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?

Well, I'll be making a support purchase then, fucksake poor bloke

I have Empireland already (and also loved Topknot as I had a very close relative with schizophrenia). What a load of arseholes.

Wow, I take a few days away from the thread and come back to discover you're all discussing dinosaur porn!!

A Lady's Guide to Scandal - Sophie Irwin this is by the same writer as last year's A Lady's Guide to Fortune Hunting which contained no surprises but (for me) was light and frothy and an inoffensive fun read. I thought this would be in the same vein with added shock and scandal but it didn't work - really plodding narrative and dull, characters. It was so forgettable that I can't even remember the heroine's name.
It follows our late 20's year old heroine who had to marry a severe, rich old man to save her family's fortunes but who was really in lurve with his nephew.The old duffer has died and his nephew has inherited the estate whilst the deceased has surprisngly left our heroine a lot of property so long as she doesn't incur any scandal!
The only scandal is that the publisher's thought it good enough to release! It was probably written in a rush to cash in on the first story's success and the "Bridgerton" effect.

The thread took quite a turn. I've heard of Japanese octopus porn, so I suppose it's not too much of an, ahem, stretch. (Truly sorry).

Arising hurriedly from the gutter, thanks for your review of Cuddy, Bold. I've now reserved it at the library. I've been in Durham and also on Holy Island over the last few months, so this appeals.

Recent reads, not particularly demanding:

61. Curtain, Agatha Christie
I don't think is her best, but it does have some poignancy as she bids farewell to Poirot.

62. Buried for Pleasure, Edmund Crispin
More Golden Age crime. I read it less than two weeks ago and can't recall anything about it, but I was amused at the time. Doesn't take itself seriously, lots of arch jokes.

63. Pratchett's Women: Unauthorised Essays on Female Characters of the Discworld, by Tansy Rayner Roberts
I have a temporary subscription to Kindle Unlimited so I'm trying to get value out of it before it expires. These are essays written by a fan rather than an academic. They're a bit basic, but it was nice to revisit Discworld for a bit. Haven't read the books themselves in years.

64. Tea is so Intoxicating, Mary Essex
Published in 1950. A man decides to open a coffee shop in a village, which promptly resents it. His wife despairs and begins to think that she should never have left her first husband. This author was wildly prolific under various pseudonyms, although I hadn't come across her before. It's quite good fun, in that mid-century style of being catty about its characters.

65. Forty is Beginning, Ursula Bloom
The same author as 64, just a different pseudonym. A forty-year old spinster teacher has a win of the pools and decides to kick up her heels and go to the south of France, where life suddenly gets a whole lot better. I'm fond of books about women throwing caution to the winds and starting something new. This has shades of Enchanted April and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day but is weaker than both those books because it leans too heavily into the wish fulfilment. By the time our heroine has won multiple fortunes in the casino and been courted by a number of dashing men, it loses any shred of credibility. There's a certain amount of fun along the way though.

66. The Time Hunters, by Carl Ashmore
I think someone upthread might have mentioned this series of children's books involving time travel. Good clean fun for the commute, although now I'm having second thoughts about the dinosaurs briefly encountered.

There's a whole line of books out there based on the premise that dinosaurs still exist but disguise themselves as humans and walk among us (how I've no idea, the mind boggles) there's apparently a whole detective series featuring a dinosauor disguised as human detective.

Chuckling away at the dino porn, I feel like I've lived a very sheltered life. @BadSpellaSpellaSpella that sounds like the 80s TV series V.

Disappointing that the Davina book was such utter tosh. Naomi Potter is actually good, I've followed her for a few years now and she's been really helpful with tips about getting GPs to listen to you.

@BaruFisher have you read Still Life by Sarah Winman? There's a bit in there about EM Forster writing A Room With A View in Florence. I thought they'd be good companion pieces.

Dino porn? Well, it certainly puts nun fiction in the shade…

Anyway moving away from strange dinophilia...

Just finished Strong Female Character by Fern Brady. This book is more about autism than about the comedy circuit , and less about her Scottish childhood than I probably wanted, although I appreciated the stuff about Protestantism and Catholicism in Scotland. A fellow MNer gave me this book- thank you!

I don't think I would have picked this up myself. I haven't heard of Fern Brady.

I thought the book would be funnier to be honest. It's very frank, quite shocking in placing, usually interesting but a bit self absorbed. I am sure Fern would tell me why that is!!

I liked the details on her relationship with her mother the most.

I have Children of time on my kindle, I am not exactly arachnophobic but I don't love spiders. Will put my big girl pants on and read it.

Giggling in the gym at dinosaur porn. Luckily in my head so I don't have to explain to anyone what's so funny!

@Piggywaspushed I read that recently and my opinion was pretty similar to yours. I find Fern really funny and was surprised that the book was so straight and it was very frank!

89. The Second Sight Of Zachary Cloudesley by Sean Lusk

This is my Mr B for this month and I don't know what I will say to them to be honest

I maybe had a bit of prejudice towards it due to its Unusual Quality Of Whimsical Name title but it got of to a good start enough

Zachary Cloudesley is a different and special child, there is a wacky spinster Aunt, a nonsense salt of the earth servant, and a grieving father who despite being forewarned by his second sight son gets involved in a chess game he should have avoided. They are all good characters but all have the whiff of derivative of other things, Betsy Trotwood is a prime example.

It's very readable and there is to a degree a plot but at the same time felt to me to be plotless and aimless, I can't really describe it, it's like there's characters and those characters change locations and that's the plot.

This is the 3rd Mr B I haven't liked - they'll be talking about me in Bath, This Bitch That Can't Be Pleased

But I am being honest I doubt I will remember any of it by the end of the year.

Jamilia, Chingiz Aitmatov trans. by James Riordan

This has been in my online basket, not even list, for possibly years. I was having a tidy and decided it was cheap enough second hand to buy. It turned up and is very short, 98 pages, so I put everything else down.

This is set during the Second World War in Soviet Kirghizia, today’s Kyrgyzstan. The story is told from the pov of Seit, a young boy who is now the breadwinner as his brother’s are away at war. Jamilia is his SIL and he witnesses her affair with an injured soldier. On the front it is referred to as the greatest love story, and it is about love but because we see everything through Seit’s eyes we don’t see the romance. The love isn’t limited to the couple, it’s about family, respect, land and art. I really enjoyed this and thought the perspective was interesting. In my head I kept imagining two actors from my dad’s home country playing the characters so it really came alive.

47. We Were Liars by E Lockhart

YA. The narrator is a teenage girl, Cadence, from a very rich family. Her grandfather owns a small island, and every summer the whole family holiday there. Cadence is in a close group of 4 with 2 cousins and the nephew of an aunt’s partner.

On one of the summers, when Cadence is 15, something traumatic happens, leaving Cadence with amnesia.
Two years later, Cadence returns to the island again for the summer, and starts trying to remember what she’s forgotten.

I think it’s supposed to be a heart wrenching surprising tragedy. It’d probably be more effective if I was a teenager. But it’s one of those ones where you can see which way the big reveal is going from quite early on through the book. And I know that most teenagers can be reckless and impulsive at times, but there’s some extremely brainless behaviour going on when the traumatic event happens.

@StColumbofNavron

I read that some years ago now when I was trying to read more international books. I remember only now that it was expensive in Waterstones and I ended up feeling ripped off.

I read at least the first of a series of 3 books featuring a dinosaur PI with a serious basil habit (rather than cocaine, alcohol or other drugs....) - Anonymous Rex. The other books are Casual Rex and Hot and Sweaty Rex.

28 The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O’Farrell
I was very relieved to enjoy this - I’m a long-term Maggie O’Farrell fan but had an adverse reaction to Hamnet. Lucrezia is a daughter of the Medici house, married off at the age of 15 to the superficiallly charming but ruthless Duke Alfonso of Ferrera. I felt fully absorbed in Lucrezia’s experience - it gave a real sense of what it must have been like to be a quietly spirited, artistic girl forced into a life of constrained obedience with the sole purpose of becoming a brood mare. It was a little short on plot, and I had issues with the ending, but it’ll be a bold for me.

29 An Emotional Dictionary - Susie Dent
A-Z exploration of the meaning and etymologies of words connected (sometimes a bit loosely) to the emotions. Not something you could read much of at once, but entertaining enough if you’re a fellow word-geek.

Favourite fact: ‘befuddled’ originally meant ‘drunk’; to ‘fuddle’ was to go out on the lash; and the pub was the ‘fuddle shop.’

I meant Duke of Ferrara not Ferrera!

For those talking about Empireland, it’s 99p on daily deals today btw.

@Stokey I haven’t read Still Life. The only Sarah Winman I’ve read is If God was a Rabbit (I think that was the name) when it first came out and I wasn’t keen on it. I do keep seeing her mentioned positively though so maybe this is a good motivation to give her a second chance. I’ve added it to my wish list!

@Mothership4two it is definitely worth a reread. My favourites of Forster’s all those years ago, were A Passage to India and Howard’s End so I’ll have to give those a pair a reread too!

Howard’s bleeding end. Only connect. Only connect. It gets right on my tits.

😂😂Gotta love Rita.

@LadybirdDaphne in my first job in Yorkshire our Christmas party was a piss-up in the office that we called the Fuddle, I've never heard the term before or since and I'd never made the connection to the word 'befuddled'!

33 Percy Jackson and the lightning thief - Rick Riordan I got this out of the library for the DCs (partly inspired by discussions on these threads) but they weren’t interested, so I read it myself 😄 lots of fun, and lots of Ancient Greek myths shoehorned in. I’m quite tempted to read the rest of the series, and I’ll try it on the DCs again in a couple of years…

Thanks!

I've been keeping up with the thread but failing to post - not much meaningful reading going on here between work & enjoying the good weather in the evenings. Also bemused by the Dino porn

I have finished a couple of things though

43. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - Our year of seasonal eating, by Barbara Kingsolver
    Didn't enjoy this as much on a re-read as I did back in 2007 when it first came out. I think the food politics message, while still obviously relevant & important, has been addressed in an awful lot of books since then. I did like the bits about their gardening / smallholding, & the recipes, but it was a smaller proportion of the book than I'd remembered.

44. Wavewalker by Suzanne Heywood
    There's been lots of publicity around this memoir of Heywood's childhood spent onboard an ocean going yacht, & her difficult relationship with her parents. I had this on audio, and enjoyed it more than @Owlbookend who reviewed it upthread, I think it probably worked better in that format.

It's a rather more complex story than comes across in the excerpts that I read in the papers. I can imagine that another child might have found it a far more enjoyable experience, and it seems that her brother did feel quite differently about the time they spent sailing. Having said that, her parents obviously had a pretty rigid view of gender roles, which can't have helped.

I think one reason I enjoyed it is that I've known a lot of families who bring up their children in unconventional situations (travelling / living in community / home schooling etc) and I thought this was an interesting reflection on the pros and cons of a childhood outside of regular social norms. Again, I think whether it's on balance good or bad often depends on a child's personality & how family relationships work as much as the situation itself.