AlisonY - Grabbing Half a Century by the Horns: Part II

Welcome to part 2 of my thread. Slightly unintended with a mistaken click of the button at the bottom of my previous page, but I guess it was getting long enough.

Starting the second half of my reading in 2023 with a picture from Dune du Pilat which we enjoyed climbing recently in France.

The half a century birthday milestone looms very close now, but it's been a good year so far with lots of nice memories and hopefully more to come with another holiday later in the year and an unexpected family wedding planned around Christmas time. Reading's been a bit slow, but when that's because life has been busy in a positive way I'll take that.

2023 Reading Track

January
1. Standing on the Shoulders by Dan Walker - read (4 stars)

February
2. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka - read (3.5 stars)
3. A Few Wise Words by Peter Mukherjee - read (3.5 stars)
4. Please Don't Come Back From the Moon by Dean Bakopoulos - read (4 stars)

March
5. Germinal by Emile Zola - read (5 stars)
6. The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg - read (4 stars)
7. Carol by Patricia Highsmith - read (4.5 stars)
8. The Smell of Hay by Giorgio Bassani - read (4 stars)

April
9. A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf - read (3.5 stars)
10. The Beckoning Silence by Joe Simpson - read (4 stars)

May
11. The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin - read (4 stars)
12. Tresspasses by Louise Kennedy - read (unmarked)

June

13. Big Brother by Lionel Shriver - read (3 stars)
14. Stressilient: How to Beat Stress and Build Resilience by Dr Sam Akbar - read (3.5 stars)
15. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway - read (4.5 stars)

July
16. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - read (4 stars)
17. When the Body Says No: The Hidden Cost of Stress by Gabor Mate - read (4 stars)
18. Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan - read (4.5 stars)
19. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - read (4 stars)

August
20. Around the World in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh - read (4 stars)
21. Release the Bats by DBC Pierre - read (4 stars)
22. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy by Olivia Telford - read (3 stars)

September
23. I Couldn't Love You More by Esther Freud - read (2.5 stars)

October
24. Happy Sexy Millionaire by Steven Bartlett - read (4.5 stars)
25. Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon - read (3.5 stars)

NF = 12
F = 13

18. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

Last week I had the fortune to enjoy a week's holiday in south-west France, and at the airport decided that although my suitcase was already bulging with books it would be a sad affair if I didn't add a thoroughly French-flavoured book to my holiday reading pile. Françoise Sagan was not a French author I was familiar with, but the front cover tagline of 'funny, immoral and thoroughly French' sounded perfect holiday reading fodder.

This book is actually two novellas - the title novella and A Certain Smile. In Bonjour Tristesse, the narrator is in her late teens and enjoying a fairly permissive life with her womanising widowed father when circumstances change one summer requiring some drastic action. I'm not sure I'd go as far as The Guardian's comment that 'Françoise Sagan is the French F. Scott Fitzgerald', but certainly she captures well the essence of that heady era of wealthy adults with questionable moral compasses enjoying the pleasures of hot summers in the south of France. It's extraordinary, given the quality and maturity of Sagan's writing, to think that this was her first book at the tender age of 18. She captures perfectly the lightness of youth, offering a sardonic, outside perspective of the types of gatherings depicted by the likes of Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

In A Certain Smile, the narrator is a late teen who, bored with her young boyfriend, embarks on an affair with his much older uncle. Every teen is wont to think they have life sussed, but this young protagonist finds out the hard way that she's not quite so in control of things as she'd like to think.

What's clever about Sagan's writing is that she wrote commandingly from the perspective of young women, yet at the same time shows so clearly the naivety of youth to the reader, which given the young age she was when she wrote these novellas is commendable.

I absolutely loved these two novellas - they were fun and absorbing and set in one of my favourite eras for fiction, and I'll certainly be looking out for other titles by Sagan which have been translated.

4.5 stars - the perfect holiday read.

19. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I fancied heading back into Russian fiction after reading The Gulag Archipelago at the start of the month. This was my first Dostoyevsky read, and it seemed as good a title to pick as any.

Crime and Punishment tells the tale of an impoverished student living in St. Petersburg who decides to carry out a heinous murder in order to set himself back on the financial straight and narrow. What follows is a cat and mouse story as the protagonist, far from enjoying his ill gotten gains, instead wrestles with his own conscience and his future options whilst the net of the law closes further in on him.

It's an interesting read given it examines the many sides and stages of the murderer's thought pattern post the event. In some places the psychological ramblings by either the protagonist or other characters grew a little wearisome in their histrionics, but this is typical in a lot of the writing style of the late 19th century, when melodrama was hugely popular. For that reason I've dropped a star, as it's personally not my bag, but otherwise it was an enjoyable read.

On the basis of having read just one book apiece which is probably a most unfair comparison, I would plump for reading Tolstoy again much more quickly than Dostoyevsky, but still - I'm glad I read this. Had it been perhaps 200 pages shorter and omitted some of the pages of hysterical rambling it would have gained an extra half a star.

4 stars - a deserved place on the list of classics.

>4 AlisonY: Nice review. I've read Crime and Punishment twice and enjoyed it both times. Happy new thread.

>5 rocketjk: Thanks Jerry. Definitely glad I read it.

>3 AlisonY: I recently read Tristesse too and gave it 4 stars. Had I read it on vacation in France it definitely would have been 4.5 or even 5

>7 Nickelini: Yep, it fitted my holiday reading mood perfectly!

I love the photo at the top, Alison. I haven't read Sagan, but will add her to my WL. I read Crime and Punishment years ago but stalled on a reread. I must pick it up again. I love the Russians! (Writers, that is).

>9 BLBera: I think I'd stall on a reread of C&P too. My engagement with it wasn't linear - some chapters were page-turning, others not as much.

Lovely photo at >1 AlisonY: Alison.

As with any decade birthday, don't forget you should celebrate all year. Thats a rule in my family.

>11 Caroline_McElwee: That's more or less what I've been trying to do, Caroline. And this year I'm definitely not working on my birthday.

>12 AlisonY: I haven't worked on my birthday for probably 30 years now, maybe more.

Nice photo of the Dune du Pilat. Hope you enjoyed South West France.

>1 AlisonY: That looks surreal with the forest backdrop!

>15 ursula: It's kind of odd. You're so high above the forest when you're on the top yet it didn't seem that high climbing up (although our legs were busted!).

I love your topper photo—I'm glad you were able to take a nice getaway. I read a lot of Russian literature in my twenties, and devoured a lot of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (I even "met" him once, although it was a situation where I wasn't allowed to acknowledge who he was). It was still a thrill. I want to reread The First Circle, but in the new uncensored edition that came out in 2009. On the Tolstoy vs Dostoevsky balance, I would tip toward Tolstoy too, although the end of Day in the Life annoyed me as much as the end of Crime & Punishment.

>17 labfs39: That's amazing coming across Solzhenistyn. How did that happen?

After Anna Karenina is there another Tolstoy you'd recommend?

>18 AlisonY: As you probably know, Solzhenistyn was in exile for decades. At first he and Natalia and their four sons settled in Zurich, but soon left for the US and Vermont. They lived in a tiny town called Cavendish from 1975 until he returned to Russia in 1994. He was a famous recluse, so spottings were rare, but I was working at a medical facility where he was an outpatient. Although he was using a false name for security reasons, he is very easy to recognize. It was hard to speak to him and pretend I didn't know who he was.

As for Tolstoy, I like his short works best: Day in the Life, despite the coda, and The Kreutzer Sonata, which may be the first Tolstoy I read. He wrote a fair number of short stories.

>19 labfs39: That's so cool...

Thanks for the Tolstoy recommendations.

>11 Caroline_McElwee: As with any decade birthday, don't forget you should celebrate all year. Thats a rule in my family..

I did not know that! I just had a big scary decade bday on August 1, so I shall inform my family. Actually, I had a holiday in England and Italy in spring and another coming up in Australia in November so I guess I’m already doing that :)

As for working on my birthday—when I was young school was off for summer, and then as an adult I only worked my bday in 1986 and 2017. It helps that the first Monday in August is a stat holiday so somehow I’m almost always able to get it off. Here’s to not working on your bday!

And happy 5-0 Alison!

happy 50th!!!

>21 Nickelini: >22 cindydavid4: Thank you! I hit the big half a century yesterday and had the most amazing day. It's such a privilege to reach this milestone and I'm so grateful for all the lovely people I have in my life and for all the amazing experiences I've had. It really was a day full of joy.

Happy birthday! So glad you had a wonderful day. Here’s to many more

>24 labfs39: Thank you, Lisa!

Happy belated birthday and welcome to this side of 50. :) I'm glad to hear you had such a good birthday!

Belated Happy birthday Alison, glad you had a great day.

My 60th was at the start of the pandemic and probably the first birthday I spent totally alone, though friends and family saw I was surrounded by flowers and I spent most of the day on the phone.

>26 ursula: Thank you! I'd a great few days.

>27 Caroline_McElwee: Thanks Caroline. And that's so sad that you were alone on your big birthday thanks to Covid. I hope you've made up for it since.

>23 AlisonY: Belated happy birthday. I'm so pleased you had a fabulous day.

My 50th was in 2020 and while I could've had a party, I couldn't be bothered organising anything by then. My partner and I had a night away the weekend before, and then a week away with friends and then family the week after so I didn't miss out on celebrating.

>29 rhian_of_oz: Thank you! I felt like that too - I didn't want people to feel obliged to turn up with gifts to an event so kept it low key, but nonetheless it was a great few days with lots of lovely memories.

Happy Birthday, Alison, and many happy returns. Aug. 10 must be an auspicious day; my granddaughter Scout shares your birthday, only she just turned 10.

Ahhhh, 50th birthdays! Congratulations on yours. Glad it was a nice one. I have great memories of mine, which was also low key. My story is a bit like Rhian's: lots of travel beforehand. I had finally gotten married for the first time about 5 weeks prior. I had told my then fiancé that I wanted our wedding far enough ahead of my birthday so that we could have a festive wedding and I could also have a big 50th birthday party. So we got married on May 29th and a week later we went to France for a 2-week honeymoon. Then when we got back my wife laughed and said, "OK, ready to start planning your big 50th birthday party?" I laughed right along with her, and my 50th birthday was a party of five at a San Francisco Giants game followed by dinner at a cool old San Francisco restaurant called the Fog City Diner. My wife had baked a cheesecake for us to share at the ballgame but it was a very hot day and by the time we decided to have the cake it had melted into more or less a puddle, so we scooped it out of its container with our fingers. A great day, all in all.

>31 BLBera: Thanks, Beth. I hope Scout enjoyed her first decade birthday.

>32 rocketjk: Well, that sounds just about a perfect 50th, Jerry. Mine was very low key but just lovely. I started the day training at my gym and was spoilt rotten by my trainer, and then went into Belfast for lunch and a cocktail with my husband and kids and a bit of birthday shopping. It was such a relaxed, unhurried day, which seems to never happen these days, and full of such good cheer and best wishes from people. Last night there was a surprise dinner with my wider family, and my husband had put together a lovely scrapbook with lots of great photos I'd not seen in years.

I don't think I've ever put my mugshot on LT before, but hey - it's a milestone, so why not:

>33 AlisonY: Lovely to see you Alison.

20. Around the World in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh

I acquired this book a few months back in a book swap event held in work to mark World Book Day. My theory with book swaps is that no one wants to give up their favourite books, but by the same token don't want to offer up something terrible either, and I think that sums up this book; it's not the best book I'll read this year, but it's not the worst either.

Rajesh (at the time of writing this book) was a young British journalist who had previously written a book about travelling around India by train. This time she had set the bar higher and planned to travel the world by train, along with her fiancé.

It's a book that I found page-turning and irritating in equal measures. No, that's untrue - the page-turning elements definitely outweighed the annoying bits, but somehow the annoying bits stuck. The best parts of the book were her descriptions of travel through North Korea and Tibet (particularly the former), where she described well what they saw out and about on their travels, but in other parts of the book there were gaps that I found frustrating. Perhaps it was that some places gave more material to talk about than others, or that she felt more predisposed to talk about the destinations that interested her most, but at times the focus was so much on the trains that I felt cheated out of hearing more about the countries they were travelling through. Perhaps that is the reality of rail travel, with long distances on trains meaning that you're simply passing through places that are simply a blur through the window. When they travelled long distances through Russia, she had tales about some of their fellow passengers, but those sections suffered in comparison with other travel books for a lack of 'on the ground' descriptions. Similarly, she whipped through the USA at a speed of knots with just passing mentions of cities travelled through, which began to feel like the project was a train-counting tick box exercise.

I also wrinkled my nose in annoyance when, at various times, Rajesh negatively commented on tourists in that smug I'm-a-seasoned-traveller-not-a-tourist annoying way gap-year students have of boring you. At other times, realising that she couldn't pass off a certain day trip here or there as anything other than a tourist jaunt, she then decided she was a tourist after all and positively eye-rolled on the page about middle-aged single men on sabbaticals classing themselves as travellers rather than tourists.

I've never travelled more than a few hours on a train, and Rajesh's book didn't warm me to planning any overnight trips any time soon (sleeping in a small compartment with total strangers - no thanks). However, such is her romance with the notion of long-distance train travel I felt she held back on describing the real nitty gritty, like the cleanliness (or lack of) of some of the trains, how the toilet situation worked out, how you stopped yourself from going crazy on a 50 hour stretch. There were quite a few photos in the book, and apart from one in a US panoramic viewing car and another on the Orient Express, there was hardly a photo of inside a single train. Where were the obvious photos inside the Trans Siberian trains or one of the Japanese bullet trains or one of the many Chinese trains? I had to resort to Google to find out what the difference in appearance was between a Chinese soft sleeper train vs a hard sleeper.

All in all it was interesting enough, but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that Rajesh and her boyfriend were gap year backpackers desperately trying to convince us they were something much more serious than travel box-tickers. There was an immaturity to her travel approach that irked me (barely mentioning Europe and the US, for example, as if they were so pedestrian for a seasoned traveller like herself).

3.5 stars - enjoyable enough, but I wouldn't go out of my way to find a copy of it. There are plenty of better travel books out there.

>33 AlisonY: Well, that sounds like a like a great day! Glad it was all so lovely.

>33 AlisonY: Birthdays are non-events in my family after the 21st, so I don't even remember what I did on my 50th. I do enjoy reading about other people's festivities though. So glad you had a pleasant, relaxing day. And it's nice to see you!

>33 AlisonY: Oh, this is wonderful! Thanks for sharing

Happy Birthday! I'm not really one for big birthday celebrations either, but 50 is a milestone!

Happy belated birthday - glad you had a good day.

>33 AlisonY: It looks like you are enjoying yourself.

Thanks everyone - it was a great few days of celebrating.

Happy birthday, Alison!

I just had my 60th, on which I was traveling to a work thing—about the most underwhelming milestone birthday you could imagine. We always have a nice dinner out the night before one of our events, and we ended up at a very good Frenchish seafood restaurant (in North Carolina, go figure). So that was festive, but that was the extent of any celebrating. I did have some very nice gifts trickle in over the next few weeks, including live plants from my best friend's wonderful lush garden in Vermont, and a catalog from the Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum, which a dear friend schlepped all the way back from Amsterdam because she knew how much I would have loved to see the show.

So hey, that's me talking about my birthday on yours! But I'm glad it was a fun one, and nice to see your picture too.

>43 lisapeet: Well happy birthday, Lisa! I think it was the little moments of lovely messages from people that was the best bit of mine, so I'm glad it sounds like you had plenty of that on your birthday too.

Happy belated birthday! Great picture!

>45 OscarWilde87: Thank you!

21. Release the Bats by DBC Pierre

I'd forgotten that I'd really enjoyed DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little until I came across it in my list of books on LT, so I looked for some of his other work and this little red number appealed.

Unlike VGL, this is a non-fiction book full of writing advice from DBC Pierre, but it reminded me how unique and off the wall his voice was in VGL. Although there are plenty of books out there on how to go about writing a novel, somehow this worked for me a lot more. For starters, his own unique writing style throughout has you thinking about what makes writing talent, and he's also a bit like an overgrown teenage rule breaker, with plenty of swearing and the odd crazy / unnecessary chapter on oddball subjects such as the impact (good and bad) that different types of recreational drugs have on your writing creativity and output. BUT, he knows what he's talking about, and there are some really excellent writing tips and information about the writing process, warts and all.

DBC Pierre might not be to everyone's taste, but he's a very intelligent writer, and even if I never write a page of a novel in this lifetime, I think I'll dip in and out of this book plenty in the future as I enjoyed it and feel like a little more will stick with each subsequent visit.

4 stars - slightly batty (if you pardon the pun), but isn't there a little craziness in all the best writers?

>47 AlisonY: Years since I read VGL Alison. Glad this was a hit with you.

This went straight into my cart.

>48 Caroline_McElwee: I hope you enjoy it, Caroline. It's a book you can dip in and out of.

22. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy by Olivia Telford

I had this book on my wish list as CBT is purported to be good for IBS, which has the audacity to pop up in my life on a fairly frequent basis, but unfortunately it missed the mark. The chapters it focused on weren't of relevance or particular interest to me (depression, addiction, jealousy, etc.), and I realised that Telford isn't a CBT expert but rather a writer who collates other people's research on wellness topics into her own books, which somehow made for a book lacking soul or obvious passion for its subject matter.

3 stars - I'm not sure if it's both CBT and the book which don't work for me, but at the very least it's the latter.

>50 AlisonY: Shame the book wasn't helpful Alison.

Just dropping by to say hello and noticed my good timing means I can wish you Happy Birthday too! Nice photo!

>52 VivienneR: Thanks Vivienne!

23. Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

I've had a bit of a fiction reading block lately. I think it's a mental bandwidth thing - I just don't seem to have the patience for that first stage of reading when you've not got hooked in yet. I picked up Crow Lake in the secondhand bookshop as I figured it would be 'easy reading' to ease me back in, and indeed it hit the spot.

This is don't-think-too-hard fiction. Summer reading fodder. The narrator's parents were killed in a car crash when she was a young girl, and the book alternates between the aftermath, as her brothers work to keep the family together, and her present day reluctancy to return 'home' to her siblings.

It was an enjoyable enough page-turner and got me back to reading fiction again, but I'm not going to rush to recommend it. There was nothing standout about it, and the ending disappointed.

3.5 stars - chicken soup sort of reading. Comforting but not gourmet.

>54 AlisonY: I always imagine that book to be bleak and also earnest. I’m rarely in the mood for either of those things

>55 Nickelini: I've read bleaker. It was just very mass market - fine, but not overly original.

24. I Couldn't Love You More by Esther Freud

I normally love Esther Freud's writing - she's up there as one of my favourite authors - but this book was so poor compared to her other novels.

I don't know if her publishers put the squeeze on her or something, but this is such a mass market read with a cliched storyline centred around a woman forced into an Irish convent for unmarried mothers and the impact on her mother's and daughter's lives. There were none of the hallmarks of Freud's usual turn of phrase, and the storyline was horribly confused - halfway through and I still wasn't sure who was who, and from the reviews on Amazon I wasn't the only one.

2.5 stars - hugely disappointing. I hope this is not the kind of writing we're going to see from Freud going forward.

It’s almost October. Is your trip starting soon?

>58 dianeham: Hi Diane, end of October. I really haven't had time to think about it as a few things have been going on recently.

>57 AlisonY: Thanks for taking one for the team Alison. I generally have liked her books in the past too.

>60 Caroline_McElwee: I was probably particularly harsh with my scoring because I usually love her writing so much, Caroline, but this was so pedestrian.

25. Happy Sexy Millionaire by Steven Bartlett

I've only really become aware of Steven Bartlett in the last couple of years, firstly when he became a dragon on the UK version of Dragon's Den (I'm assuming there are international versions), and then when I started getting into podcasts. His Diary of a CEO podcast regularly holds the #1 UK podcast chart position, and is a really interesting listen (not particularly to do with business - more about personal growth).

If you've not come across him before, he's a young British-Nigerian entrepreneur who dropped out of university at 18 after his first lecture and then went on to become a multi-millionaire by his mid-20s following the international success of his social media marketing company.

Contrary to the title, this isn't a personal development book about how to become rich and happy, but rather is Bartlett's musings on how he realised that being a 'happy, sexy millionaire' (which is what he aimed to be at age 18) was not the key to happiness. Rather it's his learnings about how happiness comes from fulfilment and introspection.

It may sound a trite premise for a book, but I really liked it. There were some really good quotes that I want to bookmark to come back to, and it's a book I'd love my teens to read (although they won't) as it's an honest signpost to building a good life for yourself at a young age.

4.5 stars - an inspiring read that I whizzed through.

A very belated happy birthday. Welcome to 50. Enjoyed reading about your reading. I find sometimes i no patience for fiction of any kind. But nonfiction can still work.

>63 dchaikin: I'm in a little patience for fiction mode still, but trying to get into a short novel at the moment. My attention span is shot at the moment.

Oh, too bad about the new Esther Freud.

26. Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon

For a slim novel it's taken me an age to get through this book. Part of it was down to being distracted by several non-fiction titles I have on the go as well, but moreover I think it's because I wasn't fully enjoying it.

Simenon writes about a lonely French actor and a Hungarian woman who meet in joint desperation in a seedy bar in New York and the development of their connection into something intense and life-changing over a short period of time that both struggle to understand.

When a book is focused on relatively few characters I need at least to feel empathy for them, even if I don't particularly like them. The male character Francois I found really unlikeable, and although Simenon showed contextualised his jealousy and petty behaviour being driven by self-doubt after his wife ran off with a younger man, he just left me cold with his unpleasant behaviour towards Kay, who seemed prepared to accept and even sympathise with whatever horrible behaviour he sent her way, whether it was punching her in the face or sleeping with someone else when she has to leave for a few days.

I appreciate that Simenon is thought of as being up there as a writer, but he isn't for me. I will happily devour novels from the great misogynist novelists of our time like Hemingway and Updike as I can at least develop some empathy or sympathy for their flawed characters, but this novel just left me a little cold.

3.5 stars - unappetising.