naturally involving varying degrees of semen, urine, blood and vomit. I didn't really care. Say semen one more time for good luck though, eh Camilla?

I really liked Beach Read too and I have a heart of stone.

It is a little grubby @TheTurn0fTheScrew . I’ve only read a couple of chapters and thought the first one was meant to reflect the heading Midnight Cowboy, but the second one was squidgily unpleasant too.
I like a bit of faded grandeur populated by odd people, so I’m sticking with the sticky seats.

A few more Women's Prize books

The Dog of the North - Elizabeth Mackenzie
A newly divorced woman with a difficult family takes herself off in a campervan for a fresh start, but struggles to escape her needy family.

For me this is one of those books that you wonder how the hell it made the Longlist. It's readable, relatable characters, a bit of farce/humour, manages a bit of commentary on modern life etc, but is ultimately nothing exciting and a bit OTT by the end. A warning, in CCF style there's something nasty in the woodshed.

Realised I never reviewed

Memphis - Tara M. Stringfellow
Family saga spanning 3 generations of a black family tied to Memphis. They experience a lynching, domestic violence and child abuse, against a backdrop of the civil rights movement. They have a lot of love and resilience as a family. The author weaves in part of her own family history into this.

Despite covering some very emotional and difficult topics, it's sensitively done. Well drawn characters and covers a lot of social history without beating you over the head with it. I did get a little bored partway through, but I also read The House of Eve - Sadequa Johnson around the same time time which covers a lot of the same ground. Memphis is the more literary of the two, but is mentally heavier. HoE is more lightweight.

A few other books I've read recently that I liked. Neither anything special, but competent and engaging enough.

I Have Some Questions For You - Rebecca Makkai
Hello Beautiful - Ann Napolitano.

19 The Push by Ashley Audrain. Blythe had a difficult relationship with her mother, Cecilia, who in turn had a difficult relationship with her mother, Etta; the details of these are revealed by flashbacks. When Blythe gives birth to a baby girl she is worried about history repeating itself. Can she break the cycle? For me this started really well but went downhill in the second half. I thought the ending was a cop out too.

20 Brain on Fire: my Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan. A journalist at the New York Post, Calahan finds herself suffering from debilitating and inexplicable symptoms including seizures, paranoid delusions and problems with her memory and speech. This memoir details her illness and search for a diagnosis. Really interesting stuff.

21 Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. Obviously I'm very late to the party on this one, and I hadn't even realised what bardo means (it's the transition state between life and death). The book centres around the real-life death of Abraham Lincoln's young son in the early days of the American civil war, but takes a most unusual turn from that point. I listened to it on audible and I thought the narration was excellent. I also learnt more about Lincoln (my knowledge was shamefully lacking considering how famous he is) along the way. I know this book is a bit marmite, but I really enjoyed it and I can see why it won the 2017 Booker (although not as good IMO as other recent Booker winners Milkman and Shuggie Bain).

@SapatSea did you manage to get an advance copy of Games and Rituals? I didn’t think it was out yet, but I'm really looking forward to it. KH's particular humour exactly chimes with me, somehow, though I know she not for everyone.

@Terpsichore I've just checked my Kindle and yes, it is an ARC Kindle Doc. Sorry, I try not to post ARC reviews here. Sadly it's not a physical copy or I would share. Just checked Amazon page and the hardback and Kindle versions are released 18 April.

I really like KH's humour too. Loved Early Morning Riser (and SD).Have you read her debut collection of stories *Single, Carefree, Mellow"? I've put it on my Kindle Wishlist on the basis of this collection.

No, don’t worry, Sap, I was just curious! I noticed in an article about KH that she’s married to a Brit - apparently he used to work for MI6…! I always feel there’s something a bit wry and English about her sense of humour. Yes, I’ve got Single, Carefree, Mellow on the dreaded tbr pile 🥴

No.14 Trespasses - Louise Kennedy
Much reviewed on here of late. I'm in the 'highly rate and recommend' camp. I don't think it's a prize winner though.

25 Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

This has been on my TBR list for a while as I wanted to learn more about the recent history of Northern Ireland so thanks to whoever pointed out it’s free with Amazon Prime.

This begins with the abduction of Jean McConville, mother of 10, who was taken from her Belfast home in the early 70s, never to be seen again. It then widens out to encompass the tragedy and violence of life in Northern Ireland during The Troubles and the resulting Good Friday Agreement. Keefe focusses on a handful of characters such as Jean McConville, Dolours Price who planted a car bomb outside the Old Bailey and Brendan Hughes an IRA Commander. For those of us that grew up in the 70s and 80s listening to news about the Maze prison, hunger strikes and Gerry Adams this will be all too familiar. I found the parts about Gerry Adams particularly interesting. He was an integral part of the Provisional IRA and very involved in their bombing campaigns and murders but managed to whitewash his image and distance himself from the violence to become a politician/ president of Sinn Fein.

26 A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

A YA book about family, friendship, love, grief and guilt that I tore through and read in one sitting. Thirteen year old Connor has divorced parents; his dad lives in America with his new family and his mum is ill and the treatment doesn’t seem to be working. Connor’s been having the same nightmare since his mother became ill and now there is a monster visiting him at the same time every night. This is beautifully written and I could barely see the words for the last 30 pages for the tears - full on ugly crying!

27 The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

This had me gripped from the first page. Maali is a Sri Lankan war photographer who wakes up dead in the violent and disturbing ‘In Between’, an afterlife populated by the thousands of people killed and tortured during the civil war. He has seven moons (7 nights) to remember how he died, who killed him and to communicate with his friends as to the whereabouts of his most important photographs before he moves on ‘To The Light’. This is written in the second person so might not appeal to everyone but I loved it’s chaotic energy and the insight into a war I knew little about. I’m currently listening to Lincoln in the Bardo and probably should have spaced the books out as there are similarities between the In Between and the Bardo.

24 Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? - Mark Fisher

A short, but powerful and reasonably accessible anti-capitalist polemic examining the phenomenon of ‘late-stage capitalism’ (it was published in the wake of the late-00s banking crisis) and arguing that it’s not the only way of organising our society, even though it may appear inevitable. This really resonated with me (particularly the internalising of control within modern businesses) and I found lots to think about.

@TheTurn0fTheScrew great review of Children in Paradise 😂 it’s cemented my view that I definitely don’t want to read it!

on the other hand, I’ve reserved Beach Read on BorrowBox - thanks in advance to those who recommended it (assuming I like it 😄)

34 The Museum of Ordinary People by Mike Gayle

I needed something light-hearted and feel good after ploughing my way through Mr Biswas, and this came in my feel good book group box this week and definitely delivered an easy feel good read. I liked that the topic was somewhat different and less predictable than most easy reads, and it was also well written.

Just finished Book 12 (the shame!) which was Sathnam Sanghera's Empireland. I like the premise of the book and agree with lots of his points about education. Some of the stories were horrifying. I actually had to put the book down at one point.

However, I found his writing style a bit tortuous - longwinded and rather rambling sentences which were hard to follow, and very long paragraphs. It's a short book but quite a labour intensive read.

I enjoyed reading the Amazon reviews by the Professionally Offended.

@Piggywaspushed I started his book marriage material once and gave it up for the same reason. A shame as I always enjoyed him as a columnist

(the writing style I mean! Not the content, sorry, that wasn't clear)