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’m going to have to go for 6. Can’t choose one to drop. If I had to, it would be the Stuart Maconie one, as it’s not the absolute best of his.

Hell Bent, Leigh Bardugo.
The Drift, CJ Tudor
The Murmuring Bones, AG Slatter
The Full English, Stuart Maconie
Steeple Chasing, Peter Ross
Cuddy, Benjamin Myers

I’m also very slow this year!

I gave up on The Luminaries last year but do want to return to it.

I need to get into a good routine of making time to read before bed but right now am focusing on something else in my normal reading time (SlimPod if I am being honest - so lots of watching videos/ listening to the pod thing - it’s working but that just before sleep time is the only chance I get to focus on it/ anything that isn’t general life/ parenting stuff so it eats into reading time).

Posted too soon!

I don’t think I can scrape together a top 5 even, maybe 3 -

Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca - Ferdinand Mount

Starlight - Stella Gibbons

The Etymologican - Mark Forsyth

I really enjoyed the audiobooks of the Richard Osman books actually, at least the first 2 anyway - despite the fact they’re ridiculously silly - but not sure they would be a bold in an ordinary year!

Top reads so far this year:

House of Glass by Hadley Freeman
Voyaging Out by Carolyn Trant
Celestine by Gillian Tindall
The Long Pursuit by Richard Holmes
The Gift of Radio by Justin Webb

I refuse to be drawn into any more Boring Butler Bunfights 😂

I haven’t been keeping a list so no top 5 from me, but the two standouts I can remember without a list are Mayflies and Our Wives Under the Sea.

11.. Siege of Silence by A J Quinnell

An American diplomat is captured and held hostage. He has crucial information that his captors want. Should the US President authorize a rescue or a plan to kill him before he talks?

In the hands of most authors, this would inevitably turn out to be a testosterone-filled action story. Not so with Quinnell who focuses on the interrogation - the interrogator and the interrogated, the mind games, their thoughts and schemes, their eventual rapprochement as their spiral ever closer around each other. It is an intriguing, cerebral book and I loved it.

A J Quinnell is another of my more recent discoveries. I read his Man on Fire after watching the film starring Denzel Washington, then went on to read all his books. Sadly, this is the last one for me.

Recommended. In fact, I recommend all his books.

12.. The Ink-Black Heart (Cormoran Strike #6) by Robert Galbraith

The other Strike books were OK and I read this out of boredom rather than an expectation of a great book, but I loved The Ink-Black Heart. Its worldbuilding was far superior to the other Strike books and its online dramas as well as slightly obsessed, nerdy characters felt real. Some of it was perhaps slightly far-fetched but I forgive Rowling the few shortcuts she took for plot convenience and wish her future Strike books will follow on this path.

Recommended.

Who are you and what have you done with @CoteDAzur ?!

I like the mid-year review idea! I've been generous with my bolds this year, and out of them I think these are currently my top five (in reading order rather than order of preference):

House of Glass - Hadley Freeman
Angelmaker - Nick Harkaway
Tomorrow x3 - Gabrielle Zevin
The It Girl - Ruth Ware
Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries - Kate Mosse

I'm having a very slow reading period at the moment - I've got a big book in French as my current paper book, which isn't really grabbing me, and a non-fiction on borrowbox which is great so far (about 20 pages in...) but I keep reading other things like news and mumsnet threads instead...I need to try and focus but MIL is coming to stay for two weeks so I'm going to have to talk to her instead!

😂😂😂

Looking back on my list, I found I've read some newer books than usual: eg Small Thjngs Like These, A Terrible Kindness, Lessons in Chemistry. None of these made the bold five so far, which are:

Dear Reader - Cathy Rentzenbrink
Shadowlands - Matthew Green
Adrift - Tracey Williams
The Appeal - Janice Hallett
The Museum of Ordinary People - Mike Gayle

40. Afloat - Danie Couchman

On my TBR for some time, this was another nearly bold. After a chaotic childhood, Danie bought a narrow boat and spent several years as a solo boater, a continuous cruiser on the rivers and canals of north and east London. The book describes her life on the move and the characters she encountered.

I loved this book though it was harrowing in parts from some of the episodes in her teenage years. I have a family member living that way of life and it was interesting to see the similarities; a fascinating insight into the hard reality of keeping a narrow boat in a modern city environment, and the pockets of nature that can be found in the most urban of settings.

The Ada Calhoun & Samantha Irby books sound good @noodlezoodle - I do like a good book of essays. Borrowbox doesn't have either, but has other books by both of them which look good too, so I've reserved them & hopefully they'll live up to these :)

34. No Fond Return of Love, Barbara Pym 4/5
    A reread of this novel. Not my very favourite Pym, but calming and satisfying, like all her novels. I like the way the heroine unashamedly snoops on the people around her she is interested in. I am also a terrible curtain twitcher. People and the minutiae of their lives are endlessly fascinating!

35. Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann 5/5
    It took me a long time to warm up to this novel, and I had to finish it out of term-time because it required considerable brain power, ha. I do love narrative, i.e. Stuff Happening, and this is more a vast cultural repository than a plot-driven work. However, I was utterly won over in the end, partly because of a Dramatic Event in the later pages of the novel that brought tears to my eyes. Yes, plot, I need plot! Incidentally, I think there’s a lot of autobiography/memoir in this novel, which makes it more interesting to me. I was at Cambridge when Lucy’s sister Maud Ellmann (a Joyce expert) was there, and I remember the sight of her with her elegant mop of curls. I think I also loved this book because it is crammed with references to places where I have lived: New Haven, Connecticut; Chicago (or rather Evanston), Illinois; a stint of living in Britain. Very moving, especially the relationships between narrator/dead mother and narrator/teenage daughter.

36. Wavewalker, Suzanne Heywood 4/5
    A gripping account of parents who chose to overlook the basic needs of their children, and a daughter whose adult happiness is hard-won. It does strike me how misery and unhappiness can provide a powerful impetus for children to break away and form a different life. Bravo to Suzanne Heywood for creating a new life for herself.

37. Histoires de la nuit [Birthday Party], Laurent Mauvignier 4/5
    Loved this, in fact I’m tempted to give it 5 stars, but the build-up of the plot is so slow-burning, it’s very French. And very cinematic. Mauvignier is a Minuit author (attached to a cerebral/intellectual French publishing house). He does a great job of nuancing the stock genre of the thriller, and delving into the perspectives of the different characters. The ending is very satisfying.

38. Windmill Hill, Lucy Atkins, 3/5
    It’s a great idea to feature a woman in her 80s as a main character, but this book didn’t grip me as much as Magpie Lane.
    

39. Love Me Tender, Constance Debré, 4/5
    Also published in English under the same title. A harrowing real-life story of how the protagonist’s husband used the courts to keep her away from her son, because she left him for a woman. She is a lawyer by profession, but cannot stop the horrific injustice done to her by the law courts. A bleak meditation on motherhood, invigorating and thought-provoking if not always sympathetic. The middle volume of a trilogy; I will read the other installments when I feel resilient enough!

40. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, 5/5
    A reread for my book group. I gave it 4 stars the first time, but it’s a 5 star read for me now. I think I understood the quirky persona of the main character better this time round (including her random capitalisation of nouns, which imitates William Blake). There are just so many memorable lines here, and the use of Blake’s poetry is brilliant. @JaninaDuszejko , now I remember where your username comes from! Love it!

Enjoy Sadik! I absolutely love Ada Calhoun's writing, I've just bought another of her books (St. Marks is Dead) but I don't think she's capable of writing a poor sentence, whatever the subject matter.

Samantha Irby is an interesting one - I think I've read all of hers now, and some of the essays don't do anything for me at all, but the ones that do have me laughing out loud.

@Sadik I meant to say, I love essays and one of my favourite collections from the last few years is Zadie Smith's Feel Free - don't know if you've already read that one?

@cassandre 😁

35. Wizard and Glass (Dark Tower series) by Stephen King

I have a real love hate relationship with The Dark Tower. It took three attempts to read the first one as it's really boring (hundreds of pages of man walks across desert description) and despite the fact characters are well established by this point it wasn't until 60% of the way through that I cared where this book was going, but then couldn't put it down! It's very much a story within a story and perhaps that just wasn't very convincing to me. I am a bit traditional and would rather just read it in chronological order.

Qualityland is going well on audiobook and is proving to be a rare find of a crossover book both DH and I enjoy. The reader of the book also has the approach spot on, very much 'over the top sales pitch'.

Having seen Tomorrow on several people's top 5 I am giving it until my holiday in September and if hasn't reduced to 99p I am going to damn well but it at full price!!

My top 4 would be
Too Late To Turn Back by Barbara Greene
Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo
Daisy Jones And The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Giver of Stars by JoJo Moyes

Nothing else has earned 5 stars I don't think, but I am really enjoying my reading this year.

@RazorstormUnicorn I think Wizard and Glass is the weakest of the series. Too much back story, as you say.

I got Tomorrow x3 on Borrowbox @RazorstormUnicorn - a bit of a wait, but not a huge one, so worth a look if you use it.

I'm reading slowly & taking my time, but I think Last Dance at the Discotheque for Deviants will be an addition to my top reads. Anyone else reading it?

It's not on Kindle Sadik and I have no space!

Top 5 so far:

The Handmaid's Tale ) by Margaret Atwood
The Testaments ) " " "
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

I think actually my lesson from my bolds this year is that I need to read novels on paper Eine, so maybe that's why I'm enjoying it so much!

I'm mellowing in my old age 😂

I feel like I've missed a lot of posts but some of my favourite books are coming up a lot - The Luminaries and Olive Kitteridge.

I think my top 5 so far would be:

*Tomorrow x3
Notes On An Execution
Really Good, Actually
Romantic Comedy
I Have Some Questions For You
*
Book 48 for me was Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson. It's set in the Brooklyn upper class, following a wealthy family over the course of a year or so. It alternates between the two sisters - Georgina, who works for a development non-profit, and Darley, married to a rich but self made banker, then their sister in law Sasha, very much ordinary middle class. Obviously, family drama ensues and secrets are revealed.

I've seen this compared to Succession a lot but it's really nothing like that. For one thing they aren't rich enough! Think flying first class rather than private jets. And they're all basically quite nice people albeit not very aware of their privilege.

It had a bit of an annoyingly twee ending where all 3 women learn a lesson about money and class, but apart from that it's a pretty enjoyable summer read.