50 Books Challenge 2024 Part Four

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fourth 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, the second one here and the third one here.

What are you reading?

26. Jane's Fame - Claire Harman

Really enjoyable and thought-provoking. A study of how Jane Austen's reputation has evolved, from her earliest, anonymous publication as 'A Lady' to the current excesses of Austenmania in every possible medium. Harman is an excellent writer of biography with a witty turn of phrase and a droll eye for the more incongruous aspects of the Austen industry, and there was a lot here I didn’t know (including that Jane's older brother Francis lived long enough to be photographed as an old man - which suddenly makes Jane feel a lot closer to our times). It was also fascinating to learn that there was a thriving Janeite cult in the trenches of WW1. Definitely recommend this one for anyone interested in Austen.

27. Little Tales of Misogyny - Patricia Highsmith

An accidental but rather pointed juxtaposition with Jane's Fame, which* revealingly *explored the ways in which Austen has often been packaged as a non-threatening female writer of 'safe' domestic fiction that won't frighten the horses and thus can be patronised by men. The Highsmith was a book club choice and tbh it left me fairly cold - 17 extremely short stories in which women are subjected to various indignities, going mad, taking to their beds and/or dying or being killed in a number of inventive ways. I struggled to see the point although it’s echt Highsmith, that’s for sure, and pithily written.

The Late Show - Michael Connelly. A good read as usual by this author. Well plotted and kept me turning the page.

Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden. For the most part, I enjoyed this. I think it was a bit over-long, but it was nicely written on the whole and I felt like I was transported to Japan.

Still on the old slump... had a few hours today to read, couldn't get anywhere

@Terpsichore And here's a photo of Francis Austen. You're right, it does suddenly pull Jane much closer, even though she died over 200 years ago.

I like the sounds of Jane’s Fame @Terpsichore, adding it to my list thank you!

I just finished my number 15, which was Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, Judi Dench - Can’t add much to the reviews from other 50 Bookers, I listened on audible and really enjoyed this. It was far more enjoyable when they covered the plays I was more familiar with, although there were fewer of those than I’d like to admit really! On the plus side it’s inspired me to remedy those omissions though.

Queens of the age of chivalry. England’s medieval queens - Alison Weir

This non-fiction book focuses on the five wives of Kings Edward I to Richard II but for a book that was meant to focus on the queens there was an awful lot of what their husbands were doing!
Each section focuses on a different wife,
and by trying to distil a whole life into a very short section of a book it did begin to suffer from becoming a list of where they went and what clothes they wore rather than really getting a picture of who they were as individuals. Due to this most of the queens come across as quite boring (I’m sure they weren’t!) whether this is due to lack of sources about them or the fact that being a ‘good’ wife in Medieval England means that their impact is very limited I’m not sure. The exception to this was Isabella of France, wife of Edward II who has more of an impact politically in his reign and eventually is involved in deposing him and putting her son Edward III on the throne, consequently her section was much more illuminating than the others.

If you take this as a brief history of the medieval kings of England it is quite enjoyable, but an illuminating look into the lives of the Queens it is not.

@JaninaDuszejko thank you, I meant to add the photo! 🤦‍♀️ Slightly bafflingly, it’s not in the book. Tantalising to think that Jane might easily have survived into the age of photography. And there are no verified pictures of her other than the Cassandra drawing plus one that shows her from the back (!).

@Jecstar - I am reading The Queens of the Age of Chivalry at the moment and making fairly slow progress because, as you say, so little is known about them that I am not gaining much insight into the queens as individuals. It’s more about the era, the king and court life at the time.

About to take a break and read something else and the court me back to it.

@Welshwabbit

Things can only get better is one of my most reread books of all time, and will be read this year as I always read it in the run up to an election. It could have been written about me and my friends, same age, same not so quiet desperation as Labour party members. I didn't knock on as many doors as he did, but I did do as many dispiriting marches in the rain. I told my (politics student) dd to read it if she wants to understand what her mum did in the 80s. (And confess that an awful lot of our activism was prompted by fancying the angry lefty young men who invariably organised the marches then didn't bloody turn up themselves)

I don't think J O'F's fiction has ever hit the spot.

25. Primordial Soup - Grant Naylor

Halfway! A quick read which I found while all my other books were inaccessible. The book comprises six Red Dwarf scripts. It's astonishing to think the earliest of them is 35 years old, and still making me laugh out loud.

26. In the Blink of an Eye - Jo Callaghan

This is set in the very near future, where Kat, a recently widowed police officer, is recruited to a pilot scheme set up to assess how the use of AI could help the police. Taking cold cases of missing persons as a test case, Kat and her team are assisted by an AI detective, AIDE Lock, who has a holographic interface. Can Kat put aside her prejudices about AI, which misdiagnosed her late husband's illness, and work with this computer to solve a case which becomes increasingly active and time critical?

The original story rattled along and gave much to think about in the themes of AI, loss and change. Enough plot twists to keep me interested (and unusually for me, I spotted a major clue), with a tense climax. The middle-aged protagonist and her team seemed realistic characters. Ironically the only character who didn't ring true for me was Lock, who came across as a combination of Alexa and Data, the android from Star Trek. His speech patterns and actions just seemed off. This was a solid start to a series so I'll look out for the follow up, published this spring.

I am a bit younger than you @ASighMadeOfStone but was interested in politics from an annoyingly early age so have vivid memories of the 1992 election (and the horribly accurate Spitting Image show that preceded it). I have also re-read TCOGB many times. Funnily enough my eldest now goes to the secondary school JO'F helped set up and wrote another non-fiction book about (now taken over by an academy trust). It's a shame about his fiction as I really enjoy his quasi memoir stuff.

@RomanMum forgive me if I'm overstepping by making a recommendation, but you might like Artificial Wisdom by Thomas Weaver. It's also set in the near future, involves AI and crime solving. It's one of my top books so far this year.

@BlueFairyBugsBooks thank you, all recommendations welcome! I'll check it out. This was a book club read so not one I'll necessarily have chosen, but turned out to be a pleasant surprise,

@Welshwabbit – I’ve only just come across John O’Farrell from the Laura Kunsberg show last week. I dipped into the podcast that he does with Angela Barnes (I really like her). I might dip into Things Can Only Get Better or Things Can Only Get Worse. I think I’m probably age wise between you and @ASighMadeOfStone I could not believe that John Major actually won the 1992 GE. I might actually buy it for my Mum. She was a big campaigner back in the day, chapping doors, but left the Labour Party back in 2015, as many people in Scotland did.

33 The Silk Code - Deborah Swift. Set in London in 1943, the story follows Nancy who moves from Scotland to London to escape her failed romance. She wants to work hard for the war effort. Her mother is Dutch so Nancy speaks fluent Dutch plus not bad French and German. She starts off in the Coding Department and grows close to Tom. But then she is asked to spy on Tom, as there is a traitor in the midst. Is it Tom? And how can she spy on him?

Enjoyed this, however (and no fault of the book) it was very similar to A Treachery of Spies which I read last month, with the coding and the SOE operatives. I prefered this one as it was all set in 1943. AToS just didnt quite gel for me, with the different time periods and the huge cast. The Silk Code is the first in a trilogy, but I'm going to leave it a couple of months and dive into something else first.

28 The World - Simon Sebag Montefiore

Epic book covering the whole history of humankind to the early 2020s (1200+ pages in paperback- I’ve been reading the Kindle version since about last October). It covers so much ground that early on I gave up trying to keep track of names and relations and just let the flood of history wash over me. It’s very readable, not dry at all and really helps to convey that history is not a series of disconnected events (which is rather how I was taught it at school) but rather a continuum whereby events that took place hundreds of years ago are still influencing the globe today - and that today’s world is still very much in flux and any periods of relative stability are the exception, not the norm.

@MegBusset

I have that but I've been daunted by the sheer size of it. One to dip in and out of?

I’ve been dipping into The World. I’m very much enjoying being exposed to different things/ideas and bits of history I didn’t know about, but by virtue of the book he has chosen to write it really only skims the surface of anything at all and reminds me of a better researched Wikipedia page.

I was actually posting because I went to Oxfam
to buy a copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and came
out with my first haul this year.

Yep, I read a few pages at bedtime every day- and after six months or so I feel like I’m going to miss it!

What an interesting haul @AgualusasLover.

I've also been struggling to get into books. Have decided to DNF the Aussie crime book Bitter Wash Road I was reading as it just wasn't delivering what I want from a crime novel - a pacey page turner.

Anyway have finished:
26. Our Wives Under The Sea - Julia Armfield. I think was quite popular on here last year or the year before. It alternates between two first person narratives of a married female couple, Mari who is coping with her wife's return from a deep sea submarine mission, and Leah who is describing what happened on the mission. It was an interesting premise and the working was descriptive but I found the voices of the two narrators weren't that distinct. And I had so many questions about the plot that just weren't resolved. It felt like parts were dropped in that you expected to be followed up - unexplained phone calls, the boss of the centre - that just weren't, and what actually happened was never explained. It reminded me a bit of In Ascension in this respect.

27. Open Throat - Henry Hoke. This was a novella that I read in an hour. It's narrated by a mountain lion who lives under the Hollywood sign. I quite enjoyed it but it was also a bit inconsistent - the lion spells Ellay and Diznee but has no problems with Hollywood or therapist. It takes on a lot of themes like fires, earthquakes, and homelessness. And the blurb makes a big deal about the mountain lion being queer but this is only really hinted at in the book. I think Laline Paul's animal books are better done than this.

47. The Girls by Emma Cline

This is kind of a bland and sterile look at a teenager who becomes adjacent to a group obviously meant to be a fictionalised Manson Family.
Don't bother and read the superior Helter Skelter instead.

I read Daddy by the same author in 2020 and have precisely zero recollection of it, so perhaps forgettable is an ongoing problem.

Still a struggle sticking to anything but this was an easy one sitting because it didn't ask anything of me. Meh.

@Stowickthevast I think I was one of the early ravers about OurWives Under the Sea, which I really enjoyed. I thought In Ascension might be similar, but just found it really, really dull and dnf.

And I've just found my review of Daddy which said :

"Won't remember much about it in a couple of weeks"

Old threads are super hard to search I've noticed. I don't have premium.

That’s brilliant @EineReiseDurchDieZeit

I read Andrew Marr’s A History of the World last year, which sounds similar to The World. I enjoyed it but it was hard going in areas I knew nothing about like China and Japan.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I was a bit ambivalent about The Girls when I read it, but it's really stuck with me.

Her book The Guest was one of my favourites last year, although the ending was extremely annoying.

Mumsnet search is not good but Advanced Search is REALLY good, particularly if you set the topic to What We're Reading. And if you're looking for one of your own reviews you can specify your own username; I find it works really well.