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?

@satelliteheart

As the resident Mitford boffin, Take Six Girls is the most dross book out there.

The definitive book is. Letters Between Six Sisters edited by Diana's daughter in law Charlotte. You can't beat them in their own words

😱🫣

No!!!!
We’ve still got stacks of Thomas and Friends books and DVDs left over from my DCs train phase 😬🫣

The It Girl - Ruth Ware Like others, I enjoyed this.
DNF however, The Death of Mrs Westaway by the same author.

Mummy was a secret Drinker - Clare Pooley
Blog turned book. SAHM realises she is drinking too much and stops blogging as she goes. This made me think of Bridget Jones, the author clearly inhabits the same sort of social circles as Bridget and indeed mentions her early on.
In her own words she is “middle aged, over educated, over privileged, (formerly) overweight Mum of three who had a long love affair with high priced, good quality wine”
A different world to mine and I rarely drink but there was a lot of stuff to think about here. You can’t help warming to her.

Currently enjoying Adventures in Morocco - Alice Morrison
I envy women who can move to a different part of the world and make friends and integrate themselves into life there. @So1invictus it sounds like you’ve done this and a good friend has recently done the same and moved to Italy on her own.

starts blogging as she stops I really should proof read.

I have created a monster...

@BestIsWest oh dear, I’ve got Mrs Westaway waiting for me on BorrowBox…

Not quite sure what to say about all the dinosaur and train porn 😲😂

@satelliteheart I find the Mitfords fascinating and really liked The Mitford Girls by Mary S Lovell which I have read a couple of times.

Mary S Lovell wrote an excellent biography of Bess of Hardwick. Thanks to that I completely bored my family talking about her as we went round Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth.

My mum's friend Sheila did the guided tours of Hardwick. Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall. 🤣 My neck of the woods when I'm not here.

Back to train porn- as a very small child DD blamed everything in the house on "Donald" the train who, rather oddly, identified as a girl train.

Those days are long gone obvs, but I made HUNDREDS flogging all the fuckers on eBay.

@BestIsWest 😍 today is a weird one. Berlisconi came to power just as I moved here, and he's gone and died! The telly is very interesting today. Bit like QE2 but with more rewriting of history. We've just been told about him bringing down the iron curtain. 🤔 (I think that's to compensate for all the left wing students spamming SM with photos of him at parties with Putin)

Yes if you're going for biography rather than autobiography the Lovell is miles better

I was just reading about Berlusconi! I can imagine!

I also like Lovell's biography. I like her writing more generally, she wrote a great biography of Jane Rigby that I picked up in an Oxfam bookshop. I was delighted when Rigby rocked up in the David Tennant ' Around the World in 80 Days' and I was telling everyone all about her before she was even identified. Yes, they were not interested.

38 Material Girls by Kathleen Stock
Clear-eyed, compassionate and measured addition to the debate on modern Trans issues. I am aware this is a divisive subject so I won’t go into the details of what I personally liked about it, but I will say it did at times challenge this gender critical feminist reader.

@Passmethecrisps oh, I hope you like Cuddy then! I know what you mean about it making you think of your MIL - I still come across books my Granny would have loved and wonder what she might have thought of them.

I chose Haven as my next book. Bought it on Kindle ages ago and discovered it is about monks and monasteries. So, that seems to be the fiction theme for this month

Just completed Sleeping On Jupiter by Anuradha Roy. Like all her works , this is elegantly written . Ultimately it's very frustrating : one of those books thta refuses to have a resolution! No idea what happened to anyone.

Lots of evocative passages and a haunting theme but not a satisfying read.

I was half asleep on the way to work when I wrote that earlier post and had forgotten about it before I came back on here.

Quite proud of my monstrous morning self!

My mind has been blown by the dinosaurs and I don’t think I will ever look at Thomas in the same way again.

@aliasgrape - My Year of Meats was quite odd. I agree with the recommendation for A Change of Climate and also enjoyed A Song for Summer.

My latest reads are:

36. Marie Antoinette - Antonia Fraser

Read this after watching the recent television series to get a more accurate picture. A nice balance of the political and social.

37. They do it with Mirrors - Agatha Christie

This month’s challenge book. Miss Marple at a rehabilitation home for criminal/disturbed young men run by an extended dysfunctional rich do-good family with slightly wacky ideas. Not my favourite but kept me reading.

38. Tokyo Express - Seicho Matsumoto

Picked up from the Waterstones “short reads” table. Set (and written) in the 1950s and is a police investigation into two suicides. Lots of train travel as commercial air travel presumably expensive and not that common. I really enjoyed this - the detail of the investigation, the insights into Japanese culture, the corruption etc. A surprise hit for me.

Well said on the menopause Sol and Janina and others - the ‘if men went through this they wouldn’t work for 10 years’ shit makes my blood boil. Speaking of shit, I enjoyed Original Sins - though it was my first addiction memoir so possibly more Original for me than it was for other readers.

My latest was a charity shop find I hadn’t heard of, Red Crosses by Sasha Filipenko tr Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner, a lovely Europa Editions paperback. A young father moves into a flat in Minsk next door to an elderly lady who is losing her memory to Alzheimer’s. She seizes the chance to pass on her memories to her neighbour before they are lost, a construction that allows the author to give us a potted history of the Soviet Union in 200 pages. I think if I had been familiar with the history I might have found this contrived and superficial, and at first I did find it too much tell and not enough show, but very quickly I was gripped by the woman’s heartbreaking story. It’s really interesting about the impact of guilt and about the need to remember and a really engrossing read.

As someone who is hovering on the edge of the perimenopause I've been a bit surprised by the menopause ire on the chat. My company, like others, has been really focused on menopause support and I had seen it as a positive thing, I probably haven't paid much attention though as I'm not there yet, and definitely hadn't picked up on some of the negative connotations that others have spotted. Going to take a closer look at the info tomorrow.

Nearly time for a new thread @Southeastdweller

I’m trying to ignore all conversation re a Gordon the train and his big pistons. Two new reads for me

Parable of the Sower- Octavia E Butler
This post-apocalyptic story is chilling, horrifying and brutal but does have some hope which kept me going! Lauren and her family live in a walled community, safe from the increasing disorder on the streets. A new drug, pyro, is causing mayhem outside the walls with addicts driven to burn anything that gets in their path. I don’t want to give away much more but this was a great though traumatising read. I would imagine that Cormac McCarthy found inspiration for The Road in here. There is one sequel which is like to read soon. Apparently Butler was working on a second when she died- it’s a pity we’ll never read it.

Open Water- Caleb Azumah Nelson
I should have loved this as it has a lot in common with Fire Rush, which I adored- young love, race, police brutality and music are themes which go across both books, but I struggled to connect with the characters in this one. The male protagonist (who is never named) falls in love with a woman who is seeing his friend, when he meets her at a bar. They start out as friends but it develops into love, though they are divided (he lives in London, she in Dublin) and he is suffering from a trauma which is never fully expanded on. I think my lack of connection to this book comes down to the writing. Very poetic prose, second person narration and overly detailed descriptions of particular albums/ songs/ other works of art I’m unfamiliar with, all combined to keep me at a distance. Nelson’s writing reminds me a bit of Sally Rooney’s- vague thoughts on love, life etc that never settle anywhere concrete. I know many people love this book, and I am not the intended audience but I was disappointed. I’d imagine others who like this writing style will enjoy it very much as it has important things to say.

Thanks eine I'll add that to my list

Thanks all, have also added the Lovell biography to the list

Paging @Southeastdweller x

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/4826770-50-books-challenge-2023-part-six

There is one written by one of the Guinesses which is superb. Lots of details about the lives they led. Their father used to hide dirty cups and plates in a cupboard rather than leave them on the table for the housemaid to clear - go figure!
The girls were well drawn and the schisms which divided them poignantly described. They really were a reflection of the times they lived in.