50 Books Challenge 2024 Part Five

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fifth 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.

Some of us bring over to the new thread lists of the books we've read so far, but again - this is your choice.

The first thread is here, the second one here , the third one here and the fourth one here

What are you reading?

@bibliomania I was about to suggest Rogers' bio of JL Carr and then remember we talked about it on here ages ago! Must re-read The Man Who Went Into the West - I remember really enjoying it.

Does anyone else find they tend to re-read e-books less because they're not sitting on a shelf looking at you? If I want a re-read & not at home I tend to default to my multi-times-read books, rather than looking through & picking something out.

Haven't read Period Piece for years - though it's probably on my dad's shelves rather than mine. I always mentally categorise it with A London Child of the 1870s & sequels.

Irish grammar always seems to require adding more "i"s than you think would be necessary.

Sadik, yes, I think it was that discussion that led to me buying The Man who went into the West a few years back, so thank you! Period Piece has been on my radar for a while so I must look out for it.

Re-reading - I don't do it as much as I expect to. I could get rid of more of more in books if I was honest with myself, but never mind, they're there just in case. If civilization collapses, I'll still have plenty to read on my afternoons off.

Ugh, ignore unintended italics

Oh, I adore Period Piece! It may be due a re-read, but actually I don't re-read much. Too many unread books on my tbr list to get through first!

I have a real tendency to read too fast, so I often re-read & get much more out of a book the second time around. DP despairs of my looking at the ending of thrillers & the like to find out what happens so that I don't rush too much. Which is annoyingly harder on kindle - I've got finding out just enough but not too much down to a fine art on paper.
I've improved with age though - when I was a child I didn't like buying books unless I'd already read them from the library & knew that I liked them (admittedly my book-buying budget is now rather larger, and our local library much smaller!)

@PermanentTemporary I've never met anyone else who’s read Eight Cousins! It was one of my childhood favourites; I loved it so much. I can still vividly recall the cover and illustrations in my (hardback) copy. Love Period Piece too - I think it was on my list last year. I’ve got a biog of Gwen Raverat which I must promote to the top of the non-fiction tbr list now.

my favourite bits in Alcott always involve unpacking boxes and cupboards

PS @PermanentTemporary you've just reminded me of the box-unpacking scene par excellence, the 'Christmas boxes' chapter of What Katy Did At School ☺️

I reminded myself of that @Terpsichore! Along with the Valentines chapter of What Katy Did...

So glad I joined these threads (like @ginsparkles was directed here last year from another one). Eight Cousins/Rose in Bloom were my favourite Alcotts (sucker for a timeskip, also in An Old Fashioned Girl), obsessed with jumbles thanks to Katy Carr's Christmas box, love Gwen Raverat and Molly Hughes.

@ÚlldemoShúl excluding the 'Four Greats' by Wilkie Collins I like The Law and the Lady on feminist/fascinating legal trivia grounds, and Poor Miss Finch for utter bonkersness (don't read the blurb!)

Work has been busy lately so I've been mostly rereading (Blandings) and catching up with series:
Past Lying - Val McDermid
Karen Pirie #7: Covid edition. This was a major step down from the rest of the series, and a real disappointment, as it's focused on the Scottish crime-writing scene so had potential for fun meta and gossip. Nope, just a plodding case which even my crap mystery brain solved in the first minute, and every character being insufferable, especially St. Karen. I also found it quite surreal reading about the very strict Scottish lockdown regulations (with plenty of Sturgeon arse-kissing), just a few years on.

Close to Death - Anthony Horowitz
Hawthorne/Horowitz #5: leafy Richmond suburban locked-room mystery. Maybe the most meta of this very meta series (including a whole bookshop specialising in Golden Age detective novels) and very fun. Still have no idea where the overarching Hawthorne mystery arc is going, and how the new elements/characters introduced here will fit in, but I don't find him particularly compelling so appreciated the back seat he took in this cold case story.

@inaptonym that’s well put on Past Lying

Second-Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta

A semi autobiographical novel about a young Nigerian woman who comes to the UK in the 1960s. A very raw look at racism and sexism written in a readable style that gives an immediacy to what she writes. Definite bold.

The paragraphs about the unpacking of boxes in What Katy Did At School are my absolute favourite comfort reading passages in any book I've ever read. I love the passages about clothes in Ballet Shoes in a similar way but they aren't quite as satisfying.

I don't tend to re-read unless they are those kinds of comfort reads from my youth. Like Sadik, I read fast and I often think I'd benefit from re-reading because I'd certainly retain more, but life is too short and there are just too many books (I saw an interesting analysis in the Economist the other day about reading rates and how many books you have left in a lifetime - it didn't make for fun reading but I comforted myself with the reflection that what I read, and how much, has definitely improved enormously since joining this thread a few years back).

I rather enjoyed Cloistered, having just finished it. It certainly took a dark turn that I didn't ever quite get to the bottom of, and I'd have preferred more analysis of that for it to be truly satisfying. I also wasn't ever quite convinced by her account of how she decided to join first the church and then the convent. The middle part was, I thought, rather well done though as always I'm left with more questions about the life of a nun than I am with answers. As I'm still behind with reviews, perhaps I'll make that my review of *Cloistered", which was book 50...

49 1989 by Val McDermid
This was my mystery book gift from the 50 Bookers meet up in London (alongside the ones I picked up from @elkiedee who generously brought a whole array of books for us to pick from). I’d had this on my library list for a while so was delighted to unwrap it.

Plucky investigative journalist Allie is writing for a newspaper owned by media mogul Wallace Lockhart, who may as well have “I’m Robert Maxwell” tattooed on his forehead for all the subtlety in the portrayal of the character (just as well the dead can’t sue for libel). She comes across a story that suggests patients with HIV are being moved from Edinburgh to Manchester, which leads her to East Berlin and into a murky world of big pharma, activists and geopolitics, which felt reminiscent of a Le Carre book at times.

I had a slight sense of being dropped into the middle of the conversation as this is the second book in the series, and without having read the first, I had a definite sense of missing some of the nuances of Allie and Rona’s story. At times it felt a little like a 1989-by-numbers plot – drug companies and healthcare systems letting down patients with HIV, Hillsborough, Lockerbie, the slow crumbling of the Soviet bloc, media barons up to no good, cellphones as big as bricks…you wouldn’t have written this story this way if you’d been writing at the time and so it felt occasionally a touch heavy handed, and the plot didn’t really excite me, but I loved Allie and Rona and really do want to know what happened to them before and what happens to them in the future.

Still in a bit of a book slump, but I've (finally) finished:

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The subtitle is "Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants", & RWK is a botanist as well as a woman of Potawatomi heritage with a strong interest in traditional teachings & practices around land use. This has been pretty universally loved by people I know IRL. There were parts I did think were very interesting, but I found it quite patchy, & there were some parts that I found really quite troubling.

Overall I much preferred Carwyn Graves' book Tir on the relationship between people & traditional approaches to land use & how these could inform practices today. Partly of course that's because it's more immediate to me, living in Wales rather than the US, but I also feel it's more internally consistent & less prone to broad sweeping statements.

Plus a couple of easy YA reads:
Scattered Showers by Rainbow Rowell
Short stories, at least one of which I've read somewhere previously. Nothing earth shattering, and some better than others, but mostly funny and sweet as her books usually are.

Quiver by Julia Watts
Set in rural Tenessee, 16 year old Libby is the oldest child in an evangelical Christian family that subscribes to the 'quiverfull' principle of having many children to be God's righteous warriors. They also have strict gender roles, with men making all decisions, working outside the house etc, & women/girls responsible for children, home schooling & household tasks.
Then a new family moves in next door - also running away from mainstream US culture & home schooling etc, but on the basisi of feminist/ socialist / vegetarian etc principles. Libby & gender-fluid teen Zo become friends, but the cultural differences between their parents start to cause big problems.
This is definitely YA, but it's still a nice read, & hit the spot perfectly for a day off work with a nasty bug.

I've spent the week comfort reading. For me it's been the Chalet School. I'd done the Austria books and some of the war ones earlier this year before a trip to Pertisau where it was originally set. The latest set are with the school now based in Herefordshire and then moving to a Welsh island - why is not entirely clear. Maybe EBD wanted boats and swimming back. Anyway I'm not properly counting them but they are:

Lavender Laughs at the Chalet School - snobby new girl gets taken down a peg or two until she fits in. She has EBD's signature lavender eyes
Gay from China at The Chalet School - temporary headmistress tries to change Chalet School ways which obviously doesn't go well
Jo To The Rescue - a slightly odd one not set at school but has Jo and her original friends on holiday in Yorkshire with various children and of course find a poor local to do good for
Three Go to the Chalet School - where we meet the One And Only Mary-Lou, who moves next door to Jo and her family, who are suddenly much older. This is also the book where they start speaking the languages again in preparation for going back to Tirol.
The Chalet School and The Island - where the school moves to the Welsh island. Lots of birding and boating
Peggy of the Chalet School - the oldest niece blessed with a silvery voice becomes headgirl
Carola Storms the Chalet School - new girl runs away from her aunt to join the Chalet School
The Wrong Chalet School - another aunt sends her daughter to the wrong Chalet School.

I think I'm done for now. I've definitely reached a stage where they're getting more repetitive, the fascination with multiple births in the Bettany- Russell-Maynard family is getting out of control, and countless incidents are resolved off scene with a "What Miss Annersley said to her was kept between them but X was a changed girl".

Back to real reading now!

Divine Might by Natalie Haynes, about the Greek goddesses, is 99p on kindle today.

I haven’t managed to post any reviews for a bit so here we go

24. Hex Jenni Fagan.

A second title from the Darkland Tales novellas I started reading with Denise Mina’s Rizzio. Another absolute stunner of a read. The novella follows the last hours of Geillis Duncan, convicted of witchcraft and executed in 1591 in Edinburgh. Her story is told through her interactions with Iris, presumably a witch of our own time, who has travelled back as a consciousness/ familiar to comfort Geillis. Their mutual story draws parallels between varieties of women’s oppression, underscoring the point that ‘a witch-pricker’s finger can be pointed at any one of us’. Although the setting is bleak, it is vividly realised and combines the magical and the real to produce a portrait of 16th century Scotland both striking and tangible.

25. The Five: The Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper Hallie Rubenhold

I would usually have given this a wide berth, agreeing with the author that the Ripper mythology is a ‘cultural obsession …(which)… only serves to normalise its particular brand of misogyny’. This however is far from the usual voyeuristic fare that supports the Ripperology industry. Rubenhold takes aim at the casual dismissal of female victims as ‘just prostitutes’ to uncover the breadth and variety of experience and lifestyle these women had. Of the ‘canonical five’ only one woman would have owned the status of sex worker, but the police assumptions and subsequent journalistic coverage cemented in the public mind the belief that the ripper was a killer of prostitutes, a misdirection which flawed the investigation, at the time and subsequently. The more the press and public focused on the killer, the further into obscurity the lives of his victim sank. Rubenhold takes each of the five women in turn and reconstructs as much as can be known of their lives from her impressive and scholarly archival work. The pictures that emerge foreground the precarity of women’s lives in an era when a ‘woman’s entire function was to support men, and if the roles of their male family members were to support the roles and needs of men wealthier than them, then the women at the bottom were driven like piles deeper and harder into the ground in order to bear the weight of everyone else’s demands’. Rubenhold presents an empathetic and sensitive set of portraits of the ripper victims which avoids both mawkishness and prurience, and provides a wonderful and detailed view of life for women in the 19th century.

Another two for my list:

26 Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. Already reviewed many times on this thread. The main character, Sonia, is an actor living in London and has come to visit her sister in Israel after the painful end of a love affair with a married man. She ends up performing in a production of Hamlet with a group of Palestinian actors, led by director Mariam. This is excellent - interesting characters, a vivid account of day to day life for Palestinians, and I liked the way that the play wound its way through the narrative. It would be a worthy winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction (to be announced next week).

27 A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel. This is set during a summer in Norfolk with Ralph and Anna and their four teenage / young adult children, plus memories of the times Ralph and Anna spent in Africa 20 years earlier. This is quite different to the Wolf Hall series, but as ever Mantel is a superb storyteller who brings every scene to life. I was gripped by this.

@Thewolvesarerunningagain i did not know geillis Duncan was real!

62. There Is No Ethan by Anna Akbari (Audible)

In 2010, Anna Akbari met Ethan Schuman on OKCupid. Catfish : The Movie had just come out and the TV Show and its advice was years away. For those who don't know the movie or show "catfishing" is to pretend to be someone you aren't online for the deliberate purposes of deception. Both are worth watching.

Ethan leads Anna a merry dance, lovebombing and being a great guy, or negging and gaslighting her, being hugely psychologically abusive.

Eventually, Anna catches on that he might not be what he seems but not until such a long time. Another woman, Gina, contacts her through a mutual connect to say that she too is in an online relationship with Ethan and the two of them contact a third, "British Anna" They then have to deal with the fallout of discovering who Ethan really is.

For the record, I thought Ethan was the biggest arsehole from the beginning and how he manages to ensnare not one but three intelligent women is beyond me really. After the first letdown like standing you up or not getting on the plane, you'd be like : "Oh Fuckity Bye, Dickhead"

His voice on the Audible is really annoying as well.

It reminded me a little of My Friend Anna by Rachel Deloache Williams. I felt that Williams was a bit delusional in that book about her part in it and there's some of that here. Ethan has more red flags than a Chinese parade and yet the women continue to overlook the increasingly obvious, almost in desperation. And he's just some guy they've never met.

A lesson in having good boundaries

Catfish : The Book Version.

Book 43 The Lost Storyteller by Amanda Block.

Rebecca barely remembers her dad, when a journalist comes wanting to to include him in an article he is writing, she starts to wonder about him. Together Rebecca and Ellis learn more about her dad and she discovers a book of fairy tales her dad had written just for her. Through the magic of these stories Rebecca has the chance to get closer to the storyteller, her father. To learn more about him, and even where he now might be.

It was slow to get going but the second half was really engaging.

21. Who's That Girl by Mhairi MacFarlane

Rom com book where the ending is predictable from very early on but still fun getting there. In amongst the usual ridiculousness where the two characters obviously falling for each other have continual misunderstandings as they don't have an actual conversation it deals with grief surprisingly well. Passed the time nicely. 3.75 out of 5.

For a treat I am going to go to my wishlist and purchase the book I most want to buy next - even if it is not 99p! I am going on holiday on Friday and hope I have plenty of reading time.

I have eventually got round to reading An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, which my random number generator has been withholding form me for over a year.

I found this an odd book, mainly because it was just nothing like I expected. It is, of course, beautifully written and very delicate and elegant.

I found myself rushing it though -partly because of its very short chapters but also because I think I don't know enough about music and didn't care enough about the protagonist. I wasn't disappointed, just unmoved. Had I not read A Suitable Boy I may have made a more positive judgement.

A review on the back says ' clear , lovely and civilised' and this sums it up rather better than I can.

30 Great and Horrible News - Blessin Adams
True crime by an ex-police officer, but with a difference - all these cases took place in England between 1500 and 1700. Fascinating in particular on the restrictions on women in the period and the odium piled on the mothers of ‘bastards’, and the emergence of forensics in the case of Sarah Stout - could her physical remains prove whether she drowned or was thrown into the river after a violent murder? Well, no, not in 1699, but at least they were trying. I loved it, but it does visit very dark places in terms of child and animal cruelty. And cruelty to adults tbh - the early moderns were equal opportunities sadists.

31 What I Want to Talk About - Pete Wharmby
Memoirs of an autistic ex-teacher shaped by an exploration of his ‘special interests’ or hyperfixations. Knew I was with my kind of person when the first two of these were dinosaurs and Lego (although I’m never going to agree with him on JKR).

32 A Curious History of Sex - Kate Lister
Not a linear history but rather a series of entertaining articles on rude behaviour and body parts (and especially cultural attitudes towards them), with a particular focus on the Victorian period which is Kate’s specialism. Covered fairly familiar ground and a bit unnaunced in its treatment of the ancient world (Greek love nothing but paedophilia), but pretty entertaining.

33 Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops - Shaun Bythell
One for the fans of the diaries only I think - Shaun really plays up his Bernard-from-Black-Books persona in this tongue-in-cheek exploration of the ‘species’ of customer commonly spotted in The Bookshop.

I haven’t finished anything new, but since I’ve caught up I thought I’d comment.

@Terpsichore I have had Waiting on my shelf for years and years. I might pick it up over the holidays.

@CornishLizard It makes me so happy to introduce people to Pereira Maintains whether they love it like me or not, it just feels like a book that should be better known. In particular, because I think the story of fascism in inter-war Europe outside of Germany and Italy (and of course Britain’s Mosley brand) is never really touched on.

@Sadik I got Braiding Sweetgrass as part of a 40th birthday diverse reading book subscription, but have yet to pick it up. I’m a little intimidated by it and feel like I need to give it my full attention.

@Thewolvesarerunningagain For anyone who enjoyed The Five and likes that sort of social history I really, really recommend The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey by Julia Laite - it’s a micro-history centred around Lydia Harvey leaving New Zealand but actually being trafficked. It takes on the history of international trafficking, the development of the met in London, the beginnings of social work and has some really interesting asides into how she researched and put the book together. Both authors are actually really good friends and whilst Laite’s book did really well (because it’s brilliant) it suffered in the history prizes because it came a year after The Five. If you ever get a chance to see either of them speak, I would really recommend it.

38. Fallen Angel - Chris Brookmyre

My third book by this author having previously read One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night and The Cliff House. This is probably a more traditional thriller/mystery than the others. The Temple family assembles at their Portuguese villa following the death of their patriarch, Max. However, the family is dysfunctional and has secrets. The key secret being the disappearance and presumed death of toddler, Niamh, from the villa 15+ years ago. Into the mix are thrown their neighbours and their new au pair, Amanda, who aspires to be an investigative journalist. The storyline is narrated by different participants at various points and it’s it clear how reliable they are and what they may be hiding so it worked well for me as an easy read.

39. And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie

This month’s challenge book and a masterpiece. Read it before and seen the TV adaptation but still enjoyed it. Very clever and really ramps up the tension.