50 Books Challenge 2023 Part Ten

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the tenth and final thread of the 50 Books Challenge for this year.

The challenge was to read fifty books (or more!) in 2023, though reading fifty wasn'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, eighth one here and the ninth one here

How have you got on this year?

@GrannieMainland I hated Vladimir, couldn't finish it.

@MaudOfTheMarches such an unpleasant book!

Happy belated birthday @BoldFearlessGirl

Just popping on to say that Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel is on Kindle Daily deals

65. Die Trying by Lee Child Second in the Jack Reacher series and as far as I made it last time. This time Reacher is accidentally caught up in a hostage situation. The whole thing is just unbelievable. First of all, the hostage takers would definitely have simply killed Reacher immediately. Also he was able to overpower multiple armed men at once in the previous book and yet never finds an opportunity to do so in the 3 days of travelling in this book. Against my better judgement I have started book 3 but I genuinely have no idea why as they're not enjoyable books, they're too long and wordy and I don't enjoy graphic violence in my books. Especially at this time of year. I bought lots of cosy crime Christmas books on black Friday and they're all staring at me reproachfully whilst I read more unnecessary violence

@satelliteheart

Give up the self inflicted punishment it's Christmas !

Im definitely going to fall short of 50 this year, so have given up and switched to seasonal/ festive stuff to see if that spurs me on a bit.
I started then abandoned something called Merry Midwinter by Gillian Monks as if I was in the market for recipes, slightly anachronistic preparation/ housekeeping tips and advice about how I should be properly appreciating the magic of the season I’d stick with Nigel, but I couldn’t stick him this year either for some reason.

Instead I flew through A Christmas Cornucopia by Mark Forsyth which I really enjoyed. It’s very short - a good recommendation for anyone wanting to quickly bulk up their numbers this year! I think I saw it recommended on last year’s thread actually. I really enjoyed his Etymologican which I also read earlier this year, but then didn’t finish another of his after that.

I’m also reading Murder in the Snow by Gladys Mitchell which claims to be a ‘Cotswold Christmas Mystery’ although Christmas is over within the first couple of chapters. I lifted it from MIL’s shelf though Amazon tells me it was ‘first published in 1950 as Groaning Spinney’ - it’s billed as being for fans of Christie, Sayers and Marsh etc but it isn’t as good as any of those, I’m struggling to care much about whodunnit or why, or any of the characters really but I will finish it all the same.

87: The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens - Helena Kelly

Gosh. I don’t know where to even start with this, quite honestly. First off, I’m a bit of a Dickens obsessive and I know a lot about his life, so I was curious to know what 'lies' this book was going to reveal. It’s heavily hyped as 'dynamic', 'radical' and 'revelatory', so a fair amount was promised.

Secondly, I’m in no doubt that Dickens was far from being a saint - he behaved appallingly to his wife, conducting an affair with the young Ellen Ternan while gaslighting the entire world on an epic scale. He treated many of his friends shabbily. He certainly didn’t make his children’s lives (his sons, anyway) very easy.

But blimey, if you believe Helena Kelly he was basically the Devil incarnate, lying, concealing, cheating and plagiarising his way through life from start to finish. Every chapter levels more and more accusations which start off as bafflingly minor (he concealed the fact that he had a younger sister who died!! errr…except that it's a fact given right at the very beginning of Forster's biography of him) and just go on from there. His sister married a man with Jewish ancestry and yet he was anti-Semitic!! And racist!! He made up things about working in the blacking-factory!! He took drugs!! His Christmas stories were rubbish!! The list of charges is so relentless I almost expected to find that he'd stolen the Crown Jewels, shot the sheriff and killed Kenny.

There are actually some interesting points of discussion - the suggestion that he routinely 'borrowed' ideas from other authors is definitely worthy of research - but the tide of accusations means that it’s very difficult to separate out the wheat from the chaff. Especially when every assertion is heavily hedged about with 'possibly,' 'maybe', 'it's likely', 'perhaps', and 'we can only speculate'.

I was already flagging long before it was confidently stated that the son born to one of Ellen Ternan's cousins was in fact the smuggled-in secret child of Ellen and Dickens, asserted on the basis of no evidence whatsoever that I can see. But the coup de grace is that Dickens was happy to let people know about his affair with Ternan because he wanted it to cover up his REAL secret……which was that he had syphilis and had passed it on to his wife and his children. Ye Gods!

To think that I used up a perfectly good book-token on this. Ah well. Sorry for the rant, but I suppose it’s good that I've made it almost all the way to Christmas without a real stinker 😱😂

42. Notes to Self, by Emilie Pine. Stunning but extremely personal essays. Hard to read, presumably very hard to write. I'm glad to have read it.

Funnily enough I knew someone on the thread had read this recently which prompted me to open my copy. So funny to see Nice that I agree with everything you say, and that it was #42 for me as well!

Oooooh, spooky noodle!

High: A Journey Across the Himalayas
Thanks to whoever recommended this; I’m so sorry that I can’t remember who it was.

I’ve not been well, which is at least in part to blame for this book seeing to last forever. It was fine, but I think I’d have liked it better if I hadn’t already read quite extensively about the area and its history. I also didn’t really warm to the writer, who I found a bit sneery at times.

However, it’s got lots of interesting and informative stuff and is a decent enough piece of travel writing. I’m glad I only paid £2.99 on kindle, rather than asking for it in hardback for Christmas though.

That was me Remus. Sounds like it was a bit of a mixed bag though

That was also the book that suddenly dropped to 2.99 and made us think Amazon might be reading this thread. Sadly my Grand Canyon botanists book is still expensive so I'm guessing not!

Thanks, Noodle. It was fine - would just be better for somebody a) not ill and b) not quite as obsessed by the Himalayas as I am!

Here's hoping the botanists one comes down soon.

64. A heart that works by Rob Delaney

I follow a couple of grief pages on Instagram (it can be very helpful to have put into words things you feel) and Robs story kept popping up. He lost his little two year old boy to cancer and he spoke beautifully about his son, grief and how to support those grieving. So when I saw he had a book out I thought I'd give it a read.

I cried on and off all the way through. It's so emotional and what his family went through is heart breaking. Luckily it's a short book so I dug in and read it in two days (I could have read it in one sitting if I'd timed it better). It's a really well written book and I laughed out loud several times, sometimes at the same points I had tears in my eyes.

It was a challenging read, so I have reflected a little on why I wanted to read it. I think I wanted to show support a bit. And having lost both parents before I turned 40, I read a bit about loss as a way of making sense of it. I resonated with much that he wrote, including some of more selfish and less palatable feelings, such as the irritation and anger at an acquaintance telling a story about a 91 being healed of brain cancer. That's not what you want to hear when your two year old is having chemo, it's not the same situation as all and I completely understood.

Recommended if you also like crying at books about loss and grieving.

I promise I will update my reading soon!! But popping on again to say that Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is on daily deals. I highly recommend

Thanks @splothersdog. I really liked Transcendent Kingdom.

88: The Appeal - Janice Hallett

I'm probably the last person in the world to get round to this, but after hearing Janice Hallett on the radio talking about her latest book, I remembered I’d bought this a while ago. The up-dated epistolary device of unravelling a murder mystery through the medium of texts and emails was quite clever and often amusing, and it made for a pacy-enough read - it felt very Osman-ish in places. I guessed various plot points fairly early on, but not the central mystery. Not sure I need to read another, though, now I know how the general idea works.

Thanks for the new thread southeast.

The Trial by Rob Rinder A friend raved about this - a whodunnit and court drama with a junior barrister as lead character. I wasn’t quite as taken with it as she was as it was sometimes a bit clunky, but I did enjoy it and was drawn along and entertained.

66. Tripwire by Lee Child Third Reacher book. This time Reacher hooks up with a woman from his past, the one who got away, to unravel a military mystery. I guessed the twist so early on it made the whole book a bit farcical. I'm partly interested in reading on to find out what goes wrong with Reacher's apparent happy ending but equally I don't really care enough.

Going to take Eine's very wise advise and stop my self inflicted punishment and call it a day on Reacher, at least until the new year. I attempted to start a cosy Christmas crime yesterday but wasn't feeling it. Think I need a trashy romance to cleanse my soul from all the gratuitous violence against women

DD bought me Susannah Constantine's autobiography 'Ready for absolutely Nothing' as an early Christmas present.
I remember her from her What Not to Wear days.
This is a good read which has seen me through a bout of recent insomnia. She says that she makes a point of trying to win people over and she is very charming in print. She is also honest about her previous issues with alcohol (and how she has overcome this) and the fact that she was part of a class and generation brought up to be good wives and mothers with no career aspirations.
Some gems about Princess Margaret.

@GrannieMainland and @MaudOfTheMarches this is one of my Kindle hoard from the other day that I am quite looking forward to, was planning on reading over the holidays.

@StColumbofNavron Look forward to hearing what you think of it - I don't really like panning a book that others may find perfectly fine, so I didn't review this at the time.

I have form for hating stuff others like and vice versa.

@StColumbofNavron it got very good reviews so do not be deterred!

65. The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

Taylor is moving away from home in Kentucky to start a new life, and the book focuses on the journey and then the time period as she figures out finding a job and a place to live. In some ways not a lot happens but in other ways loads of things happen. Primarily to me it's about finding friends who become your chosen family.

The book was written in 1988, and has a strong anti racist undertone, I wonder what it was like to read at the time?

I think it's set in the 70s, and feels a world apart from life in 2023. It makes me wonder what the world will be like in 2050, and how different it will feel to the 2000s. Which then makes me understand why older generations can seem stuck in their ways or struggling to accept change.

I love a book that sends me down a new thought path!

I really enjoyed The Bean Trees @RazorstormUnicorn. I don't think it was a big hit at the time, so I would never have read it if she hadn't become so famous later on and I looked up her earlier books. I agree with you that this made it interesting to read, as it's the sort of book you would usually read at the time rather than many years later from a completely different perspective. I also liked it because you can see her development as a writer- this isn't as powerful as her later books, but definitely showed promise.