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?

And Côte and my dp detested it. I remember Côte criticising it for being too French!

I listened to that one on audio a couple of years back but tbh it was probably a mistake, I think actually reading it would have done it more justice. I'm starting to think biographies are the way to go on audio, or 're-reads' as I miss important things at times!

I've never quite got over my DP reading Remains of the Day looking increasingly bemused as he progressed through it - turned out from reading the blurb he was expecting a political novel about aristocratic support for fascism and the Mosleyites in the 30s told from the perspective of the staff.
I'm still not sure quite what his parents were thinking when they gave it him for Christmas but there was a lot of grumbling afterwards about books where nothing happens.

Tbh I'd probably have preferred his version too

This just made me laugh out loud on the bus to work.

That's marvellous Sadik
I think I'd prefer his version too.

It brings to mind my experience of reading Moby Dick. I somehow had it mixed up with Jonah and the Whale and was increasing confused as the pages dwindled and I waited for a plot twist that never came.

I found the deals.

I picked up a couple from a Nordic noir series, The World in Six Songs, The kamagawa Food detectives and ammonites and leaping fish by Penelope lively.

This is the only social media I have now after quitting twitter. I don't really post on anything other threads and I refuse to give up my online book friends, especially as I'm not all that great at making friends. As we've said before this is one of the few lovely spots on the internet and having somewhere I can come to chat about books with likeminded people keeps me sane 😊

For my fellow St Mary's readers The Ballad of Smallhope and Pennyroyal, which I really enjoyed, is in the kindle daily deals.

58 Just Like the Other Girls - Claire Douglas I’m not sure what led me to request this (and another of Douglas’s books) months ago on BorrowBox - I think possibly I was looking for books by Louise Douglas and thought this other author with the same surname looked ok. This was a pretty average thriller about a young woman who starts a job as a live-in companion for a rich old lady in Bristol…and then realises something odd is going on as the previous companions looked just like her and died in suspicious circumstances. I had to make myself keep reading several times as the writing style was pretty dull (it was almost like it was written for 10-year-olds at times, except for the subject matter), and then it got more dramatic towards the end. Lots of very obvious red herrings and several fundamental personality changes for the sake of the plot. So, not great - but I’ve read worse! It was sufficiently ok that I’ll read the other Claire Douglas book that is now waiting for me on BorrowBox (sucker for punishment 😂).

I don’t do Twitter/X and rarely engage on other threads on here but this thread is one of my favourite places and has really expanded my reading choices and viewpoints. Don’t leave!

79. Enter Ghost - Isabella Hammad

I know a number of you have read this already. A really original storyline regarding a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. The main character is Sonia, an actress generally based in England, who has a Palestinian father and European mother. She is on a visit to her sister in Israel when she becomes involved in the play. I don’t know enough about the history and culture of this region or daily life in the West Bank to be able to comment on whether it was realistic but I found it very interesting.

80. Men without Women - Ernest Hemingway

Short stories - mostly pretty disappointing or even fairly rubbish with the odd one which was better.

81. Bella - Jilly Cooper

I thought I had read all of these in the 1980s but had no recollection of the plot of this one at all so perhaps it bypassed me. Bella is a successful actress with a hidden past. When she starts dating the wealthy Rupert Henriques his family (in particular his cousin, Lazlo) label her a gold digger and try to put an end to the relationship. I know that I don’t read these for great plotting but the storyline really stretched credibility.

Appassionata - Jilly Cooper Bonking in the back of the orchestra. Completely daft, lots of questionable stuff but lovely descriptive writing as always. I’m going to go on to Score as that picks up where Appassionata leaves off but not sure I’ll continue after that.

Slightly sad to have missed legendary bunfights of yore though I do appreciate this thread living up to its Nicest Place on the Internet billing 💚Even more fun now I'm getting a handle on some regulars' tastes.
Although @Sadik that did remind me of the legendary Amazon 1* review of P&P "Just a bunch of people going to each other's houses" 😁

Opinion dump:
Remains is in my all time top 10 and I've been chasing that high with Ishiguro ever since only to be constantly disappointed. An Artist of the Floating World also brilliant but predates it. Enjoyed NLMG but bumped it down after rereading.

Station 11 fine, wouldn't go to bat for it.

Patrick Hamilton fans - Craven House in 99p deals atm, an early precursor to SoS and apparently quite sweet(!)

@FortunaMajor Ava Reid is known for whiny delicate damsels in (Wattpad-gothic) distress YA - I wouldn't touch her take on Lady M with a bargepole.

Butter fun first 2/3, messy 1/3 and sappy sloppy ending (admittedly Christmassy, for people starting now). I thought it capably translated @Stowickthevast but maybe the original was too commercial compared to your usual fare (more Liane Moriarty or Celeste Ng than Kate Atkinson or Tana French). Also think the banging UK cover deserves credit for its sales - it's done much less well in the US with a blander one. Although I wonder if that backfires as it's so much glossier and wittier than the book lol When in Germany I saw their cover shares the wishy washy melty illustration of the original which is truer to the content (pics attached).

Loved The Observations and Gillespie & I, less keen on Sugar Money - actually always wondered if I might like it better on audio @InTheCludgie was it well performed? Does anyone know if Jane Harris still writing?

Catch up reviews later!

They were/are always good natured bunfights too. Generally conducted with humour. Unlike some other threads on here.
I do remember someone flouncing once years ago over an Agatha Christie book of all things but that was the only time I can remember an upset.
NLMG and S11 meh, didn’t mind the butler and loved the film of it.

I went in Waterstones. Unapologetic splurge on some books that will no doubt be heavily discounted after Christmas but I wanted them now, for Double Points. 14 lovely Double Points, £14 towards more books.

My family argues rather robustly about films, TV and books without ever taking offence, so I do have to dial it down a bit on here, because scorn can be a bit too biting when written down and I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Anyway, Cuddy is the hill I will die on and anyone who doesn’t like it is as wrong as a wrong thing that’s taken a wrong turning to Wrongsville

@inainaptonym noted and hold cancelled! Thanks for the warning.

@inaptonym I can't remember if you're a Japanese speaker. I wasn't sure whether it was the translation or the writing but I found it a weird contrast between very effusive food descriptions and very pedestrian prose. There's also that bit where you suddenly get one chapter of narrative from a different viewpoint about 2/3 of the way through which isn't repeated and just feels a bit odd in the context of the whole.

107. The Spoiled Heart - Sanjeev Sahota. This is about Nayan, a middle-aged, working class, Asian man in Chesterfield, who is running for election as the council's union leader. He's very experienced and starts off as a shoo-in but then a younger woman, Megha, the head of diversity and inclusion, decides to against him. Against this backdrop, there is also the death 20 years before of Nayan's mother (also a union campaigner) and son in a fire at his father's shop. He is also now looking after his father who has dementia. And there is a love story of sorts as Nayan becomes fascinated by Helen, a white woman, who has returned to the town with her son Brandon. The book is told by a third narrator who is an alter-ego of the author and is conducting a series of conversations with Nayan (although the book is written as a normal narrative), to discover what happened during the election, with Helen and at the time of the fire. Writing that all out has brought it home how multi-layered this book is, although it's not obvious when you're reading it until the end. There were a couple of bits that didn't work as well for me, mainly the speeches and lectures putting across Nayan and Megha's differing viewpoints about race and class, but the rest was very good with a satisfying ending that I didn't expect. I liked his previous books and think this stacks up well to them.

Good haul @AlmanbyRoadtrip . I liked Cuddy but the first section is a bit of a struggle so can see why people get put off.

I'm currently working my way - slowly - through The Unconsoled by Ishiguro.

I like it but I'm not quite sure why I like it. It jars at times.

I struggled with The Unconsoled, it was so dream like. Not in a good way, more a 'how did I end up here' Doctor Who style nightmare. And I say that as someone who is very much #TeamButler and #TeamUnexplainedSciFi.

Cuddy is the hill I will die on and anyone who doesn’t like it is as wrong as a wrong thing that’s taken a wrong turning to Wrongsville

👀

In my defence it didn't particularly work as an audiobook I had trouble following it.

I once had a confusing experience reading what I thought was Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller, expecting a country house saga that challenged social norms and class structures, but instead picked up Blood Orange and got a slightly chaotic thriller about what I seem to remember involved some kind of auto-asphyxiation and an affair. I kept waiting for the plot to switch to the country house and it never did. I was bewildered for weeks afterwards until the penny dropped.

101 Riders by Jilly Cooper
I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t been said already and I reckon by this point you’re either a Jilly fan or you’re not. What I was struck by on re-reading this is that while some of the views have aged badly (it’s very fatphobic, there’s a casual acceptance of domestic abuse and women in general have a very poor time of it even though they are allowed to have and enjoy as much sex as they like without consequences) these earlier books are much better written than the latter ones. I only counted three people looking boot-faced (and each on only one occasion) and only two people sang random snippets of verse at inappropriate moments. I still think Rivals is the best of the series, but this comes a close second.

100 None Of This Is True by Lisa Jewell
With thanks to @EineReiseDurchDieZeit as this was everything I was promised (and did indeed work well as an audiobook). Spotify cut me off with about an hour left to go and I had to wait five agonising days for the final chapters. As thrillers go, this was excellent..

99 Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
Much more gentle than I recall some of Hollinghurst's other books being, with less in the way of plot as an elderly actor looks back on his life from his school days onwards. There’s a Boris Johnson-adjacent nemesis who recurs repeatedly through the narrative but in the way that the people we can’t stand often pop up in our lives – randomly and with unpleasant consequences but not necessarily in ways that change the course of our own stories. For that alone, I thought it was really cleverly put together. The sense of alienation and being different was really well done, particularly set against the beautiful descriptions of the English countryside.

98 The Venetian Game by Phillip Gywnne Jones
Very forgettable, and in fact I’ve already forgotten almost everything about the plot. This is the first in a series of thrillers set in Venice and I’ve read one of the later ones. The only reason to keep reading them is that they are set in Venice which very much has main character energy throughout.

97 All Fours by Miranda July
Not entirely relatable but actually which of us hasn’t (spoilers ahead) committed to a road trip in mid life, decided against it, stopped in a motel a few kilometres away from our marital home, fallen in lust with a worker in the local car hire company, renovated the hotel room entirely in a sort of luxe-country-baroque style and nearly had sex with him on multiple occasions before embracing a whole new approach to relationships? This was fun, if you couldn’t tell.

Ishiguro doesn't seem to me to be the kind of writer of whom you could confidently say "I really like his work". I read The Unconsoled years ago and was completely baffled by it, coming off the back of the relatively realistic and plot-driven Remains of the Day. I then picked up Never Let Me Go and got something different again.

Laughing at Pepe's and Fortuna's confusion 😄 and Sadik's DH reading 'The Boring Butler' and wondering when it was going to lift off, although I loved it #TeamButler!

#team @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie-don't-go

This is the ONLY thread I go to on mumsnet. It works for me!

No bun-fighting for me on this occasion #team meh for the butler + NLMG. Haven't read Stations 11 and have no intention of doing so.

Also, I hate food waste.

I'm still reading very unfestive, uncheerful books. Yesterday I downloaded Jenny Colgan's latest from the monthly deals so I'm hoping that will cheer me up! - Need to actually get some books finished before I start yet another though 😂