50 Books Challenge 2023 Part Eight

[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, the sixth one here and the seventh one here

52. Amy & Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout

Started this afternoon at San Fransisco airport, read the final chapter on my sofa at home many hours of travel later. It was an engaging book and kept me reading thank goodness as there was nothing else to do. I felt quite disconnected from Amy & Isabelle but I wonder if that is because both are reticent characters and hold back in their lives. I'd definitely like to read more by Elizabeth Strout

So far so good with the Strike.
Yes she needs an editor. And the constant repetition of past histories (Strikes leg, Strikes parentage, Strikes Ex etc etc) is tedious.
I wish she would employ the same strategy that Elizabeth Jane Howard did with Cazalet Chronicles; a two page forward where she explains the backstory and ins and out of the characters and then gets on with.
However she is a great storyteller and plotter and at the moment this is just what I need.

Foreword even!

@splothersdog

Why she hasn't worked out that no one gives a shit about Charlotte I don't know

85. The Bee Sting - Paul Murray. So Booker Longlist number 7 for me and finally one from the shortlist. This reminded me a bit of a couple of other books I've read this year: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen that also tells a story from different members of a family and Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton with its eco themes and occasional veering into lectures. It's narrated, mainly in third person, first by the teenage daughter Cass who is finishing school, then by her younger brother PJ, then mother Imelda and father Dickie. The family own the town's car dealer and it is going into debt after a recession so the family are adjusting to losing their money. The final part of the book switches to second person but alternating the 4 narrators in shorter and shorter sections until a final frenzied ending, which feels quite abrupt. I quite enjoyed it as a whole although I found the children's sections stronger than the parents. Imelda's part is written without punctuation - perhaps to show her lack of education, maybe as a nod to Joyce. There is a lot of mythology, ghosts, foreshadowing, climate woe, just a lot of everything. I feel I need some time to digest it all. On the whole, I'd probably recommend it if you can cope with the stylistic idiosyncracies.

I came on to say I was finding the, 'Charlotte was Strike's beautiful but mad ex-wife, who shook out her hair in a swish of green silk and expensive perfume' stuff even more annoying than the, 'Lucy was Strike's sister from the same mother and a different father; he loved her but found her annoying but he really loved her" stuff.

I also winced at the advert for Mr Kipling's Bakewell Slices and a very unnecessary bit with a tree, whereby she felt it necessary to inform is that it had no leaves/flowers because it was March. My instinct is we will never meet this tree again and it doesn't fucking matter if it has leaves or flowers or not.

77Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
When this was first published it was claimed it was the true diary of a teenage girl but its "editor" Beatrice Sparks has since been found to have made the whole thing up.
The anonymous diarist has her drink spiked with LSD at a party and quickly becomes addicted to every type of drug there is, plunges into a life of debauchery and almost becomes a lesbian.
It's completely unbelievable. I thought maybe it would be so bad it's good, but no, just bad.

78Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins
Wilkins was Pratchett's assistant for the last fifteen years of his life and wrote this biography based partly on a draft of a memoir Pratchett started writing and also from his own memories of working with him and those of others who knew him.
Reading this I wished that Pratchett had completed his memoir because the story of his life would have been so much better written and more alive coming from his pen. It's sad that the most interesting part of the book is Pratchett's decline, though that may be due to it being during most of the time Wilkins was working with him so it's much more immediate than the second and third hand anecdotes that make up the earlier part of the book.
Having said that though, when I finished reading I kind of missed him.

79The Insect House by Shirley Day
Fifty something Helen is living in her childhood home, unhappily married and caring for her mother who has Alzheimer's. Secrets of her past threaten to come out and her estranged brother returns home on the same weekend her husband's pretty young colleague comes to stay.
It's OK, a sort of mystery with morally grey characters, but not particularly intriguing.

80Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith
I'm way behind every one else on this. I liked it, an easy read despite the grisly subject matter, though I did keep getting Strike's suspects mixed up.

I read Go Ask Alice in 1986- it was one of few English language books in Fnac in Brussels which was where I was studying for 6 months. The thing I most remember was her starting off on stuff like LSD and "progressing" to dope.

(The other one I remember reading was about a nun in a closed order getting pregnant and all the other nuns thinking Jesus was about to be born (again) and being terribly jealous of the having-had-sex one)

Says much about Brussels in 1986 that these 2 books form the strongest memories. Those, and Pizzaland.

I'm number 74 in the queue for Strike at the library. I think if it's out in paperback before I get there I'll just buy it. I agree about the later HP books being in need of a good slashing with a red biro or whatever editors actually do, but assumed that she was too important by then to be edited. All of this having been said, I feel v left out with everyone else reading it so might just buy it after all!

We read The Thursday Murder Club at my book club and the consensus was that if one of us had written it we would never have got it published. I suppose fame goes a long way towards sales, so editors don't need to worry so much about the book.

I am shockingly behind with this thread, but thanks so much to everyone who offered kind words about me coming to terms with my fundamentalist Christian childhood. This truly is the loveliest thread on the internet. ❤❤

Sorry for the mad patchwork of random replies below!

@Terpsichore , that bookstore in the Hague looks so dreamy! I have a French friend who has moved to the Hague and I hope to visit her one day.

A very belated happy birthday to @PepeLePew and @DuPainDuVinDuFromage !

Fleishman Is in Trouble was a DNF for me; I couldn’t stand the narrator.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit and @Tarahumara , Running Toward the Danger was one of my bolds last year. I loved it so so much! It has made me want to watch all the films that Sarah Polley directed and acted in. But I guess I do have a thing for trauma memoirs, ha.

@Stokey , you made me laugh out loud with this comment about the Booker shortlist: Now I need to start reading books by men called Paul...I may be some time. 😂
I’ve reserved the Booker shortlist books at my library, because why not. It is a bit crazy though that (as someone on Twitter observed) there are more authors named Paul on the shortlist than there are women!

@TimeforaGandT , I hope you enjoy Educated by Tara Westover; I thought it was a nuanced and courageous book.

@YolandiFuckinVisser I’m always glad to see love for Drive Your Plow. I reread it this year and was even more impressed than I was the first time round.

Normally I’m totally there for the French bestsellers but on the basis of this thread, I’ve decided to give I Who Have Never Known Men a hard miss.

@TattiePants , The Glass Castle is wonderful.

I’m one of those people who read the first Strike novel and gave up after that. I did enjoy The Casual Vacancy though. At the risk of creating an overly simplistic opposition between plot and style, I think JKR excels at plot but style is not her forte. I've read the Harry Potter series aloud to two DC now, and we've all noticed a lot of repetition in terms of the way she describes characters. Kids love repetition though, so perhaps that's part of what makes the Harry Potter books work so well.

52. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky 5/5
    Read for the MN read-along. What can I say, this was amazing. Anna is such a modern heroine. I am fascinated by the idea that Tolstoy started out with the intention to make her a reprehensible character, and then made her increasingly complicated as he went along. The novel has many threads, but I came away convinced that Anna, despite her personal psychological struggles, was primarily the victim of patriarchal divorce laws and social injustice.

53. The Soul of Kindness, Elizabeth Taylor 4/5
    The second novel by Taylor I’ve read, this story was impressive for its insights into character and social setting. The heroine (referred to sarcastically in the title) isn’t a bad person; she’s just extremely convinced that she knows best about how everyone else should live their lives. And when it turns out that she doesn’t always know best, she’s utterly bemused, ha. I did enjoy this, partly because I constantly second-guess myself and my own ideas, so it’s interesting to read about someone who seems blissfully self-confident (even when the confidence is unjustified). Taylor excels at gentle satire.

54. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor 5/5
    I think this is Elizabeth Taylor’s most famous novel, and I can see why. I didn’t manage to join in the MN thread on this novel, but I read the thread belatedly and thoroughly enjoyed it! It is such a moving, understated portrait of clever elderly people attempting to retain their independence and sense of dignity (the heroine most of all). It ends on a tragic note, but the bond between Mrs Palfrey and her younger protegé strikes me as very plausible and authentic.

Btw I have a whole pile of books reserved at the library based on recs from this thread, but none of them have come through yet! bites nails

I'm also reading the new Strike, about quarter way through so far and really liking the investigation. Agree with previous comments on the randomness of Mr Kipling cakes and snuffling breastfeeding babies. Granniemainland JKR really does write fast, doesn't she? GRRM should take a leaf out of her book, been waiting waaayy too long for book 6 of A Song of Ice and Fire!

@cassandre After reading Run Towards The Danger I watched her film Stories We Tell and loved that too!

Just got to the first, ‘Working class person with a strong accent who’s also a bit thick’ section. Sigh.

This really irks me. In the last book it was a couple of paragraphs about a blue carpet in a building that only appears once and wasn't particularly important.

I'm going to resist. If I find out Robin and Strike finally get together I may hunt it down but for now I'm going to focus on books that don't make me irritated 50% of the time. It's a shame the other 50% is actually quite fun.

66: High Wages - Dorothy Whipple

Latest read for the Rather Dated Book Club (and our second Whipple). Set in a Lancashire cotton town just pre-WW1, where our heroine, Jane Carter, lands a living-in job at a drapery business and embarks on her upward climb towards independence and her own living. Whipple came from Lancashire stock, albeit a few social rungs higher than shopgirls, and I enjoyed her clever renditions of accent, which struck me as affectionate and accurate. Jane's hard work and aspiration to better things bring her success, but affairs of the heart don’t come easily, and in the end she pays a high price for her high wages. I’d read this before but I think enjoyed it a lot more the second time around.

I read Go Ask Alice as a young teen in the 1970s and found it very affecting. It didn't stand up to a reread. (I suspect young teens today would have sussed it earlier.)

I trust she's called Pat, Shirley, or Maureen? Or, if younger, Nikki or Bex? Is she a hairdresser or barmaid?

121. The Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster by Charles River Editors

This was free with Kindle Unlimited and I didn’t realise it was so short until I’d downloaded it. I’ve read a fair bit about the Challenger disaster so I was tempted to delete thinking I wouldn’t learn anything, but I thought it might be a handy and quick refresher. I’m glad I kept it as it managed to get across the salient points clearly and there were a couple of facts that I hadn't known previously.

122. Kala by Colin Walsh

Much read on the thread so I’ll just add that I LOVED this book. Definite bold, and a contender for my favourite read of the year.

I’m a couple of chapters in to The Running Grave and so far something about it seems very familiar. Something by Ruth Rendell maybe.

Great review of High Wages, Terpsichore.
I couldn't write a better one. It was a very enjoyable read.

I have Kala lined up on Kindle, Mama. I'm looking forward to reading it soon.

Belated welcome to @PersisFord!
I hope you enjoy the company on this thread as much as I do.

You mean Pat with the deep, gravelly voice? (I've just read this for what feels like the umpteenth time so far in this book)

That'll be her.
Rough as a badger's arse but heart of gold. Husband wallops her when he's pissed and back from the working men's club.

Think others might have this on their TBR but ultraprocessed people is £1.99 on the deals today

Thanks, I'd missed that.