50 Books Challenge 2023 Part Seven

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the seventh 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, the fifth one here, and the sixth one here

I would also put Nancy Mitford on the Something Lovely pile.

111. Snap by Belinda Bauer

A young pregnant mother is killed and her son becomes embroiled in solving the mystery.

This was dross I thought what Remus calls "mindless crime"

Not remotely believable at any stage and not well written

I'm getting more distrustful of "Between The Covers" picks I must say

Still I'm out of my slump I must've needed some dross.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I really didn’t like Snap either. I was sure I must have picked up the wrong book and kept having to check that this was the book that was long listed for the Booker Prize.

It was nominated for the Booker?!

Seriously?!

No way.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit and @TattiePants I thought I was the only person who hated Snap, it gets such good reviews. I bailed when the kids built a fort out of cardboard boxes in the living room.

I read the sample of Snap last night at the same time as the sample of Storied.

I'm afraid my view of the sample was 'Snap is crap'.

Can we put Mary Wesley on the lovely pile?

YY to James Herriot for the lovely pile. Got me through lockdown on days when life felt pretty grim. Also Miss Read's Village School series.

And Alexander McCall Smith's Scotland Street series. Very cosy and amusing.

I agree The North Water is far from lovely. I very much enjoyed it though.Also, I now have a useful tip re how to survive if cast adrift on an ice floe.

Just picked up Storied, Foster, Bandit Queens & Romantic Comedy from the library - probably a good thing given how damp is looking for our long weekend away camping at a festival..... Definitely likely to be lots of hiding in my van with a good book

38 The Memoirs of Ethel Smyth (abridged and with an introduction by Ronald Crichton)

Rounding off my Virginia Woolf kick, and tying it up neatly with my reading of Another Year of Wonder, I mostly enjoyed this abridged version of the memoirs of the pioneering female composer (and much else) Ethel Smyth. As well as being a composer, Smyth was a memoirist, a travel writer, an avid hunter and a suffragette who was imprisoned for two months for her troubles - and also one of Virginia Woolf's close female liaisons. Disappointingly for me, given how she came to my notice, the memoirs end well before Smyth's entanglement with Woolf, but Smyth did so much else that any memoir covering everything would have been immense! Her early musical education in Leipzig involved meeting Brahms and Grieg, and later Mahler. She wrote six operas (as well as orchestral and chamber music) and her persistence in getting her work performed must have been legendary at the time. The sheer difficulty of getting anyone to take her seriously as a female composer is etched into every page. Even when her music was performed, she suffered from terrible luck and poor timing (the resignation of sponsors; the first world war). As much as it is about her music (which has I think had a modest recent revival), this book is about her grand female passions, and her one male passion who, ironically enough, caused a breach with perhaps her most intense female friend. The suffragette passage is particularly interesting, not least for her account of her friendship with Mrs Pankhurst, which seems to have burned intensely for several years before fizzling to an abrupt stop. You can't help but think that both Smyth and Pankhurst must have been absolutely impossible to live with - but boy, did they get things done.

Even the abridged version is quite long, and there were times where this palled for me, with too many passages dealing with European nobility of whom I knew nothing. But standing back at the end - what a life, and I'm glad I read it.

Apologies for the duplicate post - have reported!

That sounds very interesting Welshwabbit (if a bit of a slog). I remember* reading in the first Year of * Wonder that Ethel Smyth used her toothbrush to conduct the choir in the prison yard. I just thought that was great; a small detail but a memorable one.

@highlandcoo Also, I now have a useful tip re how to survive if cast adrift on an ice floe. 😆

Finally caught up with the thread. Some great reviews and I've been tempted, but also trying to tame the TBR so staying strong and resisting the urge.

42. Family Secrets - Deborah Cohen

Much read by 50 bookers earlier this year/2022, the book looks at the choices British families have made to try to protect their name. Some interesting examples of circumstances such as illegitimacy, divorce and the history of counselling. It was ok but not as absorbing as I had expected, with some dubious terminology in places.

43. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

A reread of my favourite Dickens over a long period, due to the tiny typeface (I have an old hardback edition). More violence than I remember, and I hadn't appreciated how the second half romps along - it was a real page turner. Now have a serious crush on Sydney Carton

112. The Storied Life Of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

A lonely widowed bookseller finds a new lease on life.

Though there are issues regarding plausibility this is a cute novel which brims with quiet sadness. An ideal Autumnal read, cosy night in, and though I read it in August, it could well be autumn.

A nice book, as Remus has said.

95. City of Bones by Michael Connelly

Next Bosch book. He’s still an arrogant arsehole (yet somehow irresistible to the ladies), this time running off on a whim and keeping his partner out of the loop, like he’s the only person who cares about solving crimes. This time the bone of a young boy who was buried 25 years ago is found. This was one of the weakest in the series so far, but served as an easy crime read.

96. Feedback by Peter Cawdron

Twenty years ago, a UFO crashed into the Yellow Sea off the Korean Peninsula. The only survivor was a young English-speaking child, captured by the North Koreans. Two decades later, a physics student watches his girlfriend disappear before his eyes, abducted from the streets of New York by what appears to be the same UFO. An interesting start soon descended into silliness, this one wasn’t for me.

Welshwabbit Thanks for your review of Ethel Smyth, it sounds really interesting. I saw her opera The Wreckers last year and it was terrific.

Andrew Cartmel - The Vinyl Detective. Aargh. I fell for the rave reviews on Amazon. The main character, who isn't named, is a vinyl detective and hunts for rare records for people. We have beautiful women requesting help but just as ready to fall into bed, tick, cliches of friends, tick, villains who appear just as the hero has got the goods, tick, villains who like to chat and describe their deeds rather than just killing someone, tick. Plus a puzzle to solve that was obvious very early on and convoluted in the way it was devised.

Needless to say this wasn't for me though I slogged through to the end.

Now to try to decide what to read next.

1. The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
2. The Storyteller - Dave Grohl
3. What If? - Randall Monroe
4. Explaining Humans - Dr Camilla Pang
5. The Power - Naomi Alderman
6. Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman
7. Rewild Yourself - Simon Barnes
8. Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
9. Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari
10. The Body: A Guide for Occupants - Bill Bryson
11. Ask a Historian - Greg Jenner
12. A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
13. Alone on the Wall - Alex Honnold and David Roberts
14. Conspiracy - Tom Phillips and John Elledge
15. Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker
16. Camouflage: The Hidden Lives of Autistic Women - Dr Sarah Bargiela
17. The Tao of Pooh - Benjamin Hoff
18. Zen: The Art of Simple Living - Shunmyo Masuno
19. Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder - Sarah Hendrickx
20. Move!: The New Science of Body Over Mind - Caroline Williams
21. What Matters in Jane Austen - John Mullan
22. Spectrum Women - Barb Cook (ed)
23. Stuck Monkey - James Hamilton-Paterson
24. A Year of Living Simply - Kate Humble
25. Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now - Jaron Lanier
26. Untypical - Pete Wharmby
27. How Bad Are Bananas - Mike Berners-Lee
28. Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson

I haven't updated for ages. I have had a very long non-fiction phase, but feeling pulled back towards fiction - have got some good recommendations from here and another thread, but might start by rereading some favourites.

Currently re-reading Sophie's World.

113. Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (Audible)

A fictionalised life of Marilyn Monroe

I would rather have done this as Kindle but the Kindle edition doesn't exist.

It was read by Jayne Atkinson from House Of Cards and she was good except that there's no escaping Marilyn imitations in audio, which is why I wanted Kindle.

I found this a bit redundant and pointless, I knew little about Marilyn and felt I still didn't, beyond the usual highlights.

The ending is odd, it runs straight into an author interview, and I missed the sentence indicating she was dead and had to go back.

A bit damp squib but only my 2nd JCO so not put off yet.

39 The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont

A novel weaving together an imagining of what happened during Agatha Christie's famous disappearance and the fictionalised back story of Archie Christie's affair partner, throwing in a murder mystery for good measure. This was fun and kept me reading, although the Agatha Christie of the novel doesn't at all fit with my idea of Christie the woman. The author skilfully balances the different narrative threads without being confusing and I enjoyed the murder mystery. An enjoyable lightweight holiday read.

97. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel

This is the story of an anomaly in time, which is explored though a series of interconnected stories from 1912 to 2401. Funnily enough, given the recent conversation on the thread, the structure really reminded me of Cloud Atlas (I definitely need to give that book another go soon). The time travel element wasn’t really the main focus of the story, and I didn’t really get enough of a sense of being in different time periods during the various sections, despite the near 500 year time-span. I thought the underlying theme of pandemics (including Spanish flu and COVID) was well done and interesting. All in all I just found this book to be a bit lightweight. Good, but definitely not great.

Alberta and Jacob by Cora Sandel. Translated by Elizabeth Rokkan

First book of Women in Translation Month.

Well I'm happy to report @Boiledeggandtoast @Piggywaspushed that this middle aged woman loved this first installment of the Alberta Trilogy and have now added the other two books to my wishlist.

Not a lot happens on the surface but we get a complex portrayal of the impact of early 20th century bourgeoisie expectations on a girl who is constantly told by her mother that she is ugly and dull but is denied the opportunity to get an education or job due to her social status. The landscape of northern Norway is as much a character as any of the humans and you get a real sense of place and what it's like to live in a place where there's no daylight for two months each year.