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?

I knew it would be very identifiable 😁

@mackerella Catherine Fox goes all-out on a neurodiverse new character in her latest book, as well as a trans character. It's all rather heavy-handed and they didn't feel as real to me as her existing characters.

Also agree that I like Ben Aaronovitch pointing out white characters and refusing to set it as the unspoken default.

Re portrayal of accents, to me it makes a difference whether it's "we" or "they" talk like that. The first can be very affectionate and done for good reason, while the latter tends to be alienating. I know quite a few Scottish and Irish writers who do the former and it works.

@LadybirdDaphne do read Margery! Maybe not all of it - she does get a touch tiresome. But she is such a strong voice and so entertaining. I have such a vivid picture of her in my head and am very fond of her (from a distance - the screaming would be wearying).

@LadybirdDaphne If you just want the highlights of Margery, Penguin do an edited version https://www.amazon.co.uk/Medieval-Woman-Penguin-Little-Classics/dp/0241252261 - the Kindle version is £1.49. I haven't read the full version either, as I came across this as part of the Little Black Classics series and it was enough for me.

Ooh, not sure how I feel about that, biblio! One of the things that I really love about her books is that the characters feel properly real, especially as you get glimpses of how they are perceived by other characters (and how even the ones that are meant to be sympathetic could be annoying to others at times). I hope she's not going to go all "Ishoos" driven, as discussed upthread

33. Happy Place by Emily Henry
Harriet and Wyn are part of a group of friends who holiday together in Maine every summer. For a long time they were a couple, they split up over the winter but didn't tell their friends and are now pretending that they are still a couple during this year's holiday. I quite enjoyed this while I was reading it, perhaps not as much as Book Lovers last summer but it was quite good. However, I finished it about ten days ago and just had to look up the blurb which tells you all you need to know about how much it has stayed with me!

34. A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny
Second in the Inspector Gamache series. Winter in Three Pines and a spectator watching a the Boxing Day curling match is fatally electrocuted. Gamache and colleagues must solve this strange murder. I've heard good things about this series so am reading a few to see if I like them, but I didn't rate this very highly. There were several incredibly unpleasant characters that I just didn't want to spend any time with. Got the next couple when they were cheap so will give them a go. I'm not convinced yet - have heard that the series improves at about book 5 or 6 so we'll see if I get that far.

35. The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers
By far the best of these three reads!
Non-fiction. In the very first chapter we meet Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a young Yemeni American man living in San Francisco. He lives with his parents, has saved money in the hope of pursuing higher education and is involved in community activism when something happens in the first chapter that is both a bit heart breaking and gets you rooting for him from the outset. We're taken back through Mokhtar's family background and his childhood, the jobs he takes on as he tries to make his way in the world and improve life for himself and his family...and we are with him as he becomes interested in coffee. With little knowledge but a lot of enthusiasm, naivety and the gift of the gab, Mokhtar sets out to tell the world about the history of Yemeni coffee, to improve the lives of Yemeni growers and improve the quality of the coffee that he believes he can sell as a premium product. And all of this takes place against the backdrop of political unrest and a deteriorating security situation in Yemen itself.
This is easy to read non-fiction - propulsive and fascinating, centred around a quite incredible 'main character' in Mokhtar. He meets a lot of people along the way and I struggled at times to keep all the childhood friends/ex bosses/investors/acquaintances/family members/coffee growers straight in my own head, but this was a small niggle in what was overall a great read.

I am trying really hard to read more books than I add to my wishlist, but couldn't resist adding Plainsong after @Stokey review. Sounds like something I would enjoy.

Got about 10 hours or so in the car this weekend (road trip to see family) so I think I'll get stuck into Qualityland on audible and hope my husband enjoys it. I downloaded ages ago just as we fell out of love with listening to books, but worth a try again.

I have just finished the most recent Alwyn Turner social history , All In It Together: England in the 21st Century.

Thsi was briefer and more readable than some of his other books, although , given Brexit etc, it did feel a bit thin. Almost like the interesting stuff was still to come! It's wry and interesting but does pale in entertainment value alongside Decade In Tory, although of course the aims are very different!

Thanks for the Robin Sloan recommendation @mackerella & @RomanMum I've just reserved Sourdough from the library. I enjoyed Qualityland a lot, & it sounds like a great read. (I'm curious to know what your book group hated about Qualityland?)

I've DNFed You & Me on Vacation by Emily Henry, but have Book Lovers from the e-library as well so will give that a go as I quite liked Beach Read.

54 Being Mortal Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
I read this first in 2017 & was reminded to revisit it by listening to With The End In Mind earlier this year. For me Being Mortal just stands head and shoulders above that book - it's such a thoughtful read that really considers what is important in life, and how we can live a good life ourselves / support others to live a good life in the face of ageing and/or terminal illness.
Interestingly looking back at my previous review my DM had just refused further treatment for cancer, & now I'm supporting my DF who's decided despite his age to take up the offer of treatment for high grade lymphoma. I've found Atul Gawande's writing helpful in both cases to understand and empathise with their different choices.

Sadik I am sorry for your troubles - cancer is a bitch

34. Atomic Habits by James Clear

Someone has just finished this and IIRC didn't think much of it either. It really is quite obvious and I feel like I could have just read the chapter summaries.

I do wish I had listened to this in my late teens or early 20s. I spent a long time fighting against my true nature of being organised, sensible and boring, having a system for everything as I thought it wasn't cool. As I've got in my 30s and now 40s I don't care what others think and lean into my superpower.

Ah well. I suspect teen me wouldn't have know what habits to implement anyway!

It was me Razor
Case of Man states the obvious

36 The School at the Chalet - Elinor Brent-Dyer
I never read the Chalet School books as a child but my interest was piqued by multiple threads on here. I enjoy reading the odd children's book, whether for nostalgia value or as a comfort read, but this didn't do anything for me. I got through it because I was enjoying the Alpine setting. Bizarrely the pace picked up right at the end, what with Grizel almost getting stuck on a narrow Alpine ledge in fog, swiftly followed by a fatal car crash and then a train derailment. I have been mooning over pictures of the North Tyrol since reading this book and I will seek out something more grown-up - I have The Gilded Chalet: Travels Through Literary Switzerland, which should do the trick.

I abandoned Atomic Habits about two chapters in. It was a pointless waste of time, and I thought I'd achieve more with my life by not reading the rest of it and freeing up those hours to do something useful.

Maud, I was excited about The Gilded Chalet, but found it unfortunately found it dull.

I think you might be right, biblio. I've just had a quick read and it looks like hard work.

Me too. I gave up on it.

Thanks Eine - in many ways my DPs really fit with one of the main themes of Being Mortal Both would have died of other things much younger in the past (my DM before I was born), but the success of modern medicine at curing infectious disease, heart problems & other things doesn't remove the fact that you still do have to die of something in the end. (Fortunately also my DF as well as being 89 is, fingers crossed, responding well to treatment & still has an active social life.)

Being Mortal sounds really good, I've had the Mannix without reading it for a couple of years

Between moving house and holidays I’ve fallen way behind on my reviews, though I haven’t read very much anyway. I’ve been slowly making my way through a book of Alice Munro short stories, a Hemingway and The Feminine Mystique but it’s taking forever so I’ve threw in another few pacy reads too.

76 City of the Dead- Jonathan Kellerman
Psychologist Alex Delaware helps his friend Detective Milo Sturgis investigate the murder of someone in circumstances I can’t remember. It was fast-paced, diverting and required little effort and was just what I needed. On the plus side, Alex’s obnoxious girlfriend Robin barely appeared but on the minus side the whodunnit part was ludicrous.

77 The Rabbit Hutch- Tess Gunty
This is a strange one. The novel opens with the stabbing of Blandine- a young woman recently ‘graduated’ from foster care to live with three young men in the same circumstances in ‘The Rabbit Hutch’ an affordable housing complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana. Blandine is the main character but the POVs jump around a lot, mainly to other people living in different apartments in the Rabbit Hutch (for me lonely, middle-aged Joan was the highlight of these) and looks at themes of isolation and the impact of a dying town undergoing gentrification. There is also a strange POV from a mental health blogger who was the neglected son of a Hollywood star who has recently died. I’m not sure that I fully ‘got’ this one- I liked some parts and was completely baffled by others. I don’t think I liked it enough to re-read and try to get to grips with it better.

78 Book Lovers- Emily Henry
This is a Sandra Bullock/ Ryan Reynolds rim-com written as a book. Frothy, predictable and enjoyable.

79 The Close- Jane Casey
The new DS Maeve Kerrigan book. I’ve joined my new library and got this on BorrowBox (which has made my tbr even longer). Maeve and DI Derwent are investigating a suspicious death and possible human slavery, taking them undercover in Jellicoe Close to watch the residents. Maeve is also overseeing a second investigation from afar. The solutions to the crimes were easy enough to predict, the ‘will they, won’t they’ between Maeve and Derwent is less easy to predict (or the ‘when will they’) I want this get together much more than Robin and Strike!

I’m really enjoying these light pacy reads and may continue in this vein until I’m more settled in my real life!

*Rom-com not rim-com. That would be a whole different genre…

I've heard The Rabbit Hutch being bandied about as a possible Booker longlist @BaruFisher. It sounds interesting.

56. The Hours - Michael Cunningham. I read this as an accompaniment to Mrs Dalloway. It's follows 3 women: Clarissa, called Mrs D by her best friend and ex lover Richard, in 90s New York against the background of the aids epidemic, Laura Brown - a 50s housewife who is making a cake for her husband and drowning in domesticity while reading Mrs Dalloway, and Virginia Woolf in the 1920s who is embarking on writing Mrs Dalloway while stuck in suburbia and pining for London. The Clarissa story follows Mrs Dalloway very closely in her actions and thoughts but with a few elements to modernise it - she lives with Sally as her long term lover, Richard is her gay/bi ex who is dying of aids, and the Peter Walsh character is Louis, who competed for Richard's affections with her in their youth. I think I found this story a bit too close to Mrs D and really wondered what the point was. I preferred Laura and Virginia, although a couple of bits in the Virginia dialogue jarred. I guess this was an interesting companion piece but I'm not sure it stands up by itself. It just feels like too much of a copy of Woolf, though I guess in a way it's similar to what Kingsolver has done with Demon Copperhead. Surprised it won the Pulitzer to be honest. I'm not sure whether to look for the film with Nicole Kidman and her terrible prosthetic nose.

I’d love for someone else to read it @Stokey to see if they can explain it to me! It is darkly funny at times and very moving at others. I just know there’s a whole pile I’ve missed. I didn’t know it was being talked about as a Booker hopeful- I think it was nominated for some of the American awards last year though.

I read it a few threads ago and bolded it. I really enjoyed it. Can't remember what I said but the inclusion of the unwell man fits In because the woman who deleted his post lives in that building and he is initially targeting her.