50 Books Challenge 2023 Part Nine

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the ninth 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, the sixth one here, the seventh one here and the eighth one here.

What are you reading?

62 Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure - Artemis Cooper

Enjoyable enough biography of my beloved PLF; large chunks of it are derived from his own books so there wasn’t a huge amount that was new, but it was interesting to put his life in context and learn some more details about his somewhat unconventional private life.

I appreciate M R James more now I’m older @LadybirdDaphne and his stories are best experienced read aloud as they were intended to be. Robert Lloyd Parry is the best at this and I’d love to see him ‘live’ one day, but Don’t Go Into The Cellar are also good and I fondly look back on a spooky story time in a reputedly haunted stately home where aided by several glasses of red wine I was fully immersed in Jamesian Terror
He was an interesting old bod and although it’s vehemently disputed in some circles, a repressed homosexuality and distaste bordering on phobia for female anatomy come through strongly in many of his stories. The John Hurt version of Oh Whistle And I’ll Come To You is pants, but the Michael Hordern version is a decent interpretation.

I didn't really 'feel' MR James when I tried him, tbh.

100. Trust - Hernan Diaz. Longlisted for last year's Booker and winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize alongside Demon Copperhead, which I think was far superior. It's hard to review this without spoilers. I came to it without really knowing what it was about and think I enjoyed it more than if I'd known how the narrative worked. That said there are 4 different narratives of which the 3rd is by far the strongest, followed by the 4th, then 1st and 2nd. It's loosely about a rich man in New York in the 1920s playing the stock markets and his artistic wife, who may or may not be suffering from a mental disorder. There's a lot of different issues touched upon and it sometimes feels a bit heavy handed. The narrative is a deliberate pastiche in parts and very stilted in other parts. This makes it hard to enjoy the book as a whole. I didn't hate it but wouldn't rush to recommend it either.

87. One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

I read CM's Red, White & Royal Blue a little while back (I think following @GrannieMainland ) & enjoyed it, so picked this up from the library.

This one is a time slip rom com - August has just moved to New York, running away from her mother's obsession with her long-term missing brother. She's feeling lost & out of place, when she meets the mysterious Jane on the subway. Things get stranger when she realises that regardless of when she gets on, Jane is always there. I liked this a lot, it's relatively long / slow moving for a rom-com, but was perfect for a long train journey.

(MN-trigger-warning for the above though - includes drag queens, queer, trans & nb characters, etc etc etc. But very cute & funny.)

I must admit that it disappoints and scares me somewhat that some on MN would need this 'trigger warning' about a cute and funny book.

@Sadik I did indeed rave about RWRB though that was partly the covid speaking! One Last Stop is on my list too. No objections here to trans and NB characters, though I need a personal trigger warning for time travel which I always find impossible to follow...

Don't worry, it's definitely not a complicated SF time travel story

& Remus, I'm with you - and probably shouldn't be frivolous about it :(

Thanks BoldFearlessGirl, perhaps I’ll try some audio versions of MR James (I’m in New Zealand so not sure anyone’s doing it live here). Also wondering how old is old enough - I’m in my early 40s, shall I give him another ten years? 🤔

Micheal Hordern had a lovely voice, but he’s always either Badger or Gandalf for me.

I’d give it another ten years, a winged armchair and a glass of port @LadybirdDaphne , that should do it

Eastern Horizons by Levison Wood
Travel writing, which I really enjoyed. Wood is 22 and travels through Europe, into Russia, Iran and Afghanistan then on to India, aiming essentially to follow the old Silk Road where possible. Very readable and he comes across as pretty human and not too much of a dick, which is always a plus for me in travel writing.

78 None Of This Is True by Lisa Jewell

One of my favourite authors since her Ralph’s Party days and I’ve enjoyed her change of genre to Mystery. But this was strangely unsatisfying and I can’t put my finger on why. The title sets the reader up for a high alert for Unreliable Narrator/s but it wasn’t that. The subject matter is grim, but it wasn’t that, either. There was a vague air of her having jumped the shark throughout and I didn’t really care about any of the characters, which is unusual for a Lisa Jewell book. One of them is so thinly drawn until right at the very end that I cared even less about their (grisly) fate than the others.
I think she’s tried to copy the style of Penance, Kala, I’m A Fan etc but it’s fallen a bit flat. Not a bad book by any means, an adequate thriller and it passed the time, but not one that will stick in my mind.

56 Rooftoppers - Katherine Rundell A nicely written kids’ book but very slight - it seemed to only tell part of the story and ended very abruptly. And on top of the usual suspension of disbelief needed for children’s books, there were some bits I felt uncomfortable with in terms of messaging about what is and isn’t ok / normal. I originally thought I might get it for my DDs but by the end of the book I had changed my mind. I know others on the thread love it but it’s not for me, I’m afraid!

63 Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Another Shelterbox pick and the second one in a row that I really haven't liked. That might be my fault rather than the book's, as I'm not in general a fan of gothic horror (and the clue's in the title). Noemi, the confident daughter of a wealthy industrialist, is pulled into the gothic horror of the title when a concerning letter prompts her to visit her cousin, who has married the (now somewhat impoverished) heir to a mining dynasty. Lots of gothic/horror cliches abound as she stays at their family seat, High Place, but somewhere in the middle it just got (for me) really silly. I didn't feel the explanation for all the odd happenings really made any sense at all; for me it was a sort of mish-mash of Stranger Things and bits of the Dark Tower but completely lacking in clarity. I finished it because I did still kind of want to know what happened to Noemi, but goodness, it was a slog.

52 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Disclaimer: I am a massive Kingsolver fan so I was always going to love this. I thought it worked really well as a re-telling of a classic - respecting the original while successfully adding a modern twist via the oxy storyline. Having read Empire of Pain earlier this year, which focuses on the facts and figures of the oxy crisis, it was really interesting to read about the human cost in rural communities (obviously this is fiction, but presumably a realistic portrayal). Great characters, excellent writing, so much to love about this.

@Welshwabbit

The end of Mexican Gothic is WOEFUL

I'm so glad it's not just me!

39 The Wisdom of Sally Red Shoes - Ruth Hogan
Lent to me by a friend. I spent almost three quarters of the novel thinking, this really isn't for me and the last quarter just going with the unlikely storyline and enjoying it for what it was.

Has anyone else noticed that the Kindle deals page has changed format and there no longer seems to be a way of seeing 'All Deals'?

Yes, I hate it! So hard to make sense of it now.

Same. It’s awful. I'm signed up to the Daily Deals email and I usually now click on that rather than try and navigate to the site itself, because it shows me the deals in a more readable and easy-to-see format.

@ChessieFL I agree. I’m trying to see it as a good thing as it will curb my spending if I can’t find the offers. I’ve no intention of scrolling through a gazillion genres- often with repeated books.

I really want to read Demon Copperhead @Tarahumara. I have bought it for the person who runs one of my book clubs for Christmas as they love Dickens. Going to strongly hint that I may like to borrow it at some point

I’m creeping slowly onwards but, thanks to getting involved in some verrrrry long non-fiction books this year, I’m going to read far fewer in total this year than last. The latest is:

75: The Unknown Matisse - Hilary Spurling

Volume 1 of 2 of a very readable and reliably-excellent biography. I didn’t really know anything about Matisse so it was a revelation to discover the story of his humble background (in Picardy, in Northern France) and his accidental stumble into art when his mother bought him some paints to while away his convalescence from illness. It’s hard to convey just how reviled and mocked he was in the early years of the 20th c for the paintings we now call masterpieces, and how his existence was one of almost dire poverty for many years. I’ve reached the point where, at 40, he’s just starting to be recognised. Now looking forward to Vol. 2. Wonderful illustrations in this, too.

And another fiction read:

76: The Home - Penelope Mortimer

I really like Mortimer's writing, which always has the authentic ring of personal experience…she writes about women, mothers, children, marriages, divorce, emotional pain - all the things she experienced herself. The central figure of this 70s novel is Eleanor, separated from her husband, philandering Harley Street doctor Graham. The house bought for her as part of the split gradually fills up with her mostly-grown children, returning from their own messy, imperfect lives. There’s a lot of comedy to be had, and Mortimer writes very wittily, but beneath it all, Eleanor is stalked by the terror of being alone, and longs only to be back with the (loathsome) Graham. She’d get some bracing advice on the MN Relationship threads but I enjoyed this nevertheless, even if it now feels like a vanished world in many respects.