50 Books Challenge 2024 Part Six

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the sixth 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, the fourth one here and the fifth one here.

What are you reading?

@MorriganManor Lissa Evans is good fun isn't she? Our Finest Hour and a Half is similarly light-hearted, and I'd also recommend her Old Baggage trilogy which although also amusing has some really poignant moments.

@MegBusset I'm old enough to remember Brian Clough on Match of the Day. (Jose Mourinho much later was a watered-down version) .. very arrogant but so sharp and funny and never boring. His descend into alcoholism and incoherence was sad to witness.

In football related chat, I really recommend Marvellous, a TV production based on the true story of Neil Baldwin, a chap with learning difficulties who was employed by, and taken under the wing of Lou Macari, the manager of Stoke City, and became a hugely popular and important part of the team there. Joyful and upliftng and again you don't need to be interested in football to enjoy it.

I've just finished The Pursuit of Love and now reading Into the Woods, the first in a Tana French crime series. Finding it well-written so far, although crimes involving children are always hard to read, and I'm finding attacks on women and children - on TV as well as in books - increasingly questionable as a form of entertainment. I'm not sure if it's me, or their prevalence, or what really.

@highlandcoo I love all her books, including the ones for children (Wished is a particular treat). She can’t write them fast enough for me!

@noodlezoodle thanks for that article. I wasn’t sure whether Bucky in Rare Singles was Black or not (only the sections about his brother suggested he might be) but agree with Myers that that isn’t really of significance; the seeing Scarborough through someone else’s eyes was the main point. Still found the book pretty lightweight compared to his other stuff, but it was passable.

A lovely book about Cloughie is Craig Bromfield's Be good, love Brian. It's a bit like a lifelong version of Flintoff's recent good works. Moving , uplifting and revealing. He was irascible but he was a great human being.

Not just you @highlandcoo. I’m finding the same, especially with police TV dramas and books.

The film of The Damned United is good, with the always excellent Michael Sheen.

https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/derby-news/how-brian-clough-welcomed-two-6139520

@Piggywaspushed you've reminded me of this article, thank you. Yes, there was a lot more to him that met the eye. Same with Lou Macari who has set up a centre to fight homelessness. Not everyone in football is an overpaid waster by any means.

@BestIsWest yes, The Damned United was excellent and I'm a huge Michael Sheen fan. Even more so since stumbling by chance on The Assembly, one of the best half hours of TV ever, when he's grilled by a group of ND young people. No questions are off limits. Still available on iplayer I think and absolutely brilliant.

My Good Bright Wolf - Sarah Moss
This is a memoir of her lifelong issues with anorexia. From a middle class but dysfunctional childhood to her most recent relapse following lockdown this is an extraordinary book.
For anyone who has read Moss's fiction this feels like the key to unlocking them all. There is so much of Moss in her novels.
The writing as always is beautiful.
It is an over used term in this world of celebrity culture and reality tv exposure but this feels like such a brave book.
A while ago now I listened to a drama series on sounds written by Moss called Accidents and Emergencies. It is clearly autobiographical and relived in this book.
Link below for anyone interested.
Definitely a bold for me.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m00187dw?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

Great to see your Good Bright Wolf review splothersdog, and thanks for the radio link. I am trying to hold out until Christmas for the book and checking my library catalogue in the meantime (I fear they have totally run out of money as they don’t have a few new releases I’ve looked for recently), but I see an accidental purchase waiting to happen. I already have a couple of hers that I haven’t read yet so it’s against the rules, but if they are fiction and this non then that’s different, right?

40. Thunderclap by Laura Cumming
I think this has been reviewed a fair bit so I won't go on. A very beautiful and readable twin stranded book, about the art of the Dutch Golden Age and in particular Carel Fabritius, who died in the eponymous Delft Thunderclap, and the author's father, Scottish artist James Cumming. A bold for me.

254 The Hotel Avocado by Bob Mortimer

Sequel to The Satsuma Complex, this is really just more of the same. Bob’s unique brand of humour comes through here - if you’ve seen him on Would I Lie To You there will be characters and events here that sound familiar! Good fun.

255 Five By Five by Claire Wilson

Crime thriller set in a Scottish prison. Intelligence agent Kennedy suspects one of the prison officers is dodgy. She is also falling in love with a prison officer. What if they’re the same person? Unfortunately I didn’t really enjoy this. The author works in a prison so it’s clearly very authentic, but it was too gritty in places for me, and left too many loose ends (not sure if a sequel is planned but I won’t be bothering by with it).

No Man’s Land by Tony Parker - thank you, @Terpsichore! I’m a fan of the oral historian and this early 1970s study of 6 ‘unmarried mothers’ was as compelling and effortlessly readable as always. After your warning about the haunting account of the mother whose baby had been taken from her, I read that early on so it wouldn’t be the last I read. Let’s hope she found her son in the end. The book has Parker’s trademark breadth of experience - rich and poor; women who are coping and those who aren’t; women with agency and those without. The difference in social attitudes towards unmarried mothers is striking - as is the youth of all these women. For anyone coming new to Parker I’d still recommend Lighthouse or Providence as a starting point, but this is a bold for me.

I've added Lissa Evans to my wishlist. Sounds like something DM would like too.

Sarah Moss is an author who I've never got round to reading though have always meant to. Where would you start?

80. Sandwich - Catherine Newman. This is narrated by a 54 year old woman, Rocky, who is on a week's holiday in Cape Cod with her husband, adult children, and later her parents. She's struggling with menopause - hot flushes, anger, vaginal atrophy - but narrates it in am amusing way. Not much really happens, she looks back a lot and reminisces on the struggles of young children and children she may have had - miscarriages. The sandwich is the space she's in between adult children and elderly parents, which she doesn't want to change. The background is very similar to The Paper Palace. I quite liked this, a quick, easy read, but could also see people finding the narrator quite annoying.

So pleased you liked No Man's Land, @CornishLizard . Also that @PermanentTemporary enjoyed Thunderclap, which similarly was one of my top reads this year.

My latest is another non-fiction bold -
66. Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair - Emma Tarlo

I picked this up in the September deals after finding almost nothing else, just on a whim and because it looked as though it might be interesting - in fact it opened a door into a genuinely hidden world of whose existence I had no idea. Emma Tarlo explores the often-hidden, sometimes controversial uses of hair, something most of us never think about but which is traded on a jaw-droppingly massive scale around the globe for all sorts of purposes. Her researches take her from Chinese factories making wigs and toupées, to Hindu temples in India where the faithful queue up to have their heads 'tonsured' - completely shaved of all their hair - with the cuttings sold at a premium to end up in wigs and hairpieces. She visits a North London wig salon to learn about sheitels - the wigs worn by religious Jewish women to cover their own hair - and a Hair Show in Jackson, Mississippi, where she talks to attendees about the politics of styling black hair. Back home in London, wig-stylist and psychotherapist Gary Price is among the people telling her about hair loss and the complicated business of dealing with such a deep psychological issue. And she finds out about the extraordinary trade in 'waste hair' - literal combings collected as tangled balls, but traded for quite substantial sums and then painstakingly teased out by hand, again to end up eventually in wigs.

This really was a 'wow' book in many ways and absolutely fascinating. It's still 99p if that encourages anyone to buy it!

I have bought Entanglement, sounds fascinating!

Excellent! (and I’m not the author, trying to get people to buy the book, I just thought it was worth sharing!)

Sandwich sounds interesting, stowick. Cleverly targeted at a demographic that does tend to read a lot. Have reserved from the library.

My latest:

114. City of Sinners, A A Dhaad
Crime fiction set in Bradford. The setting is interesting - the main character is a Sikh married to a Muslim, and the inter-community tensions are well-evoked - and the writing is pacy. However, I'm not keen on serial killers doing unpleasant things to young women, so I don't think I'll carry on with the series. (It does describe the beautiful Waterstones in the old Wool Exchange that I've been meaning to visit, although I hope to avoid any hanging bodies).

115. Ghosts of the British Museum: A True Story of Colonial Loot and Restless Objects, Noah Angell
Well, this was a surprising little number. I was expecting a sober essay on why the BM needs to return the Elgin Marbles and the Benin Bronzes, amongst other appropriated property. The author does indeed take that position very strongly, but from the standpoint that the ghosts of the title are literal. The stolen objects are haunted and need to go home. He uses interviews with museum employees and visits from psychics to back it up. It's passionately argued and well-informed but - not an angle I was expecting. He mentions that 99% of its holdings aren't even on show - nobody quite knows what's down there in Storage (an entire Ethiopian church containing part of the lost ark of the covenant?) It sounds bonkers but it's a good read, and an interesting position on the BM as the last remnant of Empire.

116. Private Rites, Julia Armfield
Three sisters quarrel after the death of their father in a near-future London, which itself is drowning as a consequence of climate change. How do we live and love in a world that is ending? At first the constant rain made me think that the author had experienced an Irish summer, but this grew on me as a convincing portrayal and I think will stay with me. Not with a bang but with a (damp) whimper.

61 The God Of The Woods by Liz Moore

Absolute cracker of a thriller.
The Van Laars are an old and insanely rich banking family who have owned a large tract of the Adirondacks for several generations. In 1961 the eventual heir, a personable and loving boy nicknamed ‘Bear’ to differentiate him from his father and grandfather, went missing. Despite this plus a real serial rapist and killer and a folklorish grey woman who is said to haunt the woods, the estate still hosts an elite Summer Camp. The book opens in 1975. Barbara Van Laars, the child conceived after the disappearance of Bear, has gone missing…..
The story roams back and forth in time, taking in the 1950s, when young and naive Alice Ward becomes Alice Van Laars, 1961, when Bear disappears and the summer of 1975. We see Barbara rebelling against her mentally absent mother and stern father, becoming a Punk and painting murals on her bedroom walls. She befriends Tracy, who feels out of place amongst the rich camp children and bit by bit, what really happened to Bear and Barbara is pieced together.
There’s a subtle but strong streak of feminism throughout the book, which contrasts nicely with the world of rich men the various female characters are all struggling against.
It’s elegantly plotted and forgive the cliche but “I did not see the ending coming!”

I don’t think I’ve read anything else by Liz Moore so I’ll have to look at her previous novels - if they are half as good as this I’ll be happy.

I really enjoyed Long Bright River, by Liz Moore, Morrigan.

I’ve just bought that @bibliomania . I’ll leave it for a while though, so it doesn’t blend into The God Of The Woods

93. James by Percival Everett

As everyone knows, this is a reworking of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn from the POV of Jim, the slave. I read Huck Finn about 4 years ago and remember precisely nothing about it beyond the gist.

You can see why it was written, what the point was and that it's a worthy book but I found it challenging as a read due to the unpleasantness of events depicted, which of course is to be expected.

I will say as a read, it was a page turner in the sense that the chapters are extremely snappy and it's only 300 pages so even though it's difficult and was hard to get going it does end up being a faster read than you expect

I have Enlightenment next but I'm going to take a break from the Booker for a Maeve Kerrigan fix

I would read Sarah Moss's shopping list!! But the one that got me hooked was Bodies of Light. But Summerwater and The Fell are stunning

Thanks highlandcoo - just watched The Assembly and it’s lovely.

@StowicktheVast , I agree with @HighlandCoo Lissa Evans is excellent, very readable but great characters. Plus the wonderful character Mattie from Old Baggage says 'Hobbies are for people who don't read' which I love.

I am still behind. Perhaps a new thread will be the spur I need to catch up on reading your wonderful posts and updating my reviews. In the meantime...

71 My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
I could do with a year when I lock myself away and don’t engage with the world, but perhaps executed differently to the protagonist of this novel. She is young, pretty and rich but has had enough of her awful relationship with a Wall Street bro, a problematic relationship with her best friends and unresolved issues with her dead parents. Towards the end of 2020, she sets out to sleep for as much of it as she can, aided by an entirely awful but very funny psychiatrist.

I believe a lot of people hated this. The unnamed author is a reliably awful character – shallow, cruel, self absorbed and petty. But it’s really funny in a black way and the characterisation is spot on.

70 Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
A group of international businessmen, diplomats and politicians find themselves trapped in a house in a South American country (never named, which adds to the sense of wonder that pervades this book) after they are held hostage by revolutionaries. As the world loses interest and they start to develop bonds, music becomes an important part of their lives, redefining relationships and causing them to rethink what they know about their lives.

This is quite beautiful and totally engrossing. I’m probably the last person on this thread to have read this, and I was initially struggling to concentrate because I was so distracted by bad things that were happening around me. But it did what only a really special book can do and temporarily at least provided an escape from obsessive rumination bad things, so well done Ann Patchett.

69 Under Your Spell by Laura Wood
This was so delightful. A slightly quirkier companion to Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy which I also read recently – there are a lot of similarities in the plot. Clemmie is a frustrated academic (to be honest, she didn’t need to be and that was a slightly extraneous plot point that seemed to get overlooked in the final edit) who is the daughter of an ageing rock star who fathered three girls by three different women within the space of a few months. Clemmie and her sisters grew up together and cast spells as children when one of them was hurt. When Clemmie is dumped by her boyfriend, they rerun the breakup spell and shortly after, she finds herself entangled in a very messy romantic and professional situation. On the face of it, I should have hated it, but it was funny and charming and really entertaining.

@splothersdog I wasn't aware of the companion pieces to Night Waking - thank you for highlighting them.

44.Eureka by Anthony Quinn. This follows the slightly past his best playwright Nat Fane's attempt to rekindle past glories by working on a film adaptation of Henry James's story The Figure in the Carpet.

The creative process is documented in detail, but was less fun than the various escapades of the cast and crew. Swinging London with models, gangsters and drug fuelled parties providing both glamour and grit.

This is the third book in a very loose trilogy, Curtain Call and Freya being the others, although each stands alone well enough. While this was pacy and enjoyable, Curtain Call felt better crafted, and Freya more substantial