50 Books Challenge 2024 Part Two

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the second thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2024, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

If possible, please can you embolden your titles and maybe authors as well of books you've read or going to read? It makes it much easier to keep track, especially when the threads move quickly at this time of the year.

The previous thread is here

Thank you Southeast for the new thread (not so new already!)

1. Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry

Oh dear, what a sad book. Full of windy claims and vapidity. I feel like this man had to be less awful than the book makes him sound. None of this means he deserved to die so young, though I am left feeling that fading out peacefully in a hot tub isn't the worst thing that could have happened to him.

Darn it, forgot to bold the title, sorry.

Nimona by ND Stevenson

Graphic novel that the Oscar nominated film is based on. Great fun.

I still feel a bit guilty for calling him Moaning Matthew to DH whilst I was reading it last year (before MP died) but essentially I agree. It was a difficult read in every sense.

I think he was a good example of someone who we may have thought we ought to have loved because of his character Chandler in Friends, but actually didn't, really. There was so much about his early life that I thought was sad, but equally I couldn't help thinking "he's a bit of a dick."

5.Foster by Claire Keegan. Rural Ireland, 1950s. A childless couple take in a girl whilst her mother is pregnant with another sibling (she has many). This was a short beautiful novella which made me want to devour everything that Keegan has written.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit Dds adored The Buccaneers on Apple. I assumed it was taking massive liberties with Wharton who presumably didn't have a lesbian sub-plot or steamy sex scenes. Was the abusive relationship in there?

1. Biography of X - Catherine Lacey. I got this as it was one of those books with a lot of hype last year. I didn't know anything about it and having reached the end, realised I didn't get it in full, although that doesn't make me think it was a better book.

It's written supposedly by someone called CM Lucca who is the widow of X, a famous female performance artist who has recently died and is set in the late 90s, early 2000.. The book is written as if Lucca is writing her biography complete with photographs, footnotes and quotes from X and people who knew her. It's also written in a alternate universe - slightly Atwood like - where the US has been divided by a wall in 1945 into the religious, fascist Southern Territories and the neo liberal Northern Territories, which are far more liberal than even modern day US with gay marriage, gender pay equality and fully funded childcare.

The wall has come down and now there is a bit more information coming out. As the book progresses, Lucca finds out more about X and her connections to the southern territories and then we learn more about her different art works and concept of individuality.

The second half of the book moved really slowly for me with lots of art theory and exposition. The bit I missed was Lacey's trick of using various female artists work and quotes and attributing them to X. This becomes clear at the very end but by then I was struggling to care and just wanted it to be over.

I think if you're very into modern art and art theory this could be for you, but reading a whole book about an imaginary artist, who sounded like a total tool, didn't do it for me.

I just raced through When The Dust Settles and can only echo what everyone else has said. Absorbing. What a remarkable woman doing an extraordinary job.

@Stowickthevast

The abuse wasn't in there, no, in fact Jinny barely comes off the page as a character

@PermanentTemporary

I read Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing before he died and slated it for its arrogant delusions. I felt bad when he passed away but there was an inevitability to that also sadly.

6. The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell
Ooh this was a terrific candy floss read. I found myself not really following it because of all the twists but I kept reading anyway. Kept me engrossed on my sunbed (lucky me).

Rouge - Mona Awad
After her mother's untimely death, Belle goes to California from Montreal to deal with her estate. She had a difficult upbringing and was largely estranged from her mother. On arrival there is something amiss and an unusual woman at the funeral leads her to the beauty spa/cult her mother was part of. She tries to get to the bottom of what happened to her mother.

This weaves in a lot of fairytale elements and is a bit surreal. It takes aim at the beauty industry and looks at how women are expected to conform to certain standards and ideals. I wanted to like this a lot more than I did. It started well, wandered off in the middle and got completely lost by the end. It was far too long and I was willing it to end.

7. The Kitchen Gods Wife - Amy Tan I adored this book. It's a mother telling her adult daughter the story of her life with her abusive ex-husband in China during WW2. The begining and end are in the present day and their existing family dynamics.

Thanks for the Natalie Haynes recommendations. I think I had avoided them as other modern retelling of Greek mythology had left me cold. I wasn't a huge fan of Madeleine Miller for example. I'm not sure why. They just didn't chime for me... will give NH a go though. Thanks

Oh dear.
Bit infra dig.

Hmmm.
Odd.
Did anyone else see the post from the author advertising her own books? It's not there now, but there's no deletion that I can see? Do famous people just get silently removed rather than deleted for CFery?
Anyway, as you were. 😏

@BlindurErBóklausMaður yes I saw it, sniggered at your response and went back to my book. Strange how it’s disappeared.

I saw it @BlindurErBóklausMaður was about to report it for advertising and then it was gone.... Strange.

I missed it - you have to tell who it was!

DH got me a membership to Ben McEvoy’s (from YouTube) patreon this year. It focuses in on the classics which I’ve been trying to read more of since last year. Anyway, my next couple of books are related to that.

12 Mad at the World- A Life of John Steinbeck
This was free on audible and part of me wishes I hadn’t read it- I love Steinbeck’s writing, but this biography makes it clear he was a bit of an asshole in real life. It also spent too much time giving synopses of his works which I doubt anyone wanted to hear- in my case he spoiled a couple I haven’t read yet (like Tortilla Flat)

13 Journal of a Novel- the East of Eden letters- John Steinbeck
I read this in tandem with East of Eden (which I’m not counting as it was a reread from only last year). This was a fascinating read- seeing how he planned out and wrote the novel. He wrote this ‘journal’ as letters to his editor, Pat Covici, on the left hand side of a hardback journal, while writing East of Eden itself on the right-hand pages. It gives us insight into him as a writer as well as his regular life and concerns.

We’ve also been reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass which I struggled with at first but am getting into now. I hope to dip in and out of it and finish it before the year is out.

I saw it too but strange that there’s no deletion message.

I love Walt Whitman.
Possibly my favourite poet.

The mysterious post was from an author called Caroline who was flogging her domestic noir novels, which looked like the kind of crap you see in Asda book shelves (she posted a picture as well).

10. Quiet in Her Bones by Nalini Singh
    Araav is staying at his father's house after a car accident when his mother's remains are found, ten years since she was last seen. Aarav begins to wonder if everyone in their exclusive neighbourhood is a potential suspect, including his father and himself.
    Good crime thriller. I liked the wealthy New Zealand setting and Aarav makes a good narrator, trying to recover physically and emotionally from his crash while trying to find out what really happened to his mother on the night she disappeared.

11. Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook
    Hook's memoir, mostly of his time in Joy Division, though he also writes a little about his childhood.
    His writing style is very colloquial and rambling, and I don't think anyone not already a fan of Joy Division would get much out of it. I liked reading about how the band got together, their gigs and songs and the dynamics between them.

12. The Lighthouse Witches by C.J. Cooke
    In 1998 Liv moves to a Scottish island to work on a mural in a lighthouse, taking her three daughters, Sapphire, Luna and Clover with her. They hear stories about witches and wildlings, dangerous doppelgangers who destroy families.
    The narrative swaps between Liv and Sapphire's viewpoints in 1998 and Luna's in 2020, so we know early on that something goes very wrong on the island. It starts off well, intriguing and with a gothic atmosphere, and it's readable enough, but there were things in the 2020 plotline that didn't really work. Not bad though, if you can get past a bit of implausibility.

@Tarragon123 Hope you enjoy Boudica! Very very different from Jenny Colgan but I enjoyed both. I have Treachery of Spies by Manda Scott in my Audible library but haven't listened to it yet. That's set in WWII, I think.

10 Venomous Lumpsucker - Ned Beauman Reviewed on here a few times recently. Thanks for the recommendation, doubt I would have come across it otherwise - sorry can't remember who posted first review. This was interesting and a bit close to home - which is generally why I avoid sci-fi, prefer my reading to be escapism. ;) I can totally see how we could (will?) end up in a world similar to what the author describes. A world where, amongst other thing, unless you are exceedingly rich, food lacks any flavour ... 😭. Got me thinking (more) about some of things we just take for granted. Clever ideas and it was totally bleak, there was humour in there too. Looking at you, Hermit Kingdom!

Reading ‘Murder at Holly House’ by Denzil Meyrick now as a palette cleanser and then think I am going to go for ‘The Reindeer Chronicles’ by Judith Schwartz. I’ve enjoyed her previous books on soil and water and in this one she introduces landscape scale regeneration projects. Need a glimmer of hope for a non-Lumpsucker future.

That post must have been removed very quickly. I came on the thread earlier and saw Blindur’s 15.50 post and was very confused what it referred to, so the mysterious post had obviously already been removed but that must have been before Blindur’s 16.13 post. Very odd - but at least I now understand the 15.50 post!!

It was right quick. I typed it, then went to the kitchen and put the kettle on, came back and it had gone. 😂