50 Books Challenge 2023 Part Five

[Southeastdweller]

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

What are you reading?

Eine I always feel there’s a big gap in my reading as I can never think of any feelgood recommendations! I’ve found The Vanishing Half and Once Upon a River effortlessly readable this year or you could turn to Pride and Prejudice or Harry Potter?

I've read both of those Cornish

I am definitely considering a Potter reread

@bibliomania @MegBusset

Thanks for the suggestions - something I forgot I bought has arrived today and it's ticking the boxes and happily I can't wait to get started !

I keep getting daunted by the length!

Monte Cristo is fun but goes on forever, it’s the reason i only managed like 23 books a few years ago!

What book post did you get, @EineReiseDurchDieZeit ?

Anyone got their Mr B’s subscription for May yet?

A book I loved as a teenager! Let's see if it holds up

Not yet on the Mr B Meg I'm looking out for it though thinking this weekend

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Bought this because dd was reading it. A YA fantasy thing that was a bit derivative but gripping enough. I quite enjoyed it and would read another (assume it’s the first in a series) but it was quite adolescent in the’Girl gazes into his eyes and realises she loves him’ and ‘Girl slides to the floor in sorrow and rage’ style of Hunger Games etc.

69. Among Friends by Caroline B Cooney

My favourite book aged 12/13 only took me an hour to read. Some of you may recognise the authors name from the Point Horror series. I was inspired by @InTheCludgie 's retro posts and tracked it down for 89p
Someone else also remembered this book on last years thread and I can't remember who.

A group of wealthy American teens are given a diary writing assignment in English

Jared and Ansley are the IT couple

Paul is the mysterious outsider

Emily, Hilary and Jennie have been friends since they were tiny. Jennie is gifted and talented and often singled out for praise. Resentment breeds and then spills over into bullying.

What are their private thoughts?

Amazingly I still rate it and recommend to those if you with teen girls and friendship issues

It's also a bit Dawsons Creek in terms of how mature they all sound, I definitely felt like a bit of a Jennie growing up as an adult though nobody would be that personally honest about their feeling's knowing a teacher is reading it!

Busy month at work, so sticking mostly to light reading:

34. A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer
    This tells the story of the marriage between impoverished peer Adam Deverill, and wealthy merchant's daughter Jenny. The match is put together by Jenny's father, and an older friend of Deverill's - to give the former a title, and restore the latter's fortune.
    
    This is a bit of an atypical Heyer (though both Deverill & Jenny have a fair bit in common with the leads in Unknown Ajax ) but one I've come to appreciate more as I've got older. It's a lovely story of an arranged marriage succeeding through kindness, generosity and mutual respect.

35. Beach Read by Emily Henry
    I can't recall if it was this or her other novel Book Lovers that was recommended on here. Enjoyable romance/chicklit, & I've reserved a couple of her others from the library, though I found her sex scenes rather cringeworthy & skipped them after the first couple.

I’m in a reading slump, I’ve been reading The English Patient since last Friday and still haven’t reached page 100. I wished I hated it as at least it could be a DNF, it’s just not exciting me enough to want to pick it up. When I do read I’m managing 10-15 pages then putting it down so it feels very bitty and disjointed.

Just checked and it was 2020 that I got stuck on Monte Cristo for about three months and thus only read 27 books that year, despite not being allowed to leave the house for most of it 😆

@TattiePants

I much preferred the film

I finished it but wished I hadn't bothered. Very dull and not worth the effort overall imo.

I’ve never watched the film either. I’ll stick with it a bit longer and maybe read something more appealing alongside it.

@MegBusset, I think I had my worst ever reading slump during the peak of lockdown and after. I finished a book in April (had read most of it before 20 March) and the next in September. And it wasn't the books that were the problem, it was me. I gradually picked up pace after that and eventually finished 46 books, but that's fewer books than in 2007 when DS1 was born in May, and I probably read half between January and about 15 March.

My memory is that there were weeks when I read the same page 20 times and then put the book down and got distracted.

Eine I don’t know that book by Caroline B Cooney but I loved her The Face On The Milk Carton series.

@MamaNewtNewt it wasn't me! But I also got the Mhairi McF recommendation from this thread, I've read a couple of hers this year and have more on my kindle ready and waiting.

29 Strong Female Character by Fern Brady

I didn’t know much about comedian Fern Brady as had only seen her on panel shows and Taskmaster, but I like her laconic delivery and quirky clothing. Turns out beneath that is a woman who has struggled to balance her ASD needs with finding a path that makes her happy and this autobiography is raw, honest and still bloody funny a lot of the time. She doesn’t sugarcoat her behaviour or excuse it, just explains it.
She has a lot to say about women and girls with ASD and how they often lack support or diagnosis. Or basic understanding in many instances.
It covers her early life - school, mental health unit, university, strip clubs, starting out on the comedy circuit - but skips over the establishing of her comedy career. I would have liked more anecdotes about this period, but I totally get why she left it out. She’s very careful to disguise identifying details about people in her life and I suppose the comedy circuit is too small to do that effectively.
There’s a lot about self harm, strip clubs and violent meltdowns, so there’s that to be aware of if they might be an issue, but I appreciated her frankness and it definitely doesn’t read like self pity or misery porn.

From “oh yeah, her off Taskmaster” I’m now fully Team Fern and I hope we see more of her work in what can be a superficial, self-congratulatory arena.

It may have been me who recommended Mhairi McFarlane I’ve read pretty much all of her’s and remember mentioning it. Another one in a similar vein I think are Johnathan Harvey although he maybe reminds me more of Marian Keyes.

I’ve finished the Richard Osman’s
21 The Man Who Died Twice and ..
22 The Bullet that Missed

Both back to back and after The Thursday Murder Club which I mentioned upthread.

Definitely diminishing returns and the third in particular seemed to give up on making even the slightest bit of sense with the ‘twist’. However, I’m having a bit of a crappy time - nothing major just struggling a bit - and listening to all three on audible has been a fun and comforting escape. The switch of audible narrators was a bit jarring for the third. I listened a lot during night wakings/ struggling to get back to sleep after DD woke up for the fifth time so it was all a bit blurry round the edges and probably why I didn’t mind the plots being a bit daft (increasingly so over the series).

Does anyone have any recommendations for audible reads/series I can use as an escape/ wind down now the above are finished I’d be very grateful. Nothing too taxing/ complicated whilst I’m not firing on all cylinders, something with similar warmth between the characters, and a really good narrator?

@AliasGrape I've just finished Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks on audible which I loved, but not sure it fits the warmth, not too taxing category. It's about a young woman Ymaye who lives in South London at the end of the 70s, and goes clubbing to various dub nights with her friends. She falls in love with a guy from Jamaica, Moose but then things go wrong. It ends up going from London to Bristol to Jamaica and taking in themes like black history, police brutality, riots, spirituality, all against a backdrop of music and MCing. I joined audible to listen to this and really recommend it. I think it's leapt into first place on my Woman's Prize shortlist, but not sure if reading it would have made such a strong impression. I've still got Black Butterflies & The Marriage Portrait to go.

I've got one credit left to use before the end of the month so if anyone can recommend something else that works especially well as an audiobook, please tell me.

@AliasGrape if you enjoyed the Osman books try The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood which has a similar theme (there’s also a sequel but the name escapes me). Can’t comment on audible versions of them though as I haven’t listened to them, only read them.

Just dipping in to say that if anyone's a fan of Michael Connolly's Bosch books but hasn’t read his Mickey Haller 'Lincoln Lawyer' series (which is tangentially related - Haller and Bosch are half-brothers), the Kindle deal today includes a bumper book of three Lincoln Lawyer novels for 99p. That’s a decent deal!

A re-read of teen favourites is always a gamble isnt it, but that's great you still enjoyed it Eine. Caroline Cooney was one of the Point Horror authors I never got on with, I think it may have been her writing style IIRC. There are a couple of her books, Twins and Freeze Tag, on Overdrive so I'm going to give them another bash and see how I get on this time round.

I'm almost finished reading Trespasses and while I've not been hooked and she's a bit of an annoying graduate of the Sally Rooney lack of speech marks school, it's been engaging enough. Agree with the earlier chat re Davy, what a little sweetheart he is.

@AliasGrape if you like fantasy I've enjoyed several of Naomi novik's books on audio. Temeraire was particularly good narration, but I also liked both Spinning Silver and Uprooted