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?

That makes it sound a lot less threatening @StColumbofNavron Love the idea of a chapter a day to allow time for other reading. I think that’s what I’ll do. Thanks!
At the moment I’m caught between W and P/ AK/ Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov but don’t think I’ll start until Sept/Oct maybe so I’ve plenty of time to decide.

I was a bit sceptical about Lessons in Chemistry. I genuinely thought it was all about a cooking show. But I have just finished it and loved it. I have form for hating books I buy on a whim in the supermarket shop but this one worked out. I think it's a lovely , warm, kind hearted book. And I loved the dog. And Wakeley.

The English Patient is definitely one of those rare books that was a better film. I am in awe of how anyone managed to adapt it so well.

Thanks for all the congratulations messages, everyone.🙂 I've also registered with the OU to study my English Literature degree and I'm registered on my first module. I start early next Year. 🎉

Now up to 32 on my list:

'The Book Lovers Retreat.'- Heidi Swain.

Sometimes, a book grabs you by the heart and grows to mean everything to you. That's what Hope Falls means to Emily, Rachel and Tori. So when they get the chance to spend a whole summer at the cottage when the film adaption of their beloved book was filmed, they know it's going to be the holiday of a lifetime.
Spending six weeks away will give them a chance to re evaluate their life choices. For Emily, it will give her time to decide where her career will go, whether to stick to her 'safe' job or to make her dream career in fashion design a reality. Rachel had to decide weather to move in with her partner. When Tori has has to drop out of the trip at the last moment, her place on the holiday is taken up by Alex, another devoted hope falls fan.

But when Alex turns out to be not what Em and Rachel are expecting, the holiday takes an unexpected turn, and as the holiday develops, so does their friendship. Will things ever be the same again?

I really enjoyed this. It's another 'chick lit' read with a great plot and fantastically plotted and paced. I loved the main characters and the realism of the story. I loved the way that important subjects and situations were handled too, such as death, grief and coercive behaviour in relationships. HS is definitely one to read and I highly recommend this ❤️

Currently reading 'So Pretty' by Ronnie Turner ❤️

Dying of Politeness - Geena Davis. Fun to read memoir, but there's no revelations and I thought the book could have been more compelling if she'd written a bit more about her personal life. But I liked her sense of humour and there no boring bits.

Platonic: How Understanding Your Attachment Style Can Help You Make and Keep Friends - Marisa G. Franco. This was a fascinating look at why, in general, society devalues the nature of friendships and how the ways we attach to others impacts who we become friends with and why. I found this terrifically insightful and very helpful to join up some dots in my own life. But I feel the author was let down by her editor because the book needed many more sub-headings and as a result the book doesn't flow quite as much as it should have.

Shrines of Gaiety - Kate Atkinson. Now, pretty much any other author, I would have given up after 100 pages, but I kept thinking 'Kate Atkinson wrote this so it has to improve'. But it didn't. I can't even summarise the book as there were so many stories going on and way too many characters. This was so unengaging it made me think she may have been unwell when she wrote it. This is possibly the most disappointing novel I've read to date...what a shame.

@ICrunchCrispsNotNumbers that is so exciting. I did my UG and MA as a mature student and have never regretted it, one of the best decisions I ever made. Good luck.

Thank you @StColumbofNavron 🙂 i'm very excited! I've studied my HR qualifications as a mature student too, and it's been fantastic ❤️

30 Effects Vary by Michael Harris Cohen

Short, unsettling story collection, author new to me. Think I saw it recommended on the Ginger Nuts Of Horror FB page or similar.
Very high standard for an ebook by an unknown author, with the word ‘eerie’ at the forefront of every concept. Several of them will stick with me, including ‘The Three Of Us’ and ‘I Pay You’.

Siege and Storm
I decided to continue with the Shadow and Bone trilogy. This one was okay, but not as good as the first. It felt too Hunger Games/Twilight in its 'Oh I love him, but he hates me, oh but maybe I love the other one too, but he's an evil dick hellbent on trying to destroy the world' sort of way. I also thought it was a bit derivative of the Red Rising series too. Having said that, it was readable enough - decent enough bath time reading and I'm going to move on to the third.

If I put my mind to it, I can finish Queen Victoria tonight but fuck me it's dull.

71. Queen Victoria by Lucy Worsley

Fuck me, this was dull

😂😂

That made me laugh! Well done on finishing it despite it'd dullness.

18. Sorrow and bliss – Meg Mason I’m late to this and my feelings are ambivalent. Whilst I loved the writing (punctuation issues aside) and the very wry tone she used while dealing with the thorny topics of mental health and family dynamics, the major blocking point for me is her refusal to actually name the condition that Martha is supposedly suffering from. It just feels like she couldn’t be bothered to finish the job. It literally says ‘She has ___ .’ To me this reads as = insert whatever mental illness you think best fits her symptoms here, because the author won't commit. Lazy. And somehow very disrespectful to anyone dealing with mental health issues (those who are sick and those who are caring for them). Which makes no sense because otherwise the novel appears to be a very warts-and-all approach to depicting the trauma of living with ‘this condition’.

Louise Kennedy - Trespasses
From my draft review, written straight after finishing: "I'll be honest, I'm a bit meh about this. It's okay, it kept me reading to the end, although there was a moment (no spoilers!) straight after the thing that had been obviously going to happen since almost the start of the book, happened, that it nearly became a DNF."
In the week or so since finishing though, elements of the story have stayed with me and are continuing to reverberate. It's hard not to give spoilers, but Kennedy imo brilliantly makes Cushla a kind of unreliable narrator, directing the reader's sympathies where they wouldn't naturally go. A lot of other reviews have focussed on the backdrop of the Troubles, but this feels like a universal story to me - people are people pretty much everywhere.

Kwame Alexander; Dawud Anyabwile (ilus) - The Crossover
I'm still new to graphic novels and tend to just pick one at random from the library whenever I am there. This story of basketball playing twins is okay, it's well drawn and there is a lot of almost poetic use of language. What I have noticed already is the spectrum of graphic novels, from things like this which have a lot of words and might once have just been called "illustrated", to others where the words are sparing and the panels themselves convey a lot of the story in drawing alone. It's exciting though, almost like learning to read again. Downside of my local library's selection is, most are Marvel/DC type superhero things which don't really interest me - aware that that preference cuts out a huge chunk of the graphic novel canon lol.

53. Good Girls, by Hadley Freeman.
The author's account of her experience with anorexia. This was okay but felt like familiar territory, maybe because I previously loved Laura Freeman's bookish coverage of the same topic in The Reading Cure. (Odd coincidence in surnames).

53. Sad Cypress, by Agatha Christie. A young woman is in the dock for murder. It's an open-and-shut case. Can Poirot shed a different light on events? Not one of her best, although I succumbed to the misdirection as always.

Have given up on Hags: The demonisation of middle-aged women, by Victoria Smith. I'm exactly the demographic she is writing for and I do actually agree that tropes such as Terfs and Karens are used in an attempt to silence us, but for some reason, this isn't resonating with me.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I think Lucy W is a terrible writer. Amazed you managed to slog through to the bitter end.

Ruin and Rising
The last of the trilogy. Again, very derivative and annoyingly adolescent but also very readable and some nice stuff about friendships and love. If any of you have teenage readers, I’d recommend these to them. Definitely better than The Hunger Games and Twilight.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie I haven’t tried her books, but I don’t take to her documentaries. I happened to be at a festival last week where she was the final act, talking about her new Agatha Christie bio and I went because I had a weekend ticket. The queue to get in was insane and when she came out of the Green Room to use the facilities people went mad (well as mad as a bunch of history geeks go). I did quite like her talk, which I was surprised by. Queen Victoria might have lived in interesting times, but I don’t think she is that interesting and I’m not aware of any new material that suggests she could have done something different to what other biographers have done before her.

@bibliomania Interesting on Hags - I’ve had two false starts with it on Audible and decided it’s too ‘dense’ for listening - it’s moving too fast for my brain to absorb it on the go, I need to be able to pause and reflect. I’m almost the target audience - she’s writing for Gen Xers whereas I’m a (very) geriatric millennial - but I’m close enough to female middle age to be concerned by the issues she’s raising.

@Waawo I am finding that with Trespasses. Cushla is annoying me, even though I can see why she’s doing what she’s doing. I want to hand her a grip. The other characters are a bit one dimensional, too. I’ll stick with it, because I want to see how it pans out but if I left the book on a train I probably wouldn’t buy another copy.

32. Horse by Geraldine Brooks. This is broadly about a racehorse called Lexington in the 1860s in Kentucky, and the slave Jarrett who looks after him. Interspersed with the historic racing tale, is a modern story set in 2019 where a black PhD art history student Theo finds a portrait of Lexington that his neighbour is throwing away. He meets a white museum curator Jess who is restoring the bones of an old racehorse, thought to be Lexington. There's also a couple of interludes I'm the 1950s tracing the history of the painting that take in Jackson Pollock. I really enjoyed the old story but found the modern parts a bit jarring. Maybe the research was worn a bit heavily, and I'm not sure how well the whole racism angle was dealt with. It felt a bit obvious and clumsy in places. Other parts I really loved, and found very moving so I'm a bit divided. I do often find in novels with two timelines, one is more compelling than the other. Interested to know if others have read this.

@StColumbofNavron

I’m not aware of any new material that suggests she could have done something different to what other biographers have done before her

Basically this. It was even light on her relationship with her children which I'm sure LW did a doc about in recent years.

I also have the Agatha book but am somewhat put off now

I have Worsley’s Queen Victoria on my TBR pile - but I’ve enjoyed others by her so hopefully I’ll enjoy this one. I haven’t read lots about Victoria previously so it won’t really matter to me if Worsley isn’t saying anything new. I’ve also seen her talk in person a couple of times and really enjoyed it and I like her TV work.

I DNF Trespasses about 40% through. It wasn’t that I thought it was a terrible book, but I wasn’t particularly engaged by the story and there were other things I wanted to read so I didn’t see the point in plodding on. It was probably just the wrong time to read it. I did find the lack of speech marks annoying though.