50 Books Challenge Part Three

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the third 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 first thread is here and the second one here.

The Maid by Nita Prose. I really enjoyed this! I’m embarrassed to say that I thought it was set in the UK until I saw the dollar symbols. There’s a lot more I’d like to say, but I’m worried about spoiling the book for others. I’ve seen there’s another book in what will hopefully become a series and I’m looking forward to reading it in due course.

Sorry to hear your DS is unwell @BarbaraBuncle 💐

A few others I've finished recently, all from the Women's Prize potentials list.

The Centre - Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
A Pakistani translator living in London discovers a mysterious language school that promises native fluency in 10 days for a fee of 20k plus the signature of an NDA. She attends twice and has an affair with the centre director and discovers the dark secret behind the mysterious method.

This explores class, race and identity, religion, mixed race relationships, cultural expectations from family and more. Despite having a tick list of ishoos, it is quite compelling although a bit dark. The author is getting a complete battering in the reviews as she is writing from a wealthy and privileged perspective and is somewhat indifferent to religion. I can't claim to have liked it, but I couldn't put it down.

Talking at Night - Claire Daverley
Hailed as a cross between Normal People and One Day this is the story of a teen couple who suffer a tragic loss which pulls them apart, but through time, their paths keep crossing.

It was a lot of words to ultimately not say very much. Over-hyped, over long and overrated.

I forgot one.

The Collected Regrets of Clover - Mikki Brammer
After missing the death of her beloved grandfather, Clover becomes a 'death doula' who helps people come to terms with dying and is a companion in their death. She spends so much time helping other people she doesn't really have a life of her own. She collects their regrets and advice in a series of notebooks and tries to fulfil some of these on their behalf. A particular client inspires a road trip which leads her to come to terms with her own grief and opens doors for her future.

This is a little bit schmaltzy and over the top at times. It's not something I would normally have chosen if it wasn't on the list. I'd drop it in the more chic lit end of the spectrum. (I'm not slamming chic lit, It's just not my usual choice.) It's a tough read at times if you have someone in their twilight years. It had me bawling in places. It's ultimately quite uplifting, but also a tear jerker (also not my thing). It wasn't terrible and is screaming to be made into a film.

@saturnspinkhoop i liked quite a lot of The Maid but not the last few chapters!

27. Leave The World Behind by Rumaan Alam

The novel of the Netflix film of the same name.

Amanda and Clay take their children to an AirBnB in the Hamptons, on their first night they are interrupted by owners Ruth and George who have come to the house as an emergency

As the unnamed emergency unfolds, no technology works and the two families find themselves in a state of increasing panic as they wonder what is going on in the world

This was good I read it quickly this evening as it was <250 pages. There were these occasional asides as to what was happening elsewhere that were subtly done and creepy.

It only really differs from the film in small ways except for the fact it's a married couple come knocking not father and daughter. The controversial ending to the film is about the same but makes a bit more sense in the book.

Worth a look.

@HenryTilneyBestBoy hope you like Spanky!

@BarbaraBuncle nothing I read could be described as ‘highbrow’ and all reading is valid. I’m interested in reviews about books I might read, have read or will never read. In my younger days I was a bit of a Book Snob (while devouring early Lisa Jewell’s and trashy horror) but I grew out of that . I don’t like SF, for instance but I like to hear why other people do. So don’t feel your books are somehow lesser than anyone else’s!

Reflecting on it, I agree. Overall I did enjoy it and will read the next book, but there were a few things that bothered me. I’d like to expand further, but I’d spoil the ending.

@saturnspinkhoop i think there were some factual inaccuracies in how the doorman’s daughter did her job at the end. But more, I felt that the protagonist’s behaviour towards the end wasn’t really in keeping with her character until then.

Hopefully not spoiler-ish!

Yes, I’d agree with that. I’d also say that the very end just wasn’t necessary and the book would have been even better without it.

Having said all that, it was still an enjoyable read.

Best wishes to you and your son @BarbaraBuncle 🌻
Three recent ones;

11. The Rector's Daughter: F.M. Mayor.

Read for The Rather Dated Club. Written in 1924, this is a quietly devastating story about Mary, a woman in her late thirties who cares for her elderly father, the rector, in a small rural village called Dedmayne. A new acquaintance with a neighbour causes a ripple of excitement in Mary's life, but it isn't clear that it will bring the loving companionship that she craves.

I thought the book started slowly but I found it engaging once it was properly underway, particularly after the introduction of Kathy and how she impacted on the developing relationship between Mary and Robert. This is a thoughtful exploration of the loneliness of a young woman representative of many women of this era who cared for elderly parents at the cost of their own independence. A quiet, intelligent book and a worthwhile read.

12. Elephants Can Remember: Agatha Christie.

I came across some radio plays recently based on the books of Agatha Christie and this was one of them. As I have this one in my collection, I decided to read it again. When I read it years ago, I thought the story was profoundly sad and I do still.

This is a retrospective murder mystery. Ariadne Oliver is attending a literary luncheon when an unpleasant woman comes up to her to ask her about the mysterious circumstances of the death of the parents ofAriadne's goddaughter as this woman's son is planning to ask the girl to marry him. Ariadne is intrigued and enlists the help of Hercule Poirot. They go searching for people who used to know the couple (the elephants of the title) to try to piece together what happened.

I thought this was a neat and compact book with a single selfless act of love at its core. I liked the Ariadne/Poirot collaboration. They make a good team. The joke about setting off on the trail of elephants wore a bit thin after a while, but that's a minor quibble. This is not the most clever or brilliant of her books, but I have a soft spot for it.

13. Listening Still: Anne Griffin.

This was a blind buy at Christmastime, a so-called 'blind date with a book' for a fiver. Wrapped up in brown paper, it had the first line of chapter one printed on the front. I thought it sounded humorous and quirky. Unfortunately it turned out to be a dull, tedious encounter; one that I'm keen to put behind me.

Jeanie Masterson works in the family business of undertakers in Kilcross. It's a small family business with one distinguishing feature; Jeanie and her father share the uncanny gift of hearing the dead speak. There is no explanation for this, scientific or pseudo-scientific or otherwise. They just do.

For Jeanie, this gift is a blessing and a curse. She fell in love with a young lad, but wouldn't follow him to London because she felt obliged to stay working for the family business. She married another young lad who was so besotted with her he joined the family firm but they never reached the dizzy heights of her first love. However, all had been going smoothly until her father announced his retirement and this brought on a crisis about her work, her marriage and the unresolved longing for the man she could have been with if she had the courage to leave with him years ago.

I thought this was an unconvincing tedious plod of a book. The communication with the dead was strange, creepy and disturbing. I thought Jeanie whinged a lot and needed a good talking to. One of her friends eventually came up with 'OK. Enough with could've, would've, should've. It helps no-one'. This might have elicited a faint cheer from me if I hadn't been so drained and too far gone to care. Some people might like this book, but for me, we didn't hit it off.

Thank you @MorriganManor and @FuzzyCaoraDhubh

I was just feeling exhausted last night, and felt bad about my "light reading" and not being able to contribute anything to any recent discussions. SF and Fantasy are really not my thing.

The battle to get CAMHS to see DS and take his MH seriously has been getting DH & me down. Last year was the big battle with the Council for an EHCP and his education, leaving little reading time. This year the battle continues. All roads lead to CAMHS, who are "about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike" as my late dad would say.

Lucy Diamond - Anything Could happen
Enjoyable lighthearted romance about a couple who have a one night stand in New York then through a series of mishaps don’t see each other again for almost 20 years by which time they have a grown up daughter.

Have some heavy non fiction on Audible so as a light alternative this was great.

Cross post in a way @BarbaraBuncle - I love a bit of frothy light stuff.
Interesting to read about The Christmas Appeal. I liked The Appeal but DNF the other two.
Hope your DS gets the right support.

Don't ever apologise for 'light reading', Barbara. All books are good if you enjoy them and hopefully reading helps a bit during stressful times. I wouldn't expect I'd be able to read anything too challenging either if I were under pressure or exhausted.

My dh has a very big collection of science fiction and fantasy and he doesn't read anything else.

I often read an Agatha Christie or a Chalet School book to switch off a bit. I'm tempted to buy a couple of Enid Blytons I saw on World of Books recently.

Mind yourself @BarbaraBuncle

@BarbaraBuncle

Sci-fi and Fantasy aren't massively my bag either I might read 1-2 a year. Comfort Reads are important mine is Anne Of Green Gables and Little Princess

Best wishes to you and your son. CAMHS waiting lists are dreadful in my area.

I have Anne of Green Gables on my Kindle @EineReiseDurchDieZeit
I must dip into them!

Sorry to have missed this when we cross posted earlier @BarbaraBuncle but sympathy and well wishes to you and DS. Glad to see a positive review of The Christmas Appeal which I'd received as a Christmas present but still haven't got round to...😅

I don't think my tastes in comic fiction align with that of many on this thread, but as you like Stevenson, would tentatively propose Sarah Caudwell's cosy comic mystery series beginning with Thus Was Adonis Murdered as excellent comfort reading. They're also epistolary (between barristers), like The Appeal and light but well written. (Trigger warning for much middle class camp.)

Nobody should ever feel bad about anything they’re reading. One of the main reasons for reading is to give you pleasure, so everyone should just read what they want and not what they think they ‘should’ be reading.

A lot of what I read isn’t at all highbrow. I do read classics and some more literary stuff, but it’s interspersed with a lot of 99p psychological thrillers/chicklit/cosy crime etc. I also have a whole bookshelf in my spare room filled with all my childhood favourites and I regularly dip into them.

I cannot contribute anything to the sci-fi/fantasy discussion because I rarely read either genre - I’m still finding it a really interesting discussion though to see what people think is/isn’t proper sci-fi!

@BarbaraBuncle Never ever feel remotely bad about ‘light reading’. There is literally nothing to feel bad about. It’s no one’s business what you read. All that matters is that you enjoy what you’re reading.

As an aside, I entirely ‘get it’ about the EHCP related stress. Been there and done that. I know how exhausting it is. I’m just glad for you that you’ve got something fun to take your mind off it a bit.

I love Sarah Caudwell, @HenryTilneyBestBoy

i have had lots of crappy coughs and family stuff since the start of the year and I am reading mostly easy crime with the odd higher brow book. It’s all good.

C8H10N4O2 - re "Bujold, Le Guin, Cherryh, Willis in particular will be in the airport bookshops alongside the men"

I'm not convinced that is evidence of exceptional quality.

Le Guin has her fans and I had read some of her stuff some decades ago. One book of Connie Willis that I have read suggests that she would be a very mediocre writer of any genre but that in SF her shortcomings are even more jarring. I thought I would try Bujold's novella Mountains of Mourning but after reading the first page on Amazon, I decided that I just can't do it, much as I like and respect you (see photo).

"Nagata - Nanotech, post humanism, military SF topics. Try the Last Good Man"

I'll try this + Catherine Assaro's Primary Inversion.

"She belongs to an age in SF where outlandish stories of odd civilizations on the other side of the universe were the normLike Dune?"

Fair point. Dune is also of that age in SF. Most books of that era have aged badly, mostly because the technology they imagined is so far off what we have since learned and developed. Frank Herbert skirts around the issue of having to imagine the scientific advances of a civilization at least 1000 years in the future by vaguely referring to the Butlerian Jihad that banned all thinking machines, and then going on to imagine how such a civilization would develop social sciences and human skills instead. There is also an argument to be made to consider Dune fantasy - good vs evil, the good are pretty/handsome while the bad are ugly, nasty, and awful in every way etc.

"Gibson and Herbert were non scientists... Dick was a liberal arts drop out"

These three wrote books that are not very technical, at all. Their books are definitely imaginative and have spawned entire sub-genres in their wake, though. I would think the common thread through their lives is long-term use of psychoactive drugs.

"Tchaikovsky studied psychology and went into law"

He studied Zoology and psychology, the relevance of which should be clear to anyone who read his fantastic book Children of Time and its sequels. Please read this book. I think that you will then understand my question re why women don't write such books.

"Stephenson was a geographer (albeit with a side interest in computing)"

Come on Neal Stephenson also studied Physics at university, which was one of his degrees. It is clear to anyone who has read his Anathem and Seveneves that he has rather deep knowledge in this field. He also has a bit more than a "side interest" in computing, I would say, having done a lot of coding which is also clear in his books.

"Asimov was a biochemist."

I think you will find that he was a bit more than just a biochemist. I have read some of his non-fiction books on Physics and Astronomy. In any case, he was undisputedly a scientist not to mention a Mensa member. Without meaning to hurt anyone's feelings, I seriously doubt that Connie Willis is one.

"Subject expertise will reduce the research needed, is likely to stimulate the interest but I wouldn't say its necessary, any more than the engineers need degrees in sociology or anthropology to build convincing worlds."

I disagree. In SF, it is absolutely necessary to have an idea about about the science behind the technological advances that one is describing, in order to construct a realistic scenario. A bunch of English Lit majors just can't write about space stations like Arthur C Clarke or Neal Stephenson.

"Even successful women writers are pushed by publishers to make more key characters male, to do more "feelings" - it would be funny if it wasn't so annoying... they need to bend toward what sells/what publishers will accept."

This is what sells in a female reader base, though. Given that the vast majority of SF readers are men, it seems extremely limiting to target a female SF reader demographic. I suspect that the issue isn't what sells because that certainly isn't garden-variety feelings about other people and children in an SF setting, like Connie Willis's Doomsday Book. I think it is more likely that either these women authors just want to write this way, or that they/their publishers are actively targeting female readers.

"One of the SF groups I was on years ago used to have "where is the female Greg Egan" in the FAQ because it was so frequently asked. The answer was "in the same room as the other male Greg Egan". Some writers are decidedly individual"

Agreed, but my question is more general and the example isn't just N Stephenson. Why do I not read mind blowing ideas and incredible worldbuilding in SF books by women found in so many books by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Neal Stephenson, Liu Cixin? Not only them but so many other books like Stephen Baxter's Flood and Ark, Dan Simmons' Hyperion, Chris Beckett's Dark Eden.

"I'm a heretic who prefers Cryptonomicon to Snowcrash"

I love both. You should definitely read the Diamond Age if you haven't already.

Henry - re "The ‘science’ is essentially handwavy magic glossed with terms that seem to have been lifted from an archived Buzzfeed listicle of “20 trendy biotech words that will blow your mind!!” so unsurprised to read of his psych/law background in @C8H10N4O2post. Not something I would normally cavil at when being so well entertained, but in light of recent discussions I wonder what the reception would have been like to a fantasy equivalent featuring e.g. dragon and unicorn telepathic intelligences and magic knowledge beans…."

What are you referring to in particular? My thoughts on Children of Time and its very detailed evolution plot were quite the opposite of "handwavy magic".

The author studied zoology as well as psychology, by the way.

@BarbaraBuncle At risk of getting too political, the crisis within CAMHs is, quite frankly, a source of national shame and Sunak, Johnson, the lettuce and all should be held to account for letting things get to this.

Regarding light reading, I don’t remember the whole quotation but in Educating Rita when Frank attempts to explain the difference between so called high and low brow texts, she describes it as, “Oh so it’s alright to go out and have a bit of slap and tickle with the lads” (ie read the low) “as long as you don’t go home and tell the missus” (try to analyse such deviance).