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.

33 Aunt Margaret's Lover - Mavis Cheek
39-year-old Margaret has raised her niece from infancy, following the tragic death of her sister in an accident caused by the sister’s drunk-driving, cheating rat artist husband. Now 18, the niece is off to Canada for a year to meet said DDCRA father and Margaret decides to take a lover, with a clear end in sight.

This is not the kind of plot that usually appeals to me, and despite the pull quotes (brilliant! witty! social satire with feminist edge!) this middlebrow literary gem may well have passed me by had it come in different packaging (see cover collage). Of these only the Gloriana portrait cover gives any indication of what the book actually reads like, though pic 2’s German edition (titled Probier's mal mit Ovid!) comes closer still. But the more pretentious covers may have put off a different reader, who would also have enjoyed this book for its wide-ranging humour, still-relevant insight into relationships and what now amounts to charming period detail (pub. 1994). As someone who was just about reading chapter books then, Aunt Margaret’s Lover felt at once older and less dated than, e.g. Bridget Jones’ Diary: some set pieces could have come out of Nancy Mitford, others were pure Frasier slapstick.

To be fair, it is a bit of a marketing nightmare. In a world of artists and rich collectors, Margaret herself works in a shop making frames. Everyone, from friends and exes to eccentric elderly clients, calls her 'Aunt'. Ovid and Elizabeth I are touchstones, but her references to them generally elicit alarm, bafflement and/or eye-rolling boredom from other characters, and Angela Brazil and Shirley Valentine get nearly equal billing. Relieved to land a lover she can have a laugh with as well as good sex, she can’t help musing that the Crippinses probably also had a honeymoon period. This is exactly the kind of thing my brain likes to do, so I revelled in the flippancy and emotional constipation of it all. For those less patient of such, there are periodic hints at what underlies Margaret’s chronic un-seriousness, and major payoff by the end.

The ending is one thing preventing me from bolding this, with 3 Very Dramatic Incidents / Big Reveals in the last few pages, each enough to flip the script on a reread, but all arriving like buses got very silly very fast. Another, the chapters focusing on Margaret’s female friends (Verity, a just-dumped London writer; Jill, slightly too comfortably married in an empty Cumbrian nest), both of whom suffer unexpected consequences from Margaret’s lover experiment, both utterly insufferable. Despite this, I intend to read more by Cheek, and to propose this one to my millenial women's book group.

It is also the only book I've enjoyed enough to actually finish since my bike accident and resulting ereaderless state. About a dozen DNFs later, I'm going to hit the library and bookshops this afternoon to hopefully find some I'm in the mood for.

@Terpsichore oh that is interesting. There was indeed an attempt to keep the discovery secret from the Germans and it's partly why Fleming is more recognised than Florey, Fleming could talk to the press about discovering the mold but Florey wasn't allowed to talk about the manufacturing process. The Germans tried to get the mold from both the French and the Dutch but they deliberately gave them the wrong strain that didn't produce penicillin. Even more incredibly the Dutch also developed a process for manufacturing penicillin during the war but kept it secret from the Germans by supplying the German security guards with gin so they slept all afternoon and didn't realise what was going on in the labs!

31. Killers Of The Flower Moon by David Grann (Audible)

Finished last night.

I haven't watched the film yet as I keep thinking 3.5 hours is too long so I went for the 9 hour audio instead

This is a truly interesting story about the murder and exploitation of Osage Native Americans by whites and how it led to the birth of the FBI. The Audible didn't always work for me there were 3 different voices and one had this Cowboy Voice that I didn't know if it was put on or not. Stops short of a bold because of this.

Felt very original and I'm really glad I read it, I am more eager to watch the film now I know the plot funnily enough

Great review @HenryTilneyBestBoy. You’ve made me want to revisit Mavis Cheek.

@HenryTilneyBestBoy I like the sound of that and it's free with kindle unlimited so will definitely give it a go.

12 Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents by Jean M. Twenge. I found this really interesting. I'm a Gen Xer myself, my DC are Gen Z, my parents are Silents (I always thought they were boomers but not by this definition), and it was fascinating to read about the differences between the generations, both real and perceived, and possible explanations. It is by necessity very data heavy, because the process of teasing out the trends that relate to a specific generation (as opposed to either a general change in attitudes over time, or a tendency to fall into a certain pattern as you age) does require the right kind of data analysis. This is both a positive (the evidence based approach allows the author to explode some popular myths and agree with others) and a negative (it can get rather dry and heavy going at times). This aspect reminded me of our recent discussion about Invisible Women - it may not appeal to those of you who disliked all the stats in that. It is also very US focused, but I think a lot of the material covered is equally relevant to the UK (and other countries).

13 Our Wives Under the Sea by Julie Armfield. Leah is in a submarine with two colleagues when they lose power and descend to the ocean floor with no ability to contact the outside world. When she eventually returns from the trip, several months later than expected, Leah is irrevocably changed and her wife Miri tries to get to grips with the new normal. I think this was popular on last year's thread (or possibly the year before) but it didn't really work for me. I just found it too slow-moving and inconclusive.

14 This House of Grief by Helen Garner. In September 2005, Rob, an Australian man who had recently separated from his wife Cindy and was struggling to adapt to life as a single dad, was at the wheel of his car when it left the road and plunged into a dam. Rob escaped, but his three young sons all died in the car. Was it a tragic accident or deliberate? This book is an account of his trial for murder. It's an interesting case, but I don't think it's worth a whole book - there's a LOT of detail about things like the tyre marks left on the road. If you're interested in reading about a real-life murder trial, I recommend The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson - I think it's much better.

The generations book sounds interesting @Tarahumara although I'm terrible at reading non fic. DD2 always tells me she's generation alpha which is apparently after 2010. I'm gen X too, I feel like we're more adaptable than some of the other generations!

I've finished another book - 2 in two days - due to ridiculous wait at the dentist.

15. Lublin - Manya Wilkinson. This was the second from my And Other Stories book subscription. I'm linking in case anyone is interested as they've got a really unique selection of mainly international books. This is set in Poland in 1905, and is about 3 Jewish boys who embark on a road trip to a town, Lublin, that's 100 miles away to sell some brushes. The boys have very different characters, one wants to be a salesman and takes it all very seriously, one is very religious, and one is a communist joker. The book is funny but also set against the historical backdrop of what is happening in Russia and Poland, and what we as readers know is going to happen over the coming years. I thought it was original with an interesting voice.

@Stowickthevast we're the generation that has to explain technology to our parents while our kids can't understand why it's so hard!

Finished another this evening which means the hunt is on for my next read! I've got nothing on the go now.

32. I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

I didn't intend to read another dead girl book but somehow here we are.

This novel is like a hybrid of My Dark Vanessa, Penance and the famous podcast Serial so I think if any of those were up your alley this may well be.

Bodie Kane returns to Granby the prestigious boarding school (at which she was an outsider) to teach a class on podcasting, for which she has an audience. During Bodie's time there a girl, Thalia Keith was murdered, but Bodie has never thought the convicted Omar Evans was guilty. As her students look to re-examine what happened, Bodie becomes fixated on the case once more.

Fixated is a good word for it, there are times when the intense obsessing of the protagonist becomes a bit overwhelming to the reader, there are lengthy paragraphs addressed to "you" a character Bodie believes is guilty. It gets a bit tedious, like oh this again.

It's a very "of the moment" novel managing to feature race, class, cancel culture, #MeToo, Ukraine and COVID with quite a light touch

Some flaws aside it might be a bold because it really did work well as a whodunnit and I can strongly see it working as a TV show or film and I enjoyed coming back to it every session I read it.

I went to put that on my Wish List and it was 99p so I bought it @EineReiseDurchDieZeit . I have no willpower when it comes to books at 99p

@MorriganManor

I was just coming back on to say it's still only 99p. It's definitely worth that much.

@ICrunchCrispsNotNumbers I read The Story Collector at the end of last year and thoroughly enjoyed it.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I was in two minds whether to buy I Have Some Questions For You but I do have one of her other books on my wish list. I can't remember if you liked Penance or not? I really didn't like it but did like My Dark Vanessa.

@TattiePants

I wasn't keen on Penance I found it sordid, where the similarity lies is the fact it's a dead schoolgirl and then you've got someone making content from it, in Penance case a true crime writer and in this case a podcast, they aren't similar reading experiences just a lot of thematic crossover.

Two more Women's Prize books

River East, River West - Aube Rey Lescure
A Chinese American coming of age. Split on 2 timelines. 1985 a poor clerk with a wife, has an affair with an American ex-pat who he had met years previously. 2007 Shanghai, teen comes to terms with her poor American mother's marriage to their wealthy Chinese landlord. She manipulates them into moving her from her Chinese public school to the American private school where she enters a different social sphere.
This was an interesting look at the economic and social changes in Chinese society over the course of a few decades. It's very readable, but there is some CSA in it, which felt a bit unnecessary to the storyline.

The Blue, Beautiful World - Karen Lord
Happy clappy alien first contact in which various alien civilizations in a UN type organisation work out the best non-violent way to make contact with humans. And some bollocks about an alien pop star. Or something like that, I think.
Abandoned at 50% due to being unreadable tripe. It probably has something to say about the dangers of advanced tech and also celeb beauty standards, but I didn't stick around to find out. Not enough world building and largely nonsensical.

It's rare I don't finish a WP book, but this was shockingly shit, which means it's a shoe-in for the shortlist.

12. The Frightened Lady by Edgar Wallace This has been adapted into a play called The Case of the Frightened Lady which DH and I saw a performance of a few years ago. I don't remember the play at all. But after seeing it I added the original book to my tbr and just got round to reading it.

Originally published in 1933 this is the story of the Lebanon family, an odd historic family living in their ancestral home in West Sussex. The matriarch, Lady Lebanon, controls her son to an extreme degree. The house also contains a distant cousin, Isla Crane (the Frightened Lady of the title), two American footmen who are terrible at their jobs and a shady doctor, Dr Amersham. Everyone is hiding secrets and when the family's chauffeur is killed in the grounds the secrets start coming out

Even having read the book I don't have any memories of the play and I doubt I'll remember much about the book in a month's time. I found the Scotland Yard detectives absolutely bumbling and frustrating and their dialogue was frankly painful to read. The dialogue probably actually works better on stage. Also I was over halfway through the book before I got any sense that Isla was frightened and even then it was just other characters telling the reader she was frightened. It didn't come across from her until the final chapter. Overall an extremely forgettable novel adapted into an extremely forgettable play

23. The Silent Patient - Alex Michaelides I enjoyed this although it did stretch the limits of believability. It's told from the point of view of the psychotherapist of a woman incarcerated in a mental hospital following the killing of her husband, since which she has refused to speak.

23. Lobster - Hollie McNish - was lucky enough to get an advance copy of this collection of poetry and prose.
Bold for me because I love this women and in my eyes she can do no wrong.

@splothersdog looking forward to Lonster even more Hollie is wonderful

14 Shakespeare: The Biography - Peter Ackroyd

Very readable and enjoyable biography of the Bard; while the absence of much in the way of primary sources means that a certain amount of supposition and guesswork is inevitable, Ackroyd brings the period to life brilliantly.

This was my book haul from my secondhand book shopping the other day. I had £40 credit to spend and for once really struggled to find much from my wish list so ended up mainly buying books from authors I’ve previously enjoyed.

I have just finished In Memoriam, much lauded Alice Winn novel.

I thought it was OK but wasn't bowled over. A few things annoyed me. There were too many interchangeable public schoolboys. The fact that some were siblings didn't hope. Once more, I cared about minor characters more than the (I thought often unlikeable ) protagonists : the very last paragraph was sad, as was in memoriam on a character that isn't even in the book! (her acknowledgements suggest she pilfered that one anyway) I didn't like all the sex, must be honest.

Also, I was possibly irrationally annoyed by not knowing how to pronounce Preshute.

I've read better, more affecting war novels with better, more affecting love stories (and - shock- actual developed female characters). The story of Carlo in Captain Corelli's Mandolin made me bawl and weep hot tears. This one ,despite all the horrors left me a bit cold. I suspect if I reread Pat Barker or Birdsong now they might annoy me but they really moved me at the time of first reading, as did Atonement.

I thought Winn tried to cover too much derring do and atrocities (the trenches, POW camps, terrible scarring, shellshock, the Somme) and perhaps needed less range and fewer coincidences. There were a few clunky Americanisms.

Some have complained about the book being all about posh boys. She did throw in her own justification for this part way through the book by mentioning the fact that nearly all the officers came from a handful of public schools and did basically all know each other.

The book read more like a love letter to Marlborough in places. Not sure the bullying and abuse brushed off as high junks and sexual discovery quite washes with me. But as they helped her with much of her research she can't really delve too deeply there.

Who Dares Wins, Britain 1979 to 1982 - Dominic Sandbrook

A mammoth 48 hours on Audible. I’m probably the perfect demographic for this book as it begins with the election of Thatcher in May 1979 just as I was about to take my O levels and ends with the Falkland’s conflict in 1982 just as I was coming to the end of my first year as an undergraduate.
It invoked SO many memories, many of them had a big impact on my life at the time : Monetarism, Hi-de-hi, the steel strike, 19% inflation, football hooliganism, the Right to Buy, Brookside, CND,
The New Romantics, OMD, the Human League, Factory Records
Smash Hits and The Face, the SAS storming the Iranian Embassy, the race riots, Two Tone music, the Irish hunger strikes , Free Wales Army,
British Leyland, Red Robbo, Dennis Healey, Michael Foot , Tony Benn, recession and the decline of British industry, Brideshead Revisited , Tainted Love, Sloan Rangers, Charles and Diana’s wedding, Sinclair ZX81, John Lennon’s death, Chariots of Fire , Ken Livingstone, Daley Thomson, Coe and Ovett and the Moscow Olympic Boycott. Not The 9 O’clock News. Shirley Williams, David Owen and the SDP etc etc

I cried often. The chapter on youth unemployment broke my heart.
Half of all school,leavers in 1981 went straight on the dole queue (my brother was one and I remember my mother crying). It’s not perfect. There’s not much on gay rights or the women’s movement and Sandbrook is MUCH kinder on Thatcher than I would be.

I really wished my DF was still around so that I could have talked about the political issues of the day with him . He worked for British Steel and was quite senior in his trade union and I used to walk past him standing by his brazier on the picket line on my way home from school during the steel strike. He was incredibly well informed about the steel industry. Would have liked to rehash his opinions on Tony Benn too.

I’ll leave the final words to the great commentator and poet of the era (quoted often in the book).

Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep?
Do you wake, Mrs Thatcher, in your sleep?
Do you weep like a sad willow?
On your Marks and Spencer’s pillow?
Are your tears molten steel?
Do you weep?
Do you wake with ‘Three million’ on your brain?
Are you sorry that they’ll never work again?
When you’re dressing in your blue, do you see the waiting queue?
Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep?

That sounds great @BestIsWest. I’m a little younger than you so I only experienced the effects of those years rather than understood what was going on iyswim. At just under 1000 pages I’ve put it on my Kindle wishlist rather than get it in pbk.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit – I wouldn’t recommend the film Flowers of the Killer Moon. It was at least 2 hours too long and I couldn’t get over the casting of 49 year old Leonardo Di Caprio as a 26 year old! However, Lily Gladstone is utterly amazing as Mollie Burkhart and well deserves the Oscar. She saves the movie IMHO.

@BestIsWest – that sounds like a good read, very much my era.

Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson. Enjoyed this. I think someone reviewed it favourably earlier on in thread, which made me read it next. Set in June/July/August 1781, mostly in the port of Deptford, but also in London and on the transatlantic slave ships. Harrowing in a lot of parts, graphic as well, it’s a possibly the best book that I have read about the slave trade. It’s also a murder mystery.