50 Books Challenge 2024 Part Seven

[Southeastdweller]

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

What are you reading?

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss I’m a big fan of Sarah Moss, especially the first 2 I read, Summerwater and The Fell, and the Iceland memoir. For me, this earlier short novel wasn’t up there with those, but was still excellent. It has resonances with The Bog People which I read recently - in the first 2 pages it brings home the horrors of those circumstances. The rest of the book is modern-day. Teenage Silvie is on an Iron Age reenactment camp with her obsessive and violent father and subjugated mother, along with a group of students. It’s brilliant on how Silvie and her mother tread on eggshells around her father, and how their whole worlds are under his influence, as she starts to get a glimpse of lives lived outside it.

86 Day One - Abigail Dean

Got it in the deals. It was good, but not a patch on Girl A. There has been a shooting at a primary school and the narrative largely follows a couple of characters - the teenage daughter of the teacher who is killed and a boy of a similar age who used to live in the village and gets caught up with “truthers” who claim the incident didn’t happen. It jumps around in time as well as between viewpoints and I found it hard to follow.

Rupert is a shit in Riders and I seem to remember that Jake isn't much better. I didn't know he was based on Andrew P-B - very odd idea of a hunk! Helen was also quite annoying but I did like Billy & Janey. Rivals had Declan which made it for me.

Thanks for all the deals recommendations. I ended up with far too many - The Fell, Once Upon a River, the Chris Brookmyre, an Anthony Horowitz, the Claire Lombardo and the Chris Whittaker. I also noticed The Bandit Queens was on there which is well worth it if you haven't read it.

Latest reads:
87. A Flat Place - Noreen Masud. Shortlisted for the woman's prize for non-fiction, this is part memoir and part nature writing exploring flat places around the UK which helps the author deal with her complex PTSD. I thought the nature writing was fascinating, particularly descriptions of Morecambe Bay which I didn't know anything about. The memoir parts about her father and traumatic upbringing in Pakistan didn't work as well for me as I think she was writing too opaquely about the events. I would have liked more characterisation especially of her sisters.

88. The Coast Road - Alan Murrin. Novel set in the mid 90s in Donegal in Ireland just before the referendum on whether divorce should be legalized. It's a brilliant portrayal of three different marriages written from the viewpoints of all those involved. It centres around a 44 year old woman Colette, who left her husband and 3 children to have an affair, and has now moved back to the town to try and make contact with her sons. The impact of Colette affects the other couples in the book. I thought this excellent and it's frightening to think that divorce was still illegal in Ireland so recently.

I totally fell off the thread again!

I have read about two books over the summer, I don't know what happened to me! There's been no time although I haven't been especially busy and life isn't stressful. Apart from I have a lot of reading to do in the next few months to hit 50. I know it's not about the number but I have managed it for the last couple of years so it would be a shame to miss it this time.

Storygraph says I am 5 books behind...

33. The Ship Beneath The Ice by Mensun Bound

Recommended on here I think and really interesting modern day search for the wreck of the Endurance in incredibly inhospitable conditions.

Confusingly I thought I knew a bit about Endurance having been to a museum in Norway earlier this year but that boat was The Fram and a different story. Anyway, once I'd sorted the history out in my head, it was a great read!

71. The Book-Makers - Adam Smyth

Another great book about books. Adam Smyth focuses on 18 people who had a significant impact in some way or other on the development of books as physical objects, from the 16thc printer Wynken de Worde, working 'in fleete strete at the sygne of the sone', through to the stapled and photocopied zines of the 1970s and 80s. Lots of fascinating facts along the way (eg it took 30 sheep to make one copy of Gutenberg's parchment Bible) and plenty of bookish stories I’d never come across, like the concept of 'extra-illustration' - the practice of disassembling a book so as to add in multiple illustrations, thereby swelling one volume to potentially many, many more; especially popular in the 18th c - and lots about typography, paper-making, circulating libraries, the whirlwind genius that was Benjamin Franklin, and more. I kept dipping into this with pleasure and I’ve now signed up to Adam Smyth's blog updates too.

Another book available in this month's Kindle deals - at 99p - is Heather Clark's The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, a huge biography of the writer, over 1100 pages. As a teenage Plath obsessive, I bought it a few yeas ago with some birthday money, but was a bit intimidated by its size, and often I prioritise library books over those books I couldn't wait to buy (!). I'm sure this book isn't for everyone, but the Kindle edition is well formatted, with page numbers and linked endnotes (for anyone who is a bit strange about these things like me). I've read several other Plath biographies and own a few more that I've not got round to, but I liked Heather Clark's approach to her subject and writing style.

77 Her Last Words by Brianna Labuskes

A 17 year old girl asks to speak to an FBI Agent and confesses to the murder of a 12 year boy. The FBI Agent is unable to take the confession at face value and travels to the girl’s hometown to investigate further. While there she joins forces with a taciturn Sheriff to investigate the cult that both the murderer and victim belonged to. I’ve read a few books by this author now and have really enjoyed them, she keeps me guessing throughout and her books are free on Kindle Unlimited.

43. Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
I think this is a bold, if only because there are lots of strong ideas, enjoyable writing, and I think the central theme is very strong. Klein sets up a contrast between 'Mirror World' - various privileged groups staring only at their own image of idealised perfection and loudly desperate to keep out, other or punish any deviation - and the 'Shadow Lands' - essentially any economy or social group that is suffering, excluded or permanently disadvantaged to the point of violent or neglected death due to their status as unseen or service functions for the privileged. Think of those terrifying images of the children working in open mines in the Congo, children like mine or yours. Or the children in the 'Indian residential schools' in 1890s-1960s Canada, which she powerfully describes being deliberately torn from their culture as a genocidal act, with a death rate of somewhere around 60%. She tackles plenty of tough issues, but you can feel the ones she cares about most, particularly Palestine, and climate injustice. I dont always accept some of her conclusions, why would i - she is good on accepting disagreement anyway.

I got the feeling that writing about Naomi Wolf and the confusion between them wasn't exactly her choice, but anyway she uses it as a way into discussing more interesting things.

I thought Doppelganger was excellent, Permanent. Though I agree the Naomi Wolf hook wasn't quite as embedded into the book as it could have been but it did open up a lot of interesting lines of discussion. I think from memory my review said it felt like three books in one, all of them good and thought provoking.

I am (finally) caught up on reviews but will inevitably fall behind again soon. Problem is that if I don't write them when I finish reading them, I find I can't remember much about them. Maybe that should be a clear indicator of which books are worth reviewing.

85 No Place to Call Home by Katharine Quarmby
Journalistic account of the siege of Dale Farm in the 2000s, where a group of primarily Irish Travellers but also some Roma families were evicted from their homes and displaced. The book goes broader than that to look at the challenges these families face around access, prejudice and hostility. I’d have liked more history and broader context, and also to know more about the individual families in the book and their stories but it was well worth reading nonetheless.

84 Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee by Meera Syal
I think I picked this up at the 50 Bookers Meet up in London a few months ago, and thank you to whoever (elkiedee, perhaps) brought it along. This was not at all the fluffy rom com I assumed it would be (or that the cover implied, in my defence!), but something much more substantial and engaging.

83 Leave The World Behind by Rumaan Alam
If you turned up to a holiday home – beautiful, well appointed, a haven from city life – what would you do when a couple turned up on your doorstep claiming to be the owners and with stories of very bad things happening in the world outside? What would you do when the internet goes down and you start to witness disturbing things happen around you? How do you carry on with your holiday even as the world seems to be ending.This was disturbing and detailed in a way that laid bare the nonsense of middle-class aspiration. You can buy all the fancy cheese you want (and the family here do just that) but it won’t help buffer you when the fragile foundations on which civilisation is built start to crumble.

82 Girl A by Abigail Dean
Lex was one of six children subject to brutal abuse by their parents. After her escape, and their rescue and placement with different foster parents, she has created a better life for herself, while her siblings all deal with the trauma in their own way. I am late to this and picked it up after reading One Day earlier this year. The time jumps and fragmented narrative were similar, as was the unreliable narrator who is clearly a victim but more complex than that. This had moments of real tension and tenderness, though I was wildly unconvinced by the oldest sibling Ethan’s story arc.

81 Material World by Ed Conway
How a handful of basic materials (oil, copper, salt, lithium and so on) are essential to modern life and how the way in which they are extracted impacts people and the planet. As good as the reviews suggest – interesting, full of useful information and sheds a light on the complexities of the global systems that are integral to how we live now and how we may live sustainably in the future. Really interesting, and I will be recommending it to colleagues, friends and others.

80 Ghosts by Dolly Alderton
I am not the target demographic for Dolly Alderton, being about 20 years older than her protagonists but this was charming and very well done. Nina is a food writer looking for a relationship (I was reminded of Taylor Swift’s very funny “my friends all smell of weed or little babies”) and finds Max who seems to be everything a woman in her thirties would want. This was very moving in places with sharp and funny writing.

79 Ex Wife by Ursula Parrott
This was mentioned on Backlisted a few episodes ago and I was intrigued enough to seek it out. It was very very good and if I hadn’t known it was written in 1929 and if it wasn’t for the occasional reference to Prohibition it would be hard to know it was nearly 100 years old. Which is extraordinary for a book with such contemporary themes, sensibilities and characters. It’s about a failed marriage, but also about female friendships, getting your life back together after disappointment, navigating the world of work and New York, which is very much a main character. It’s the scrappier, less polished, sexier, funnier and much much more modern twin of The Great Gatsby, I reckon. Completely brilliant and definitely a bold for me.

78 Necessary Endings by Henry Cloud
Why we need – sometimes – to let go of things that no longer serve us, whether that is a commitment we have made, a relationship or a professional role. This hit a chord on several levels and although it isn’t great literature, it has made me reflect and commit to some fairly significant life decisions that were long overdue.

77 Butter by Asako Yuzuki
This is about cooking, food and misogyny. Journalist Rika is writing a story about a convicted murderer, jailed for poisoning her lovers. Worth it alone for the wonderful sentence “There are two things I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine” and for the outstanding accounts of meals enjoyed and recreated. The plot didn’t quite hang together for me, and I’m not sure it really warranted the hype and massive marketing budget it seems to have enjoyed, but as a commentary on beauty standards and our relationships with food it was pretty good.

Oh that's good @PepeLePew I have Material World as a physical copy and it's a chunk so I've been eyeing it rather warily glad to hear it's good

It's really good. And accessible - it's a good mix of human interest and facts. And each material has its own section so it's easy to approach as a series of long reads, rather than a single book (though I think he does an excellent job of drawing links between them). I really can't stop thinking about it!

I have Material World and agree with the above.

I think I said more or less the same about Doppelganger!

I have just finished CJ Tudor's The Gathering. Please note: there is No Gathering. This is set in Alaska which means I can stop finding Tudor's Americanisms exasperating. But I didn't know it was a Vampyr (sic) book and wouldn't have bought it if I had. Meh.

124. Bothy Kat Hill
I wanted to like this non-fiction account of why the author seeks refuge from life's difficulties in bothies. I did enjoy some sections, especially where she was giving a straightforward account of what it's like to spend a night in one. However, she's a former academic and hasn't yet managed to shake academic writing habits, such as including lots of quotations from other writers just to show that she's done her reading, not because the quotations have earned their place in the narrative.

125. The Last Princess, Matthew Dennison
The life of Princess Beatrice, who probably had the most Victorian life ever, swept up as a four-year-old in her mother's endless mourning for Albert, and never really released from her mother's iron clasp. I find it rather amazing that someone who was born in the age of the crinoline was still living well into WWII - it makes time collapse.

Speaking of collapsing time, I'm currently reading The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley. It has received a lukewarm response on this thread from what I remember, but I'm enjoying it so far. A civil servant is responsible for looking after someone who was removed from his time in 1845 as part of a hush-hush government scheme experimenting with time travel. I'm really enjoying the time travellers themselves.

@bettbburg good to know Betty thank you

First week of the month, so very busy. I’ll get round to catching up on the thread later, but till then…

<strong>58.	Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries</strong> - Kate Mosse

A bit of an odd one this; it feels very much like two books sandwiched together, and occasionally quite clunkily. The author started by researching her great grandmother, Lily Watson, an author writing in the late Victorian/Edwardian era, and every other chapter goes into her life from cradle to grave. In between are chapters devoted to celebrating many women achievers in different fields, most of whom were unknown to me, so in that respect it was informative and sent me off Googling a few names. In places these chapters got quite listy though, and the links between sections felt forced in places. I think in retrospect I’d have preferred to read two separate books on these two subjects, though the family history stuff maybe didn’t warrant a volume to itself. Not a bad book, but not quite a bold either.

I also enjoyed Doppelganger. And Material World sounds like it might be just what I need for my next audio book (No Place to Call Home too)

Those who have enjoyed Material World: would it be suitable reading for a teenager? DD is looking into the environmental science/geography type areas for A Level.

65 Back To Blackbrick by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

I read a fair number of books for children as part of my work, but don’t usually include them in these lists. This one enthralled me so much that I thought it deserved a place.
Cosmo is a young teen who lives with his Grandparents as his Mum is working away. He had a brother, Brian, who died in an accident when he was 10, but no one really talks about that. When Grandad begins to show increasing signs of Alzheimer’s Cosmo turns to the internet to find the cure he is sure must exist, but the adults in his family go down the medical route of capacity tests etc. His horse is stabled elsewhere and there are mutterings that he might have to move out of his Grandparents’ house.Desperate to save his beloved Grandad from hospital, Cosmo talks to him more and more about stories from his childhood. He uses an old, bent key and takes a taxi to Blackbrick, where Grandad was a stable boy. Opening the South Gates he then steps back to the 1940s and meets a young, idealistic Grandad…..
It’s a basic Time Travel plot but what lifts it above the usual early teen genre is the deep and often heartbreaking search Cosmo undertakes for a way to stop Grandad’s memory slipping away. And if he can travel back in time then surely he can somehow alter the path taken by Brian to his fatal accident?
Plot twists are obvious if you’ve ever read a time travel book and one character’s epiphany was a little rapid, I felt, but those are my only quibbles.
I loved Cosmo’s take on the world and there are moments of delightful comedy where he contrasts modern times and the world of Blackbrick. There are also moments that are so poignant I had to put it down at work so I didn’t cry and make a show of myself.
It’s suitable for a mature 12 yr old, I’d say. Would have been younger but there’s a story strand around possible sexual abuse of a young servant girl that might be difficult for 10-11 yr olds to process, understand or put into context. It’s sensitively done, but the description of Lord Corporamore’s behaviour towards Maggie and its inevitable consequences is more for teens than tweens. That might sound hypocritical from someone who read The Rats and Forever Amber at 12 but in the day job I have to err on the side of caution!

@elkiedee I nearly bought the Plath, but I’ve not been great with dense non-fiction lately and have a huge, ignored pile of physical books on my bedside table so decided against it. I went to visit her grave in the summer and enjoyed revisiting her poetry as a result.

I'm afraid I've let my reviews pile up and I have told myself I won't start a new book until I bring myself up to date, so here goes! Some reviews or at least a few thoughts on books I have read recently.

56. A House in the Country: Jocelyn Playfair.

Read for The Rather Dated Bookclub in August as the book for September. Golden-haired Cressida owns a large manor house in a small village deep in the countryside. Britain and its allies are are at a critical juncture in world war two following the fall of Tobruk in 1942 and everyone needs to chip in and do their bit. Cressida lets out rooms to people at a low rate and strides around the estate in trousers (this is mentioned as often as the colour of her hair and her beauty). The lodgers are an indistinguishable set of minor characters because Playfair places the focus a lot of the time on the deep and earnest conversations between Cressida and one of the lodgers, Tori, the enigmatic man from Eastern Europe.

While there was an awful lot of pontificating and sermonising which nearly marred the book for me, Playfair wrote in an engaging and witty style. I particularly enjoyed the visit of her aunt to the house and the various mishaps that cramped her style. I thought that the fact that the book was written during the war years gave a unique and valuable insight into that time. I enjoyed reading it.

57. Blank Pages: Bernard McLaverty

This is a series of twelve short stories featuring the themes of love, relationships within families, aging, grief, loneliness, Catholicism and The Troubles. I liked the simple, pared-back prose. Most of the stories are set in Ireland with the exception of one that describes the death of Edie, the wife of Egon Schiele the artist, in Vienna 1918 when Spanish flu was running rife. This was harrowing and the hardest one to read.

58. Misty Harbour: Georges Simenon

A man is found wandering around Paris, unable to speak, with no memory or knowledge of who he is. However, he has new clothes and a wad of notes in his pocket. Chief Inspector Maigret must find out who he is. His search leads him to a small town on the Breton coast. It turns out this man is the former harbour master and someone has tried to get him out of the way.

Maigret starts to make enquiries, but finds himself up against the incommunicative townspeople who have decided en masse to keep Maigret in the dark. Maigret stands many rounds at the café to ingratiate himself with them which works to a certain degree. However, when he gets too close to solving the crime, he has a mishap and finds himself tied up, trussed up like a chicken on the quayside. The indignity of it all! In spite of being left to moulder there all night, Maigret starts to think and slowly the mist lifts from his mind and he solves the mystery!

I like the Maigret books for the psychology behind the crime and the view of French life in the time the books were written.

59. Amongst Women: John McGahern

Moran is a farmer with a small holding in North Leitrim, the border region in Ireland. He was a guerilla leader for the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence. He has five children, three of them are girls who keep house for him while he works on the farm. His wife died some time ago and he has come round to thinking it would be a good idea to marry again.

He marries Rose who has plenty of spirit to stand up to his crankiness, but she realises early on that Moran rules the roost and that she will fit in with the children. She makes the best of the situation, but falls into line calling him 'Daddy' along with the others. When he is in good form there is no-one like Daddy but when he is in bad form they all tiptoe around him. He is a tyrant, but they love him as well as fear him.

While the girls accept their father for who he is, the boys rebel and run away. He denied one girl the chance to take up a scholarship for university and she didn't forgive him. The story opens and ends with the girls organising a meet-up with an old friend to try and lift their father's spirits. The book paints a vivid picture of Ireland in the 1950s; the family dropping on their knees after dinner to say the rosary, the children running away to London, frequent return trips to the farm and homesickness. I liked the changes of perspective in the story from Moran to Rose and Michael the youngest son. It is written in an easy, understated style but with great depth. I liked it very much and found it absorbing. This might be a bold!

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh

Another one on my TBR. Must get to it soon!

You may find yourself muttering 'cranky old bastard' (or worse) at the book when you read it @EineReiseDurchDieZeit !

I had flashbacks to being a kid hearing my father saying 'woman' to my mother as Moran does to Rose as in 'I told you I was coming, woman'. It gave me a jolt. He was no way like Moran, my Dad, but could be cranky at times. (I won't say he was a cranky bastard!)

68 A Night In The Lonesome October - Roger Zelazny

Can’t recall if it was here that I heard about this book, but it’s a perfect shaggy dog story for this time of year - a fantasy set across the month of October featuring various gothic characters (like Frankenstein’s monster, Count Dracula, a werewolf and Sherlock Holmes) and their animal familiars compete against each other in a magical Game that culminates on Halloween and on which the fate of the world may depend. Yes it’s whimsical but also a lot of spooky fun.