50 Books Challenge 2023 Part Six

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the sixth 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, the fourth one here and the fifth one: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/4793238-50-books-challenge-2023-part-five?page=20&reply=126860721

What are you reading?

Glad you found the money Tattie, I saw your other thread earlier.

£100 disappeared from my handbag once. It really is a horrible sinking feeling. Tattie

@Sadik I know you were on the lookout for something similar to the Left-Handed Booksellers - just seen that this is in the 99p deals and wondered if it fit the bill?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stranger-Times-C-K-McDonnell-ebook/dp/B0875TYLCJ/ref=lp_5400977031_1_2?sbo=QS21L9be7oZFAGyl4IXR%2Bw%3D%3D

Thanks @noodlezoodle - I'd glanced at it in daily deals & assumed it was a tv spin off. I've splashed out my 99p

So have I!

97. People Person by Candace Carty-Williams

5 estranged siblings are brought together by an emergency, sharing only in common their feckless father Cyril.

Highly implausible from the start, initial drama fades into petty shit quite quickly. It's very lightweight and not a patch on Queenie which I really rated. I would venture as far as to say I feel I wasted my time and it was a bit crap.

I seem to remember @TattiePants feeling similarly

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit yes I thought it was a disappointment after loving Queenie. It was readable and I liked the characters but the plot was just silly.

43 Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield
I liked this. It had a pleasing ambiguity as well as some sections that conveyed a creeping horror very well.
Miri’s wife Leah has returned from a deep sea mission that lasted much longer than it should have done. She is not the same as she was and no one seems to be able to help Miri find out why.

The Stranger Times is well worth 99p. I found some bits of it a tad forced but it settles into its pace nicely and the second book is better. I am waiting for the third in the series to come down from £10 on Kindle.

I think Our Wives is going to be up in my top 5 this year, unless I have a really good run here on.

I am pleased to have started an I Have Some Questions For You trend! @Stokey I'm not sure about a teen to be honest - it is very much about looking back at your school days and re-evaluating what happened, re-thinking things you may have misunderstood, so that might not be of huge interest. I should also say it has frequent references to cases of women being raped or murdered - these aren't detailed but they are clear about what happened, so that might not be something you want your child to read about.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit @TattiePants I was disappointed in People Person too after loving Queenie. I know Candice C-W is adapting Queenie for TV and also writing a programme about a music dynasty, so I'll be interested to watch those.

I'm reading Our Wives Under The Sea right now and it's certainly beautifully written but very uncomfortable.

81. Blood Work by Michael Connelly

Continuing my read of Michael Connelly books in order and I definitely prefer the ones without Bosch. Terry MCaleb is a retired FBI agent, recovering from a heart transplant, who is asked to look into the murder of a young woman shot during a convenience store robbery. He agrees to the request from the sister of the victim when she tells him that the heart he received was from her sister. I quite enjoyed this, there were a lot of twists and turns, not all of them realistic, but it was a solid crime novel.

DH sometimes buys the New European and this recent article about books spotted onscreen made us both laugh. I reckoned it might strike a chord with us 50 Bookers too.

Definitely strikes a chord with me Terpsichore! Thanks for sharing

I particularly liked the fact that in the TV series of Normal People, Marianne was reading Never Let Me Go. It’s almost as though they’d seen this thread 😂

@Terpsichore Thanks - I enjoyed reading the article about books on screen

The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer It's 1645 in the small viillge of Cleftwater where Martha Hallybrand a middle aged "mute" with tuberculosis lives contentedly as a devout christian and local healer who spends most of her time in her physic garden, tending to the inhabitants and looking after Kit, her employer who she was nursemaid to from childhood. However, things are changing in Cleftwater, Martha has recently helped deliver several stillborn children, Kit's ships sank and he has married a rich wife who has paid his debts but who dislikes Martha and now a "Witchfinder" has arrived and taken off the house's cook to the local Inn and stables that is serving as a makeshift jail. Is any woman in the village safe? Does Martha's only keepsake from her mother, a wax poppet doll make her the only true witch?

This was engaging to start with but some plot points were belaboured and unnecessarily repeated. The pacing was also uneven which hampered my enjoyment of the narrative. It started well but became a bit dull.

Thanks for sharing the books on screen article. I’m definitely guilty of peering to see what the book is when anyone is reading in public.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North A friend raved about this, I really enjoyed it but perhaps not to the same extent. Harry is born in 1919 and lives a life that is unremarkable - until after his death when he starts all over again, with his lifetime of memories and experience in tact. As with other people who are on this cycle, his second and third lives are difficult but after he makes contact with the Cronus Club he has the support of others in subsequent lifetimes and learns to live his lives comfortably. Then, 11 lives in, he receives a message from the future and is drawn into research and development, espionage and a friendship with a maverick theoretical physicist. North sets the repeating life idea up and has great fun playing with it. It’s frequently witty, such as when Harry has a wife he likes well enough but doesn’t seek out in future lives. It made me think about sanity and insanity, and how we are products of our time, ‘cultural madness’ being an ‘infection of expectations which corrupted her perception of what should be and what actually was’. A good read.

DNF How To Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie

To summarise a lot of wordy waffle. It is about a young lady Grace Bernard with a chip on her shoulder. She starts bumping off her estranged Father’s family. She does not know them other than her father abandoned her mother. This just goes off on a tangent and I do not recommend.

Next book Where the Crawdads Sing. Reviewed and discussed many times on here but I have never read it and have been given the book.

I've had a couple of strange reads recently.

21. The Guest, by Emma Cline. Still cross about this one, which is beautifully written all the way through, and then has the most frustrating ending ever. Alex is a grifter who is swindling her way through life, and she needs to escape the city (not named but I'm assuming NYC) as the list of people she's cheated grows ever longer. She meets a new boyfriend and is spending time with him at the beach, until things go wrong at a party and it all falls apart. Raises interesting issues of consent, addiction, and survival, as Alex exploits people just as she herself has been exploited. Hard to review without spoilers, but this would have been a five star read for me if it had a proper ending. I'm not a fan of intentionally ambiguous endings, but this one is so odd that I wonder if I'm missing something important. But if I am, so are many other reviewers!

22.Big Swiss, by Jen Beagin. The bumf: "A brilliantly original and funny novel about a sex therapist’s transcriptionist who falls in love with a client while listening to her sessions. When they accidentally meet in real life, an explosive affair ensues." This is so weird, but also hilarious and compelling. I seem to be on a run of books with protagonists that live on the edge of society at the moment, but Greta and Sabine's falling down house feels a lot more palatable than Alex's Long Island nightmare. It feels as though the author slightly lost her grip in the last quarter, with things ending in an overly simple way. Nonetheless, still interesting, funny, and original.

A friend raved about this

Wonders if I know Cornish in real life

I didn't like People Person either. Just found my review from last year
"I found the writing pedestrian, the story predictable and the main character particularly annoying."

@noodlezoodle a friend recommended The Big Swiss to me the other day. I'm intrigued.

@Terpsichore I remember laughing when I saw what the girls were reading in White Lotus. Nice snide comment on them.

😂I’ll ask my RL friend if she’s raved about Booth online!

Harry August was the first book I logged on Goodreads (1.1.15) when I first started using it and was the book that got me back into reading.

I loved Harry August but haven't been able to get on with any of her other books so far.

98. Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

This was a weird little book. In Mexico, Cruel Mama Elena abuses youngest daughter Tati who is not allowed to leave home.

The book is separated into months and each month has a corresponding recipe alongside as Tati bakes her feelings.

I really only read this because it's in one of those books about books. I just found it pretty strange although it left an impression

@GrannieMainland very interested in a Queenie adaptation I could see the actress from Queen Charlotte doing it well - the younger Lady Danbury