50 Book Challenge 2021 Part Eight

Waits with baited breath...

50 Bookers: What We Bolded 2021

Hi all, I'm stopping here as tomorrow night I have a Social Event. I think not everyone has managed to get their bolded books up to date but we have to stop somewhere!

This list features the contributions of 25 fine 50Bookers:
ladybirddaphne, einereisedurchdiezeit, SOLINVICTUS, TimeforaGandT, JaninaDuszejko, FortunaMajor, Palegreenstars, SapatSea, bibliomania, FranKatzenjammer, DesdamonasHandkerchief, Terpsichore, TheTurn0fTheScrew, bumpyknuckles, StColumboofNavron, Sadik, 2021namechanger, PermanentTemporary, noodlezoodle, nowanearlyNicemum, Tarahumara, MamaNewtNewt, YolandiFuckingVisser, StitchesInTime, BadSpellaSpellaSpella 25, Midnightstar76, Hushabyelullaby, DBI78, Welshwabbit, Puddock1, MegBusset, yoshiblue, highlandcoo, Boiledeggandtoast, BestIsWest, MaudOfTheMarches, cassandre, southeastdweller, PepeLePew, Stokey, Piggywaspushed, VikingNorthUtsire, CoteDAzur, Matilda2013

Time for a last one...

57. 10 Days to a Less Defiant Child - Jeffery Bernstein
Useful parenting guide based on the principles of showing understanding, not yelling, being non-controlling, rewarding good behaviour and having consistent non-punitive consequences for negative behaviours. Manages to be non-judgemental while also suggesting ways parents can improve the situation by altering their own practices.

My stats for the year are:
57 books read
49% male, 51% female authors
37% fiction, 63% non-fiction (a lot of self-help, parenting and career-type books this year!)
77% own books, 23% library
46% hard copy, 37% Kindle, 17% Audible

Top Fiction:
The Terror - Dan Simmons
The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - didn't exactly 'like' it due to intense irritation at Charles Ryder, but it's stimulated a lot of thought.

Piranesi - Susanna Clark
Rosemary's Baby - Ira Levin

Top Non-Fiction
Erebus - Michael Palin
Fierce Bad Rabbits - Clare Pollard
A Life on Our Planet - David Attenborough

Almost Stinkers:
Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House - Cherie Jones
The Absolute ly shite Book - Elizabeth Knox

Thanks for reminding me about Storygraph Viking. I had it on my laptop which I don't use much anymore and never thought to check if there was an app. It always gave me much better recommendations than Goodreads, but was a lot less convenient. It struggled to handle the import of my Goodreads last time due to the high number of books in it, but hopefully I can get it up and running.

While we're all statsy, has anyone tried Storygraph? I've just imported my Goodreads history and it's done some analysis for me.

Not sure I’ll get another book finished so will post my list for now then catch up on the thread.

1. The Three Mrs Wrights - Linda Keir
2. Holly's Christmas Countdown - Suzie Tullett
3. Butterfly Kisses - Patrick Logan
4. The Push - Ashley Audrain
5. The Last Thing To Burn - Will Dean
6. The Silent Treatment - Abbie Greaves
7. How to Disappear - Gillian McAllister
8. Contacts - Mark Watson
9. Girl A - Abigail Dean

Nothing moved past The Last Thing to Burn by Will Dean for my favourite book of the year! And I read that in January

Here is my list for the year. Standouts in bold.

1. The Atrocity Exhibition (Laundry Files #1) - Charles Stross
2. Transfer of Power (Mitch Rapp #1) - Vince Flynn
3. Anna Magdalena Bach. Fanny Hensel. Clara Schumann - Three Female Musicians in the Spotlight
4. Circe - Madeline Miller
5. Cage of Souls - Adrian Tchaikovsky
6. Doctor Frigo - Eric Ambler
7. Space (Manifold #2) - Stephen Baxter
8. Quantum Theory - A Graphic Guide by J P McEvoy & Oscar Zarate
9. Bear Head - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Female authors: 18%
Non-fiction: 12%

This year, I was happy to have discovered two exceptional writers: Adrian Tchaikovsky who has written some of the most interesting SF I have read in recent years, and A J Quinnell whose thrillers that combine engaging thrillers with historical and political insight. They have both written quite a few books and I look forward to reading them all.

@southeastdweller I'm sorry that I launched off into doing this spreadsheet without even asking you - I hope you don't mind x

for Permanent. And thank you so much for collating the favourites, looking forward to a great 'best of' list.

My bolded favourites this year have been:
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, by Sue Townsend.
Wintering, by Katherine May.
The Searcher, by Tana French.
Girl A, by Abigail Dean.
The Ruins, by Mat Osman.
Pickard County Atlas, by Chris Harding Thornton.
A Crooked Tree, by Una Mannion.
The Cutting Room, by Jane Casey.
The Final Revival of Opal and Nev, by Dawnie Walton.
When the Stars Go Dark, by Paula McClain.
We Are Watching Eliza Bright, by A. E. Osworth.
Malibu Rising, by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
Summerwater, by Sarah Moss.
Northern Spy, by Flynn Berry.
Dope, by Sara Gran.
The Guide, by Peter Heller.
The Paper Palace, by Miranda Cowley Heller.
Who is Maud Dixon, by Alexandra Andrews.
Monogamy, by Sue Miller.
Into Thin Air, by John Krakauer.
That's a pretty good strike rate I think! Favourite overall was The Paper Palace.

Only one stinker, but by god it was bloody awful: The Maidens, by Alex Michaelides.

Some late reviews and I am DETERMINED to get to 50 this year even if I have to stay in bed reading for the next 2 days .

47. This Is Going To Hurt, by Adam Kay. I think I might be the last person in the world to read this so nothing much to add. I enjoyed it, it was funny, heartbreaking and infuriating about the state of the NHS. I know some people were upset by his tone and jokes sometimes, but to me it seemed very like the gallows humour I hear from medical staff and the other emergency services.

48. Octavia, by Jilly Cooper. I haven't read this for ages and had forgotten how… erm… retro some of the language is, but much more than that, how outdated the tone and how horribly sexist it is. I love the 'single name' Jilly Coopers but I don't think I'll revisit this one in a hurry, it's beyond even a period piece.

49. Leave The World Behind, by Rumaan Alam. Well this took a turn. I knew this was about a family in a holiday home who are joined by a couple who claim to own the house. I thought this would then be a domestic thriller but… NOPE. Hard to discuss without spoilers but this dissects race, class, the physical vs the cerebral, how we prepare for disaster and much more. Having said that it needed a thorough edit to cut it down and I found myself very frustrated by the end - although I have spoiler-y thoughts about why it was written that way.

So here are my bolded books / my stinkers and my stats:

My recommended reads - quite a lot - but reasonably high book count (89 so far):

A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Crooked Heart - Lissa Evans
Fingersmith - Sarah Waters
The Spy and the Traitor - Ben MacIntyre
A Song for Summer - Eva Ibbotson
The Offing - Benjamin Myers
Confusion - Elizabeth Jane Howard
American Dirt - Jeanine Cummins
Small Pleasures - Clare Chambers
Break In - Dick Francis
Bolt - Dick Francis
Regeneration - Pat Barker
The Girl with the Louding Voice - Abi Dare
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford
Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart
Bring up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel
Hungry - Grace Dent
Casting Off - Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Mirror and the Light - Hilary Mantel
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid
Leave the World Behind - Rumaan Alam
Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In the House of Brede - Rumer Godden
The Only Plane in the Sky - Garrett M Graff
A Bit of a Stretch - Chris Atkins

If I had to do a top 5 it would be:

Hungry
Shuggie Bain
Americanah
In the House of Brede
The Only Plane in the Sky

Don’t waste your time:
House of Trelawney - Hannah Rothschild
Box 88 - Charles Cummings
To Calais in Ordinary Time - James Meek
Alternative Li(v)es - Arnie Arnstein

Female authors : 60%
Fiction / non-fiction : 93% fiction and 7% non-fiction
Real books / kindle : 32% books and 68% kindle

A woeful classic count this year and a lot of comfort reads.

Ooh I forgot one!

90. Happy Endings, Adele Geras

It's possible that some of you may remember me posting on the "help me find this book" threads about an 80s teen book I had read about being in a play. I had forgotten a lot of the key facts that would have helped me to track it down (the play in question is Chekov's Three Sisters, it's a UK teen book not an American one) but I chanced across it when I saw the cover of another book from the series and remembered the thrill that I used to get in the library when I spotted a new title with the brightly coloured jackets (see photo!). A bit of searching later and I finally had a copy of my half-remembered teen read.

What had stuck with me for 30 years, despite forgetting a lot of the details about the story, was the emotions that the book inspired - wistfulness, possibility, the giddy intimacy of being in a stage production, the simultaneous realisations that one part of life is coming to an end while another is just opening up in front of you. This is a light touch teen book with gossip, snogging, awkward 80s slang and worry over outfits, but Geras makes clever use of the play (both its text and its themes) to give her story real depth and impact.

I've done my stats, but still need to tinker with the bolds for my final list. I've included the two books I will finish today and tomorrow.

Total 221 books
Female authors 85%
Fiction 80%
BAME 12%
Audiobooks 86%

I find it interesting to compare to the previous years to see if I have hit my reading goals.

2021/2020/2019

Total 221/300/202
Female 85/83/68 %
Fiction 80/87/90 %
BAME 12/19/13 %
Audiobooks 86/94/70 %

This year I wanted to read more women, more non-fiction and more classics. I also wanted to decrease the amount of audiobooks.

My classic tally is woeful this year. I need to try to add more next year.

Permanent I was so very sorry to read about your DH, and also those on the thread who have suffered similar losses.

Probably my last two reviews for 2021 below. I am currently reading Mrs Death Misses Death but unlikely to finish it before the end of tomorrow.

I've read some really good books this year. Below are my bolds (fiction then non-fiction). I can't decide on my top book of the year; it would be between Nomadland, My Rock 'n' Roll Friend and Findings - all brilliant.

Bricks and Mortar, Helen Ashton
A Spell of Winter, Helen Dunmore
The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue
Redhead by the Side of the Road, Anne Tyler
Love After Love, Ingrid Persaud
Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid
Spring, Ali Smith
Shadowplay, Joseph O'Connor
Three Hours, Rosamund Lupton
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell
Throw Me to the Wolves, Patrick McGuinness

Stasiland, Anna Funder
Findings, Kathleen Jamie
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caroline Fraser
My Rock 'n' Roll Friend, Tracey Thorn
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Jessica Bruder
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, John Carreyrou
One of Them, Musa Okwonga

88. Come Again, Robert Webb

Kate has recently lost her husband, Luke, to a tumour which has, unbeknownst to him, been growing in his brain since he was a boy. Broken by grief, she falls asleep one night after too much booze only to wake up in the past - in the early 90s, in university halls, on the day she met Luke for the first time. Will she be able to let him know about the tumour and somehow save him from his fate?

This was OK. I came for the depiction of early 90s student life, and enjoyed that (poster sales! cheap cider! paying for everything by cheque!). Webb's emotional intelligence is not as clear here as it was in How Not to Be a Boy, but he finds a good balance between romanticism and pragmatism which takes the plot in a different direction to the one I had expected initially.

The ending, sadly, is not great and feels like the ending from a different book bolted on (goodbye grief, melancholy, nostalgia, hello car chases and spies). I was just finishing this while we were discussing chick lit and it struck me how a not-brilliant book by a bloke about a woman and her husband gets described as "hilarious, brilliantly plotted", a "comedy thriller, a "wistful science-fictional romance", "well paced, nicely written and highly entertaining" - I'm not sure that female writers get given so much space to be mediocre in?

89. Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo

Comfort read which delivered. I didn't make huge efforts to follow the finer details of the plot which involves the (real life) secret societies at Yale actually being up to their elbows in magic, necromancy, and murder. At times it was all a bit confusing, and I didn't really bother to learn which society was which, and what sort of magic they specialised in. And that was OK - I was still able to engross myself in the escapist mix of Secret History (ivy league students, misfits, loyalties and secrets) and Harry Potter (protagonist from unhappy childhood discovers that they are actually Very Very Important and Powerful in a magic way, gets inducted into brilliant world of spells, libraries that read your mind, portals that travel through space etc) plus gritty social issues and more than a hint of romance (Bardugo has done the Twilight/Discovery of Witches thing here and taken sex between the main characters firmly off the table while hinting at it like mad to create a nicely simmering erotic undertone). I can't deny that there were times when it all got a bit silly, but generally this was a successful, engrossing, guilty pleasure.

Think I am finished for the year. Here is my list :

1. The Gift of Rain – Tan Twan Eng
2. Such A Fun Age – Kiley Reid
3. Pine – Francine Toon
4. Small Island – Andrea Levy
5. Motherwell- Deborah Orr
6. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
7. Adam Bede – George Eliot
8. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong
9. Troy – Stephen Fry
10. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me – Kate Clanchy
11. Sovereign – CJ Sansom
12. Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
13. Half Of A Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
14. Revelation – CJ Sansom
15. His Bloody Project – Graeme Macrae Burnet
16. Wives and Daughters – Elizabeth Gaskell
17. Girl – Edna O’Brien
18. A Promised Land- Barack Obama
19. Shuggie Bain – Douglas Stuart
20. How Not To Be Wrong – James O’Brien
21. A Glasgow Gang Observed – James Patrick
22. The Folded Earth – Anuradha Roy
23. The Mysterious Affair at Styles – Agatha Christie
24. The Artful Dickens- John Mullan
25. Black Tudors – Miranda Kaufmann
26. The Spirit Level- Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
27. The Pull of the Stars – Emma Donoghue
28. Poverty Safari – Darren McGarvey
29. We Should All Be Feminists – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
30. Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd – Jonas Jonasson
31. Behold, America – Sarah Churchwell
32. Elizabethans – Andrew Marr
33. The Courage to Care – Christie Watson
34. How To Be A Tudor – Ruth Goodman
35. Murder On The Links – Agatha Christie
36. The Authority Gap – Mary Ann Sieghart
37. Purple Hibiscus- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
38. The Miseducation of Evie Epworth- Matson Taylor
39. Moonflower Murders – Anthony Horowitz
40. Gang Leader for a Day – Sudhir Venkatesh
41. Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s – Alwyn W Turner
42. Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
43. The Great Godden – Meg Rossoff
44. The Appeal – Janice Hallett
45. The Burning Girls – CJ Tudor
46. Heartstone –CJ Sansom
47. The Survivors- Jane Harper
48. Scoff – Pen Vogler
49. The Haunting of Alma Fielding- Kate Summerscale
50. Stigma – Imogen Tyler
51. The Inner Level – Wilkinson and Pickett
52. Toxic Childhood – Sue Palmer
53. The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England – Ian Mortimer
54. A Scandinavian Christmas
55. The Christmas Murder Game- Alexandra Benedict
56. Unwell Women – Elinor Cleghorn
57. Little Dorrit – Charles Dickens

58% fiction
57% female.

97. Underbelly by Anna Whitehouse
    An easy fairly predictable read about two women who live their lives via Instagram. The social media commentary was fun.

98. Mrs March by Virginia Feito
    A women who is married to a famous authors live and mind unravel. I very much enjoyed the start and end of this novel but unfortunately the middle section dragged because Mrs March is quite a boring person to spend time with (I can deal with her being unlikeable but not boring) the mundane of her life and thoughts ahhhhhh

99. People from my Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami translated by Ted Goosen
    This really is an unusual one. It’s a tiny book of about 110 pages and is made up of about 50 short stories (all being about two pages long) about the narrator’s neighbourhood where there is a lot of magic realism. Its taken me ages to read this because I tended to only read a couple of stories before I went to bed but as the book went on I ended up recognising all the reoccurring characters (of which there are many) and ended up very much loving this.

I'm currently finishing Everything Under by Daisy Johnson which will make it an even 100 - its been many years since I've read that many in a year.

I'm loving all this interesting data! Mine is:

Books read 50 (just!)
Fiction 90%
Women writers 46%
I can't really give a breakdown of audio / hard copy / e-books as I tend to read them all jumbled together (i.e I'll listen to a bit of an audiobook in the car and then read a bit of the e-book later).

Best reads:
A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
Our Man in Havana - Graham Greene
Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart
And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 - Sue Townsend

64. A Time to Keep Silence - Patrick Leigh Fermor

I think this will be my last finish of 2021, a short collection of three essays describing PLF's visits to monastic communities of different traditions. The bulk of the book describes his stays at Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys in France, which have very different rules, architecture and lifestyles. The Benedictine order is the closest to how I imagined monastic life to be, with the monks rising at 5am, spending hours each day at prayer and the rest working, studying and in private prayer. The life of the Cistercian community, at least when Leigh Fermor stayed with them in the 1950s, is brutal by comparison, the monks rising at 1am or 2am, sleeping in dormitories on straw mattresses laid on wood planks, and communicating in their own sign language. The monks spend almost all their waking hours at communal prayer, sometimes in total darkness, or working in the fields to support the community.

The final essay describes a visit to the Byzantine churches of Cappadocia, which PLF finds unmoving compared to the churches of Northern Europe. I found that surprising given his extensive travels in Greece and surrounding areas.

This was fairly hard going for such a short book but I learned something new and I'm glad to have read it.

I have the Lauren Groff book on my Kindle and I also really want to read Cathedral by Ben Hopkins, but after this one and The Professor and the Parson I'm all churched out for now.

Are We Having Fun Yet? by Lucy Mangan

This is written in diary style from the POV of a harassed working mum, juggling work, children, husband and friends. This was funny and I did enjoy reading it, but equally I felt I had read it all before. All the usual stereotypes are there - crap boss, useless husband, queen bee PTA mums etc. There was nothing new there. Also, this didn’t really have any plot - at the end Liz is in exactly the same position she was at the beginning and normally in these books there would have been some big event to add a bit of character or situation development. All in all a bit disappointing but still worth looking at if you want something funny to fill a few hours up.

50. You Have Arrived At Your Destination by Amor Towles

I'm closing 2021 with a short SF by the author of A Gentleman In Moscow. This started out as a fairly predictable exploration of the near-future when parents can choose not only the sex but also the major character traits of their offspring, watching short videos of what their lives might be like with a certain genetic makeup. I would have placed it in the meh category if it had stayed there, but it went further, into the prospective father's sudden insight into his own life and that of his wife's.

I recommend it, and not just to get to 50 books before tomorrow night. It was interested, insightful, and well-constructed. I will look into reading this author's other books.

Definitely my last book of 2021 now -

108: Slough House - Mick Herron

A pleasure to return to this gripping and entertaining series, although it broke my heart a bit too (others who've read it will probably understand where I'm coming from). I hope there's going to be another.....

I'm not going to post my final tally but will just note that my wheeze of alternating fiction and non-fiction worked well (apart from the fact that the non-fiction always took me much longer to read), so I feel content with an even 50:50 split at the end of the year. I'll definitely keep this going in the New Year.

Thanks to all for a marvellous, entertaining, endlessly interesting and fun thread, my favourite bit of MN.

Just had my morning meeting cancelled so have worked out a few year-end stats on my coffee break:

64% women authors
67% kindle ebooks
61% authors that I hadn't read before
72% fiction - I think previously my lists have been 80-90%fiction, so that's a change
14% BaME authors - I'd like to see this increase next year

I've just finished what will undoubtedly be my final book of the year as I have several others on the go but they will be for the 2022 thread.

23. Sunrise by the sea - Jenny Colgan A most delightful, charming and cosy read - which is just what I needed as an antidote to the harrowing On earth we're briefly gorgeous

Thank you all for your reading companionship once again this year. I have read much less than in previous years but really love the recommendations and general book chat on this thread.

I wanted to even up the numbers of male and female authors read and have read 45% of male authors compared to 26% last year. I also wanted to increase my number of non-fiction books and indeed 30% of my books were non-fiction this year. I fully intended to read more books in French this year but on that point I've failed dismally - so that will be my challenge for next year!

My favourite reads of the year in bold below, in no particular order:
To kill a mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Christmas Chronicles – Nigel Slater
Casting off – Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Shipping News – Annie Proulx
Prodigal Summer – Barbara Kingsolver
The world I fell out of – Melanie Reid
Olive, again – Elizabeth Strout

I managed to finish off a final book (thanks, menopausal insomnia) - Matrix, by Lauren Groff. I have a sense it was not loved on here but can't remember why. I found it rather soothing and absorbing. I do love a good story about nuns and while this didn't have enough Church skullduggery for my liking it did hit the "detailed accounts of animal husbandry and weird medical practices" buttons. I was guilty of skimming in places but all in all it was time well spends

I haven't worked out quite the data that some of you have for my reads of 2021 but I'm pleased with what I've read. 107 books - will probably end up 108 - and a real mix. I've read fewer comfort reads and more racially diverse writers. I read quite a bit of YA at the start of the year to keep Dd1 company in lockdown but have stopped that now, Twilight was a step too far for me! I've started and not finished quite a bit of non fiction so that's a growth area for me.

Books of the year:
Mermaid of the Black Conch - Monique Roffey
Small Pleasures - Clare Chambers
Nothing But Blue Sky - Kathleen McMahon
Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart
Sorrow and Bliss - Meg Mason
Great Circle - Maggie Shipstead
Winter - Ali Smith
The only plane in the sky -Garrett Graff
YA BOTY The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas
Honourable mention for Piranesi which I actually read at the end of last year but still think about now.