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?

Oops, didn't realise how behind I was with reviews.

30. The Bullet That Missed, by Richard Osman. More Thursday Murder Club shenanigans. I still love these, all the little retirement village details are so on the nose. Not quite a bold but great fun.

31. The Mess We're In, by Annie McManus. Loved it. Set in the early 00s, young Irish woman Orla Quinn moves to London, into a house share in Kilburn with her best friend and the band that her best friend's brother is in. Not a great deal of plot but extremely evocative. Excellent on the underbelly of the 'glamorous' music scene and what it's like to be young and broke in London.

32. Tales from the Back Row, by Amy Odell. Essays on being a fashion writer and outsider (although I don't know how outside she really was, as fashion editor for The Cut). A hoot. Funny and entertaining, although the essay about Victoria's Secret went on and on. This is now 8 years old and some things seem very out of time - for example pre me-too Harvey Weinstein being mentioned, and Kanye appearing as a huge star, rather than an absolute mess.

33. Time's Covenant, by Deborah Harkness. Fourth in the Discovery of Witches series, this one mainly focuses on Marcus and his background. Too much US and French revolutionary history for me, and not enough Diana and family (although I'm not really bothered about Matthew, who is one dimensional and generally just there to be moody and jut out his jaw as far as I can tell).

34. I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, by Glyniss MacNicol. I absolutely loved this. As per the blurb: "After New York City emptied out in March 2020, Glynnis MacNicol, aged 46, unmarried with no children, spent 16 months alone in her tiny Manhattan apartment. The isolation was punishing. A year without touch. Women are warned of invisibility as they age, but this was an extreme loneliness no one can prepare you for. When the opportunity to sublet a friend’s apartment in Paris arose, MacNicol jumped on it. Leaving felt like less of a risk than a necessity. What follows is a decadent, unexpected journey into one woman’s pursuit of radical enjoyment." What follows is a joyful account of friends, dancing, sex, chilled rose, cycling round a very quiet Paris, hot chocolate, and the most glorious trip to an island off the French coast. She makes some fantastic points about women's place in the world and history, but also writes a brilliant account of having a rollicking good time. A strong bold.

67. The Prisoner - Marcel Proust

The great Proustathon continues with Vol. 5, and a shift in my feelings about this classic of which we hear so much praise. In the past I'd happily accepted the general idea of Albertine as the narrator’s great love, but in fact this point in the saga reveals troubling aspects, to my way of thinking. There have been feminist literary critiques of Proust but I'm really curious to know how we should judge him in the age of 'me too' and coercive control, given that the basic premise of this volume is that the narrator takes Albertine back to his Paris apartment and essentially keeps her shut up like a captive (hence the title). Well, not literally - he takes her on outings, showers her with lavish gifts, even contemplates buying her a yacht (!). But his mindset is that of an obsessive jailer, endlessly brooding on her transgressions, her possible lesbianism, his need to control her, even to the extent of having her watched by others.

I'm actually surprised by how strongly - ie negatively- I’ve found myself reacting to this volume, in the light of my own thinking about men who behave this way towards women. I’m doing a readalong with friends and it’s been extremely difficult to separate out the literary criticism aspect from the distaste I feel. It'll be interesting and maybe challenging to press on with the final two volumes to see if he can redeem himself.

@noodlezoodle the Glynnis MacNicol sounds really fun and uplifting – I’ll add to my list

256 A Violent Heart by David Fennell

Fourth in the series featuring detective Grace Archer, here investigating a series of murders of young sex workers taking place over decades. Good characters and fast paced.

257 Remember Me Tomorrow by Farah Heron

This was my Amazon First Reads freebie for this month. It wasn’t described as YA but felt very YA in tone. Aleeza falls out with her friend so moves to a new room at her university. The guy who previously had her room disappeared a few months ago. Aleeza discovers she can message him (the version of him before he went missing) via their room chat service and they use this to work out what happened to him. I liked the parallel universe/time travel aspect of this but I thought the reveal was a bit ridiculous and as mentioned above I don’t think I’m really the target market for this!

258 Reader, I Married Him by Various

A collection of short stories all using Jane Eyre/the titular line as a starting point. This is very similar in idea to the collection of Wuthering Heights short stories I read a couple of weeks ago, but while that collection had a couple of gems hidden amongst the dross, this was almost entirely dross. There was only one story (by Lionel Shriver) that I thought was OK, the rest were all very disappointing. Most didn’t actually have anything to do with Jane Eyre, they were just about marriage. Not recommended even for Brontë fans.

Terpsichore, I have a lot of unresolved guilt around Proust as I feel deeply fraudulent to have a degree in French literature and have never got beyond translating the occasional passage in an exam. It's a "one day" kind of project for me, so keen to see how your reading journey unfolds.

73 The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelssohn
I love Mendelssohn’s writing though I suspect the upper middle classness of her characters and their preoccupations won’t do it for everyone. This was an absolute zinger of a novel about family dynamics, thwarted ambition and monstrous male egos. Ray Hanrahan is a painter whose best days are behind him and who has turned being fucking awful to everyone, particularly his wife and children, into his USP. They are preparing for his comeback exhibition while treading carefully around each other. His wife is having an affair and trying to hide the evidence of her actual talent from her husband because it’s all about him. He’s a horrible malevolent spider of a man sitting in the centre of the web he’s woven for everyone around him and I was here for it from beginning to end.

72 Ministry of Time by Kaliane Brady
I think it was Eine who said this was silly. It was somewhat silly and that made me a touch cross because I was so excited to read it after all the hype and the premise (time travel means the UK government can rescue people from the past, set them up with liaison officers and let them find their way in the modern world while the darker machinations unfold around them) was so promising. And the writing and characterisation kept me hooked long after I lost interest in the plot. I could have usefully skipped the interminable “stuck on the ice in the 1840s” sections and had more of the “people from the past navigate the weirdness of near-future London” but it wasn’t the worst book I’ve read this year.

It was me @PepeLePew I wanted more from it and prefer St Mary's Chronicles even though they also are suffering from a case of "silly" at the moment

@PepeLePew I wish I was able to read Proust in French but alas it has to be English - the pretty good, most recent Penguin translations. I’ve been quite surprised overall though by how the experience so far hasn’t really measured up to what I was expecting! Maybe I’ll feel differently at the very end….

I'm also impressed @Terpsichore
Is there any one volume of the book that you would recommend or does the work need to be read in its entirety?
I've never tried reading Proust.

Don’t be impressed @FuzzyCaoraDhubh! it’s taking a very long time and I’m sure we’re missing many, many nuances! You could read it in a French, too, which I’d be mightily jealous of. I’ve got a parallel text and can muddle through with that but I couldn’t read it directly in French.

What has surprised me is that, after the ‘madeleine dipped in tea' moment that unlocks the narrator's flood of memories - effectively the hinge of the whole cycle, which is right at the start of the first book - it takes some very unexpected directions which you wouldn’t necessarily expect if all you knew about it was that madeleine. Such as Marcel's obsession with what he's convinced are Albertine's lesbian tendencies 😂

You do need to start at the beginning and be in it for the long haul, though. It builds up into a vast edifice from his childhood experiences. Although it’s strangely patchy because he wrote it over a long period and two of the 7 books didn't appear until after Proust's death.

I enjoyed the first book of In Search of Lost Time recently. There’s something in the rhythm of the writing as much as what he’s writing about. Planning to read book 2 soon- probably like book 1 over a couple of months.

For anyone who is into prize lists, much of this years and last years Women’s Prize longlist and a scattering of Booker and Pulitzer nominations/ winners are currently in the Audible 2 for 1 credit sale. Some good catches in many categories. I have three credits so think I’ll pick up a couple of books on there- a non-fiction Aftermath and a Stacey Halls book. I highly recommend Prophet Song and Fire Rush on audio from the sale selection. Both great on audio.

It sounds a bit mad, the whole length and breadth of it. Let us know how you get on with it eventually Terpsichore!
Maybe I'll have a look at volume one sometime as Úll has done just to get an impression of it :)* *

I feel relieved that my degree wasn’t in French literature so I don’t have to feel guilty for not reading in French (despite living in France I’ve managed one book in French this year and it was Gardening for Dummies, translated 😂) My degree was in a dead language (well, two of them, although I was extra rubbish at Ancient Greek), so I feel much less pressured to read in those languages 😄

40 The Masked City - Genevieve Cogman Sequel to The Invisible Library, and a good development of the characters and storyline. Plenty of fairies, dragons and magic (as expected), mostly set in a fantasy version of Venice. I like these more than the St Mary’s Chronicles as they don’t have the problematic relationship dynamics and wider unpleasantness (no Mary Queen of Scots or Sack of Troy), but there is a similar vibe in terms of objective outsiders visiting historical places and times. I’ll reserve the next in the series if BorrowBox has it.

Death at the Sign of the Rook - Kate Atkinson. The sixth in the Jackson Brodie detective series, this has two main stories - the first follows Jackson trackng down a stolen, potentially valuable, painting which was apparently taken by their carer of someone who's hired him. The second plot line (not as interesting) involves a murder mystery weekend at Burton Makepeace, once a magnificent country house but now a struggling enterprise desperately turning to novelty events in order to make ends meet. I've mixed feelings about this - it was mostly engaging, but two thirds of the way in the story begin to drag and the killer reveal felt underwhelming. I was also disappointed that Jackson wasn't featured much in this and there were too many characters.

64 Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence - Will Hodgkinson

Words fall to describe just how much I love, love, loved this book - a year in the life of the first-name-only Felt / Denim / Go-Kart Mozart / Mozart Estate frontman, the most brilliant but baffling singer-songwriter ever to have totally sabotaged himself out of any kind of career success, though he’s undeniably an increasingly recognised cult figure. This book doesn’t shy away from the more difficult aspects of his life and personality but is humane, fascinating and very very funny.

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck. Translated by Michael Hofmann

It's the late 1980s in East Berlin. A relationship between a 19 yo student and 52 yo married man slowly falls apart after she sleeps with a colleague. Hans was an arse and if I was Katharina's mother I'd have been a lot more outspoken about how she should leave him, particularly after her fling. I got really very annoyed at the chatacters and their bad decisions. Having said that the writing was gorgeous and the parallels with the collapse of the GDR were interesting.

94. Cruel Acts by Jane Casey

Maeve Kerrigan #8

Kerrigan proves her worth after being thrown off a case.

Why is she always in mortal peril though ?

Two DNFs to break my run of excellent books.
The Strandling by James Brogden. His work can range from good to patchy but this became unreadable. It’s about a Norse witch, a Barghest and a Yorkshire coastal village slowly sliding into the sea but it was garbled and badly paced. I skipped to the end at halfway through and that made little sense either. He references Covid quite a lot and his first Thank You at the end is to a Sensitivity Reader. Couldn’t find a physical copy of it to buy and the Kindle edition was suspiciously cheap, so it’s one step away from self-published indulgence imo.

Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan. Flatly written Misery Lit with too much dwelling on the personal hygiene of a 7 yr old girl and some horrific sexual abuse. If it’s real then I hope the author has found some peace in getting it onto paper but it wasn’t for me.

50 Traces by Patricia Wiltshire

This quite extraordinary memoir recounts Wiltshire's career as a forensic scientist with a difference - she is a palynologist (an expert in pollen) who quite by chance became an expert witneee when asked by the police to assist in matching a crime scene to an offender. The development and minutiae of her career (to which she came late in life; her earlier work is also very interesting) are fascinating enough but what makes this book really unusual is her searing honesty about her life; her childhood relationship with her mother, her only child's tragic death at the age of two, and her views on religion and death. Wiltshire is not a shrinking violet; she is confident and proud of her achievements, and that is an unusual voice for a British (in this case, Welsh) woman's memoir. The writing is uneven and in places repetitive, but I never doubted that it was her authentic voice. One of a kind - and if you like it, also well worth listening to her Desert Island Discs, which is the reason I bought this book in the first place.

Elena: A Hand Made Life by Miriam Gold
This is probably the most beautiful graphic novel I've read. It's a memoir of the author's grandmother, who was a refugee twice before she was 18 before becoming an NHS doctor. Every page is a collage, with photos, pencil drawings, and maps all used to enhance the story of Elena's life. Absolutely stunningly beautiful.

85 Restless Dolly Maunder – Kate Grenville. I was mooching in the library and remembered that on a recent Bookshelfies podcast, Julia Gillard recommended The Secret River by Kate Grenville. I had a look for that one, but the only Kate Grenville they had was Restless Dolly Maunder. Much reviewed on here as it was shortlisted for the Womens Prize for Fiction this year. I enjoyed it and will look out The Secret River and The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane which was also on Julia Gillard’s list. Anyone read either of them?

Popping in to catch up and add my latest reads:

63. The Enchanted April - Elizabeth von Arnim

Read following the numerous recommendations on here and loved it. I want to spend April in Tuscany in a beautiful house and reading in the garden.

64. Hickory Dickory Dock - Agatha Christie

I had read this month’s Christie challenge book relatively recently but this was one of the alternatives. Set in a student hostel or lodging house. Poirot is called in when things start going missing but the situation quickly escalates to murder. Quite different from the usual settings and characters. Some of the language and attitudes reflect the time. Not one of her best but by no means her worst (looking at you Tommy and Tuppence….). Didn’t guess the murderer.

65. Yellowface - Rebecca Kuang

Simplistically, June Hayward publishes her dead friend’s novel as her own and deals with the fallout. Whilst I didn’t find this a page turner there was more to it than I expected. The morals of the situation, the role of social media and June’s unraveling might stay with me for a while.

25 The Taxidermist's Daughter - Kate Mosse
Silly nonsense, quite enjoyable but not one I'll remember for long. The titular taxidermist is a previously-successful man who drinks to forget. His adult daughter (a taxidermist in her own right) is constrained by Edwardian societal mores, her alcoholic father, and her epilepsy caused by a childhood accident which rendered her first 12 years of life a mystery. As Connie's memory begins to return a storm is brewing, and 4 local gentlemen are brought to violent justice for a decade-old crime.

151 The Road- Cormac McCarthy
This was a reread- not sure how it made its way onto my spinning wheel but it’s many years since I read it. Still grim. Still heartbreaking.

152 Spoilt Creatures- Amy Twigg
This was disappointing. So much potential. Iris has just had a serious break up, has a crap job and is living with her mum. She ends up moving into a women’s commune with a charismatic leader. This isn’t going to end well…
Unfortunately, the journey was unconvincing and the writing just okay.

153 Falling Animals- Sheila Armstrong
This was the opposite- much better than I expected for a book I got as a gift a few months ago. It is a novel, but at times reads like a short story collection- but they all centre around a dead man found on a beach and a crashed ship. Eventually it all comes together. The writing is fabulous and each character in each chapter feels real and different and alive. I loved this. Another bold.

@Tarragon123 I love The Secret River and most people I know who have read it loved it too. It's very atmospheric and sympathetic to everyone as individuals while recognising the gross unfairness of how settlers treated Indigenous Australians.

I enjoyed The Secret River and the other two books in the trilogy - #2 is The Lieutenant. I have The Sun Goes Down and Restless Dolly Maunder TBR.