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.

I have read all of hers. I know she is a very outspoken Gender Critical Feminist and I am slightly worried that she has been cancelled. It has been so long since she published anything.

This much is true - Miriam Margolyes Listened to this on Audible - outrageous and entertaining as you would expect. I can't decide whether I would want to be friends with her or not but I totally agree with her on Brexit and Boris. Enjoyed this.

A few reviews - all non-fiction.

25 Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain by Allan H Ropper and BD Burrell

This journey through some of the brain disorders seen by top neurologist Dr Ropper throughout his career, was by turns fascinating and slightly terrifying. The many ways in which our brains can impact our bodies, and vice versa, along with the weird symptoms and the investigations into the cause really appealed to me. Not quite a bold but I did really enjoy it. Also this is free on Kindle Unlimited for those that have it (I'm trying to make the most of my subscription this year).

26 The Princes in the Tower by Alison Weir

This is a reread from years ago, and brought back fond memories of my good-natured history debates with DH's Granny. One of our favourite debates was around the fate of the two princes and whether Richard III was a 'nephew killing monster' (me) or a 'fine Northern king framed by those dastardly Southerners' (her). I enjoyed this examination of the evidence looking at the fate of the two Princes and the culpability of the main players. Although it is a little out of date on the general facts, being written before the discovery of the remains of Richard III, I don't think it suffers from that and I found this to be a fair and balanced account overall.

27 A Pocketful of Happiness by Richard E Grant

I like Richard E Grant, and found his obvious excitement and enjoyment of his Oscar nomination to be both lovely and refreshing. I started off enjoying this book, the stories of his early career and how he met his wife were weaved together with her later diagnosis and decline, in a way that I thought worked well. Richard and Joan obviously shared a great love over nearly 4 decades, but, and I feel really bad saying this given the content, I found the book overall to have a very superficial feel to it. The compete erasure of his stepson (and I appreciate that this may have been at his request) felt very jarring, and the endless name-dropping, and constant descriptions of gifts and food from their friends, as well as mention of how perfect his daughter is really irritated me by the end. Given the strength of feeling shown by everyone towards Joan, I feel that REG didn't do a very good job of painting a picture of her as I didn't find her anywhere near as charming as I think I was meant to. Yep, if I believed it it, I'd definitely be going to hell for my uncharitable thoughts.

Thank you @MamaNewtNewt ! I will be joining you on the train to hell we don’t believe in for that APFOH review. I did not find her charming at all. She came across as downright unpleasant at times and they weren’t the times when she was terminally ill, either. I was bored by the book, mostly, which was a shame.

I have read all of hers. I know she is a very outspoken Gender Critical Feminist and I am slightly worried that she has been cancelled. It has been so long since she published anything

I didn't know that @splothersdog jeez I really hope that's not the case.
I've just visited her website - it's really good; lots of interviews that look worth exploring - and can see that there's usually a gap of 5-6 years between her books, so fingers crossed there's one due soon.

@MamaNewtNewt I've just seen the play Richard, My Richard, written by Philippa Gregory and performed at the Shakespeare North Playhouse in Prescot. The conceit is that Richard wakes up unaware of how History has judged him and his reaction to what he discovers is interspersed with scenes from his life. I think she's a better playwright than an author to be honest. It was extremely well done.
SNP Is a great wee theatre which would benefit from more support
https://shakespearenorthplayhouse.co.uk/visit-us/cockpit-theatre/
and interesting in itself having been constructed on the site of the original playhouse in traditional style; it's pretty small so you're right in the middle of the action. The play is coming to Bury St Edmunds next if anyone living near there might be interested.

@Piggywaspushed I read In Memoriam last year and was a bit disappointed by it given the rave reviews. It wasn't terrible but I felt it was overhyped - I did buy a Kindle copy for 99p and would be interested to see what she writes in future.

I also bought Western Lane and various other books from this month's Kindle deals.

Anyone read / is reading All That She Carried by Tiya Miles? I was really excited to get this from the library, but I've only got a little way in, & I'm finding the writing style hard to get on with.

In the meantime:

37. Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet by Andrew Blum
    How does the internet actually work? Starting with a short history of the development of the internet, the author then chases down & visits the whole range of hardware that underpins our online world: internet exchanges, datacentres, the landing places for undersea cable runs et al.
    
    I found this absolutely fascinating, it's so easy to get caught up in the idea of a 'virtual' internet and forget that there's an awful lot of real physical infrastructure sitting behind it all. Although this was printed in 2012, it prompted me into lots of follow-up internet searches, and it seems that broadly it remains a good description of how things work, though the size & amount of traffic have obviously grown hugely since then.

38. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers
    Second of the Monk & Robot novellas. We're back in Panga with Dex the tea-monk and Mosscap the robot, exploring the meaning of life & what humans want.
    
    Overall it's entertaining & harmless, though the author's utopia feels rather like it was designed by a committee of Totnes hippies. (I reckon also that the people are all doped up to the eyeballs on some kind of Pangan soma equivalent to keep them in line.)

39. The House Witch & the Enchanting of the Hearth by Delemhach
    Cosy fantasy (suits me better than cosy crime) featuring Fin, the titular house witch and head palace cook in his struggles to keep people out of his kitchen, stop knights harassing his staff, and - maybe - make progress in his romance with one of the castle ladies.
    I suspect this was self published/grew out of fanfic - it's quite rambling, and has lots of internetty self-referential jokes. For 99p it was an amusing read though, and thankfully (unlike BC above) doesn't take itself at all seriously.

Sadik I'm 10% in on my second attempt. I'm listening though. First time round I was struggling. My impression from the audio is that it is full of long complex sentences that require a lot of concentration as it doesn't flow very well. It has a very strange cadence. Without seeing it in print, I'm guessing there are commas like confetti.

NC for April - I used to be HenryTilney

@Sadik I DNF All That She Carried. I found the fussy, verbose style threw the often quite banal and platitudinous content into unfortunate relief.
Tubes sounds excellent, will look that up.

@highlandcoo and @splothersdog I'm a bit fan of Jane Harris too (esp. Gillespie&I which I push on anyone who likes Sarah Waters) and really hope she will publish more novels.

@cassandre I'm actually not a big reader of Korean lit, generally finding it either too sentimental or sad/dark/violent. There's a more recent trend of 'healing lit' (cf. 'up lit' or various 'cosy X' genres in English) but 'nothing happens, no peril, nice vibes' is the whole point, so I find one or two a year plenty.
But if you'd like to try, both the authors I reviewed had mega hits in excellent English translations:
Han Kang's The Vegetarian at the absolutely bonkers end of magic realism (both darkly funny and just plain dark). My favourite of hers is Human Acts which is a more conventional historical novel about the 1980s Gwanju massacre by the military dictatorship - just plain dark, but unlike 8 Lives it actually does interrogate narratives and story-making on both the most personal and national level, and sheds light on some aspects of SK's recent past which I think most Westerners would tend to associate with NK (another thing I was annoyed with Lee about... situating all the Bad Stuff in the North/the past).
Cho Nam-Joo's Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is an easy, short, feminism-101 realist novel, probably of more interest for the unholy fuss surrounding it. Cancellation/death threats for merely being photographed holding a copy was A Thing for a while there, even for A-listers and Olympic gold medalists.

29 The Girls of the Glen -Lynn McEwan

Third book about DI Shona Oliver. This was my favourite so far, I liked the blending of history and the present day.

34 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
Not sure why I’ve never read this before but I really enjoyed it, despite my blood pressure raising in fury in the last quarter.

15 The Twyford Code - Janice Hallett Well I should have heeded the warnings! The Appeal was fun, if a bit flawed, but I really didn’t enjoy this. The audio file format was a slog, but what I really didn’t like was that it was trying to be so clever that it forgot to tell the story properly. I like an unreliable narrator but by the end of the book I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t - and frankly I didn’t care enough to go back and try to work it out (not that I think that would be possible - it’s deliberately confusing). I know lots of people have liked it but I’m with @EineReiseDurchDieZeit on this one!

And Then She Fell is 99p on Kindle today.

Catching up today. I'm enjoying all the Woman's Prize reviews, though it's a pity it sounds like there are so many duds this year. Last year I read 9 I think and thought at least 5 were really strong and a couple of the others were at least interesting from a narrative perspective - Pod I'm looking at you!

Interesting Korean lit discussion too @inaptonym. I've read Kim Jiyoung and wasn't that impressed by it. She seemed to not be sure if she wanted it to be fiction or non-fiction and I tend to find footnotes in fiction a bit annoying - see also Babel. I read Whale last year after it was shortlisted for the International Booker and found it's attitudes to women so awful. I was pretty surprised it made the shortlist tbh, especially given there were some really strong female authors on there.

Anyway recent reviews:
19. I Have Some Questions For You - Rebecca Makkai. Not much to add to previous reviews. I think there were the bones of an interesting book in here but what we got wasn't it. I nearby DNF but did want to know the ending which was a bit annoying too. There seems to be a bit of a trend for young female authors writing fictional true crime - see also Eliza Clark - so far I'm not on board.

20. Hungry Ghosts - Kevin Jared Hosein. I've been listening to the Audible of this since January and was finding it really hard to get into, despite the narrator having a perfect voice for the story. I then bought the Kindle version and managed to get through it far quicker. It's about a very poor family living in Trinidad. Father Hans works on the estate of a rich man who goes missing at the start of the book, and his wife tries to come to terms with life without her husband. Shweta, Hans' wife, is mourning the death of her daughter and trying to find ways out of the barrack they live in. Krishna, Hans' son, is very bright but at a school where he is horribly bullied by both the teacher and other pupils. I thought this was very interesting, well written about a country that I really don't know much.

21. Eight Detectives - Alex Pavesi. I wanted an easy read next so went for this crime book which I'd seen described as very original. It's quite odd. Basically it's about an editor meeting an author who many years before had written a book of murder stories based on mathematical suppositions. The structure of the book is that each chapter is the story the author wrote, and then a chapter where the editor and author discuss it. But it soon becomes clear there is more going on. I found it quite disjointed and the stories are not that compelling. Still the final part did enough to push it from a 2 to a 3 for me.

Sorry that was a very long post!

I've just purchased And Then She Fell thanks for the heads up! Also Fingersmith which has been on my wishlist is 99p so got that too.

14. The Moth and the Mountain by Ed Caesar

This is an interesting addition to Everest history but I don't recommend it as a starting point (that should be Into Thin Air).

The author stumbled across Wilson who is a slightly eccentric character from the 1930s who decides he is going to be the first to summit Everest despite having no climbing or mountaineering experience. He isn't even an avid hillwalker.

There is a lot of detail on Wilson's life, including his fighting on the front line of WW1 which is common for other mountaineers of this time. Surviving the war made them feel indestructible I guess.

The book jumps around a bit and two chapters a bit randomly are suddenly in the authors voice asking questions instead of an autobiographical story which was a bit jarring.

I ended up with huge respect for Wilson's courage and can do attitude as well as thinking he was a complete idiot for attempting to do this with such a lack of preparation. I gave it 4 out of 5 on storygraph.

@MorriganManor I just bought that for £2.99 yesterday

@DuPainDuVinDuFromage

Sorry it was also shit for you. The classism was a real bugbear for me.

@inaptonym I loved The Vegetarian

Any 50 bookers able to answer this Audible question for me?

Sometimes when I buy a Kindle book, Amazon will tell me ‘You own Audible narration for this book’ but I can’t then find the book in Audible nor does it say anything on my Kindle about it. When I try and match the book on The Amazon website it tells me the Audible narration will be £3.99 or whatever.

I’m confused.

E.g.

A Flat Place: A Memoir - Noreen Masud

A memoir looking at her early life in Pakistan with a difficult upbringing which resulted in CPTSD. This continues to have an effect throughout her life. As an adult living in the UK she seeks out flat places in the landscape and discusses how they give her comfort.
It's well written but a bit of a mixed bag. Each element is very interesting in its own right, but I can't help feel the two things have been shoehorned together for the sake of it, rather than it being a cohesive whole.

I think I too will DNF All That She Carried. Now at 33% and I don't have the patience for another 6 hours of linguistic acrobatics. It's won 10 awards, but it's not for me.

It's done this to me. It's an error and trying to deal with customer service was like banging my head on a wall. Just ignore it.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit disappointing!

I hate audible. They sent me an email saying "you're entitled to another free trial" which I clicked and then the page said "you've already had a free trial, no more for you" so obviously I hit the back button, closed the tab, whatever. They charged me for a membership! I wouldn't even have noticed if they hadn't emailed me saying "don't waste your credit this month!".

They refunded it eventually but still...

I've just had a look at the deals which are reasonably good this month. Some that I liked last year that are on offer are :
All The Little Bird-Hearts
Fire Rush
This Family
The Whalebone Theatre - not as much as the others but it's worth 99p

I also picked up Annie Mac's book, Our Wives Under the Sea and romptatstic Jilly Cooper's Mount

I haven't been through the deals yet, just popping in to say I loved @HenryTilneyBestBoy 's review of 8 wotsits and have put it on my "don't go anywhere near this" list. 😂

The deals are deliberately hard to find I think it drives me mad, people mention things on here that I have to go back for because they didn't show up for me. I don't get why they make it so hard. The algorithm is crap.

I’m glad it’s not just me that thinks that @EineReiseDurchDieZeit. Takes me ages to hunt through