50 Book Challenge 2020 Part Eleven

Bett
Your comment on Kes really made me laugh.

Highlights below. I read 110 books this year which is fewer than usual. I found myself struggling to concentrate a lot of the time and also didn’t have the same number of really absorbing novels I usually have which I think made a difference. I think I need to track down some real escapism for January as it’s going to be bleak.

Guest House for Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
Christy Malry’s Own Double Entry by BS Johnson
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman
Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
The Stand by Stephen King
The Five by Hallie Rubenhold
Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
Corregidora by Gayl Jones
House of Glass by Hadley Freeman
Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith

Looking back over the list, 63 out of 110 were by women and 68 were fiction. The two best were House of Glass and Ducks, Newburyport. Seven books about pandemics, fiction and non fiction.

I need to think about what I want to get out of reading next year - this was the first year in a while I haven’t been goal-oriented when choosing books and while I didn’t hate anything I read I don’t think it feels like a vintage year for reading.

Does anyone get on with Deborah Levy? Her fiction is such hard work for so little reward. Though her memoirs are more engaging. I enjoyed The Cost of Living.

299. The Way of All Flesh - Ambrose Parry 19th century Edinburgh and a medical student has noticed a spate of unexplained deaths of young women. As they are all either housemaids or whores, nobody seems that bothered so he sets out to investigate. Fab easy and entertaining read. The whodunit element was blindingly obvious, but the journey to get there was still interesting. There's a sequel which I will definitely read.

I have started book 300 which fittingly is Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. At 16% it's proved that people really haven't changed much in 350 years. All the rich lot have just fled to their second homes in the country. Self isolation is 28 days though. There are some serious rules going on. This is fascinating!

highlandcoo I really don't get on with Deborah Levy either.

Eine I feel you could save blurb writers a lot of work with your one line synopsis method.

southeast Lovely book swag. I didn't realise Waterstones did a hurt book sale.

HeadNorth Damian Barr has written a memoir about growing up gay in 80s Glasgow called Maggie and Me.

Keith I've gone back to your Apeirogon review. I found the format hard work in audio and I was interested to see it wasn't exclusive to that. It was interestingly done, but I was more interested in what happened than playing mental hopscotch to find out. I don't mind a fractured timeline, but this took it to an extreme.

Ham I think the consistently high numbers usually come from Chessie and Stitches who in previous years have inspired me that it is possible to read a good number of books. My first few years I was in awe of anyone hitting three figures and couldn't fathom how it was possible. I'll be back to normal numbers next year as I won't have the same free time as the past 2 years.

This year has been exceptional for reading, if crap for everything else.

Oh those sound good mackerelfa I will hunt them down.

I've concluded that anything resembling chicklit is definitely not for me and so for an easy page-turning read between more demanding stuff it has to be crime, preferably not too grisly - those would fit the bill nicely.

I love Chris(topher) Brookmyre and I'm not at all Scottish (but I do have a rather black sense of humour). I reviewed two of the newer books (written as Chris) a couple of weeks ago and have just finished the third and last book in that series, which I'll review in a while. The series is about a private investigator called Jasmine Sharp and they do represent a slight change of direction, as they're less bleak/cartoonist/OTT than the earlier books (I think this is possibly why he changed his name for them?) I know some of the more hardcore fans were disappointed by how "straightforward" they were in comparison with the earlier books, but I think they're still well worth reading - his voice and Glaswegian sense of humour still come through loud and clear, as do the boldly-drawn characters, even though the action is more of a conventional police procedural.

Thanks for the final thread of the year South-East, this has been my first year and I have really loved it, will definitely be back for 2021!

Here is my final list as I don’t see me getting another book finished tomorrow.

1. Pet Semetary - Stephen King
2. The Outsider - Albert Camus
3. Somebody's Mother, Somebody's Daughter: True Stories from Victims and Survivors of the Yorkshire Ripper - Carol Ann Lee
4. Just One Damned Thing After Another (The Chronicles of St Mary's, #1) - Jodi Taylor
5. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
6. 4 3 2 1 - Paul Auster
7. Valley of the Dolls - Jacqueline Susann
8. The Devil's Teardrop - Jeffery Deaver
9. A Symphony of Echoes (The Chronicles of St. Mary's, #2) - Jodi Taylor

Some stats for the year:

• 91% Fiction / 9% Non-Fiction
• 86% Kindle / 11% Audible / 3% Books

• 33% Male / 67% Female

Favourite books of the year:

• The Outsider – Albert Camus
• This was a re-read and I loved it just as much the second time around.
• Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
• This has gone straight into my top ten books. It is a short read with not a single word wasted and I found myself really taking my time, savouring every moment. I was entranced, that’s the only word for it.
• Harry Potter Books – JK Rowling
• I have read the books before but this was my first time listening to the audible versions (in fact this year was my first year of listening to audiobooks) there was something very soothing and comforting listening to Stephen Fry reading some old favourites, especially during the lockdowns. Also it felt good to support JK Rowling after all the abuse she got this year.
• The Chronicles of St Mary's – Jodi Taylor
• I love Time Travel books and the team at St Mary’s have really captured my imagination this year. OK they are not high literature and the constant scrapes due to not following the rules (I am very much of the opinion that rules are there for a reason ) is a bit repetitive at time but the characters are great and I really enjoyed the sections set in the past. I mean working at St Mary’s would basically be my dream job.
• Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders
• I found this one a bit confusing at first and thought about giving up – I’m so glad I didn’t as the more I read the more it seeped into my consciousness and I found myself thinking about it time and again, both during the reading and afterwards. It was an emotional, affecting read and felt truly original to me.
• Beastie Boys Book – Mike Diamond and Adam Horowitz
• This was also an audible book and I absolutely loved it. The sections read by Horovitz and Diamond were by far the best, and the majority of the rest covered by guest speakers were good too with only one or two stinkers (Kim Gordon I am looking at you and your monotone!). It was an open and honest account with a couple of mea culpas and hearfelt apologies. The loss of Adam Yauch is dealt with beautifully and Diamond and Horivitz convey the love, respect and friendship without ever descending into mawkish detail on Yauch’s passing. As Horovitz says Yauch’s cancer diagnosis and death is “just too fucking sad to write about”.

Also jealous of southeast's haul!

Highlights of the year:

Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
Mothership, Francesca Segal
Mrs Miniver, Jan Struther
Requiem for a Wren, Neville Shute
Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders

Thanks, Terpsichore! I also bought Eating Up Italy on your recommendation, so you're obviously my books-about-food enabler .

What a fantastic haul, southeast!

Terp, thanks for the reminder about Scoff. I liked the reviews and was on the lookout in my library - they've now added it to the catalogue so I've been able to reserve it.

And mack,; I've had Dead Famous languishing on my Kindle, but your review has now made me want to read it.

I felt the same about The Bookshop. It was a pleasant enough read but the ending was indeed terrible.

I kept a list up until July so I may as well post it. An awful lot of re reads the s year - at least 50 percent - and I can’t be bothered to go back through my Kindle to add to the list. A lot of comfort reading too and why not? Very few stand outs.

1. Little Women
2. Good Wives
3. Little Men.
4. Jo’s Boys.

1. Persuasion - Jane Austen
2. Me - Elton John
3. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen.
4. Pale Rider - The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World - Laura Spinney.

There are probably around 40 more on my kindle ending with.

The Bookshop - Penelope Fitzgerald - Woman opens bookshop in 1960s Suffolk seaside town. Enjoyable but terrible ending.

Two more to add - don’t think there will be any others after this. I’ll post my list of highlights tomorrow.

110 Mordew by Alex Pheby
Extraordinary and inventive fantasy novel published earlier this year about a city where God’s corpse is buried under the streets and children are formed from the Living Mud. This was a wild and engaging read and I loved the world building.

111 My Wild and Sleepless Nights by Clover Stroud
This struck a real chord with me. It’s about motherhood - both the anguish and boredom of being a mother to babies and toddlers and the heartache of being a mother to teens. I can’t imagine doing both at the same time, as Stroud does. It’s entirely without interest, I should imagine, to anyone without children but I felt a strong connection with the emotions she describes and found myself wondering what I would do with all the space in my brain if I hadn’t spent the past 16 years being a mother.

My last book of 2020 is:

135. The Bookseller's Tale, by Mark Latham
The author shares his enthusiasm for all things bookish, ranging from marginalia in medieval manuscripts to customers he has encountered as a Waterstones bookseller. There are some good stories, but if I'm being critical, I'm not sure it comes together as a cohesive whole. All very civilized, though.

Thanks for the new thread, south, I love the flurry of Lists of Best Reads and the breakdowns.

I’ve read 60 books again this year. 22 5*/stand-outs. No duds but that’s because I DNF’d a few.

32 female writers, 28 male writers.
37 fiction, 21 non fiction, 2 poetry collections (both of which I loved - by Maya Angelou and Lorraine Mariner ).
5 translated books.

23 physical books, 21 Kindle/IPad, 16 Audiobooks.
15 books from the library/BorrowBox, which are a mix of physical, iPad and audiobook.
I only bought one physical books through Amazon and that was second hand - Lila.

These are my stand-out reads, in order of reading rather than preference:

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn.
Matterhorn Karl Marlantes.
Pachinko Min Jin Lee.
My Name is Why Lemn Sissay.
And Still I Rise Maya Angelou.
Black Wave Kim Ghattas.
Home Marilynne Robinson.
The Arab of the Future (A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984) Riad Sattouf.
Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows JK Rowling.
Furniture Lorraine Mariner.
David Copperfield Charles Dickens.
The Life Project Helen Pearson.
The Five Hallie Rubenhold.
Hour of the Star Clarice Lispector.
Lila Marilynne Robinson.
Shuggie Bain Douglas Stewart.
Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe Kapka Kassabova.
Who They Was Gabriel Krause.
The Warmth of Other Suns Isabel Wilkerson.
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion Jia Tolentino.
Sing Backwards and Weep Mark Lanegan.
Humankind Rutger Bregman.

Very happy with my reading this year! 😊 I wonder what 2021 holds..

Good question Highland - I think skimming Amazon maybe his newer books are Chris?

Has anyone read The Trick to Time by Kit De Waal? Was recommended to me on Twitter. The writing and story are beautiful, it has stayed with me

Eine I get what you are saying but I totally loved it. And I'm a hard-hearted Scottish person who resists such feelings as much as possible!

We discussed it on our online book group and one or two members were rather nonplussed by the enthusiasm so you're probably right that it's a marmite one.

Sadik that's so funny about bigging him up to your daughter and then giving her his one book without a laugh in it So is he doing the Iain Banks/Iain M Banks thing and using his short name for his SF?

highlandcoo I read my first Brookmyre ( Boiling a frog ) slightly randomly when I lived in Spain (pre Kindle days!) & English language books weren't easy to come by. I love how he writes such funny books which often also have something serious to say too. (Mind you I bought dd his SF novel Places in the Darkness last Christmas & told her how funny he was - it's an absolutely dead serious SF thriller without a single laugh )

Damn I missed Circe by Madeleine Miller to make the ten!

Can I get this one in??

49. How I escaped my certain fate by Stewart Lee
    A reread; very funny and informative about his life and comedy if you're a fan.

50. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
    Great retelling of the Helen of Troy story. Unfortunately will forever be 'not quite as good as Circe'.

My top reads (some of my picks have changed over the months)
Girl by Edna O'brien
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
The Five by Hallie Rubenhold
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Invisible Women by Carolina Criado Perez
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

Special congratulations to the two male novelists for making it into the list. Well done, gentlemen! Other stats not collected, will try for a better spreadsheet next year.

@highlandcoo

I reviewed Leonard and Hungry Paul along the lines of listening to my Mum talking about neighbours I don't know in novel form

Real marmite book

"You know! Leonard! Her odd son Paul's friend"

No Mum, I don't

HeadNorth so interesting to read your opinion of Shuggie Bain.

Over Christmas I've gone for more light-hearted choices but it's going to be one of my first reads next year.