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

1. The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
2. The Storyteller - Dave Grohl
3. What If? - Randall Monroe
4. Explaining Humans - Dr Camilla Pang
5. The Power - Naomi Alderman
6. Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman
7. Rewild Yourself - Simon Barnes
8. Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
9. Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari
10. The Body: A Guide for Occupants - Bill Bryson
11. Ask a Historian - Greg Jenner
12. A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
13. Alone on the Wall - Alex Honnold and David Roberts
14. Conspiracy - Tom Phillips and John Elledge
15. Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker
16. Camouflage: The Hidden Lives of Autistic Women - Dr Sarah Bargiela
17. The Tao of Pooh - Benjamin Hoff
18. Zen: The Art of Simple Living - Shunmyo Masuno
19. Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder - Sarah Hendrickx
20. Move!: The New Science of Body Over Mind - Caroline Williams
21. What Matters in Jane Austen - John Mullan
22. Spectrum Women - Barb Cook (ed)
23. Stuck Monkey - James Hamilton-Paterson
24. A Year of Living Simply - Kate Humble
25. Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now - Jaron Lanier
26. Untypical - Pete Wharmby
27. How Bad Are Bananas - Mike Berners-Lee
28. Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson
29. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke

Not a particularly long list for me.

Strange and Norrell is a re-read - absolutely loved it when I read it around 12 years ago (can be precise as I read it when my youngest was a baby and he is now 12) and loved it again. It's so long and I had forgotten a lot of detail so it felt comfortingly familiar but also still surprised me - a perfect re-read. I found I was slightly less in love with JS (I've grown up a bit maybe - he seemed less dashing and more arrogant), which was a shame, as he has been my literary crush for some time.

Now about halfway through Mansfield Park - an Austen that I haven't read before. It pains me to say that it is just ok. Fanny is dull and Edmund is bloody awful - much prefer the Crawfords, who I know are supposed to be the villains, but I suppose this is Austen messing with us and letting us be drawn in by their charm like the characters of the book. Mrs Norris is like professor Umbridge - so odious, worse than Voldemort (and many, many times worse than Henry Crawford).

Stokey I agree about the pigeon. It was obvious what she was doing, but it didn't really go with the rest of it. Thanks for the recommendation of Boulder. I'm terrible for getting round to the International Prize as an afterthought, but there are generally some really good books on there.

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell this was a book group choice that I confidently expected not to finish, as last time I read MO’F I had that weird effect where you’re reading the words but only seeing the workings. At first I was itching to get at it with a red pen - unlike other books where at the end you abstractly think they would have been better 100 pages shorter, with this I could have crossed out many of the words on each page. However, about 50 pages in I got interested in Lucrezia and was swept along for most of the book, no longer noticing the prose until towards to the end when I stopped buying into it again. I read Lucrezia as slightly on the autistic spectrum early on, though later this alternated with periods of Machiavellianism. Overall I enjoyed the sense of the lives of ducal women in 1500s Italy and was swept along by the plot for most of the book but both prose and imagery came across as pseudo to me.

40. A Dry Spell Clare Chambers * * An impulse 99p kindle deal. Bought as I loved Small Pleasures. This is a 'something bad happened in the past and has repercussions' novel. The terrible thing happened during a 70s university expedition to measure sand dunes in Algeria. We meet the characters in the 90s suburban London. There is Jane (depressed, difficult relationship with her second child, gone off sex), Guy (her husband, CofE primary head having a mild crisis of faith) and Nina (single parent to teenage son, social worker). It's slow going - you are almost halfway through before you find out anything about the trip to Algeria. There isn't a lot of tension and when things are finally revealed it's not really worth the wait. I don't mind stuff that is slow moving and ponderous if the characters are interesting or engaging, but they were all a just a bit bland and dull. I really couldn't work out why Guy was so completely devoted to Jane, she was quite a difficult to put it mildly but he never so much as uttered a cross word. It was okay, but I think I had quite high expectations after reading Small Pleasures, that it didn't live up to.

Thank you for the new thread southeast!

My list:

1: EC Bateman - Death at the Auction
2: Sophie Irwin - A Lady's Guide to Fortune-Hunting
3: Deanna Raybourn - Night of a Thousand Stars
4: Lynn Messina - A Brazen Curiosity
5: Lynn Messina - A Scandalous Deception
6: Lynn Messina - An Infamous Betrayal
7: Lynn Messina - A Nefarious Engagement
8: Richard Armitage - Geneva (audiobook)
9: Hazel Holt - Death of a Dean
10: Richard Osman - The Bullet That Missed
11: Anthony Horowitz - Stormbreaker
12: Rosie Talbot - Sixteen Souls
13: Jonathan Stroud - The Notorious Scarlett & Browne
14: Rory Clements - Corpus
15: Rory Clements - Nucleus
16: Sophie Hannah - Closed Casket
17: Karen M McManus - Nothing More to Tell
18: M C Beaton - Devil's Delight
19: Alexandra Benedict - Murder on the Christmas Express
20: M A Bennett - S.T.A.G.S.
21: M A Bennett - D.O.G.S.
22: M A Bennett - F.O.X.E.S.
23: M A Bennett - T.I.G.E.R.S.
24: M A Bennett - H.A.W.K.S.
25: Sophie Hannah - The Monogram Murders
26: Sophie Hannah - The Mystery of Three Quarters
27: Joanna Lowell - Artfully Yours
28: Joanna Lowell - The Runaway Duchess
29: Caroline O'Donoghue - All Our Hidden Gifts
30: Caroline O'Donoghue - The Gifts That Bind Us
31: Emily Brightwell - Mrs Jeffries weeds the plot
32: Rhys Bowen - The Last Mrs Summers
33: Rhys Bowen - God Rest Ye, Royal Gentlemen
34: Rhys Bowen - Four funerals & maybe a wedding
35: Michelle Salter - Death at Crookham Hall
36: Deanna Raybourn - Killers of a Certain Age
37: Lesley Cookman - Murder on the Run
38: Lesley Cookman - Murder at Mallowan Manor
39: Scott Allan - Do the Hard Things First
40: Helena Dixon - Murder at the Country Club
41: Helena Dixon - Murder on Board
42: Helena Dixon - Murder at the Charity Ball
43: Beverley Watts - Grace
44: Beverley Watts - Temperance
45: Beverley Watts - Faith
46: Rachel McLean - The Blue Pool Murders
47: Lynn Messina - A Treacherous Performance
48: Lynn Messina - A Sinister Establishment
49: Maureen Johnson - The Box in the Woods
50. Robert Muchamore - The Recruit
51. Hazel Holt - Murder on Campus
52. Lesley Cookman - Murder at the Manor
53. Jodi Taylor - About Time
54. Linda Davidsson - The Ikigai Book
55. JM Hall - A Pen Dipped in Poison
56. Hannah Dolby - No Life for a Lady
57. Hannah Beckerman - The Forgetting
58. Rachel McLean - The Lochside Murder
59. Rachel McLean - The Lighthouse Murder
60. Helena Dixon - Murder at the Beauty Pageant
61. John Marrs - The Good Samaritan
62. Lesley Cookman - Murder out of Tune
63. Enid Blyton - The Enchanted Wood
64. Enid Blyton - The Magic Faraway Tree
65. Enid Blyton - The Folk of the Faraway Tree
66. Enid Blyton - The Adventures of the Wishing Chair
67. Enid Blyton - The Wishing Chair again
68. JM Hall - A Spoonful of Murder (audiobook)
69. Maureen Johnson - Nine Liars
70. Tracy Whitwell - The Accidental Medium
71. Caroline O'Donoghue - Every Gift a Curse
72. Charlotte Leonard - Afterwards
73. Shalini Boland - The Silent Bride
74. CK McDonnell - Love Will Tear Us Apart
75. SG MacLean - Seeker
76. Various authors - Marple
77. Mary Stewart - Madam, Will You Talk?
78. Terry Pratchett - Guards! Guards!
79. Charlotte Plain - Happy planning - plan your way through anything
80. Ashley Poston - The Dead Romantics
81. Jodi Taylor - Saving Time
82. Hazel Holt - The Cruellest Month
83. MRC Kasasian - The Horror of Haglin House
84. Tracy Rees - The Elopement
85. Alison Uttley - A Traveller in Time
86. Ruth Ware - The Death of Mrs Westaway
87. Georgette Heyer - The Black Moth
88. Grace Friedman & Sarah Cheyette - Winning with ADHD
89. MC Beaton - Agatha Raisin & the Deadly Dance (audiobook)
90. Jodi Taylor - The Good, The Bad & The History
91. Heather Fawcett - Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries
92. Enid Blyton - More Wishing Chair Stories
93. SG MacLean - Destroying Angel
94. SG MacLean - The Bear Pit
95. Cynthia Murphy - The Last to Die
96. Jonathan Stroud - The Screaming Staircase
97. Jonathan Stroud - The Whispering Skull
98. Jonathan Stroud - The Hollow Boy
99. Jonathan Stroud - The Creeping Shadow
100. Jonathan Stroud - The Empty Grave
101. Chris Brookmyre - The Cliff House
102. Mark Wells - College of Shadows
103. Mark Wells - Gate of Shadows
104. Mark Wells - Legacy of Shadows
105. Lynn Messina - The Harlow Hoyden
106. Lynn Messina - The Other Harlow Girl
107. Jane Wetherby - A Dangerous Melody
108. Lydia Travers - The Scottish Ladies' Detective Agency
109. Lydia Travers - Murder in the Scottish Hills
110. Lydia Travers - Mystery in the Highlands
111. MC Beaton - Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener (audiobook)

112. MC Beaton - Agatha Raisin: A Spoonful of Poison (audiobook)
113. MC Beaton - Agatha Raisin: Down the Hatch

An older Agatha Raisin and a newer one, the older probably slightly more enjoyable (for me)... Agatha solves more crimes in her sleepy(!) Cotswold village.

114. Simon Mayo - Tick Tock

I've read the Itch books and quite enjoyed those, found this enthralling! Itch was YA fiction, this is aimed at adults - Kit (a widowed teacher) notices clicking noises coming from the teenagers he teaches, which quickly becomes a terrifying medical emergency. Kit's daughter is at the same school so it's seen from different viewpoints; I liked that because it gave a sense of the spiralling out of control situation. The only thing I didn't like was the sentence structure, which I found too stop/ start on occasion - for example, my morning would read like this:

'Clara got up. Looked around. Thought about making a cup of tea. Put the kettle on, reached for the teabags. Thought again, reached for the coffee.'

I just found it a bit jarring (sorry, Simon!) but in general definitely a bold for me, a thought provoking book.

115. Fiona Leitch - A Cornish Seaside Murder

Part of the Cornish murders series - Jodie Parker (ex Met PC) moves back to her home town in Cornwall to work as a caterer, solves murders with the help of her (dizzy) Mum and (sparky) teenage daughter. Nothing earth shattering but pleasant to read.

116. Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

An exciting thriller which didn't require much brainpower (handy for me during the school holidays, then) where a group of experts are flown out to a new Chinese zoo pre-opening day, to iron out any potential issues. Of course it all goes hideously wrong Jurassic Park-style... I enjoyed this and tried the Jack West series of books as well. Didn't like them at all

117. Gemma Bray - The Organised Mum Method

Much loved on MN and I have to say, I liked Gemma much more than I thought I would I'm trying to implement some of her cleaning methods, and have planned a big declutter soon. Annoyingly I would like to buy this on Kindle to refer back to, but the Kindle book is quite expensive and a second hand hard copy would be much cheaper, but it seems a bit counter productive to buy a book about decluttering when it will add to the 'stuff' in my house...

118. Nathan Lowell - The Wizard's Butler

Much recommended in the Jodi Taylor Facebook groups. I just found it... a bit dull. Ex-military chap takes a supposedly temporary job as butler to a wizard, of course doesn't believe a word of it but is won round eventually. I thought this would be funnier, it wasn't

119. Yvonne Vincent - Losers Club: A Murder Mystery
120. Yvonne Vincent - Losers Club: The Laird's Ladle
121. Yvonne Vincent - Losers Club: The Angels' Share

Recommended again by the Jodi Taylor group and LOADS more fun than the Wizard's Butler Penny Moon returns to the small Scottish island she grew up on following a disastrous divorce, with her teenage kids in tow and various local 'characters' to add interest. Penny reconnects with friends, makes new ones and solves mysteries, what's not to like?! I did have a few minor gripes but honestly, they are just easy reads and I enjoy the local background, I'd love to visit the Shetland Islands or Orkney or similar, but Skye is the closest I've come.

122. SG MacLean - The House of Lamentations

The last in the Damian Seeker series - shorter, snappier and more enjoyable (for me) than Shardlake! Mystery series set during the Commonwealth - Seeker is a hardened soldier who also solves crimes whilst tracking down Royalists. This last book is set towards the end of the period, it would be interesting to have another series set during the end of the Commonwealth/ first days of Charles II's reign as it's not a time I know a lot about.

123. Kathryn Foxfield - It's Behind You

YA 'dark thriller' based around a game show concept, which involves teenagers being locked in a supposedly haunted location and trying to win the prize money by staying in there the longest. It was a tad overly long and I got very mixed up with the geography of the caves, but certainly passed a few loooong hours whilst I waited for DS to be seen by a GP, he was not very well at all and of course there was no GP appointment available at a weekend.

124. Tom Hindle - The Murder Game

I couldn't get on at all with the Tom Hindle book set on board a cruise ship, fared better with this typical locked room mystery (although I did guess the ending). One tip though, Tom: don't name one of your characters 'Justin Fletcher' because then those of us with small children will have any suspense-filled atmosphere ruined by the really bloody irritating 'Justin's House' theme tune going round in their head

@SapatSea I've listened to the Geneva audiobook and enjoyed it (I think it was out as an audiobook first?), maybe more than reading the actual book because Nicola Walker voices the female character and she's great! I do remember being very irritated when one of the main characters completely changes their hair colour within minutes - plops the dye on, five minutes later, hey presto! - do a bit of research Richard, it takes me longer than that just to do my roots...

Loving the dog photos @FortunaMajor and @LadybirdDaphne - the DC are currently pestering for a dog but I'm not sure our elderly cats would be very impressed!!

@Owlbookend I gave up on A Dry Spell before the halfway point. A 99p Kindle for me too, last year, also got Swimming Lessons at the same time and DNF that either. perhaps, Small Pleasures is CC's best.
@ClaraTheImpossibleGirl ah yes hair dye in fiction and on TV - someone pops into a public loo or tiny loo at a "truck stop" garage and emerges minutes later with a perfect dye job😁

Sniggering at some of these reviews!

46. Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Read by quite a lot of people on here I think. It's a look at how we age, the different ways our bodies fall apart and how medicine sometimes helps, but doesn't always. I learned a lot. Hopefully I am a long off needing any of The Difficult Talks myself, but I might start planting the seed with DH that I will be asking questions of doctors. It seems at the end, medical intervention doesn't always help. Those who accepted the chemo etc were in more pain and suffering and sometimes died quicker than those who used hospice services and potentially had a more peaceful end. Interestingly, that also seemed beneficial for those left behind to grieve. Big thoughts but important stuff.

Oh dear I seem to remember quite enjoying The Signature of all Things. Though I was very heavily pregnant when I read it so maybe not my normal self.

Finished Demon Copperhead. Like others have said, it's very good. Such a compelling, unusual voice and I learnt a lot about the opioid crisis. A real departure from Barbara Kingsolver's other more recent books which I've found quite preachy and obvious.

I haven't read David Copperfield, and when I looked up a plot summary I realised everything I thought I knew about it was actually Great Expectations, so I have no idea how good a job she does of adapting it. My criticisms are things which are probably bound by the source material, like being too long and having too many characters who don't add very much to the plot. Overall I'm very glad I read this.

Off on holiday tomorrow with Yellowface from the library so I'm excited to get started on that!

Ha! Me too on the plots of David Copperfield and Great Expectations (and also on quite enjoying The Signature of All Things, in fact). I could have sworn I'd read DC but if I did it must have been decades ago, because everything I thought I knew about it is in fact in GE.

Thank you southeast! I need to catch up on the thread properly, but for now I will just dump my list here, along with a few new reviews (I read several bolds in a row, hurrah).

1. Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
2. Greenwitch, Susan Cooper
3. The Beginning of Spring, Penelope Fitzgerald
4. The Grey King, Susan Cooper
5. Spare, Prince Harry
6. Les Cahiers d’Esther, Tome 1 [Esther’s Notebooks], Riad Sattouf
7. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
8. Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
9. Homesick, Jennifer Croft

10. Lucy by the Sea, Elizabeth Strout 11. Wandering Souls, Cecile Pin 12. Stone Blind, Natalie Haynes 13. The Moth Catcher, Ann Cleeves 14. Silver on the Tree, Susan Cooper 15. Just a Mother, Roy Jacobsen, trans. Don Bartlett and Don Shaw 16. Winter People, Gráinne Murphy 17. George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large, Belinda Jack 18. Trespasses, Louise Kennedy 19. Fire Rush, Jacqueline Crooks 20. Bandit Queens, Parini Shroff 21. I’m a Fan, Sheena Patel 22. Dog of the North, Elizabeth McKenzie 23. Memphis, Tara Stringfellow 24. Children of Paradise, Camilla Grudova 25. Black Butterflies, Priscilla Morris 26. Cursed Bread, Sophie Mackintosh 27. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin 28. Passion simple, Annie Ernaux 29. Babel, R. F. Kuang 30. The It Girl, Ruth Ware 31. L’Évangile du nouveau monde [Gospel According to the New World], Maryse Condé 32. Open Water, Caleb Azumah Nelson 33. August Blue, Deborah Levy 34. No Fond Return of Love, Barbara Pym 35. Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann 36. Wavewalker, Suzanne Heywood 37. Histoires de la nuit [Birthday Party], Laurent Mauvignier 38. Windmill Hill, Lucy Atkins 39. Love Me Tender, Constance Debré 40. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones 41. The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, Kei Miller 42. Les Cahiers d’Esther, Tome 2, Histoires de mes 11 ans [Esther’s Notebooks 2], Riad Sattouf 43. The History of Emotions: A Very Short Introduction, Thomas Dixon 44. A Spell of Good Things, Ayobami Adebayo 45. At Mrs Lippincote’s, Elizabeth Taylor 46. Madame de Maintenon, Peter de Polnay 47. The Other Wind, Ursula Le Guin 48. Yellowface, Rebecca F. Kuang

49. Journal du dehors [Exteriors], Annie Ernaux 5/5
    I keep five-starring all of Ernaux’s books with boring regularity, but I loved this very short text of hers, although I don’t think it’s one of her more famous. One review I read said that it’s a book that takes people-watching to the next level, and I agree. It’s a collection of snippets describing strangers she sees in her suburb on the outskirts of Paris, while she’s shopping or commuting. Elements of these strangers’ lives mirror her own, and she comments on her world and theirs with her customary insight.

50. Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel 5/5
    A memoir focusing mostly on Mantel’s childhood and young adult years. She was already a successful novelist when she wrote it in 2003, but she hadn’t written the Wolf Hall trilogy yet. A compelling story and very shocking in parts, as when the medical experts refuse to believe that her physical pain is real and therefore put her on anti-psychotic drugs, which wreak havoc with her mental health. Her Catholic schooling was also very authoritarian. Reading this, I could understand why her historical novels seem so real. As she says, I began to read about the old regime, its casual cruelties, its heartless style. I thought, but I know this stuff. By nature, I knew about despotism: the unratified decisions, handed down from the top, arbitrarily enforced: the face of strength when it moves in on the weak. Bless you Hilary and the way you turned adversity into literature!

1. L’Art de perdre [The Art of Losing], Alice Zeniter 5/5

A thoughtful, informative multi-generational saga that focuses on the neglected perspective of the ‘harkis’ in the Algerian War – the Algerians who sided with the French – and their descendants in France. The writing style is sometimes a little heavy-handed perhaps, with lots of historical information incorporated into the narrative in quasi-journalistic fashion, but the characters and their struggles feel believable. Rich explorations of identity and belonging, and of what it’s like to grow up as a second and third generation immigrant in France.

123. Horse by Geraldine Brooks

This is a fictionalised account of the real celebrated racehorse Lexington, the slave who takes care of him and in the future two academics researching him.

This was disappointing, on paper, this had everything it needed to be great but instead just had a lack of je ne sais quoi. No magic. Not gripping.

Definitely too many POVs and a twist ending that belongs in another book.

Lacklustre overall and a bit of a trudge I think someone else felt the same possibly @Stokey

Thank you @Stokey

Just finished Kindred by Octavia Butler. Picked this up on kindle ages ago after it was recommended on Between The Covers. I think by Graham Norton.
Set in 1976 a black woman Dana is married to a white man. She is then pulled back in time to the early 1800's in the Deep South, to a plantation. It becomes apparent that she has to keep going back to save her white ancestor the plantation owners son.
As with lots of time travel stories there is a far amount to suspending disbelief and you could pick holes / find issues very easily.
However the concept is a intriguing one and I found it an easy and engaging read. As always the scenes and depictions of slavery are pretty harrowing

Prudence - Jilly Cooper I love Jilly but this one is much more problematic for me than Harriet. An unsavoury rape case near the start and some unpleasant characters. I still love the way she writes though and could read her descriptions of clothes, food, houses, gardens and dogs all day long.

@splothersdog

I also read Kindred this year due to Between The Covers

The series is on Disney Plus but ended on a cliffhanger only to be axed after one season

I've read around sixty pages of The Singularities by John Banville and it looks like an uphill struggle. Very dense overblown prose and according to Goodreads, there isn't much reward in terms of plot or likeable characters. I think Borrowbox might be getting this one back soon. See below, for example.

A belated thank you to south for keeping us on track. Covid subsiding slowly! A couple more books in the meantime:

48. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People - Toby Young

A memoir of sorts recounting the five years from 1995 that Toby Young spent amongst the literati and glamour of NYC, from the highlife of Vanity Fair all the way down. I don't know much about the author or his politics but he came across as a bit of an arse at that time, and while he had some interesting things to say about the nature of New York society on the whole the book didn't do anything for me. Name dropping, bad behaviour and only in the last third of the book did I get engaged. Not quite a Gallows Pole stinker, but not great by any means.

49. Slow Horses - Mick Herron

Much read on here, and with a TV series (which I haven't seen), this was a solid start to a spy series and I may well read some more of his if I see them along the way. There are touches of humour among the tension-building plot, which had enough twists to make it interesting but not so many that I lost track. Great characters too among the 'slow horses' of Slough House, one more reason to keep reading.

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh Life is too short to waste on men having a self indulgent word-wank over daffodils (see Wordsworth).

Ha! Agreed, Remus! Wordsworth's description was more pleasant to read though!

"Much-dithyrambed daffodils"
That's very very funny. Probably not the intended impact.

69. I'm a Stranger Here Myself by John Seymour
    John Seymour is best known for the Complete Book of Self Sufficiency (one of the earliest Dorling Kindersley books). The first of his autobiographies, The Fat of the Land recounted how he & his then wife Sally (an artist & potter who illustrated the books) came to small holding & self sufficiency on a 5 acre plot in Suffolk.
    
    This sequel takes the family - by now John, Sally & three children, soon to be four - from their rented home in Suffolk to their own 74 acre farm in west Wales. It's rather more downbeat than Fat of the Land (they end up separating due to financial & other pressures), but there's some lovely descriptions of life in rural Pembrokeshire in the 1960s & 70s. JS was very ahead of his time also in writing about the problems with what we now call ultra-processed food (obviously in its infancy then), & it's interesting to reflect on where we've come to in the 45 years since this was written.

70. Little Disasters by Sarah Vaughan
    Reviewed by a few people already. I thought this was very well done & convincing - I liked it much better than Anatomy of a Scandal

71. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
    Part of the read-along, so I'll leave my comments over there, but I'm really happy to have read this & enjoyed it much more than War & Peace

Yes @EineReiseDurchDieZeit I read Horse and maybe @FortunaMajor ?

I didn't think the two stories worked well together and the signposting was more whacking you round the head than subtle story telling.

It was frustrating there was a much better novel in there.

I've got it, but haven't got round to it yet. Won't be rushing now

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh ah, John Banville. The Untouchable is one of my favourite books, I maintain because real life wrote the plot for him and someone must have curbed his more elaborate excesses. I haven't really got on with any of his others.

I dismissed Horse after the sample. It didn’t help that the subject held very little appeal to me.

Still reading a third Michael Dibdin and finding the writing less and less interesting. A pity, as I like the settings, ideas and Zen himself.