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.

On the theme of not finding things in the deals, if anyone fancies The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes, that’s 99pat the moment.

Usually I'm so glad I stick to physical books. Except for now: having to pack away boxes and boxes into storage, I kinda wish I had a kindle instead.

24. Making it So - Patrick Stewart

A memoir, from Patrick Stewart's childhood in 1940s Yorkshire (in many ways a Dickensian tale of working class life) to Hollywood stardom. A great deal of the book is dedicated to his stage work, with another section relating to his time captaining the Enterprise on Star Trek: the Next Generation, but not to the detriment of writing about his other works. I liked the tone of the book, and could imagine Patrick Stewart's voice throughout.

I had two criticisms: because (presumably) the book is aimed at an international audience there is some overexplaining of British places, and a couple of Americanisms have crept in. I would have liked to have read more about the current Stewart family, and while his personal life, particularly the early years, was recounted, he focussed on his considerable career which I suspect meant a lot of material was omitted.

I have reserved the audiobook on Borrowbox @RomanMum ('Making it So') I'm looking forward to it. Good to read your review.

Finished Demon Copperhead at last. I get what Kingsolver is doing but it just left me cold. All the drugs stuff was doubtless very impassioned (she says as much in her acknowledgments) but I got a lot of people a bit confused and cared very little about any of them. Having read David Copperfield relatively recently didn't help in various ways : a) I knew lots of outcomes b) Copperfield is vastly superior and comically genius c) it's quite distracting to one's head reading a book so heavily based on another and I am now going to have to go away and read Wikipedia to clear up some earworms like wo exactly June is.

I also get that the book has to be long because Dickensian but it felt soooooo long at times. If I compare to the far longer A Suitable Boy - or indeed most Dickens (although he has form for lots of confusing characters!)- it pales in terms of reader satisfaction, engagement and characterisation.

The deals drive me crazy. Amazon knows what I like to read and has no issue recommending things to me on my home page. No idea why it can't sort deals so that things I may want come to the top. I'd buy way more that way. After scrolling through 50 or so books I usually give up.

In (somewhat) exciting news, i took part in an Economist focus group last month and got reward points credited to my account which I can redeem for a £70 book token. I have barely bought a physical book since joining the library at the start of last year so am planning a trip to the big Waterstones in Piccadilly this weekend. I will report back, of course. It's what is getting me through a very trying week.

Wow @PepeLePew I'm well jealous

Fab stuff Pepe, have a lovely time choosing.

@Stowickthevast I have Eight Detectives on my tbr from when it was 99p sometime so interesting to read your review

I shall!
Reading is an entirely separate hobby to book browsing and buying. And I've continued to do a lot of the former but have missed the latter.

Well done @PepeLePew Enjoy it.

18.Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay. In 1900, three students and a mistress from a well-heeled Australian girls’ school go missing after a trip to the wilderness. The book, presented as a factual account of real-life events, follows the impact on those left behind.

This was fine. I think it evokes a sense of time and place beautifully, and the oppressive mood of the colonial class system is well depicted. The characters were a little flimsy however, and for a short book I wondered if there were too many sub-plots.

You lucky thing, @PepeLePew ! I love a browse with a book token.

26 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Also finished this last night and my review is totally different to @Piggywaspushed, although I can see why you make all the points you do.
This will be a definite bold for me. Demon’s ‘voice’ was so strong and very readable, despite me having no interest whatsoever in American Football (I could see what was coming injury-wise down the line there). It didn’t seem like 600+ pages and I could have read more. It didn’t seem like a pastiche, either, although I did dip into Wikipedia to see which character might be which. I’m not a huge Dickens fan, which might have helped, or hindered, I can’t decide. Probably the former. I thought she did Uriah / UHaul and the Micawber / McCobbs very well.
About a third of the way through I realised why I liked it so much; The Talisman by Straub and King is one of my all time favourite books and I had a lightbulb moment of “He talks like Jack Sawyer!”. Even down to trying to save his Mum and having friends who never give up on him. You can see the original David Copperfield as the alternative world Jack / Demon slips in and out of, if you’re the fanciful sort
I rooted for Demon, I mourned some of the characters and Boo-hissed others. I’ll miss them now it’s finished.

https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/do-i-own-too-many-books/

Enjoy your visit to Waterstone's Pepe!

I love the Japanese word tsundoku - the act of buying so many books that you'll never have time to read them - and this article argues that tsundoku is a good thing ..

Calling @Southeastdweller for a new thread.

I thought she did Uriah / UHaul and the Micawber / McCobbs very well.

Interesting as I thought this was the weakest bit of the book. The Uriah Heep bit was really underplayed.

I know there’s a lot more to his work, but Dickens does universal stereotypes very well and my impression is that Kingsolver included their essential essences in modern characters with a light touch. But that’s why I like 50 Bookers threads - always a different point of view to mull over!

@bibliomania I love the antilibrary concept. Much more civilised than the knitting acronym SABLE: stash acquired beyond life expectancy.

@ASighMadeOfStone (it’s Henry, NC) If I've saved even one fellow reader, my suffering has not been in vain 😀

@Stowickthevast I don't mind footnotes in fiction (actually love the Terry Pratchett or Susanna Clarke type) but found the last chapter reveal in Kim Ji-Young infuriating, though perhaps Cho intended it to be so. Recent news stories like this or this may help contextualise her caution; if anything SK has gone backward since KJY was published.
Thanks for the warning about Whale - will steer clear.

Sorry for the political derail, back to books:
44 Absolutely & Forever - Rose Tremain
Longlisted for the Walter Scott prize and surprise bold! I love Tremain's earlier big historical novels but have found her more recent shorter ones just okay - accomplished and absorbing but pretty forgettable. This one, despite being the shortest yet and potentially the slightest (beginning with Marianne at 15 in the late 1950s, falling in love 'absolutely&forever' with Simon, and ending with her in her thirties), packed a surprising emotional punch. Despite being so vignette-y, I felt, as with those older books, as if I’d fully inhabited an entire other life.
There are some very funny bits especially in the teenage years (think vair posh Adrienne Mole), fabulous period dialogue and detail, a fierce and brilliant bestie, clever odd boys, emotionally stunted parents - all elements I enjoy in fiction, but none of that explains why this got so under my skin. The strong autobiographical feel, and an underlying valedictory tone and sense of the fleetingness of life? Which sounds a bit too wanky for the book, TBH (there's also lots of horsey stuff). Anyway, it made me want to read RT's autobio, and hope for more books from her.

Thanks for the Rose Tremain review inaptonym, you've reminded me that I've been waiting for the paperback to come out (I see now it's due in June). I find her books a bit uneven but I really enjoyed her autobiography Rosie.

A couple more Women's Prize reads.
My first from the non fiction shortlist. Thunderclap by Laura Cummings. I enjoyed this. She writes really well and it held my interest. Not quite a bold for me and I can't quite say why but deserves its place on the short list.
From the fiction list and halfway through the longlist, 8 lives of a Century Old Trickster - Mirinae Lee. I didn't have quite the same response as others on here. I thought it was ok. It held my interest but I did feel it was disjointed. As previously mentioned it is a collection of previously published short stories that have been put together and it shows. I feel like with a bit more thought and less of a desire to be quirky in its structure it could have been much much better.

I shall embrace my antilibrary tendencies, as the idea of "all these unread books reminding you of all you don't know" is one that very much appeals!

Brutally Honest - Melanie Brown. The second memoir from the former Spice girl and nowhere near as engaging as her first book. I got irritated by her self-pity and constant refusals to examine her own behaviour. I also thought the ghost writer did a crappy job capturing Melanie's voice and the passages from her childhood were covered in her first memoir so it was stupid to repeat them in this book.

I'm jumping in to post before the thread fills up!

@inaptonym , thanks so much for the thoughtful comments about Korean literature, and the recs; I'll definitely follow those up. How depressing about the South Korean antifeminist movement, yikes. I'm glad that women's groups are fighting back.

@Piggywaspushed , your comments on Demon Copperhead resonate with me! I read David Copperfield just before I read Demon, and like you, I thought the Dickens was such a masterpiece that the Kingsolver paled somewhat in comparison. I think I would have appreciated Kingsolver more if the Dickens hadn't been so fresh in my head! The narrative voice in David Copperfield is so subtle and layered, and as you say, the comedy is brilliant and balances out the dark bits. Here's the review I wrote in September:

I suspect my reading of this novel suffered due to the fact I’d just read the Dickens and enjoyed it so much. Kingsolver has written an original and moving book, and I admire her ingenuity in reworking the Dickens story of poverty and hard times. It was fun to pick out the characters and episodes she reworked – I feel like there should be an internet chart somewhere, ha, that lays out all the parallels. One example of an episode that worked really well was the portrait of two young addicts in love trying to run a household (a riff on a young married couple trying to run their own household in Dickens, and doing it very ineptly). That said, I never fell in love with the narrator (even though I admired the consistency of his voice), and I was disappointed in the way some of the complex characters in Dickens (Steerforth, the Micawbers) were much more straightforwardly unpleasant in Kingsolver (Fast Forward, the McCobbs). So some of the nuance was lost. Also, while I think Kingsolver’s focus on the opioid crisis is a stroke of genius, I found some portions of the novel to be too heavy-handed and didactic. In short, though, I’ve been a fan of Kingsolver for many years, and this is an ambitious and interesting addition to her body of work.

Also jumping in before the thread finishes.
re Demon Copperhead - I really enjoyed it but I found the same problem with it that I found with the other Kingsolver I read (The Poisonwood Bible) - it went on for far too long. I know she was emulating Dickens but he was publishing monthly and could afford meandering side stories- today not so much.

Recent reads
53 The Two Gentlemen of Verona - Shakespeare
Continuing my attempt to read one Shakespeare a month in publication order. This one is number 3 and probably the worst so far. Two friends fall in love with the same woman (even though one is already committed elsewhere) leading to ructions. The ending of this was just preposterous. Here’s hoping number 4 (Titus Andronicus) is better.

54 Thunderclap- Laura Cumming
There are plenty of reviews of this one already- I agree that it’s beautifully written and deserves its place on the shortlist but it’s not quite a bold. It has made me look at Dutch art in a different way.

55 Anne of Green Gables
Free audible plus read by Rachel McAdams. I’m not usually one for rereading children’s books but this was a lovely bit of gentleness needed amongst the heavier WP content on both lists. I have already decided that May will be a light reads month after all this trauma!

Speaking of trauma, book 66 Brotherless Night - VV Ganeshananthan was a traumatic though brilliant read about the Sri Lankan civil war. Told from the perspective of Sashi a teenager who wants to become a doctor, it deals with the opposing factions of the Tamils, the Sri Lankan army, the Indian ‘peacekeepers’ and most importantly Shani’s brothers, friends and teachers. It’s very moving and has awakened my curiosity about a war I know little about (though it mirrors much of the history of so many countries dealing with independence after colonialism) This was a bold for me.

It feels like it was a couple of weeks that I did the last thread, not five and a half...

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/5042398-50-books-challenge-2024-part-four

Thanks southeast