50 Book Challenge 2021 Part Eight

@PermanentTemporary, so sorry about your DH. And thank you for the spreadsheet.

I've made it to 46 and have a couple on the go but can't see me finishing 4 in 3 days!

46 Insertion by AJ Quinnell.
This was a pretty good premise and I enjoyed it, yet felt it could have been more. It's a Robin Cooky (medical crime one, not foreign secretary one) Alistair MacLeany, James Bondy sort of very readable hybrid with an interesting premise that didn't really get explored as much as the gung ho breaking into things and rescuing people bit. He could perhaps do with JK's editor going "I say AJ, what about adding another 280 pages here?"
An easy read and I'll probably pick up more of his.

Me too ChessieFL, I picked it up when it was a 99p Kindle deal. I'm waiting for a lazy poolside holiday to give it a fighting chance!

I have TTOD on my kindle but I’m a bit scared to read it as I don’t think it will be my thing and I don’t want to get kicked off the thread!!

I wouldn't say it gets much more cheerful, Ladybird. I'll still talk to you even if you give up.

Do I get summarily expelled if I DNF This Thing of Darkness? One-third in and it’s not really grabbing me. Does it pick up?

Sorry too @PermanentTemporary. I also had no idea that subject matter was covered in Morgan’s latest, I loved her first (was it really a decade ago!).

Looking forward to hearing peoples round ups. I’ve got some lovely reading time left this year so think I will hold fire.

So sorry about your DH, Perm.

Will be interested to see our communal hitlist.

I have read a personal record of 62 this year, thanks to lockdown and this thread (thank you!). Only one DNF which was "I Am Pilgrim" by Terry Hayes.
I have six favourites for your Excel sheet @PermanentTemporary. Looking forward to reading your list - thanks!
We Begin At the End - Chris Whitaker
Small Pleasures - Clare Chambers
This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor - Adam Kay
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
The Sealwoman's Gift - Sally Magnusson
The Cat and The City - Nick Bradley

Permanent I'm so sorry to hear about your dh and that he, and you yourself, were let down so badly by mental health services. It is a scandal and very worrying that mental health provision and support is in such a dire state.

I've only managed 36, but have read some great stuff this year.

Top 3 are:

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
Company of Liars by Karen Maitland

Brilliant Permanent - looking forward to it.

56. Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens

Will save my thoughts for the readalong, but overall I loved spending time in this book’s company! Definitely one of my highlights of the year.

Hopefully can polish off another book or two before the end of the year.

I don't usually clog up the beginning of every thread with do lists but as it's the end of the year, here's mine for the spreadsheet, with standouts bolded.

1. Broken Greek - Pete Paphides

1. London Belongs To Me - Norman Collins

1. I Wanna Be Yours - John Cooper Clarke

1. Piranesi - Susannah Clarke

1. Samuel Pepys - The Unequalled Self - Claire Tomalin

1. Every Man For Himself - Beryl Bainbridge

1. Exterminate All The Brutes - Sven Lindqvist

8 The Order Of Time - Carlo Rovelli

1. Journals - Keith Vaughan

10. Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese - Patrick Leigh Fermor

11. A Change Of Climate - Hilary Mantel

12. A Swim In The Pond In The Rain - George Saunders

13. Against The Grain - A Deep History Of The Earliest States - James C Scott

14. Digging Up Mother: A Love Story - Doug Stanhope

15. The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith

16. Motherwell - Deborah Orr

17. Dickens - Peter Ackroyd

18. Medical Grade Music - Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi

19. Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son - Gordon Burn

20. The Nation's Favourite - Simon Garfield

21. The Big Midweek: Life Inside The Fall - Steve Hanley

22. Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald

23. Just One More Thing: Stories From My Life - Peter Falk

24. In A Lonely Place - Dorothy B Hughes

25. The Evenings - Gérard Reve

26. Chernobyl Prayer - Svetlana Alexeivich

27. And Away - Bob Mortimer

28. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

29. Starlight - Stella Gibbons

30 Miracles Of Life - JG Ballard

31 Conundrum - Jan Morris

32 The Fortnight In September - RC Sherriff

33 Treacle Walker - Alan Garner

34 Betjeman's England - John Betjeman

35 The Expendable Man - Dorothy B Hughes

36 The Bookshop - Penelope Fitzgerald

37 Alone On The Ice - David Roberts

38 Archangel - Robert Harris

39 Scott's Last Voyage - Through the Antarctic Camera of Herbert Ponting - ed. Ann Savours

40 Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem - Peter Ackroyd

I use the end of year bolds to shape my hit list for next year.

Just to let others who may be doing something similar know - I've started a compilation spreadsheet of the books we've bolded in 2021. I'm only doing lists from this last thread, and I'm still on page 1, so it's going to take a while! I don't think there are big surprises on those being recommended by several people but I thought it might be satisfying to do anyway. Hope nobody minds. I'll post it when I get it done.

I need to get my list updated for the annual round up. We've got book club Xmas lunch tomorrow so that will motivate me to try to get it sorted in the morning.

I've got two I'm not sure I can count as they are podcasts/radio shows, but they are on Goodreads and were found via the library audiobook service.

Down the Line - Pam Ayres
A few of her shows and a bit of general chat. This was joyous. I listened while walking the dog round a very popular spot and was very aware I was laughing out loud and had a huge grin on my face. I was beaming. It's mostly very silly stuff but with her very acute observations. Worth a listen if you need cheering up.

Angela Carter: A BBC Radio Collection including The Bloody Chamber and part of Nights at the Circus as well as a script she'd written but not submitted that was found after her death. There was also an interview with her at the end which was recorded shortly before she died.
It was excellent. She was in heavily involved in the dramatisations of her work for radio and they were brilliantly done.

Tin Man - Sarah Winman after really enjoying Still Life I requested her other book from the library. This did not disappoint. It's about the intense childhood friendship between two boys in the 70s and what happens when their lives diverge in the 80s/90s when one decides to marry and the other is openly gay. She creates really interesting characters and writes beautifully. I would now buy anything she releases blurb unseen.

King Lear - William Shakespeare
A king splits his kingdom between his daughters to avoid potential war, but things don't go to plan as he slips into madness.
I wasn't that keen on this one and don't think I would rush to read it again.

Learwife - J.R. Thorp
The untold story of the wife of King Lear, noticeably absent from the work of Shakespeare. This starts with her 15 years into banishment in a convent. When she learns of the deaths of her husband and daughters, others stop her from leaving She mulls over events that lead up to her banishment, while dealing with a crisis within the Abbey itself.

This was a wonderful idea for a book and is beautifully written, but is self-indulgently long. There is no plot to speak of, it's all character driven and is very very slow burning. I think it helps to be at least familiar with the play before embarking on this. I'm hesitant to give it a star rating just yet as the length (12hrs40mins) was unnecessary and this is clouding my judgement.

I'm determined to finish Julie Bindel's Feminism for Women by the end of the year as I really don't like to carry books over (for no reason other than my own silliness). I'm 20% in and it's a call to arms if ever there was one. It's brilliant so far.

65. More Than a Woman by Caitlin Moran
This is a whole lot of fun to read. I don't necessarily think it's the answer to anything much but it has sparked some thoughts in my mind, for sure. One of the main ones is about the absolutely shredded state if the mental health services in this country, and wondering what the answer can possibly be. I'm not sure anyone has got the answer. There's a loud clear message from consultants that inpatient stays often don't fix anything, or even make things worse, or is that just because the inpatient services are so threadbare that they are simply places where at least a locked door can keep some of the predators out, and don't have anythingthat would be necessaryto be therapeutic? I lost my dh to suicide a couple of hours after he was assessed by the local service as low risk (actually the assessment was written as 'no risk' but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that that was a slip of the pen rather than a nonsense). There is a high rate of suicide in men and Moran does address that, though I don't know if I agree with her. Because, actually, until very recently suicide prevention in the UK was a bit of a success story. Sometimes the answers are very simple, but not the simple ones she goes for. Anyway. I enjoyed reading it. Thanks to her. Also I like to fantasise about sex with Pete Paphides.

Sod it, I'm abandoning The Ruin of Kasch.

Yes, that's one of them. There's also a series by Patricia Hall but her Bradfield isn't necessarily the same Bradfield as Val McDermid's one.

@elkiedee I'm also from Leeds hence my tongue in cheek teasing about Bradford, although Leeds is clearly the best city in Yorkshire I also enjoy regional settings, especially in Yorkshire, but the whole "he's bled for this city" thing was so frequent that I found it really off putting and coupled with the other cliches it ruined what was a decent enough idea. Is Bradfield the setting for the Wire in the Blood series?

I'm from the best city in Yorkshire - Leeds - but I have no problem with the idea of authors or characters with a connection with another city making a case for their place, and I do really like reading books with Yorkshire settings even if they're not ones I'm familiar with. I have a couple of favourite crime series set, separately, in a fictitious Yorkshire town called Bradfield which clearly has lots of references, including a council estate called Wuthering Heights.

But playing around with crime fiction tropes is also something I quite enjoy in the books I read.

@VikingNorthUtsire have you read Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead? We read it in book club last year and it was one of the highlights. I'd like to read her new one too but it's mammoth, also love the covers from that printing press.

106. The Toast of Time by Jodi Taylor

A festive (kinda) Chronicles of St Mary’s short story. Nothing much happened. Not one of her better efforts.

107. Streets of Darkness by A. A. Dhand

This is a detective story set in Bradford. Amidst racial tensions a prominent Asian citizen is murdered and Detective Harry Virdee needs to find the culprit before racial tensions can explode into race riots.

There’s the germ of a good story here, and some interesting characters, but it’s absolutely drowning in clichés. A chief five days from retirement. Dark pasts. A detective with anger issues, who has been suspended and so on. I also hated the fact that the only female characters are peripheral at best, either wives, or prostitutes or victims. However the most off-putting thing was the references to Bradford, trying to brand it as Gotham City...! I hate the entire “I love this city”, “This is my city” trope, you can just about pull it off if you are in NY, but Bradford?? I couldn't really take it seriously, I mean Bradford isn't even the best city in Yorkshire, hell it's not even the best city in West Yorkshire

Cluck cluck, Viking.

Forgot to mention I finished The Dark is Rising.. Hoping to finish The Ruin of Klasch before the end of the year, but I'm a bit... bewildered.

Biblio thank you for your passionate defence of chicken. All are welcome here

I am not quite ready to post my final reviews of 2021 but have just done some rough and ready totalling-up on my spreadsheet.

I will have read ~90 books this year
About 2/3 were written by women
About 3/4 of them were fiction
Only about 1/6 were written by authors who are not white (to the best of my knowledge)
About 1/2 of them were library books
About 2/3 were ebooks

I know I've been lazy in my reading this year, seeking out comfort reads and grabbing things from the library ebooks app which maybe weren't what I really wanted to read (but were easy to find). I think, looking at my list, that it's probably been a bit more varied than these numbers suggest. I might think about recording some other information about them next year (when they were written, whether they are books originally written in English etc)