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?

Just finished Burnout (Sophie Kinsella), really not my usual read but pilfered it from a holiday home. Not the best..Also read I want to die but I want to eat Ttebokki, which I actually quite liked. Almost done with Portenoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, outrageously provocative.

Coming up:

Thirst for love

Butter

Piranesi

Grapes of Wrath

Good point @elkiedee , I'm sure getting Walliams was something of a coup for them.

A House in Sicily by Daphne Phelps This falls into the ‘privileged Englishwoman moves abroad and has problems with plumbing and staff’ genre which isn’t usually my thing, but I enjoyed this. The author inherited her uncle’s house (more a chateau, a beautiful home with a splendid view of Mount Etna) just after WWII and spent 50 years living there and keeping it going by renting out rooms. This was published in her old age and is ‘of its time’ but very readable. Interesting on her experience of Sicily and the characters she met, both Sicilian and some of her guests, including a lovely portrait of Henry Faulkner and a scathing one of Roald Dahl. The author’s life was interesting even before her Sicily days, as she studied at Oxford and worked in psychiatric social work, and I enjoyed escaping the winter gloom here to a different time and climate.

Phew!

105 The House at Sea’s End - Elly Griffiths

The third Ruth Galloway book. Ruth is juggling single motherhood and archaeology and feels like she is failing at both (she’s doing fine!) This time, it’s Germans. Long dead Germans who were buried in secret and who are now, obviously, just bones.

A good read and galloped along but I found the ending a little meh.

The Observations by Jane Harris

I got this in the bookswap at our Manchester meetup this summer, thanks to @highlandcoo IIRC. It's a Scottish Victorian pastiche with a fantastic narrator in Bessy who was funny and likeable. The initial premise is that Bessy, an Irish Scottish teenager, is escaping her past in Glasgow and is heading towards Edinburgh when she is offered a job at a country house due to the recent departure of the previous maid. What follows is great fun, gothic, episodic and with lots of twists and turns (including some painfully sad sections). Every time I thought I had an idea of where the plot was heading it veered off in another direction. I absolutely loved this, one of the most fun reads I've had all year. I have now added her other two novels to my Christmas wishlist.

I had an early browse of the deals and didn't buy anything but saw a few good books I've already read buried in the nonsense - Americanah, Plainsong, Our Wives Under The Sea.

81. Friends Like These by Meg Rosoff. Well written, slight, YA coming of age story about a young woman going to New York in the 80s and being swept up by a charismatic but troubled new friend. Very Bell Jar coded - hot summer, magazine internship etc.

82. Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans. Big cast of characters trying to save a crumbling stately home after the war, as class barriers are breaking down and the family realise they have to accept help from newcomers. All fine and entertaining but the central romance was completely unconvincing, I don't think the two characters even spoke to each other until they were suddenly in love! I don't think she's ever written anything close to Old Baggage really, which I thought was a masterpiece.

83. The Echoes by Evie Wylde. I loved this though god it had some upsetting scenes. It's partly narrated by the ghost of the main character Hannah's boyfriend, haunting the flat where they lived in London, but bear with it - the book traces back through Hannah's family in Australia to show the trauma passed down through generations. It's a lot like her previous novels (apart from the last one The Bass Rock) as a kind of Australian gothic, but this one makes it explicit that the family are essentially haunted and doomed through living on stolen land and the crimes their ancestors committed.

Finally I caught up.

I've bought Butter too.

Station Eleven and The Bloody Boring Butler are both in the deals, if anybody fancies a fight.

Yet again I'm not keeping up with the thread so I'll go back and catch up. In the meantime I'm posting the latest before it heads back to the library:

66. The Ghost Theatre - Mat Osman

Elizabethan London: on a rooftop, Shay, a messenger girl, hawk tamer and diviner of bird flight, meets Nonesuch, a boy actor, while she is running from a rich man whose birds she had liberated. Shay joins the Blackfriars Boys theatre group and together the pair start the Ghost Theatre, a pop-up company giving what today would be called site-specific pieces with a social realism theme. Their hallucinatory performances bring fame, spark rebellion and attract attention in some extremely high up quarters in Court.

There was a lot going on in this book, and it could have done with trimming some of the plot lines: we didn’t get enough about Shay’s home life with the bird worshippers or her role as a messenger for example. I was in two minds about how I felt: the set pieces were great and there was some very descriptive language, particularly of Birdland and the murmerations which Shay divined. However, I felt more comfortable seeing the setting as an alternative reality London. There were too many historical inaccuracies which detracted from the work: glass skylights, indeed extensive use of glass in buildings such as glass walls and toughened glass floors, and cardboard were not a thing in Elizabethan London; everyone seemed able to read; and how would an uneducated girl know about hummingbirds and other non-native species?

Also when a character is described as having a shaved head but her rescuer has his hands in her hair three paragraphs later you wonder if the editor was doing their job.

Therefore not quite a dud, but a real letdown nonetheless.

20.The Pumpkin Spice Cafe by Laurie Gilmore
A book I disliked that I finished. I was absolutely drawn in by the pretty cover. Did not pay attention to the pen name and of course it’s very much a Gilmore Girl’s for fan’s book. I am not a fan but thought I would give it a go. I didn’t warm to any of the characters and I honestly love a nice chick lit romance type book but this was boring. It took me an age to read just because I didn’t really want to pick it up. Note to self just give up on the books that don’t interest you. I have had ton’s of DNF’s this year mind you oh well. Happy December 50 bookers! 😁

@RomanMum I shared your disappointment. A book with a lot of promise that just wasn’t as good as it could have been.

Also not caught up on this thread so off to have a read. I think 20 is where I will end up finishing this year. I kind of tried to get to 50. Happy I added a few non fiction in this year and hope to do the same next year and have found I have an interest in Victorian history. Absolutely fascinating actually so if any recommendations anyone fire away

I'll roll up my sleeves to defend the honour of my beloved The Remains of the Day.

I loved Hangover Square, and The Slaves of Solitude as well. I don't mind the bleakness when it's so beautifully done. I've had Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky on my wishlist for ages hoping someone will buy it for me, but I think no one wants to give such a desolate sounding book for a present.

@janinaduszejko The Observations sounds just my sort of thing, I'll add this to my list.

I might have to give the butter another chance at some point. Maybe when I’m 80.

49. Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 by Anthony Beevor
I guess I didn't read this book for plot surprises, but I got a few (eg didn't realise that Marshall Zhukov was kept in internal exile following WWII until his death, apart from a brief period in Khruschev's government, as his overwhelming popularity was seen as a threat by Stalin and Breschnev). I always enjoy Beevor's narrative drive and use of sources, and bought it while on holiday in Berlin as you can still see some scars of war there, but have ended up churlishly withholding a bold from this one as somehow it doesn't spark to fire for me, perhaps because of his sadness at what he is describing. Beevor tackles the subject of rape by soldiers with care but his discussion doesn't quite hang together. Nonetheless, a strong description of the final weeks of WWII in this theatre of war.

#TeamButler

#StationEleven

#NeverLetMeGo

#Teamall3ofthemarecrap

😂@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie

#TeamStationEleven and #TeamButler here.
#TeamMeh for Never Let Me Go

Tbh this debate has never had the same vigour since Coted'Azur left MN. She could stir things up like nobody's business. A woman who knew her own mind 😂

Team mate

I miss Cote as well and often wonder what happened to Satsuki we had very similar tastes.

I’m on @cassandre ’s team- pro Butler pro station 11, don’t care about Never Let me Go