50 Books Challenge Part Eight

[Southeastdweller]

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

What are you reading?

‘Academic manspreading’
Although it would pain me, I would go for dribbling a little milk on the books every time I used the kitchen area. And possibly globs of jam.

That would learn him!

I don't know who Nigel is either cassandre. I suspect I wouldn't* *have any patience for his faffing around and his expensive tastes.

Honestly, the milk and jam idea is such a temptation.

Every time I go into the kitchen, I feel cross.

I swear that if it were the other way round and I had decided to annex the kitchen and Prof X were the one complaining, the head of housekeeping would sort the issue out instantly. Grr.

Seriously I think he has hoarding tendencies.

Prawns down the spines!
I’m too invested in this, aren’t I?
Trouble is, all the smelly revenges will just backfire on you and your colleague, I suppose. Is there a Men’s Toilet you could move them into?

@JaninaDuszejko couldn't agree more. Hated Zorba the Greek - I do love Crete though.

Blimey, this thread is entertaining today. I was once on a MN thread about Jay Rayner where people were confessing all sorts of things they wanted to do to him.

Commiserations to everyone having run-ins with pickpockets/perverts/general wankers 💐
I love a library visit, sometimes I'll buy a coffee and sit in my local one with a book (saves me wasting time on housework if I'm at home!)

😂

Oh @cassandre that is shitty behaviour.

I also don’t go in for Nigel, though I know who he is. Jay on the other hand, I have been on more than one thread where he has been, shall we say, admired. I have a friend who knows him quite well and he does seem thoroughly decent, as @PepeLePew says.

I appreciate all the support 😂

Sadly the toilet is unisex and shared and the less said about the state he leaves it in, the better. There is also a shared bath (don't ask me why we need a bathtub, but we have one, lucky us!) and he's the only one who ever uses it. He goes for a run, has a bath and then drapes his wet towel and gym kit over the kitchen radiators to dry 🙄Honestly our whole workplace is like an extension of his personal home.

I tell myself that life is short and I should just be a more chilled, less uptight person.

Based on the mention of jam, though, Alman, I've become inspired to buy a toaster for the kitchen. How nice would it be to have toast in the middle of the afternoon! There should be just enough room to squeeze a toaster in between the books and boxes.

I'm aware of how ridiculous it must seem to have two grownups skulking around playing out a silent drama of Kitchengate. Rather than actually, you know, speaking to each other about it. This is probably why I love Barbara Pym novels (@AgualusasLover I appreciated your recent mention of Pym!). I can identify with people getting absurdly preoccupied with trivial aspects of human relations.

saves me wasting time on housework if I'm at home!

That's a beautifully phrased sentiment @InTheCludgie 😂

One more post: reviews of three recent bolds that I read in a row and that had uncanny resonances with one another. All three are about feminism, landscape and food. None of them were light reads though and after finishing them I felt like I needed a serious break from highbrow literature!

72. The Empusium, Olga Tokarczuk, trans Antonia Lloyd-Jones 5/5
    A wonderfully strange, original story. The language (as rendered by Lloyd-Jones) is gorgeous. Apparently this novel is a retelling of the German classic, Mann’s Magic Mountain, but I haven’t read Mann and enjoyed the tale regardless. A young Polish man with TB goes to a famous mountain health resort, and strange happenings ensue. The title ‘empusium’ comes from the figures of empusae from Greek legend: female monsters who devour men. It’s a hard book to summarise but I particularly enjoyed: the mysterious first-person plural narrator, the way some of the characters become satirical mouthpieces for misogynist tropes (Tokarczuk includes a long list at the end of the book, naming the various illustrious male authors across history she’s borrowed antifeminist discourse from!), and the end of the story, which playfully undermines the whole notion of a gender binary. Thanks to @inaptonym for recommending this!

73. The Vegetarian, Han Kang, trans. Deborah Smith 5/5
    Short and gripping, this novel is made up three novella-like sections. So we get three different perspectives: the self-satisfied, unreflective husband whose wife suddenly stops conforming to society’s rules; the artist brother-in-law who is madly in love (or obsessed) with said wife (the heroine); and finally the heroine’s sister, who desperately wants to save her, and who responds to her with a mixture of alienation and understanding. The story reads like an allegory or fable, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, but I would read it again. On one level it’s about a daughter and wife who has always done everything she was meant to do, and who one day has just had enough. But instead of experiencing some kind of powerful feminist self-realisation, she slowly loses her very desire to be human.

74. My Good Bright Wolf, Sarah Moss 5/5
    @StrangewaysHereWeCome your review of this was lovely and I agree entirely. It’s an amazing memoir, but was a more harrowing read than I expected somehow (even though one wouldn’t expect a memoir about anorexia to be an easy read). Moss writes beautifully and I loved the way she makes sense of her own story by interspersing it with razor-sharp observations about the books she read as she grew up. If I have any criticism it’s that she’s very hard on herself, constantly questioning her own memories and reminding herself of her own privilege. Her parents were outrageously neglectful so I don’t think she needs to apologise so much, but that’s part of her whole point I guess: that she (and women in general) are constantly encouraged to be self-abnegating, to occupy less space, to push down and repress any feelings and desires that could be labelled as selfish. This book will stay with me a long time, in particular the ‘good bright wolf’ image of the title, which is inspired by the poem ‘Question’ by May Swenson, and which becomes a way for the narrator to console herself and nourish herself (soul and body). I feel like all women could do with a good bright wolf to conjure up when they’re feeling vulnerable; I know I could.

74 She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark
I grew fond of the Content Warnings in the end, because they are so bland compared to the actual content of these stories
A matriarchal society where the men are targeted by a sea spirit to add to their woes, pure gross-out acne and weight loss remedies, an Apex Predator cannibal on Earth who waits out a nuclear holocaust to become King (contains the hilariously banal line “For now, I work in Tech”)…….just four of the eleven deliciously dark stories in this collection. Other gems are an unsettling tale of a weird restaurant told entirely in online reviews and an example of how men tackle the problem of sexual abuse towards women without listening to what the woman would like.
It’s not often an author is skilled enough not to let the gore overpower the story but Clark is and most of them will stick in my mind for quite a while. A definite bold.

Surely there's an obvious solution @cassandre. Move a load of his books into the bath and store them there!

Good idea @Tarahumara 😂Generous woman that I am, I'm happy to hand over the whole of the bathtub to him!

56 A Very British Murder - Lucy Worsley Until I read this book, my only experience of Lucy Worsley was a clip of her introducing herself in an incredibly annoying voice on a podcast trailer, and I found the start of the book a bit difficult to get into, possibly because I had that as an earworm every time I started reading! Overall though, I liked this as a high-level overview of British crime literature and other art - I think it’s a good starting point for exploring the topic in more depth. And it reminded me how many books I haven’t read - I feel like I need to read more Golden Age of Crime books especially!

124.The Outcast Dead by Elly Griffiths

Ruth Galloway #6

I enjoy these but the thing is with Ruth being an academic and an archaeologist they keep having to shoehorn her in to the police procedural side. It doesn't always work and didn't on this outing.
Cathbad came back, I thought I'd seen the last of him.

241. Summerday. Christopher St John
     The first in a series set in the Million Acre Wood. Set in the future, when humans are extinct and animals rule. This book is really clever. The animals worship Dah, and have their own holy book which is clearly the Bible rewritten. Rabbits were put on earth to be glorified (aka eaten). Until one day they start to question if that's really their purpose and a war begins. Honestly, it sounds like total nonsense, but was a bold for me.

242. The Enlightenment Club. Chris West
     Starting in the mid 1970s,Stella is at college and joins a club where they talk about philosophy and art and other big things like that. The prof who runs the clubs gets sacked, Stella gets kicked out of college (i can't remember why) and ends up as a roadie for a band. The years roll by, she gets married. Isn't happy. Considers suicide. It was actually a really beautiful story of self discovery and learning to accept the failures in life. I found it really cathartic.

243. Ghost Talker. Byrd Nash
     Psychic medium solves crimes. It was alright but fell a little flat for me.

244. Death in the Sunshine. Steph Broadribb
     A bunch of retirees living in Florida solve the murder of a young woman who is found in their communal pool. Half of them seem to be retired police, but don't want the others to know. I think I've read too much crime fiction this year as im struggling to remember which was which.

245. Mother. Hristina Bloomfield.
     I think this might have been translated as the language was a little odd in places. Either that or the author speaks English as a SOL. Thea is an unmarried mother, whose baby is stolen just after birth by her family and the baby's father. She uncovers a whole child trafficking ring.

246. Watch Over My Child. Roberta Kagan
     Book 3 of Michel's Destiny. This book follows the younger daughter, Gilde on the Kindertransport and her life in England. I think the book really captures how it must have felt to be in a new country and have no idea what has happened to your family. Sadly, like book 2 there were some really annoying factual errors.

247. Witch Wife. Lumen Reese
     Another bold for me.
     This is set in an alternate universe/future that's recreating the past. So technology etc doesn't exist, it's basically the war for American independence and people believe in Witches. Irene Shannon is taken from the battlefield and accused of witchcraft. The British royals try to make her marry into the family, but she refuses and then a battle of wills commences. There's also some huge fantasy creature things to contend with.

248. The Paris Inheritance. Natalie Meg Evans
     A dual timeline story. In 1940s Paris, Lally has a silver brooch from her German lover Otto. She's not a Nazi, neither is he. But France in the 1940s was a dangerous place to be.
     In 2014 Hope, armed with the brooch her Father left her, searches for the truth about where the brooch really came from. Fairly standard, a bit of romance. Some Nazis. Some mystery.

249. The Asymmetric Man. Alex Rushton
     Yet another bold. I loved this so much. Blake is an ex army recruit turned undercover agent. He goes to Saigon, escapes through the jungle, hides out as a monk, becomes a businessman, falls in love. It has a bit of everything.

250. Eden's Comfort Kitchen. Tilly Tennant
     Exactly what you'd expect from this kind of book. Eden moves to the seaside, opens a cafe, blah blah.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie – grrr, I am very cross on your behalf. I bet the man isnt bothered about going back to Oxfam. How about Jenny Colgan or Freya Kennedy?

@inaptonym – Its been a long time since I read March Violets, possibly 20 years? I didn’t even remember that there was a rape scene.

106 – Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir (Audio) Much reviewed on here. I enjoyed it, but it was probably a bit too techie for me. A lot of the science went completely over my head. However, I really enjoyed the relationship between Grace and Rocky and I loved the ending.

The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous - Jilly Cooper. Fully immersed in the the Jillyverse now. This was plain daft but enjoyable. I’d forgotten the really disturbing relationships in it though which gave me the ick.
Luscious descriptions as always though and it’s the clothes, decor, food, gardens etc that keep me coming back for more. On to Appassionata.

Finished an audio and another shorty. Now up to 7/50 on Read What you Own.
187 Roots- Alex Haley
Ive been listening to this for weeks! I saw the series many moons ago. Enjoyed the first two generations but by the time we get to Chicken George I was willing it to be over. I think I’ve read a lot on slavery in the last three years so it’s a theme I might avoid in 2025, just so I don’t overdo it.

188 The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry
Very stylised short Western. Tom, a dope addict runs away with Polly, wife of a pit boss at the mine. For odd western it wasn’t as good as The Sisters Brothers but some great lines.

@ÚlldemoShúl

Have you read Lonesome Dove ? It's a chunkster but it's worth it. Haven't found anything that matches it for a Western!

I have @EineReiseDurchDieZeit I absolutely loved it too.

79. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst. Follows David, a mixed race and lower middle class boy as he gets a scholarship to public school, befriends the rich family who fund it, then becomes a famous actor over many years. The rich family's son becomes a politician campaigning for Brexit.

The writing is impeccable of course and it felt so pleasant and easy to read. I found the politics clunky but I loved the deep dive into British theatre from the 60s up to the present, from avant garde companies doing naked Shakespeare to becoming a national treasure in late life.

It's told in vignettes through David's life, almost like a set of short stories, some of which felt really strong as a stand-alone - I loved the chapter about a 50s holiday where David is about 13, staying in a hotel in Devon with his mother and her friend who he comes to realise is her lover.

An easy bold for me, I found his last novel dull but this is a return to something like The Line of Beauty or Stranger's Child.

80. Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo. Long family book, about a mother of two grown up children supporting them while reminiscing about an affair she had 20 years ago which almost ended her marriage. I'd say this was patchy and went on a bit, and I found the main character oddly abrasive to everyone else (despite a slightly over dramatic backstory about her difficult teenage years).

That said, I thought bits of it were very well captured, for me the flashbacks to being the parent of a pre-schooler and wondering why you still find it so hard when everyone else is already moving on to second babies.

81. The Proposal by Jasmine Guillory. Not sure why I read this! I like her as a person, she seems very political, a good advocate for other female writers and has interesting things to say about the romance genre. But this is the second of her books I've read and I just find them boring, low stakes and minimal chemistry between the lovers.

It’s so good.