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?

@TattiePants

I also properly, properly wept at A Monster Calls - Patrick is a lovely man as well, met him a couple of times

Today, I read an excerpt from Suzanne Haywood’s book Wavewalker: Breaking Free which is released in April. I was absolutely boggled by her story and she writes wonderfully - I will definitely add this to my reading list

Yes, I added that to my wishlist this morning too @Passmethecrisps

I read that too @Passmethecrisps - debating buying it right now even at hardback price, I just wanted to know more. But I'll try and restrain myself and just put it on the list. I might read What Does Jeremy Think which is hers as well I believe.

Along with The Peking Express by James Zimmerman - sounds great from the review at least though I'll get the Kindle sample before splashing out

I loved The seven Moons too @TattiePants and Lincoln in The Bardo though I did read them a couple of years apart.

Your review of Children of Paradise made me laugh @TheTurn0fTheScrew but I really liked it despite the abundance of bodily fluid.

22. Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky. This is about a newly retired classics professor, Richard, in Berlin (originally from the East but it's set in modern day). Richard is quite bored by his retirement and loss of purpose. He becomes aware of some African refugees who have been protesting in a square in Berlin but are being moved to an old nursing home, and decides to go and interview some of them. The book them follows Richard learning more about the refugees and their journeys, as well as the problems that they have with their paperwork. He becomes more embroiled in their lives which gives him a sense of purpose. I thought this was good drawing parallels between the border in Berlin and those that the refugees have to deal with as well as ancient history - Seneca and Plato feature, and Richard gives the refugees classical names. It's a slow burner rather than a page turner, and Richard is quite a dry character, but I think it's one that will stay with me.

17 Les Années - Annie Ernaux (in French). I read this following recommendations on this thread, and I really enjoyed it - after a slow start I got used to her writing style (and maybe my French vocabulary improved a bit too, as I found myself looking up fewer words as I got further through!). It was a great way to understand a bit more about French cultural references, especially with its focus on the female experience - it was a bit like having a long conversation with my mother-in-law (or more likely her older sister, who is closer in age to Ernaux). And by the time it reached the 90s and early 2000s I was able to compare my own experiences of the world events she mentions, as a Brit and 40-odd years younger. I found it both sad and hopeful - reassuring that everyone goes through the same sort of feelings and life changes, while at the same time a bit depressing.

The thing that struck me most was the extent of the changes in the first 40 years of her life (from the war years and poverty in the 1940s to the consumer culture of the 1980s) - it feels like so much more of a difference than in the 40 years since I was born! And it was interesting to read the book at a time when France is going through another series of strikes and demonstrations like the ones she mentions - lots of similarities and some explanation for why the French are so resistant to the pension age reforms.

i don’t know firsthand what the translation is like but from the comments I’ve read on here and Goodreads it sounds like it’s very good. And I enjoyed reading it in French, if only for the achievement of having done so! I did let a lot of the cultural references wash over me, as I could have spent days going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, and it suited me to just take bits of it in rather than looking everything up - I still know more than I did before I started! This probably gets a bold from me - I’ll see how I feel when we next do our start-of-thread lists.

15. Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Thank you to everyone raving about this. I raced through this as fast as I could given I am on a weekend away with my cousin and trying to be polite. I am now going to add TJR back catalogue to my wishlist as I am sure I want to read everything else she's written.

So true to life of rock memoirs and really engaging. Also, it the mess we were heading towards wasn't the mess I predicted and I loved that.

33. How to be Champion: My Autobiography by Sarah Millican

As a fellow north-easterner, who is slightly rotund and wears glasses, I feel a bit of an affinity with Sarah Millican and generally find her quite funny. This book takes us through her life, with a bit of advice thrown in along the way. I felt like it ran out of steam towards the end but generally I really liked it and laughed a fair bit. Sarah seems like a lovely, funny, down to earth person with some of the same struggles as the rest of us.

25 Souvenir - Michael Bracewell

Short, impressionistic book that evokes the sights, sounds and smells of London in the early 1980s. As someone who grew up in the capital during this time, I enjoyed the passing details of places like the old Virgin Megastore at Tottenham Court Road, but found the lack of narrative structure a bit frustrating and would have liked a bit more to get hold of.

21 Children Of Paradise by Camilla Grudova
I quite liked this. Aimless, disaffected youth trapped in minimum wage jobs in a crumbling cinema. Bit of supernatural tension, interesting undertone of film history. Probably a bit too much vomit and minging toilets, but then the public as an entity are pretty gross, especially when you’re the one who has to clean up after them.
Wouldn’t describe it as ‘prize winning’ but a quick and largely enjoyable read, especially if the chapter headings instantly put an image in your head of the film. Some beautiful descriptions scattered among the litter. Andrew reminded me of Simon Pegg in the Black Books episode where Manny goes to work for the large bookshop chain

@DuPainDuVinDuFromage do you have any recommendations for where to buy french language books from? I 'd like to get back into reading in french again

(I did try and find time to get to a bookshop last time I was in France but the children had other ideas )

@SweetSakura unfortunately I don’t have any useful recommendations - I go to our local library (I live in France). I would guess you can get hold of most things on Amazon France but I’m not sure what the charges are like for ordering to the UK post-brexit…

@SweetSakura I‘ve inherited a pile of paperbacks in French. One or two duplicates among them. If you’d like to PM me your address I’m happy to put a few in the post

7 Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel
Alison (kind, plump, unassuming) is a medium, working the circuit of psychic fayres with the aid of her assistant Colette (cold, thin, assertive) in the final years of the last millennium. Colette, having taken Alison's business affairs in hand, brings her employer up-to-date and increased her earning power. Things earthside are going well. But Alison is plagued by her spirit guide (Morris), a nasty character from her past, and she is forced by degrees to remember her horrific childhood and the extreme unpleasantness that surrounded her home life as Morris invites various "fiends" to tag along and make Alison's psychic life as unbearable as these hideous men from her past can contrive.

I enjoyed this one, it's an easier read than the Wolf Hall trilogy in some ways, but more difficult in others. It's obvious to the reader that Alison was raped and mutilated by the fiends while they were alive, with her mother's full knowledge and consent. Alison has managed to block the memories but the process of remembering the terrible things that happened to her is painful, as is her eventual recollection of the retribution she exacted. There are moments of humour and touching portrayals of human emotion and protective relationships between women.

15. The End Of The World Is A Cul De Sac by Louise Kennedy
Short story collection from the author of Trespasses. These stories are all set in Ireland but not the same time period as Trespasses - this is the post financial crisis Ireland of unfinished housing estates. The writing grew on me and I'm not sure if that's because I got used to the style or because I didn't connect with the first few stories but preferred others later in the book. One of the blurbs on the back describes these as "downbeat, stirring, disconcerting, punchy, touching, believable short stories". This is not a cheery read - these are lives that have drifted off course, characters who are lonely and isolated and not necessarily in control of their own futures. I enjoyed it - it was good to read at most a story a day and allow a little time between each.

16. The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
This is nonfiction with an expansive reach. Henrietta Lacks was a black woman living in the US - born in 1921, died of cervical cancer in 1951. During her cancer treatment, doctors removed cells from Henrietta's tumour which were used in tissue culture and became named HeLa. These cells reproduced and thrived in ways that scientists had never really seen before. Cells from the HeLa line still live today and have been used in a huge variety of medical and scientific research over the past seven decades. In this book, Skloot intersperses chapters about the science of Henrietta's cancer treatment, the history of HeLa cells and the many ways that they have been used since (with lots of science but also looking at medical ethics) with research about Henrietta's family history, her life and the lives of her children and grandchildren who Skloot got to know personally. I listened on audio and found I sometimes couldn't take in the details about time periods as the narrative jumps around a little. There is so much in this book that it is hard to absorb it all, and personally I started to let some of the science wash over me while finding the family history and social history aspects more interesting. It's a really interesting read. I think the thing that will most stay with me is the extent to which doctors and researchers either didn't think they had to ask permission/gain consent/explain themselves clearly or did so without any appreciation of whether what they were saying was actually understood. The kind of nonfiction that opened my eyes to things that I'd never thought about and didn't know.

If you’re near London, the Institut Francais certainly used to have a bookshop (I used to visit to pick up Camus books as a poncey A Level French student)

Agatha Christie- Lucy Worsley
I know her style divides people on here but this is the first of her books I’ve read and I found it very accessible and thoroughly enjoyed it. I knew much of Christie’s life story already - I can just about remember her dying but there was plenty here to keep me entertained. I’ll definitely read another Worsley.

My Cousin Rachel, Daphne du Maurier

What more can I add to the du Maurier love really. This was a page turner (not as much as Rebecca) where we are constantly questioning motives, truth and lies. I loved it. For those not familiar, Philip is brought up by his bachelor cousin Ambrose, Ambrose gets married then dies, his wife Rachel comes to Cornwall and we are constantly wondering who to trust. I thought du Maurier really brought alive the disdain that some had for the continent in the 19th century, but I had to suppress a sigh when ‘savages’ were mentioned. Looking forward to reading more.

30) Fat Man on a Roman Road, Tom Vernon
This is a 40-year old paperback picked up in a charity shop and then ignored for ages, till the Taming the TBR thread motivated me to give it a go. It ended up being just what I was in the mood for - a tour by bike from Devon up to Scotland. The author was recording for the BBC as he went; he was accompanied by a producer who arranged accommodation and set up interviews along the way, so he talks to the oldest resident/practitioner of traditional craft/other noteworthy inhabitant and it's not exactly a typical experience, but he's a genial companion who writes well. Spring is springing and I'm in the mood for an expedition; I read this mostly on a day-trip by train to walk part of the Cleveland Way, and this was the right read on the right day.

A couple of Women’s Prize longlist reads that didn’t impress me too much:

1. Wandering Souls, Cecile Pin, 3/5

This story of how Vietnamese refugees (‘boat people’) came to Thatcher’s Britain is very much worth telling, and clearly resonates with the author’s personal history. However, the characters and the historical context never really came to life for me. The narrative voices do become more convincing as the story approaches the present day.

1. Stone Blind, Natalie Haynes, 3/5

I have a longstanding obsession with Medusa (in pre-modern lit especially), and regrettably, I didn’t feel that this book added a great deal to the myth. To be fair, there is such a rich body of literary thought on Medusa (I’m thinking for example of The Medusa Reader, edited by Marjorie Garber, which includes landmark pieces by Freud and Hélène Cixous and so on), that I think it’s quite difficult to come up with a new take. The figure of Medusa as feminist icon is very much there already in Ovid’s version of the myth (she's a beautiful woman who gets raped in Poseidon's temple), and Medusa has had a spate of fascinating afterlives, as plentiful as the snakes on her head (!). So I felt that Haynes retold the myth more than she transformed it. However, I really liked the ending, and what Haynes did with the figure of Medusa’s mother, and with the relationship between Medusa and Athena.

I haven’t read Children of Paradise yet, but I’m loving the various reviews, especially your review, @TheTurn0fTheScrew , which made me lol.

I’m super keen to read Wavewalker by Suzanne Heywood; the Guardian extract was great. Weirdly my DH knew her at uni (postgraduate) and really liked her as a person.

@DuPainDuVinDuFromage I love your review of Les Années!

@Sweetsakura I get my French books mostly from amazon.fr. I’m rather ashamed of this, because Amazon is so unethical as a company, but the books are relatively cheap and tend to arrive fast, even post-Brexit. Perhaps there are other French companies you can order from (eg chapitre.com?), but amazon.fr is easy and tempting. I suspect it’s because of amazon.fr that my local Blackwells has stopped stocking most French books, because it’s not financially worthwhile for them to compete, which is a shame.

BTW I love My Cousin Rachel. I covered myself in glory by choosing it for my local book group a few years ago, because everyone loved it, ha. Frenchman’s Creek has been on my TBR list for ages.

Oh ffs I see MN has botched my numbering. Never mind.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit
Have you had your email from Mr B yet for this month's book?
I haven't yet (getting worried).

Yes! I've had both the teaser and the request for feedback

I'd email them, they seem very friendly

@cassandre Lovely review of Stone Blind. I've read The Laugh of the Medusa by Cixous and found it really interesting. I don't much enjoy modern retellings though, and am a bit bored by all the vogue for this.