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?

@CoteDAzur You are making me want to reread Cloud Atlas - I loved it the first time round but I didn't think about it too deeply, I just enjoyed it in the moment.

Cloud Atlas was a DNF for me when it was first released but given the fact I've really liked Bone Clocks and Utopia Avenue I'm definitely planning on giving it another go.

@CoteDAzur is your post one for reading after I've read the book to avoid spoilers?

Loved Cloud Atlas. And The Bone Clocks too.

Mama - The thread mostly talks about the themes in the book and how they appear in the words and actions of the characters in its six stories. I don't think there are any plot spoilers in there.

Eine - A good debate is worth having again and again

I had three Amanda Cross books on my shelf, published in the late 1980s, featuring a female professor in New York with a sideline in solving crime. Having disliked the first one, I nevertheless went on to read the other two, providing a textbook example of the sunk costs fallacy. I suspect that I may not be alone here.

85. No Word from Winifred, Amanda Cross
Investigation into missing woman, pointlessly involving extracts from her childhood diaries and speculation about her parentage, none of which has anything to do with anything and isn't well-written enough to be enjoyable anyway. I did like a scene where a man discovers his wife and mistress are good friends despite being perfectly aware of his involvement with them both, and he's the one who feels betrayed.

86. A Trap for Fools, Amanda Cross
The best of the three, although that is not high praise. Involves an unpopular academic who was pushed out of a window - or was he? The author knows campus politics of the era, and the racial politics add some interest.

Anyway, I can get them off my shelf. So far I've stuck to my resolution of reading at least two physical books I own each month - I prioritise library and kindle books so if I don't make the effort, these pile up unread.

Thanks Chessie for the Agatha Christie books tip-off. I picked up a couple.

Just finished My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout - I found this to be very disjointed, more a series of vignettes, though get the point that childhood can be remembered in this way. Not a fan.

Also Letters From my Sister by Alice Peterson - a fashion designer, living with her hedge fund manager boyfriend in London, is asked by her parents to have her sister, who has learning difficulties, to stay for a fortnight. An easy read, if a bit predictable at times.

Sticks fingers in ears and hums…

I thought the Cloud Atlas debate had died and gone to the great dusty library in the sky. I would rather kiss Boris Johnson’s left buttock than try to read it again.

Oh there's a bun fight up and coming with me for sure!

37 The Hound of the Baskervilles
Holmes and Watson decamp to the Devon moors to track down the huge, satanic hound which drove a wealthy landowner to his death. Loved this and have downloaded the other three Holmes novels. I've heard that the short stories are better, but there are so many I don't know where to start and the completist in me is overwhelmed.

Can I distract people from the Cloud Atlas shenanigans with a gratuitous pic of my Gigantic Hound? 🙂

Oh Maud what a beauty! ❤️

I have never read Cloud Atlas. I hated *Slade House’ with a passion and have no desire to try anything else by him.

See, I couldn’t even be bothered to bold it properly

The funny thing about David Mitchell is that he's not just polarising in himself, he's wildly polarising across different books, so people can love one and absolutely hate another. He's a funny beast.

I’m not a dog person but he’s gorgeous.

I think Cloud Atlas is one of my most started, read a few pages then straight back on the shelf books. It’s still on the shelf so I do plan to read it at some point but not in any hurry! I read The Bone Clocks a few years ago which was ok but hasn’t inspired me to pick up any of his other books.

❤️ to the hound

David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas - hated
Slade House - loved
Bone Clocks - amazing
Black Swan Green - average at best
Utopia Avenue - average to below average
number9dream - DNF
Ghostwritten TBR

I’m half way through Great Circle and as much as I’m loving it, it is (overly?) long do I thought I’d have a brief interlude.

59 Evidence of the Affair by Taylor Jenkins-Reid
This is a short story at less than 100 pages long that was free on Amazon Prime. Carrie discovers her husband is having an affair when she finds letters his mistress has written to him. She writes to the mistresses husband David and the book is the correspondence between Carrie and David as they comfort each other and their friendship grows. It’s no great work of literature and of course included the obligatory name check for Mick Riva and Daisy Jones. I rattled it off in an hour and now I can go back to Great Circle.

I love Hound of the Baskervilles and I love that hound too! Beautiful.

I leave the thread for a couple of days and come back and another fight has broken out over Cloud Atlas It would be that or Never Let Me Go.
I didn't hate Cloud Atlas but I never got round to finishing it. I must have been about 80% through it then got distracted and never felt the need to go back to it and that's really unlike me. On the other hand, I have loved all the other books of his that I have read, particularly Bone Clocks.

Thank you for the hound love! My David Mitchell score:
Cloud Atlas - loved
Bone Clocks - hated, made me irrationally angry
Slade House - never got further than twenty pages, despite several attempts

I have Utopia Avenue downloaded.

The Gigantic Hound is gorgeous.

Just wanted to say that Cloud Atlas is one of my favourite books. Liked Number9dream and Black Swan Green. The Bone Clocks is sitting in my to read pile next to my bed

Forgot Number9dream, I also liked that.

I liked (but didn’t love) Cloud Atlas and Number9Dream. Never bothered with any of the others.

A few books finished/ DNFed I. The last couple of weeks.
80 The Importance of Being Ernest
A quick read between others- wittier than I anticipated- I’m not usually a big fan of punny/ farcical humour (Jeeves and Wooster leave me cold) but I quite enjoyed this with it’s clever dialogue. Light and frothy on the surface but with a little bite underneath.

81 A Farewell to Arms- Ernest Hemingway
A mixture of war story and love story set in Italy in the First World War. American Fred Henry is a volunteer in the Italian army and working in the ambulance service. He meets and falls in love with English nurse Catherine Barkley. This is my first (and probably last) Hemingway. The prose is very stylised- simplistic and childlike at times with a lot of repetition of vocabulary and sentence structure. The central romance is unconvincing especially in terms of the dialogue- Catherine is like a cardboard cutout. Hemingway’s misogyny is well known and it certainly shows in his writing. Not an author for me.

(DNF- The Traitor God- can’t remember the author. A free audible fantasy which started with a good voice but the plot failed to draw me in- I am I. A bit of a reading slump though so it may be me, rather than the book. I can’t remember if I mentioned I had also DNFed Self- Help, a short story collection by Lorrie Moore- I did like the stories but it was narrated by the author and she didn’t do them justice- I will try again with these on kindle/ paperback at some stage)

82 The Feminine Mystique- Betty Friedan
A feminist classic written in 1963 and very much focused on the US. It was very influential in its day. I read to 80% so am counting it as read but I did give up. I found it quite repetitive and far too focused on the white middle class- which in the civil rights era seemed strange to me. I believe it helped to kickstart a new era of women’s rights activism at the time which is why I read it, but I guess sometimes these books can’t generate the same interest in a modern day reader.

83 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo- Taylor Jenkins Reid
A movie star (reminiscent of Marilyn Munroe/ Elizabeth Taylor) tells the story of her life to a biographer, from starlet in the 1950s to Oscar winner in the 80s, then obscurity after that. Evelyn’s story was enjoyable and sad, though it flagged a little in the middle. I loved Harry. The biographer’s story was bland and I had no investment in her as a character. Still, a diverting read.

I’m hoping my next book (Kala by Colin Walsh) gets me out of this slump!

A few years ago our book club read Travels With Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn (the third Mrs Hemmingway) and we all enjoyed it so we decided that our next book would be A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway and were universally disappointed and pretty much agreed with everything @BaruFisher said.

Yes, it's the only Hemingway I've read because it was such a struggle.

88. A Darkness More Than Night by Michael Connelly

Next in the Bosch series, although this was more about former agent Terry McCaleb from Blood Work, and his investigation into the murder of a man who Bosch believed to have got away with murder. Interesting start which very much tailed off in the second half.

89. Between Us by Mhairi McFarlane

Usual formula here, but not one of her best. The friendship group didn’t ring true and the main characters were particularly flat. “Honking” also makes an unwelcome return. The Mum was quite funny at times though.

90. How To Be Right In A World Gone Wrong by James O’Brien

I like James O’Brien, and am broadly in agreement with his views (trans issues aside where I am gender critical and he prevaricates trying to please everyone) so I thought I’d like this more than I actually did. I think the problem is that he covers a lot of ground so can’t go into a lot of detail on anything, and as these were areas I’m fairly knowledgeable on, I don’t feel like I learned much from reading this. Also James comes across as a bit smug and patronising, his constant use of the word “mate” on excerpts from his radio show were particularly condescending and grating. All in all this serves as a good introduction to a number of areas but it’s now pretty out of date, although the general points still stand.