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?

@Tarahumara

I'm also off to Morocco but later this year, winter sun!

22. The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis
    Newton arrives on Earth on a mission from Anthea, his home planet. As he becomes rich making and selling his advanced technology he becomes more and more jaded.
    A bleak, but compelling story of alienation.

23. The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
    When a girl vanishes from the beach odd, reclusive Ted who lives at the end of Needless Street is a suspect. As the years go by the missing girl's sister becomes determined to find out the truth.
    If I'd known this is partly narrated by a cat I would probably have been put off but it actually works well and I found the book very absorbing. It's a creepy gothic mystery and I didn't fully work out the truth of the story until the end.

24. The First Time Lauren Pailing Died by Alyson Rudd
    As a child Lauren has glimpses of other realities that are not quite the same as this world. When she dies she shifts to another version of herself, and the story splits following Lauren and each of her parents in different realities.
    I liked the idea but Lauren is a very boring person and the writing style is quite distant so I never really empathised with any of the characters. The plot's quite aimless and it got a bit confusing with so many people being the same but different in alternating chapters.

45. Fairy Tale by Stephen King

PepeLePew reviewed this yesterday, so I won’t recap the details about the plot and Charlie’s quest here.

I’d agree that Charlie wasn’t the most convincing of characters. Too good to be true’s a good way of putting it.
But, as usual, King tells a good story, which makes it easy to overlook that and just enjoy the ride.

@Tarahumara I'm one of the adventure travel lovers!

I went on Amazon looking to buy Adventures in Morocco but actually chose Walking With Nomads instead as I've seen that mentioned in a couple of places instead.

Both are 99p but I refused to buy both due to self imposed rules about not buying books quicker than I'm reading them (it's not working this week)

87. We Had To Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

So I added this to my Wish List some time ago, this is Amazon's blurb :

Kayleigh is broke. Out of options, she takes a job as a content moderator, reviewing horrors and hate online and deciding which posts needs to be removed. Kayleigh is good at her job, and in her colleagues she finds a group of friends, even a new girlfriend. For the first time in her life, the future seems bright . . . But soon the job begins to shift Kayleigh’s world in alarming ways. In the glare of the screen, how long can Kayleigh hold on to her humanity?

I was totally up for this book, great, timely, original. Got it for 99p. Bargain. God am I so glad it was a bargain. Firstly, it's only 138 pages long so no value for money, and over before its even begun. And it's so poor I would have felt absolutely cheated.

The book promised by the blurb doesn't really exist and it's mostly about one woman obsessing over another woman at work, and the concept of these people being worn down as humans by the shit they have to watch is very much background noise.

An utter waste of a real opportunity for storytelling.

Tempted by that one too @RazorstormUnicorn - I look forward to your review!

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit sounds like a good idea wasted in the execution, shame.

33. Dear Fatty - Dawn French

Continuing with my trilogy of funny womens' memoirs, this is written in the style of fictitious letters to important people in her life. Some of the chapters were quite short which made for easy reading in a spare moment. The book was moving in places and as I didn't know much about Dawn French's life it was informative, but it was published in 2008 so obviously a lot has happened since.

Emma Watson by Joan Aiken
Another of her Jane Austen series, this served me well through insomnia last night. I liked it well enough. She clearly knows her Austen and a couple of the characters were very believably Jane-ish. It did get increasingly silly though and I thought the ending was a bit lazy.

@RomanMum

Totally I want to read a book that claims to exist and doesn't

@Gingerwarthog @MegBusset

For my Mr B I got The Second Sight Of Zachary Cloudsley by Sean Lusk which I think was on Between The Covers recently

Mine’s Nick Hunt Walking The Woods And The Water - subtitled ‘In Patrick Leigh Fermor’s footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn’.

Given that I put PLF as one of my very favourite writers, I can see why they went for this! Will give it a go once I’ve finished current (excellent) Philip K Dick biog and The Full English which I’ve just got on Libby.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

This revenge comedy is inconsequential fun that relies on a lot of consequence. The talking dog was not as annoying as I thought it would be. But I whizzed through it.

@MegBusset
@EineReiseDurchDieZeit
My Mr B is Red Love( The story of an East German family) by Maxim Leo, which looks intriguing.
I read Stasiland by Anna Funder several years ago and was absorbed by what she had to say about how people functioned in the GDR and what you had to do to survive.
Hoping this will be in the same vein.

@MegBusset

Oh PLF!

Out of nowhere a long time ago Amazon recommended me In Tearing Haste his correspondence with Deborah, Duchess Of Devonshire. PLF would write these long descriptive letters and put so much work in and Debo's short responses would be like Dinner with Famous People Ghastly evening. MUST DASH. It was quite comical and I was like :

Who Is This Absolute Icon?

And it was the gateway to my Mitford obsession - not read a PLF since. Where to start?

@Gingerwarthog

That wouldn't be something I'd necessarily run for so a lot will depend on your review

17. Vietnam by Max Hastings
I have finished it! Weeks if not months of ploughing through it. But that's very much my tattered concentration span, not the fault of what seemed to me a very fine and comprehensive account of the war. Better than his WWII books I think because much less reverent (Hastings was a young journalist at the time and was evacuated from Saigon in April 1975). Lots of personal and horrific accounts by participants. Recommended.

Looking forward to the review of Red Love which is on my wish list.

Just bought this in today's Kindle sale. I don't remember seeing him mentioned on here, but the Guardian, Observer and Torygraph all gave it rave reviews.

I was about to say that I had Red Love on my wishlist, but then I realised I read it a few years back. Looking back at my review I enjoyed it, but would have liked more of Leo's own story. In fact, I see that you got the Kindle sample back then Remus

Thanks @sadik. I have no recollection of whether or not I ever read the sample!

2 short tales by Paul Gallico read tonight:
The Snow Goose
The Small Miracle
Gallico wrote Mrs Harris Goes to Paris which I adored. These 2 very slight little stories are sweeter and sadder, especially the first which went in a direction I just hadn’t anticipated. Glad to have read them. They’re moving but imo manage to avoid moving into mawkishness.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit Everything PLF wrote was pure joy but the best of the best is A Time Of Gifts imo.

31 Babel: or the Necessity of Violence - R F Kuang This got slightly better after the first couple of hundred pages, but I still didn’t like it. Yes, it’s set in an alternative reality, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that everything about the four main characters screams 2020s American student despite them supposedly being products of early 1800s English imperialism, living in Oxford in the 1830s. It was very hard to care about any of them, especially as the plot got sillier and more grandiose. But the worst thing was that it is just so preachy! The message is rammed down our throats with no subtlety at all, and the whole book is an exercise in telling, not showing. I could rant more but instead I’ll just say that I agree with all the 2-star reviews on Goodreads. Not recommended.

38 I Am Alive And You Are Dead: A Journey Into The Mind Of Philip K Dick - Emmanuel Carrere

Extraordinary and brilliant biography of the SF author. It’s not a straightforward facts-and-figures account of his life, rather a kind of semi-fictionalised account which portrays Dick’s search for making through his life and writing. I found it totally immersive and compelling and would give it a hard recommend for PKD fans.

I'm falling behind on my reviews but I started Our Wives Under the Sea on @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie's recommendation and loving it so far.

Not sure if I just missed these in the 99p deals on the 1st but just bought:

Build your house around my body, Violet Kupersmith
Wolf Among Wolves, Hans Fallada
The Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill
The Book of Night Women, Marlon James
On Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
The Age of Innocence, Edith Warton

@TattiePants I have to say On Human Bondage in a Scouse accent (‘Sounds filthy, doesn’t it?). Ten brownie points if you understand this reference!