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?

Yeah, I've been meaning to read TCOMC for a while so will be up for a readalong. Presumably there are several translations available?

Sorry, wine has been consumed. We have the Penguin Classics Robin Buss translation.

I read The Count of MC last year- enjoyed it mostly. I read the penguin black edition and the translation was great.

'Count' me in for a readalong too :)
('The Count of Monte Cristo')

I up for a read-along too, although like eine I have form for dropping out. I have the Penguin Clothbound classics version.

I have the Robin Buss translation

Fell off these threads due to various events but now caught up - so enjoyed the cooking of Nigel (Terpsichore absolute savage!) and everyone's recent reviews.

I also loved Mercury Pictures Presents @Tarahumara 😁Definitely want to read Marra's backlist next year.
Other future plans similar to @ÚlldemoShúl including War&Peace and RWYO. I particularly want to cut down on forgettable contemporary litfic so plan to avoid next year's prize lists except the International Booker (and WP maybe).

Thanks to previous chat, I'm currently listening to March Violets and finding Bernie's wisecracking entertaining and the setting well done. So far women's nipples have been likened to Tommy helmets and teapot lids - wonder what the next 13 books will bring... 🤔Hadn't realised these started so late though (1936) so might reread some Erich Kästner childhood faves for a Weimar hit.

Otherwise struggling to engage with new print fiction so mostly dipping in and out of this stack:
Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen from this month's 99p deals. Little new to anyone familiar with this era's social history/JA but still really enjoyable and avoids both stuffiness and sensationalism. Not as good as (though much lighter than) the author's earlier Gentlemen of Uncertain Means.
The Book At War driest/least engaging of the lot but the subject's interesting enough to keep me reading.
Around the World in 80 Games Light and anecdotal, with less maths than expected. Adopts a vaguely geographical organisation to justify the title, which can feel forced.
Dictionary People well-liked on here. I'd read a few conventional histories of the OED but am liking this fresh approach.
*Blurb Your Enthusiasm delightful, plan on buying more copies as presents.
*The Bookshop Woman also fun, less twee than it sounds/most books in this genre and more substantial than e.g. Rental Person Who Does Nothing. Unfortunately, most books mentioned aren't available in English, though thread regulars Never Let Me Go and Into Thin Air popped up.
(*finished)
Also recently finished in a similar vein: Pen Vogler - Scoff. Sprinkling of amusing tidbits but over-long and poorly organised.

Up for trying TCOMC on a read along - haven’t done one yet. Translation recommendations welcomed. See the Penguin one so far.

Now juggling watching Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light with Rivals depending on my mood.

I will crack on as fast as I can!

@inaptonym Glad you’re enjoying Bernie. I don’t recall noticing the nipples.

I will join the read along. I think I have translation on my Kindle already, so that will have to do. Not sure on reading goals for 2025 but reducing the number of unread books on my Kindle has to be a priority.

59 The Werewolf in the Ancient World - Daniel Ogden
Academic monograph pulling together all the evidence (which is quite a small amount) for werewolf stories in the ancient world and interpreting the heck out of them.

60 Monsters: what do we do with great art by bad people - Claire Dederer
What we do is stare at our own navels while doing our best to get quoted in the Pseud’s Corner segment of Private Eye, apparently.

To be fairer, she was very strong on the struggle of mothers also to be artists - they face heavy censure if they abandon their mothering duties to do creative work, whereas men have historically had the chance to be ‘art monsters’, selfishly pursuing the muse wherever she led them. The chapter on Lolita was also very strong - she reads it as a reflection on the silence of abuse victims, as we only get Humbert’s self-justificatory narrative and mere glimpses of Dolores’ POV. I would recommend it overall if only for these bits.

@LadybirdDaphne great review of Monsters. I'm halfway through and not really loving it either.

46. Poor Things by Alasdair Gray
In the 1970s a curator at the Glasgow Museum finds a collection of papers waiting for collection by the dustmen that instinct tells him are of interest. So the 'Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless MD, Scottish Public Health Officer' are saved. Within them is the story of McCandless, Godwin Baxter and Bella Baxter. Or, the stories; because there are multiple versions competing to be heard of these characters and of Glasgow and its population. Full of energy and distress, funny and bitter. You could say it's disjointed I suppose but I'm sure it's meant to be.

98 Birnam Wood - Eleanor Catton

I almost DNF’d this a couple of times, but I’m glad I finished it. The pacing was erratic and many of the characters unlikeable.

Mira and Shelley run a guerilla gardening collective called Birnam Wood, growing crops on unattended land. Shelley is getting disillusioned and Mira is trying to keep her involved. Mira ends up meeting a billionaire, Robert Lemoine, who made his money in drones, whose wife died in mysterious circumstances and who is in the middle of an under the table property deal with recently ennobled Owen Darvish. Lemoine offers space to Birnam Wood, but he has some dark secrets to cover up. And Mira’s mouthy ex, Tony, comes back onto the scene, fancying himself as an investigative journalist and generally causing trouble.

The only person in the book who didn’t leave me with a depressing view of human nature was Owen’s wife, Jill. And she wasn’t in it nearly enough!

What we do is stare at our own navels while doing our best to get quoted in the Pseud’s Corner segment of Private Eye, apparently.
Yes! I am struggling not to DNF this as her handwringing can only be taken in tiny doses, her inclusion of JK Rowling is ridiculous and I feel like I’m being followed around by someone whining about wanting to watch films she feels she shouldn’t. Plus, I’ve always loathed Woody Allen so I’m struggling to care whether she watches his stuff or not. It’s an interesting dilemma (speaking as someone who loves the film Chinatown and the music of Marilyn Manson) but my God does she go on and on to no purpose!
Also, she wasn’t telling me anything new about Lolita, or just about anyone who has actually read it rather than apply the lazy victim-blaming moniker to female children suffering abuse.

56.My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss. A memoir of Moss's struggles with anorexia, spanning from her ascetic 1970s childhood through to a recent relapse. This was brilliantly written, realising well the competing voices and internal battles that push and pull in different directions. Along the way Moss dissects the literature that kept her company through her struggles, including Jane Eyre, The Bell Jar, and Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, and finds parallels with other women finding ways to take up space in society. Thanks to @bibliomania for the recommendation.

60 Rivals by Jilly Cooper

So 80s! So many people having sex! So many gorgeous dresses! So much champagne and delicious food! An absolute riot; I can't believe I never got round to reading these when I was a teenager. I'm still not wholly down with Rupert/Taggie, but this was a frothy delight.

I abandoned Monsters because it was dull and one-note. It should have been genuinely interesting but I felt like it was really a memoir masquerading as a serious exploration of ethics, aesthetics and sociology and the JKR handwringing was far too woe is me.

119. A Room Full Of Bones by Elly Griffiths

Ruth Galloway #4

Ruth assesses some Native Australian skeletons.

I'm finding that Cathbad the magical wizard is starting to grate on me as a recurring character.

Taking a break.

81. Patient - Ben Watt

The soundtrack to a particular era of my life was the music of Everything But the Girl, and I read this book by one half of its line-up, Ben Watt, many years ago - probably not that long after it came out. I happened across a copy a couple of days ago and raced through it again with just as much admiration for his outstanding writing and astonishing resilience in the face of misfortune. It charts his catastrophic descent into sudden, terrifying illness in the late 1990s, during which he very nearly died - doctors were baffled, but finally an exploratory operation resulted in the removal of most of his small intestine and an (eventual) diagnosis of an extremely rare auto-immune disease which few people survive.

He writes superbly, evoking the weird, nightmarish experience of a long hospital stay and its routines, interwoven with reminiscences of his family, childhood and his early days with his partner Tracey Thorn, who was by his side as he hovered at the edge of survival. Outstanding and a definite bold.

82. Graham Greene - May We Borrow Your Husband?

Not such a good verdict for this one. It’s the title short-story in a collection of 1967 and to be honest, I feel Greene's powers were very much on the wane on this showing. The narrator, a middle-aged writer, is staying in a hotel in Antibes while writing a biography of a 17thc poet (exactly as Greene himself did), and is in the habit of people-watching. Two predatory men - he shies away from uttering the word 'homosexual', but as they’re flamboyant interior decorators it’s not hard to get the message - are his fellow-guests, and when an awkward young honeymoon couple arrive, they gleefully set their sights on seducing the man, Peter. The bride (saddled with the unfortunate name of Poopy) is too innocent to see this, though unhappy and bewildered at her new husband's lack of affection, while the narrator agonises over what he can predict is about to happen. I just found this rather unpleasant, the characters either ciphers (Peter barely exists at all except as a cardboard cut-out) or overdone (the gay men are total stereotypes), and the narrator is an ineffectual bore who bafflingly decides he's in love with Poopy, though it’s hard to see why or how. Not great.

78. Earth - John Boyne

I am a John Boyne fan and this didn’t disappoint. It loosely follows on from Water (which I read earlier in the year). The main character in Earth was a very minor character in Water and the location is referenced. However, this could easily be read as a standalone book.

Evan is the main character, an unlikely and reluctant professional footballer, who is on trial as an accessory to rape (by a fellow footballer). The rape trial unfolds alongside flashbacks of Evan’s life up to the trial. Difficult subject matter but a gripping read (for me).

120. Dying Fall by Elly Griffiths

Ruth Galloway #5

I said I was taking a break from these but I wanted something lightweight and couldn't get into anything. Described as spooky and gripping in reality it was neither. It wasn't particularly believable and Cathbad outstays his welcome again, but they are very much easy reads that I tear through. I would hesitate to recommend them though and they bear no comparison to Jane Casey's Maeve Kerrigan series.

310 The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I like the author’s children’s books (A Little Princess and The Secret Garden) but this is the first of her adult books I’ve read. Unfortunately I was disappointed. I enjoyed the first third, where our upper class but down on her luck heroine meets and agrees to marry a marquess. From there onwards though it all got very strange as his relatives show their feelings about the marriage. I gather that this was originally published as two separate books and it did feel like that.

311 The Married Man by K L Slater

A while ago I decided to give up on this author as her books had got more and more ridiculous. This popped up on kindle unlimited and sounded intriguing so I thought I would give her another chance. I should have stuck with my original decision. This was not good.

312 What’s Eating Gilbert Grape by Peter Hedges

I loved this! Those who have seen the film (I haven’t) will probably be familiar with the story but basically Gilbert lives in a small American town with his dysfunctional family. That’s pretty much it but I just loved the writing about the Grape family and the other people in the town and really wanted to stay in their little world, which is quite an achievement given that the vast majority of characters are not really very likeable. A surprise hit for me.

313 Superjilly by Jilly Cooper

I’ve bought a bulk job of Jilly’s non fiction, largely collections of her journalism, so will be gradually working through these amongst other books. I did enjoy this but some of it was interviews with people I’ve never heard of (who were presumably famous in the 1970s) so I wasn’t particularly interested in those, but enjoyed the standard columns.

314 The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker by Annie Gray

This is a really interesting look at the development of the high street, from the 1600s up to the 1960s. It does look at some specific types of shops but also the development of things like markets and shopping centres. It’s easy to read and not dry.

315 What Does It Feel Like? by Sophie Kinsella

I feel a bit bad criticising this, given the circumstances in which it was written. It’s a fictionalised account of Sophie’s operation for and recovery of a brain tumour. It’s sad thinking about what she’s been through. However this is a very short novella and as such you never feel that you know the characters. I think the length is deliberate given she may still be suffering with cognitive abilities (hence feeling bad about criticising) but as a story it’s just too short. She might have done better to just issue it as a non fiction diary - but then that probably felt too close to home. I really hope she continues to recover well though and I hope writi n this has helped her.

316 The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

I didn’t enjoy this. I never felt any sense of menace or tension, and all the characters were just annoying. I’m still not sure whether the house was haunted or not. Maybe that’s the point but it didn’t work for me.

317 Poor Girls by Clare Whitfield

Interesting story, about a young woman getting caught up with the Forty Elephants female crime gang in the 1920s. However the writing felt very ‘creative writing class’. People rarely just say anything - lots of ‘she spat’, ‘she exclaimed’ and so on. Plus she did one of my pet hates - used the word slither when she meant sliver. I know I’ve read another book this year that touched on the Forty Elephants story so this just felt too familiar (and not in a good way). It’s not a bad book though, just could have been better.

318 Eating The Cheshire Cat by Helen Ellis

This is a reread. I originally read it in the early 2000s when first published and then saw a reference to it online recently and wanted to reread. It’s about three teenage girls in Alabama whose lives are all linked and are going through the usual growing up activities such as camp, sororities etc. Sounds very straightforward but this is actually rather bonkers. The book starts with one of the mums getting her daughter drunk and smashing her fingers so the doctors will straighten them. Another runs away with a travelling fair and another has an unhealthy obsession. This is another one where none of the characters are very likeable but I was keen to keep reading to see what happened (because I couldn’t remember from my original read). Don’t think the author’s done much else since which is a bit of a shame.