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?

34. Enter Ghost - Isabella Hammad womens prize shortlisted book about London based actress Sonia who returns to Israel and Palestine and ends up starring in a production of Hamlet staged in the West Bank. I didn't love this book. It's told in the first person from Sonia's point of view and I just didn't like her as I felt like she lacked empathy and self awareness. She would often come out with random mean thoughts about other characters that weren't reflected in the storytelling. I also didn't find her relationship with her sister relatable or believable.

It was interesting reading this depiction of life in Palestine/Israel. I live in a Muslim country and I was quite surprised by the amount of beer drinking. I was also surprised that we got 66% of the way into the book before this lone, western looking, non hijabi woman was cat called. Maybe (hopefully) that's my prejudice and actually Palestine is a lot more liberal than I expected.

Not all Palestinians are Muslim - Sonia and her sister, and the woman who is putting on the theatre production, are all from the Palestinian Christian community, as apparently are a lot of the theatre audience. My memory of the novel is that Sonia's sister lives and works at a university within Israel. The action of the story moves between Israel and the West Bank.

Interesting, that makes sense that they're Christians.

@minsmum – I’ve still to read The Maiden. I think it was universally hated on here. As well as being on the long list for the Womens Prize for Fiction, it has just been announced as on the short list for the Crime Writers Association for a ILP John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger, so someone is enjoying it :)

Link for the Daggers: https://thecwa.co.uk/awards-and-competitions/the-daggers/
They have short listed, but haven’t updated each category. I fancy Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Sutanto. Has anyone read anything by them?

@SheilaFentiman – Lynne McEwan is working on the next book!

@Stowickthevast – that’s a great idea for listening to the Audio of Enter Ghost as well as reading. I make up pronunciation in my head, probably very incorrectly!

@Kinsters - yes, I think we tend to forget/not know about Christian Palestinians. There is a fairly high profile politician in the UK, Leyla Moran MP and she is from a Christian Palestinian background, but until she spoke about her family in Gaza being trapped in a Christian Church, I hadnt appreciated her background and assumed she was Muslim.

Thank you @Tarragon123 !

35 The Instruments Of Darkeness by John Connolly
This arrived on Tuesday and after a busy week I carved out some time to read the majority of it in peace and solitude, as a book this good demands.
Charlie Parker is asked by lawyer Moxie Castin to investigate the circumstances of a toddler’s disappearance. Everything points to his mother, Colleen Clark. Local and national hatred ensues. However, another woman with an unwelcome gift reluctantly gets involved and it becomes apparent that this is no ordinary child abduction.
I adore the Charlie Parker series and this latest addition isn’t going to change that. It’s the time he takes to fully draw characters, the moral stance of Parker and his close compatriots and the sheer evil (often literal) of his opponents. You’ll be in a place of dark, creeping terror, then the next chapter will start chattily filling you in about the background of a neo-Nazi villain before segueing into a tense stand off involving shotguns.
There was a plot element that I thought could have been more fully developed, but that’s a tiny niggle. The Fulci Brothers and Louis and Angel feature (the latter not quite enough for me this time).

18 The Unwanted Dead by Chris Lloyd
A police procedural set in Paris in 1940, just as France falls to the Nazis. I thought the first third was excellent, as cop Eddie Giral works out what it will take to keep doing his job in these new circumstances, and investigates bodies found apparently trying to escape from Paris, and a suicide on the same day. I did feel that Lloyd had squeezed a bit too much both into the character of Giral and into the story - and I have got very tired of the trope of the wisecracking female American journalist whose status as representative of a neutral country and abundant money cuts through a number of problematic plot holes. In this case the time her cardboard dialogue took up pushed out some more interesting characters.

9.The Ladies Midnight Swimming Club by Faith Hogan
This was just what I was looking for to read. Uplifting but sad at times too. It is about Elizabeth a Dr’s widow who has been left in debt due to her gambling, drunken deceased husband. It is about how she forges to find her path with the support of her good friend Joe. It also tells the story of Lucy Joe’s daughter a burned out divorcee from Dublin with a troubled teenage son in tow. It tell’s the story of these trio of women and their interlinking lives in Ballycove a quiet village where everyone knows of each other. I really liked this and would recommend. For me it was an easy gentle read and I was hooked into the unfolding gentle drama

I've just finished Enter Ghost too @Kinsters. I agree about Sonja who I found defensive character and a bit detached. The way she behaved with Ibrahim seemed quite confused. But overall it was a really fascinating book and an insight into life in Palestine - I hadn't really realised the reality of living there in terms of checkpoints and the constant threat of the Israeli army. It was also an interesting look at Arabs living in Israel.

I was thinking about it when a bun fight over anti-semitism was kicking off on one of the Eurovision threads on here earlier today!

I've got Brotherless Nights still to read but think will take a break before diving into another war zone.

Not sure if I'll bother with either Anne Enright or Kate Granville.

TTOD lovers... DS2 has just finished it and sent me a text with a sad face and a broken heart ,saying 'great book'. The love has spread.

Yes I liked the setting @Stowickthevast. In theory the book sounded great but if something is in first person solely from one pov and I don't like that character then it's probably never going to work for me! I thought the depiction of miscarriage was very unrealistic.

32. The Dictionary People - Sarah Ogilvie

I was annoyed with myself for missing this when it was a 99p deal, but luckily it popped up as a library ebook and was an absolute delight. Sarah Ogilvie basically had my dream job - she was an editor at the OED in Oxford (although, ironically, just about to leave for a job in Silicon Valley) when she happened to open a box in the archives and discovered the address books in which James Murray, fabled editor of the OED for 35 years from 1879, had kept details of all the Readers and Specialists who'd contributed to his great endeavour. They’d been accessioned but nobody had researched them at all - which was her chance to take on this mighty task.

The result is a fascinating, funny chronicle - organised from A to Z, naturally - of some of the 3,000 people who helped make the OED a reality. Eccentricity features heavily, not least in Murray himself, as does disturbance of the mind (three of the top 4 contributors spent time confined to asylums and the other one worked there). There are many intelligent and capable women, a lot of clergymen, many long-distance walkers, polyglots, pornographers, Americans, and vegetarians…and combinations thereof. A lovely book.

This sounds amazing!

A Great Love by Alexandra Kollontai I came across Alexandra Kollantai's name in the biography of Sylvia Pankhurst that I read recently and realised that I had this on my bookshelf. Kollantai is a fascinating figure, she was born into an aristocratic Russian family but was involved in radical circles and dedicated to women's emancipation; she worked tirelessly for the revolution and was the only woman in Lenin's 1917 government.

I know I read this back in the day (it's a 1981 Virago) but I had no recollection of the story. It was written in 1923 and follows the course of a woman's love affair with a married man, and her growing disillusionment as she aims for friendship and equality with the man she loves. It's actually a roman a clef, based on Lenin's love affair with Inessa Armand, who Kollantai got to know after the revolution. Both women were aware of the double standards in sexual morality and the ways that men subordinated women's needs in the revolutionary movement (which also exasperated Sylvia Pankhurst). The book contains two other, very much shorter, love stories exploring a similar theme. Passionate, interesting (although the longer story gets slightly frustrating) and very Virago.

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy Much reviewed previously. Great writing and it took me back to the madness of having small children, but not without its (minor) faults.

37 East West Street - Philippe Sands

Much reviewed on here so will just add that I found this gripping, fascinating and heartbreaking in equal measure. A slight quibble with the Audible narration, which had the author swapping sections with another narrator (presumably professional but actually worse) - I would have preferred Sands all the way through. But anyway this is a definite bold from me.

38 Art Sex Music - Cosey Fanni Tutti

Compelling autobiography of the performance artist and musician, from the 1970s to 2010s, and covering her work with COUM and Throbbing Gristle (with Genesis P-Orridge who sounds like a total arsehole), as well as the more recent Chris & Cosey and Carter Tutti. Plus stripping, pornography and lots of getting her kit off in general - all on her own terms. I’m not the biggest fan of her music but absolutely love her no-fucks-given approach to life.

Glad you rated East West Street, @MegBusset - I thought it was a great book.

Just scampered through a fun and easy vintage read:

33. Tuesday Girl - Marjorie Gayler

In the 60s and 70s there was a vogue for 'career' novels offering girls (I suppose teens - what we’d call YA now) an idea of what the world of work might be like. Marjorie Gayler wrote several and I’ve read two, one set in the world of dress design (Daphne Sets a Fashion) and the other in hotel management (Operation Hotel). Nobody would call them great literature but they’re really well-written and surprisingly enjoyable. The focus of Tuesday Girl is Christine, lowly assistant in the editorial department of the titular magazine, who gets an unexpected chance to pitch an idea to the Managing Director himself ('a large important-looking man in a large important-looking room') and sparks his interest with a suggestion that the mag's cover girls should be chosen from ordinary readers rather than models.

There are a couple of minor sub-plots involving a good-looking chap in Advertising and a mysteriously-missing paper dress (!) but the main point is to give a picture of the daily job of putting a magazine together, which gets quite technical but is conveyed with a light hand. What really stands out is the utter slog of typewriters, galley-proofs, endless memos and dummy pages all painstakingly assembled by hand and remade over and over in the days long before computerisation. Great fun.

80 My Cousin Rachel by Daphne duMaurier
A reread but many years after I first read it as a teenager. What I remembered was that I preferred this to Rebecca, and that’s still the case. Ambrose Ashley, a bachelor set in his ways surprises his cousin and heir Philip when he writes to him from Florence to say he has married the titular Rachel. When Ambrose dies, Philip is determined to blame Rachel until she comes to England to visit. Gothic, mysterious and full of suspicion I really enjoyed this- a bold for me. Now I need to make sure I read more Du Maurier.

81 Before the Coffee Gets Cold- Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Sitting in a particular chair in this coffee shop allows you to visit the past, or the future. The only people you can speak to are others who have been in the coffee shop and you must return before your coffee goes cold. Interesting premise which manages to be dull as dishwater. I don’t really get on with Japanese literature and yet I keep persisting. At least it was short…

82 The Instruments of Darkness by John Connolly
I reiterate everything from @MorriganManor ’s review of this book. A compelling investigation. Connolly’s writing is back to full strength after what I felt was a series slump with The Furies. Loved every minute (especially the Fulcis). A bold.

Excellent!

@Terpsichore Tuesday Girl sounds great fun - I worked in magazine publishing just as desktop publishing software became a thing so just missed galley proofs and manual typesetting, but worked alongside many older hands who’d lived through them!

@ÚlldemoShúl The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda is a great DDM-ish Japanese literary mystery (multiple unreliable narrators, dysfunctional families, modern gothic elements, borderline woo).

@Terpsichore I've never heard of Marjorie Gaylor, but those sound great fun and Susan Scarlett-ish.

@Tarragon123 Hope I'm not too late to save you from Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers which is UTTER TRIPE (inflicted upon me by a bookgroup). The protagonist goes from 'comic' broken Chinglish, thinking a pot-cut (podcast) is a kind of rash, to dropping Latin tags and adjectives like 'Holmesian' and tactfully inquiring why someone 'with your talent doesn't want to pursue a job in photography'... not to mention the TWO year old who is at once still breastfed, terribly shy but willing to instruct Good Uns how to approach the charcuterie board she helps assemble, and capable of explaining inflation to dotty old Vera (who is 60! But with orthopedics and a grey poodle perm, because old people, amirite?) <breathes>

Thanks @inaptonym ive added it to my kindle wish list.

50. Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape, by Carwyn Graves
    'Tir' is Welsh for 'land', & the book explores a number of types of land (rhos, or moorland, fridd, mountain pasture etc). Rewilding (particularly the ill-conceived, George Monbiot-linked Summit to Sea project) has been hugely controversial in Wales. Carwyn Graves manages both to illuminate the ways in which the Welsh countryside & ecology has been shaped by human settlement & farming, without ignoring the fact that many modern farming practices (often because of the legacy of the CAP) are very destructive, and draw out some possible ways in which land use could meet the aims of the re-wilders, without the exclusion of people. He also uses Welsh poetry to illustrate the relationship between people & the land. A really good read for anyone interested in the Welsh countryside.

51. The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older
    Short SFF murder mystery novella with a Holmes/Watson dynamic (plus a bit of romance), with investigator Mossa & her ex-girlfriend Pleiti tracking down a missing academic, & finding more layers to the mystery as they proceed. Fluffy but well done & very enjoyable, plus well read on Audible. I'll definitely listen to the next book when it's out.

52. Cloistered by Catherine Coldstream
    Memoir of the author's time as a Carmelite nun, from entering in her 20s as a young Catholic convert grieving for her much loved father, through vows & then disenchantment & a wider upheaval in the community as a whole. An interesting read, & I've bumped "I Leap Over the Wall* by Monica Baldwin (also about life in an enclosed convent, though pre-Vatican II) which I think was recommended on here up my wish list to see how they compare.

Recent reads, no bolds:

The Librarianist - Patrick deWitt
A duel between deWitt's writerly fireworks and the uneventful life of a resolutely drab protagonist, ironically named 'Bob Comet' - typical deWitt. I have a high tolerance for little-happens-in-sparkling-prose but did facepalm the second time something finally happened, and we immediately cut away to another vignette set decades earlier. But the 1945 section ended up being my favourite - implausibly eccentric characters, vaudeville patter, imminent riot - though it could have been highly irritating with dare-you-to-DNF bits like:
“…our latest work, which consists of a series of somewhat-connected vignettes. Do you know what a vignette is?...It’s a story that’s too small to be called a story, so you call it a vignette. By pretending you’ve made it small on purpose, you avoid the shame that accompanies culpability. Do you know what culpability is?...It’s the bill coming due. This work is not our strongest. It is not bad work, but it doesn’t have the power of our past labors.”
Definitely A Minor Work, and not the place to start with deWitt; even for fans, best saved for a sunny mood.

Fire Weather - John Vaillant
An excellent 5 star book about the 2016 Fort McMurray fire, and the context of the Canadian bitumen industry, diluted with mediocre 2- and 3 star books on Climate Change 101, Fire 101, the story of oxygen (from the Great Oxygenation Event through Lucretius, Priestley et al.), the rise of petrochemical corporations, colonialism, scientific misinformation, etc. etc. There were some brilliantly effective turns of phrase, striking images and telling details from the disaster, and the central analogy linking fire/corporate/human omnivorous consumption and aspiration was clever, but it was excruciatingly long and all the extraneous stuff unskippable on audio.
Surprised this won the Baillie Gifford prize last year - it's the fourth I've read from the shortlist so far and I'd rank it dead last.

Murder in the Family - Cara Hunter
Centred around a fictional true crime documentary series reopening a decades-old cold case: the murder of a 20something Australian man who’d recently married a wealthy older woman, whose body was discovered in the (posh) family home by his young stepchildren - one of whom is directing the show. Mostly presented as the shooting scripts of the documentary, with various messages between the expert panellists assembled to investigate, reviews and social media commentary after each episodes cf. The Appeal. I quite like Cara Hunter’s police procedurals but this was utterly preposterous style-over-substance stuff clearly designed to elicit TikTok reactions.

DNFs:
The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law - Kate Morgan interesting subject, prose unfortunately true to its title, both wooden and weirdly bumpy.

Code Dependent - Madhumita Murgia (WP shortlist) The first chapter on the 'pyramid base' of global tech workers was good but for anyone who even casually follows related news, this rapidly descends into a load of stating the bleeding obvious in clumsy prose ('aesthetic' as an adjective, 'veering on' for 'verging on' just two examples from opening the book at random).

I'm also midway through both Hugo and Intl. Booker shortlists, but will group those reviews together, on another day. No bolds from either, so far.... beginning to think problem may well be me 😅

Fire Weather was definitely better in print where I could skip all the non-Fort McMurray bits!

Code Dependent knocked off my TBR as that's the second stinker review. It's a shame, as I'd like a book on AI that's up to the standards of Living With Robots & ideally (as that one is) written by researchers in the field rather than a journalist.

Has anyone read How AI Thinks by Nigel Toon? It's had some decent reviews at least.