50 Book Challenge 2014

[juneybean]

Hopefully nobody minds me starting this thread.

The idea is to read 50 books in 2014 (or more as many people have achieved this year!)

Please also check out our group on Goodreads if you're stuck for ideas of what books to read!

www.goodreads.com/group/show/59438-the-book-vipers

juneybean what did you make of The Reluctant Fundamentalist? I really enjoyed it when I read it a couple of years ago. Would love a reread but lent it to someone and never got it back.

Book 1 The Secret Keeper, Kate Morton. Enjoyed it but guessed the ending which was a bit disappointing.
Book 2 - Gone Girl,. Gillian Flynn - really enjoyable.
Book 3 - Inferno, Dan Brown - the travelogue/fact throwing got a bit tedious but I really like the twist at the end.
Book 4 - Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief - read this with the kids then finished by myself as wanted to get to the end quicker than they did!
Book 5 - The Rabbit Back Literature Society - loved this and didn't expect to after hearing other people's opinions.
Book 6 - The Hobbit, Tolkien. A re-read and just love it.
Book 7 - Prisoner of Heaven - Carlos Ruis Zafon. Really loving it and now want to re-read the other two.
Book 8 - Pride and Prejudice - again a re-read but just as good for the billionth time.

reading rather than tv watching wih gusto this year and loving it!

Book 10: A Cat, a Hat and a Piece of String by Joanne Harris.

A collection of short stories which tend to the whimsical and slightly spooky in places. I do enjoy Joanne Harris' writing and the sense of magic she sometimes includes, although the woman narrating Cookie did rather creep me out.

ballroomblitz I enjoyed it! It was quite a different read to what I'm used to :)

mumslife I hated 'Oranges'. I found it rambling and self-indulgent. Hope your daughter enjoys it, though.

Love, love, love, 'Charlotte Sometimes.' Another one of my favourite comfort reads.

I haven't read, 'The Painted Garden' though I always look hopefully in charity shops for it.

Just finished Book 16, another favourite comfort read - Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster.

I've now got a book about Nile exploration, a book about rhetoric, and 'Pure' waiting for me, so things are likely to slow down again for a week or two!

1. Three Hands in the Fountain by Lindsey Davis

Book nine in the Marcus Didius Falco series. Falco is a private eye in Ancient Rome. I love him. Fortunately there are at least another five books in the series for me to enjoy.

I'd forgotten about this.

1. Abandoned by Meg Cabot. OK but a bit too Twilightish for av ten author who I usually admire a lot.

1. Ragnarok by A S Byatt. I enjoyed this as I don't know a lot about Norse mythology and I think I might end up going back to these stories in a different form.

1. The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir. Very long - took the best part of January to read it, but really enjoyable. Loved all the historical detail.

1. Broken Homes - Ben Aaronovitch. Enjoyed it.

Another finished this morning
1.Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling
2.Mad About the Boy - Helen Fielding
3.Tangled Lives –Hilary Boyd

1. I Am Pilgrim - Terry Hayes

Really enjoyed I Am Pilgrim once I got into it. It's a thriller/ worldwide terrorism which kept me really gripped.

1. Player One – Douglas Coupland, a fairly happy ending for a DC book!
2. Wolf Cry – Julia Goldingm YF I like Julia Golding's books
3. Of Bees and Mist – Erick Setiawan, Different and enjoyable - a grown up fairytale
4. The Clan of the Cave Bear – Jean M. Auel, This was FANTASTIC!
5. Luke and Jon – Robert Williams , I enjoyed this

So far I've got

1. The Detectives Daughter - Lesley Thompson
2. Divergent - Veronica Roth
3. Insurgent - Veronica Roth
4. Amityville Horrible - Kelley Armstrong
5. Allegiant - Veronica Roth
6. Priceless - Shannon Meyer
7. Bloodfire - Helen Harper
8. A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
9. The Yorkshire Pudding Club - Milly Johnson

10. The Ice Queen - Alice Hoffman 11. Apple Tree Yard - Louise Doughty

I really, really enjoyed Apple Tree Yard. I stayed up really late reading it last night and finished it this morning while I was at the park with dd2. Bad mummy for not playing with her, and letting her run around screaming while I read my kindle.

1. The Husband's Secret - Liane Moriarty Really enjoyed it but it is nothing like the description on the blurb. The tone of the book is completely different.

11. Splinter, Sebastian Fitzer. All supporting characters one dimensional but kept me guessing to the end, a good thing for me as I can usually spot the endings or 'twists' a mile off and then I thought, Really? All that - was for that? Good enough idea for a story but the ending spoilt it.

Book 1 - the Crimson Petal and the White - Michel Faber
Book 2 - The Blackhouse - Peter May
Book 3 - The Universe Versus Alex Woods.
Book 4 - Mad About the Boy
Book 5 - My Life - David Jason
Book 6 - Paper Towns - John Green
Book 7 - We Are Water - Wally Lamb
Book 8 - American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
Book 9 - What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty
Book 10 - The Personal History of Rachel Dupree - AnnWeisgarber
Book 11 - The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng.

Exquisite. I live in Malaysia so lots of location and phrasing is familiar. Nevertheless, this is a beautiful, tight, heartbreaking novel of tradition, loyalty and human complexity.

10. The State we're in. - Adele Parkes 6/10 Not as good as some of her others

1. Haunting Christmas Tales -Joan Aitken (ed). Read with the DCs. Some very scary stories.

3.Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell? - Horace Greasley. Truly awful 4 Wonder- PJ Palacio With the DCs. We all loved it

1. The Painted House - John Grisham

(Not his usual legal stuff, it was about a boy growing up in 1950's Arkansas on a cotton farm - I really enjoyed it).

1. Penguin Great Journeys No.1 - Snakes with Wings & Gold-digging Ants - Herodotus

(I bought a set of 20 Great Journey books from the Book People a few years ago as I love travel books but I still haven't read them. This one was interesting but quite heavy going - glad they are short books!)

1. Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion. A re-read but I feel differently reading it again now I have children.
2. Grimm's fairy tales - very grim indeed. Much more gruesome than the Ladybird books (the princess in The Princess and The Frog is still a nasty drip though)
3. Alice In Wonderland - unlike the Didion book I feel that I understand this book less and less as I get older!

10. Priscilla: an Englishwoman in Wartime France by Nicholas Shakespeare - really interesting account of the author's morally ambiguous aunt and how the family's tradition of her potential heroism was probably inaccurate as she lived the high life in Paris with various black market Nazi "entrepeneurs". The author probably banged on too long about how none of us know what we would have done to survive in her place (it isn't hard to sympathise with the risks and hardship from which Priscilla tried to escape via her romantic attachments without having her nephew ram home the point for page after page.)

11. Pietr the Latvian - Georges Simenon - very evocative, quick read!

#6 Longbourn
Hmmmmm. I can't decide if I liked it or not. Felt a bit of a trudge to get through, yet I felt compelled to finish it.
I think I prefer the concept to the actual writing, I found myself rolling my eyes at the flowery stuff too often.

So in complete contrast to that, I'm now on #7 Monsters of Men, the third book in the Chaos Walking trilogy.

Am quite tempted by Pullman's new book of Grimm tales - is that the one you read, Lorna? The originals are v dark, and v good.

Don't think I can bring myself to read, 'Longbourne.' I read the first two pages in the bookshop and can't say the writing inspired me much.