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?

@BaruFisher people often say that about WH, that the teen angst speaks to teens but I read it at 24 (was married with DS1) and I just think her writing is breathtakingly beautiful for her age. The story, I quite like, but I love flawed and actually downright awful characters. I had some expectation of Heathclifd but was taken aback by how furious Cathy made me - but over the years, and many rereads it Nelly Dean that enrages me. Shit stirrer extraordinaire. I just think it’s an incredible work of abuse, revenge and toxicity.

Thanks @LadybirdDaphne as it happens I bought Femina earlier this year when it was 99p on kindle so must move it up my tbr.

@StColumbofNavron I agree with so many of your points- Cathy is much more annoying than Heathcliff- I can understand somewhat how he became so twisted with his past. I completely agree on Nelly too, and the less said about Linton the better…
I think it’s the descriptions and understanding of romantic love that I found a bit adolescent rather than the writing itself which is beautiful which is why I’m glad I finally read it.

I'm in the middle of Femina

She's very underrated @TattiePants start with her more grown up stuff Folklore and Evermore

@BaruFisher if you have the opportunity to visit Eyam, you can see the (heartbreaking) Ryiey graves and also the famous Boundary Stone in the field where the villagers left coins in holes filled with vinegar, to avoid infection, to pay for the food that was left there for them. We used to take pupils on school trips; a good way of helping them to understand the impact of the plague, and the courage of the people of Eyam who cut themselves off from the world to prevent the plague spreading.

Geraldine Brooks tells a good story. March is Little Women told from the point of view of the father, away fighting in the Civil War. I enjoyed it.

Thanks as ever @Southeastdweller for keeping house.

@StColumbofNavron I am with you on* Thérèse Raquin. I did it for A-level and disliked it at the time, probably because it was so relentlessly dark, but I do think the themes are strong and timeless. Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests felt like it borrowed a lot from it. Perhaps I should try L’Assommoir *– but definitely in translation this time.

My short list to date is:

1. In a Good Light by Claire Chambers
2. Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes
3. Lean, Fall, Stand by Jon McGregor
4. The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns
5. The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS by Simon Garfield
6. The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
7. Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova
8. Riceyman Steps by Arnold Bennett
9. Reputation by Sarah Vaughan
10. Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates
11. This Must be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell
12. Giving up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel
13. Villager by Tom Cox
14. Old Filth be Jane Gardam
15. Whips by Cleo Watson

Currently reading Night Waking by Sarah Moss, which is decent so far.

@highlandcoo I was in Eyam once many years ago but definitely intend to go back now I am more familiar with the story. I’d like to read more non-fiction about it too- such bravery by those poor people. Thanks also for the recommendation of March. I’ve added it to my tbr.

A couple of good books on the kindle daily deals today- Anne Enright’s latest The Wren, The Wren, Stoner and I also bought Ali Smith’s Autumn as I liked the sample I read earlier this year when it was much discussed on here.

68: The Last September - Elizabeth Bowen

The latest read for the Rather Dated book club. In County Cork in 1920, young Lois Farquhar is staying with her aunt and uncle, Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, at their house and estate, Danielstown. Other visitors arrive, not seen for years - old family friends Hugo and Francie Montmorency, and, later, the bracingly modern Marda Norton. Socialising takes place with other local Anglo-Irish families and with the British officers billeted nearby, against the background of escalating violence and local Irish resistance, creating an uneasy tension. Lois falls into an intermittently-intense, half-incoherent affair with a young British officer, Gerald. Eventually, the drifting uncertainties of the autumn will come to a brutal conclusion.

I've never read any Elizabeth Bowen before and I’m now asking myself why, as this was stunningly good. More thoughts to follow in due course over on the other thread!

91. She's A Killer - Kirsten McDougall This is told from the first person point of view of Alice, a 37 year old almost genius who is living in a dead-end job in near future New Zealand. The climate crisis has affected the world and an influx of wealth-ugees has bought their way into NZ. Food is outrageously expensive, a $200 steak, water is scarce and the local residents are being marginalized while the wealthy few buy up their land. But Alice doesn't really care that much. Her childhood invisible friend has returned, her paranoid mother lives upstairs and she's falling out with her best friend Amy and her survivalist husband Pete. She meets a wealthugee Pablo and is soon looking after his teen daughter, enigmatic Erika while Pablo disappears.

I really enjoyed this. The voice of Alice is funny and self-deprecating, the near-future world is brilliantly depicted, and it turns into a bit of a twisty thriller where you're never sure what will happen next. It reminded me a little of Birnam Wood which I read earlier this year as another NZ eco-thriller, but I found the satire in this much lighter and more enjoyable. Possible trigger warning for eating disorders which seems to affect some of the characters but are not really dealt with fully.

@Terpsichore that sounds really good!

@BaruFisher and @highlandcoo , our school play when I was 12 was The Roses of Eyam (I had a very minor part!) and we had a whole school trip to Eyam as part of that - it was incredibly atmospheric, I’ll never forget the eerie feeling of knowing what had happened there a few centuries earlier. (We stopped off at Meadowhall shopping centre on the way home - a somewhat less moving experience 😂)

73 Shadowlands by Matthew Green

I’ve been slowly reading this as each section deals with a different ‘lost’ area of the UK and I didn’t want them to all blend into one. The language is quite dense too, although by no means unreadable. My ‘favourite’ sections were on Skara Brae, Wharram Percy, the army training Ghost Outposts of Norfolk and Capel Celyn, but all are interesting. Whether washed away by the sea, abandoned by the whims of capitalism and war or deliberately flooded by a city’s corporation far away, all the locations retain an imprint of the people who lived, worked and died there. A worthwhile addition to the Standing Around Having Feelings About The Landscape genre.

Goodness me, how are you 111 posts into the new thread already!

Bringing my list over

1. After Henry – Joan Didion
2. Year of Wonder – Clemency Burton-Hill
3. Motherwell – Deborah Orr

4. Just Kids – Patti Smith 5. Best of Friends – Kamila Shamsie 6. Macbeth – William Shakespeare 7. Wyrd Sisters – Terry Pratchett 8. War Gardens – Lalage Snow 9. Soul Music – Terry Pratchett 10. Daisy Jones and the Six – Taylor Jenkins Reid 11. The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde 12. How to Train Your Dragon 11: How to Betray a Dragon’s Hero – Cressida Connolly 13. Trespasses – Louise Kennedy 14. The Brexit Tapes – John Bull 15. Real Tigers – Mick Herron 16. The Sins of Our Fathers – Asa Larsson 17. Ordinary People – Diana Evans 18. My Pen is the Wing of a Bird: new fiction by Afghan women – various 19. A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf 20. Malibu Rising – Taylor Jenkins Reid 21. How to Train Your Dragon 12: How to Fight a Dragon’s Fury – Cressida Cowell 22. Becoming – Michelle Obama 23. The It Girl – Ruth Ware 24. Lessons in Chemistry – Bonnie Garmus 25. The Map of Salt and Stars – Zeyn Joukhadar 26. Here Comes the Sun – Nicole Dennis-Benn 27. Wings of Fire #1: The Dragonet Prophecy – Tui T. Sutherland 28. The Story of a New Name – Elena Ferrante 29. I Have Some Questions for You – Rebecca Makkai 30. Pyramids – Terry Pratchett 31. Witches Abroad – Terry Pratchett 32. Nine Perfect Strangers – Liane Moriarty 33. Midnight at Malabar House - Vaseem Khan 34. Foster – Claire Keegan 35. Carrie Soto is Back – Taylor Jenkins Reid 36. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf 37. Love Letters – Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West 38. The Memoirs of Ethel Smyth – abridged and with an introduction by Ronald Crichton 39. The Christie Affair – Nina de Gramont 40. Friendaholic – Elizabeth Day 41. Wings of Fire 2: The Lost Heir – Tui T. Sutherland 42. Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words – Jenni Nuttall 43. The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula Le Guin 44. The Dance Tree – Kiran Millwood Hargrave 45. Little Disasters – Sarah Vaughan 46. The Color of Air – Gail Tsukiyama 47. Treacle Walker – Alan Garner 48. A is for Arsenic: the poisons of Agatha Christie – Kathryn Harkup 49. Into Every Generation a Slayer is Born: How Buffy Staked Our Hearts – Evan Ross Katz 50. Kala – Colin Walsh 51. Judgement Day – Penelope Lively 52. All Souls – Javier Marias 53. The Dying Day – Vaseem Khan 54. The Running Grave – Robert Galbraith

And updating with my 3 most recent reads:

55. Some kids I taught and what they taught me by Kate Clanchy

Reading this some time after all the fuss, I thought some of the descriptions of the pupils (I have the pre-edit version) were indeed a bit dubious, but I recognised parts of my schooling and my schoolmates in Clanchy's writing and experiences. Especially interesting to read now as there is a section on deciding what to do about secondary school, and I've just gone through the same process with my eldest. I was very much the sort of teenager described in a Facebook meme I saw not that long ago "If your English teacher wasn't your favourite person at secondary school, what were you doing?" - and so I was probably always going to like this, and I did.

56. The Lost Man of Bombay by Vaseem Khan

Third in the Malabar House series featuring a female police inspector struggling in the man's world of 1950s India. Reliably enjoyable.

57. Autumn by Ali Smith

Contrary to all expectations (because I am never quite sure about Ali Smith), I've just read this in one gulp on a long train journey and really liked it. Maybe reading it in autumn helped (I've started but not finished it before, I suspect in a different season). I loved the relationship between Daniel and Elisabeth and the popping colours of Pauline Boty's paintings. Also enjoyed Elisabeth's mother. She just carried me along all the way through (I remember similarly liking How to be Both but couldn't get along with The Accidental). I'm going to try to read the other seasons, er, seasonally now.

Right, I'll go back and read the thread.

@Welshwabbit I loved autumn, as well. Especially bits about Elisabeth and her mother, I thought this bit was very realistic and yet endearing.

And it was easy to read yet I loved loved all the different descriptions of Elisabeth's dreams, trees, her getting her passport -- there was something so vivid yet entrancing about the whole book, it's one of my favourites and one of hers I actually enjoyed reading so glad to read your impressions.

Oh yes, I appreciated how Elisabeth stood up for herself when her tutor wasn't keen on Pauline Booty.

Autumn capital A, and Pauline Boty* typos whilst using the app

84. The Crow Garden by Alison Littlewood
    Set in Victorian times, Dr Nathaniel Kerner arrives in Yorkshire to be the new mad doctor at Crakethorne Manor. One patient in particular, Mrs Harleston, who has been sent there by a controlling husband, catches his attention. After an attempt at mesmerism things go very much awry.
    It starts off well with a good creepy atmosphere but then seems to lose its way and turns into a convoluted mess, leaving some threads hanging.

85. Bunny by Mona Awad
    Samantha is the misfit in her creative writing master's degree class. When the other women, who all call each other Bunny, unexpectedly invite her to spend the evening with them she gets sucked into a cult-like group involving black magic and rabbits.
    I really enjoyed this. The writing felt fresh and there was lots of humour. Some people might find it too silly but I liked the craziness of it and thought that Samantha, with her awkwardness and angst kept the book from descending too far into daftness.

86. The Haunting of Brynn Wilder by Wendy Webb
    After a difficult year Brynn comes to a small town by Lake Superior to spend the summer, but there are spooky goings-on in the boarding house and is her handsome fellow-guest really who he says he is?
    This seems to start off as a ghost story then becomes a cringy paranormal romance filled with characters who are horribly affable and wholesome. I really didn't like the romanticisation of Alzheimer's, where the character who suffers from it is endowed with clairvoyance.

87. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
One October a carnival comes to town. Thirteen year old best friends Jim and Will realise that something sinister is going on and it becomes creepier and creepier. They need the help of Will's father, who has always felt inadequate, to save themselves and the town.
The writing style is very poetic, almost a bit too flowery, and it took a bit of getting used to, but it's a good creepy read for anyone looking for something to get them in the mood in the run up to Halloween.

Watch Us Dance by Leïla Slimani. Translated by Sam Taylor

I loved the first novel in this trilogy based on Slimani's own family history and it was one of my top reads in 2021 and I've beeen looking forward to reading this ever since. No book could live up to that anticipation and sure enough this didn't blow me away in quite the same way although that may have been because I was so busy with work and so the jumps between the many characters were more distracting than if I'd read it quickly. However I was still sneaking in a cheeky chapter or two before breakfast and there was some beautiful writing in parts and a good sense of place. I think maybe Mathilde and Amine were better drawn characters than Aïcha, Selim and Mehdi and I don't know if that's maybe because there's more time and distance between Slimani and her grandparents than her parents. Still an interesting read and I'll definitely read the third book when it comes out in English.

8% through London. Going to stick with it.

Purchased Breathless. My DH and I are about to book trekking Annapurna Circuit in Nepal next year, so this armchair mountaineer is going to get a really good close up look at the mountains! Its deliberately not Everest so as not to deepen the obsession! I've read a lot of the classic mountaineering books already, but will be looking out for any I have missed!

57. Ulysses: James Joyce

I got this on Kindle at the start of the summer but I soon switched to an audiobook version read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan which I got on with much better.

I will admit to not fully understanding what was going on all the time. Sometimes I hadn't a blooming foggy notion (pun intended!). I found Stephen Dedalus's wittering hard to follow and the 'nighttown' episode was also really hard going. I confess to skipping large swathes of it and just get the gist of it.

However, in spite of that I enjoyed many parts of it. I thought the writing was vivid and colourful and the story gave great insight into the lives of Dubliners in the early years of the last century. I liked the stream of consciousness in Bloom's and Molly's narrations. I would describe the whole thing as brilliant, bonkers and baffling.

I may go and read it another time with Gradesaver as a guide. I recommend that audiobook. The narrators are excellent and I loved the old music hall songs between chapters.

58. Exploring English One; Short stories we did for our Inter Cert: compiled by Augustine Martin.

This is a textbook that was brought back into print by popular demand in recent years. It was part of the curriculum in Ireland for the old Intermediate Certificate exam in English (equivalent to O Levels). It was in use up to the early 1990s when there was a revision of the exam system and a new syllabus.

I enjoyed reading these stories again and being transported back to 1989. It consists of mainly Irish authors and a few British and American ones.

A belated thanks to south for the newish thread.

55. My Sister Milly - Gemma Dowler

I thought long and hard about what to say but words cannot do full justice to this book. I was living locally at the time and remember seeing posters around the area. The heart of the book celebrates Milly Dowler's short life and beautiful character, and the place she held within an ordinary, loving, close family which was blown apart by a truly horrific event.

As you'd imagine, a harrowing read, but all the more powerful in its truth, revealing the shameful way the investigation was handled by Surrey Police, the treatment of the family during the investigation, trial and aftermath by the police, press and defence lawyer, and the lasting psychological damage inflicted on the whole family during this horrendous process which was dragged out for years.

Gemma's courage in reliving these events in print is admirable. It was one of those books which needed to be written: I'm sure I'm not alone in finding it deeply affecting, particularly having a teenage DD, and it will stay with me for some time.

Snap, Fuzzy - I did the Inter Cert in 1989 too! I loved The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which wasn't on our curriculum but was in the book. The Majesty of the Law and the one about the monk who never had time to stand and stare seem to have lodged themselves indelibly in my brain too.

I too did the Inter Cert in 1989 @FuzzyCaoraDhubh and @bibliomania I must seek out Exploring English 1. I actually bought a book of Frank O’Connor’s short stories earlier this year because of remembering I’d loved his stories in it.

Oh yes @bibliomania snap 😄
I loved those too. It was strange to go back over these stories. I was impressed by Janey Mary and Up the Bare Stairs and others that didn't affect me mmuch when I read them as a teen. A different perspective.

@BaruFisher goodness!!

And here's the book.

@RazorstormUnicorn DH and I did the Annapurna Circuit trek in 2003. It was amazing!

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh

You aren't alone FORTY TWO HOURS I wailed on these threads the year I did it. My main takeaway was how you would understand all the Catholic references without being Catholic.

Educated in England so didn't do Intercert.