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?

285 Rivals by Jilly Cooper

No idea how many times I’ve read this but still love it every time!

286 The Puzzler by A J Jacobs

Non fiction looking at different types of puzzle. Each chapter has a bit of the history of that type of puzzle, and interviews with key people e.g. the person who invested it, or someone who has won prizes for completing it. The book also contains lots of puzzles for you to have a go at. I really liked this but then I do like doing puzzles. However I recommend reading in hard copy if possible as the puzzles were hard to see properly on kindle.

287 A Spring of Love by Celia Dale

Esther is in her thirties and comfortable financially when she meets and marries the perfect seeming Raymond. But is he really as nice as he seems? This is set in the Fifties/Sixties and is great on the period settting but it wasn’t quite as tense and menacing as I expected from the blurb.

288 Return to Wuthering Heights by Anna L’Estrange

WH is one of my favourite books so I was a bit nervous about this (especially as I have read some rubbish spin-offs/sequels of classics) but I actually enjoyed this one. Not a patch on the original obviously, but an interesting follow on. Other WH spin-offs tend to focus on Heathcliff’s missing years but this picks up where the original ended and follows the next generation of characters, which I think is easier than reading a different author re-writing well-known characters from the original. I’ve got another book with the same title but by a different author on my kindle to read soon so it will be interesting to see how it compares.

@ÚlldemoShúl I read Trespasses with my book club last year and we spent ages debating who should play Michael in the film. Interested to see who they've got.

For Claire Keegan fans, I just saw the premiere of Small Things Like These which was excellent and stayed very close to the book - lots of shots of Cillian Murphy looking pensive. I did wonder whether it was so understated that you wouldn't have understood all the nuances if you hadn't read the book.

Yes @TimeforaGandT and @Stowickthevast I hope they do a decent job. The names I’ve seen attached are Lola Petticrew as Cushla (no idea who she is) Tom Cullen (who seems far too handsome and young for Michael in the picture I’ve seen) and Gillian Anderson as Gina (I can see her doing a great job)

Oh, interesting about Small Things Like These, Stowick. I'm going to see it in a couple of weeks when it’s on at my local indie cinema. I wonder how unusual it is for two feature-length films to be made out of short stories/novellas by the same writer? (maybe not at all, the thought just crossed my mind).

I would love to see it as well. I might take myself off and see it by myself!
That's interesting Úll. I'd love to see 'Trespasses' too.

I think it's probably quite unusual @Terpsichore because the only other I can think of is Stephen King

Riders - Jilly Cooper
I’m firmly back in Rutshire now. I love JC but RCB is a complete shit with no redeeming features that I can see at all. I never got the love for him. I skipped the rape scene as I had no need to read it again but there are several other unpleasant bits that wouldn’t get written today I suspect.
However, there are other great characters and Jilly’s descriptions are as always sublime.
On to Polo next.

@BestIsWest

I'm slowly doing the Rivals TV series piece by piece as I hit the right bit of the book. Just seen Rupert's interview

He does get a bit of redemption in Rivals @EineReiseDurchDieZeit. I’ve got as far as episode 7 of the series. Enjoying it very much.

Anne of Avonlea
I think I’ve got the name right but didn’t check. It’s the second in the series. Nice enough but not a patch on the first. I found it irritatingly preachy in a What Katy Did manner in places. It was also much more disjointed than the first and I found the two little boy characters quite tedious.

Having said that, I’m going to jump straight into the third.

The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. Translated by Alexandra Keeble.

As a 22 year old medical student the future Che Guevara travelled with a friend from his home in the east of Argentina, across to Chile and up the western side of south America. These are his diaries, based on notes he made at the time but written up later. It's a bit of a caper with then regularly leaving their accomodation early because they can't afford to pay and regularly persuading unsuspecting travelling companions to buy them drinks and food. But they also visit mines and see the conditions the Indians have to work in and go to leprosy clinics and learn more about how to treat the disease. By the end you can see he is beginning to formulate his ideas of Pan-Americanism. An interesting read, although marred at the end by him coming out with some shockingly racist comments about the black people he met in Venezuela. 'We are all mestizo' he says at one point but that clearly didn't include everyone who lives in south america.

289 Flour Babies by Anne Fine

Children’s book about teenage boys who are given a ‘flour baby’ to look after for a week and one of them unexpectedly learns all about parenthood. Interesting idea but far too simplistic as the behaviour of the main character didn’t ring true.

290 Grave Talk by Nick Spalding

A man and woman help each other when they meet at their loved ones’ graves. They agree to meet there on the same date each year to see how they’re coping. This is a nice story and not as predictable as I expected it to be.

291 Only Fools and Stories by David Jason

This meant to be about all his well known characters but it’s really all about Del Boy with a few chapters on others (Frost, Granville). An interesting read if you like hearing backstage gossip.

292 Pike Island by Tony Wirt

One of my Amazon freebies this month and unfortunately not great. I was intrigued by the description which talked about a house on an island which was abandoned and looked like the residents had just left, so I thought it was going to be about that but it wasn’t. The house was just used as a setting for something else and I wasn’t particularly interested in that story.

293 Lights Out by Louise Swanson

Another disappointment that didn’t live up to the blurb. The Government has decided that all power is going to be turned off between 8pm and 7am (except places like hospitals). That could have been interesting but instead it focused on a really annoying main character who was scared of the dark and becomes convinced someone is breaking into her house. The reveal of what’s really going on is very silly.

92 The Girl in the Ice - Robert Bryndza

First in a series - rattled along well enough but I won’t rush to read the rest. Maverick cop DCI Erika Forster comes back from leave after the op that killed her husband and 4 others. She’s tasked to solve the murder of the socialite daughter of a Labour peer, manages to piss off top brass and politicians, generally goes rogue but after much murder and mayhem involving secret iPhone 5s (yes, this is another from my historical unreads) she saves the day.

58 Mongrel by Hanako Footman

I hadn't realised until I looked her up that Footman is also an actor, who I remember from the legal comedy Defending the Guilty. Multi-talented indeed! Her debut novel interweaves the story of three women - Meiko, a motherless teenager in love with her best friend Fran; Yuki, a talented musician who has come to London to study from Japan and Haruka, a hostess in a downtown bar. They are connected, but the connections are unearthed slowly throughout the story. This was beautifully written and heart-wrenching in places. I was drawn in by the stories of the three women, but for me, parts dragged a little. Not enough to ruin it, but it could have done with a bit more pruning.

@Welshwabbit

I have this on TBR. Another poster has read it also, I don't know why I haven't got round to it. Hanako Footman did the audio for Butter and was very good.

18.The Push by Ashley Audrain
This was very disturbing and very dark. Blythe has a daughter Violet who is an angel or is she? This is a twisty gripping read but as I say truly disturbing. It looks at the relationship Blythe had with her own mother Cecelia which was cold and unloving and then we look at Cecelia’s own relationship with her mother Etta which was abusive. Has this passed down through the generations? Yes recommend but as I say some very triggering issues in this book. I will seek out more from the author and want to read her other book Whispers. However a light read is in order next but it will stay with me this one not a bold but very much a four star.

I much preferred Mongrel to Butter, which I found very clunky in terms of writing with a bloated plot that didn't really know where it wanted to go.

95. Polo - Jilly Cooper. Wasn't quite ready to give up Jilly after my Rivals binge so moved to this. I found it much more annoying - Perdita is a total brat who needs serious discipline and I really didn't care what happened to her. I also found the descriptions of endless polo games pretty dull. Some amusing parts but on the whole, I was pleased to finish this.

I don't think I've read any of the other Rutshire books (other than Riders). Are they any better?

The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous is also very good (and very little about horses, if that’s not your thing). I also really like Appassionata and Score! which are both based around music. After that though, while I do still like them, the quality does drop off.

There's an interview with Lissa Evans in The Guardian today, and this bit very much reminded me of @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie and the other adventure lovers on the thread

"I read a lot of nonfiction and particularly relish gruelling tales of travel and exploration in which inadequately prepared travellers drop their only pair of gloves into a crevasse or unwisely decide to eat polar bear liver, etc. Along these lines, I’ve just finished novelist and sailor David Vann’s A Mile Down, the true account of what happened when the author paid a lot of money to have an ocean-going yacht built and it turned out to be a deeply dangerous dud. Riveting."

Thanks @noodlezoodle Speaking of which, did anybody see this news article a few days ago?

Yes, and it filled me with horror, as I’m claustrophobic!

93 Whatever You Love - Louise Doughty

by the author of Apple Tree Yard.

Nine year old Betty is killed in a car crash, and her friend Willow seriously injured. The book follows the bereaved mother Laura and her younger child Rees. Some chapters are set before the accident, as laura grows up, meets her husband David and later separates from him. Some after, as she copes with her grief and the investigation into the driver. Well written and Laura was a great character.

Yikes 😱 'Pity about the phone though' 🙄

She was bloody lucky. The stuff of nightmares.

I would be having nightmares for ever more after it. She was lucky they were able to get her out.