50 Book Challenge 2016 Part Two

[southeastdweller]

Thread two of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2016, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, it's not too late to join, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

Previous 2016 thread here

Have finished Room by Emma Donoghue it was interesting to hear this story from the view of the child who had known nothing outside but I would have liked to know more about after. Trial etc but this isn't done probably as it isn't experienced by the child. Still a good read though and wanted to read before film is released

1. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides

First big read of the year and I really, really loved it - more than I have done any recent novel since Michael Chabon's Kavalier And Clay, which it reminded me of a little in its treatment of the American immigrant experience. Except this also deals with Greek history, incest, race, class, family, love, sexuality and hermaphroditism without being heavy-handed, worthy or boring, or going on too much about feeeelings (as Cote would put it). Highly recommended.

11. A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Loved it but I love all her books. I thought this was an amazing account of the bombing of Germany- really riveting, and a fascinating riff on how we experience events in many ways- once through experience and then in memory and the memories can mean different things at different times. I also loved that she had one character, a novelist, reviewed "Almost as good as Jodi Picuolt: Mumsnet"

7Thornyhold by Mary Stewart

I loved it. I cam see this becoming a "comfort read" for me. It's got nature-y magic, a hint of romance and a wonderful setting. It's a sort of late coming-of-age novel about a woman who inherits her mother's mysterious cousin's house and begins to find herself.

Meg - I've not read Middlesex yet but I really enjoyed The Virgin Suicides and the Marriage Plot. Eugenides is a wonderful writer. I look forward to reading Middlesex once I've got through a few more of my enormous TBR pile.

Still slogging through Americanah.....

Oooh the Tanya Byron book, The making of a clinical psychologist , is £1.99 this morning! Think someone reviewed it up thread ? Have snapped it up

William Gibson's the peripheral is 99p... Have yet to read neuromancer, feel I should read that first for some reason!

It was me who recommended the Tanya Byron book - hope you enjoy it!

13. Crossing Places Elly Griffiths. I needed an easy read and this fitted the bill perfectly- it was pacy, engaging and had lots of interesting literary and archaeological references while focussing on the main character, Ruth who I Found quite intriguing. The ending was somewhat disappointing but then I find that the case with most whodunnits.

I love Thornyhold, Tenar! Have you read any other Mary Stewarts?

Hope nobody minds if i join....

Am on book 3 of this year which is quite slow for me but i blame work for stealing my evenings! Currently not really reading anything to difficult and like my crime thrillers so expect a lot on my lists.

1. Speaking in Bones - Kathy Reichs. Usual temperance brennan story with usual will they wont they and lots of sciency stuff. I love it but wouldn't recommend people read this one first as there's a lot of stuff that isn't mentioned in the book.

1. Career in Evil - Robert Galbraith. Already been reviewed by many. Good page turning story although it was slow at points, it did give an extra side to characters as well. Personally the ending bugged me and i can foresee already what will happen next book.Took me a while to get through more due to lack of time.

Just started The woman who walked in Sunshine - Alexander McCall Smith.

For those of you with kindles, are you signed up to Bookbub? It emails with daily deals in genres you're interested in so might be useful for spotting the next read.

Welcome eitak22 - I have the latest Galbraith on my 'to read' pile as DH finished it 2 days ago and now I can steal it, but as it's a bloody great hardback, I need to finish a book ready to start again over a weekend so I don't have a lot of time of lugging it around making my handbag heavy or having to be out and about without something to read (usually read on the kindle)

Book 15
Sherlock Holmes: The Spirit Box by George Mann
This was okay, but not as good as the previous Holmes one of his that I read on the rec of somebody on MN (sorry – have forgotten who). It unites Holmes and Watson with Newbury of Mann’s steampunk novels, which works surprisingly well in theory, but the problem was in the execution – I just didn’t think there was sufficient depth or content for a novel, so it all felt a bit sparse and unsatisfying. He also stole an entire idea wholesale from Doyle, which I thought was lazy. On the whole, it wasn’t a disaster but I didn’t love it.

No, not read any other Mary Stewart, TooExtra, but I'm going to soon, or at least once I've made my way through all the other books that seem to accumulate around the house and on my kindle. I've been looking up her other books and I'm definitely going to read Moonspinners at some point.

Not Quite Nice, by Celia Imrie is currently just 99p on Kindle. It's a comic, chick lit novel about ex-pats in France and was one of the most entertaining books I read last year.

Meg - I loved Middlesex, and I say that as someone with no interest in family sagas and the like. It was well-written, with some fantastic prose. Historical fiction aspect of it was interesting, too, the one part or the other of the family lives through various world events like post-WWI breakdown of the Ottoman Empire, social unrest in Detroit, the fight for gay rights in California, etc. It was quite a ride.

I did have a problem with the part of the book where Calliope's grandparents got caught in war, before they left for the US in a French boat. The author's description of events was very biased and lacked in research imho. No mention of Greek army's three-year brutal occupation, but oh such heartbreak over Turkish army fighting them off in the end. Err... If you don't want to fight the nasty Turks, maybe don't invade and occupy their land? And if you didn't want to mess with the multi-ethnic harmony of the city, maybe don't try to annex it to Greece? Dunno, just an idea.

The book as a whole was fantastic, though. I remember one part where Cal is on a double-date of sorts with the girl he loves and her brother who looks like her. While high on weed, he imagines/feels that he is in the skin of the boy who is on top of the girl he loves. The writing there was sheer brilliance.

10. Going Corporate: A Geek's Guide by Shailendra Kadre. Meh, read for semi-professional interest. This book aims to guide technical people into management by the route of IT Project Management. I've been in the corporate world for much of my career, and read this to see if it had anything new to say. It didn't.

11. South: The Story of Shackleton's 1914-1917 Exhibition by Ernest Shackleton. Brilliant actually, much better than I was expecting. It's of its time of course: not as "cinematic" as if the tale were being told today; and hardships and setbacks are described in a very understated, stiff-upper-lip kind of way. The things these men went through though! It's very poignant that some of the expedition, having survived years ice-bound in the Antarctic, sailed small boats through hurricanes, and trekked for hundreds of miles over ice and through snow, all the time having no knowledge of what had been happening in WW1, then returned to "civilisation", joined up fighting regiments and were killed in the last year of the war.

12. Under the Dome by Stephen King. I stopped reading SK about fifteen years ago (having read everything up to that point). This book was a gift that I've been carrying around with me for an age. It's okay, it's certainly comfortable - not the story, but the way it's told - and felt very like The Stand. "Big canvas" King if you like, loads of characters and an epic struggle. Oddly, at the beginning the experience of the townspeople trapped under the glass is not that different to that of Shackleton's crew, trapped on an ice floe - both have a strictly limited set of horizons and have to make the best of it. Parts of this were beyond familiar i.e. they felt a bit recycled. Very interesting to read in the author's note that the first attempt at this story was written in 1976, not very far into his career at all. This has whetted my appetite to read some of the other SK novels that I've so far missed though :)

Loving the thread, obviously the "want to read" list keeps getting longer...

Book 9 A Death in Sweden by Kevin Wignall. It starts with a bus crashing and a man saves a teenager but in doing so dies. Then switches to the CIA executing private contractors that they used to undertake black ops. It was an entertaining read.
Book 10 Zombie's Bite by Karen Chance. This is a short story that introduces Dorinda Basarab.

Book 4 - The Virgin's Lover by Philippa Gregory. This was an easy treat read after reading the first three novels of Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time' series. The novel covers the relationship between Robert Dudley and Queen Elizabeth 1 and the implications this had both politically for the country and emotionally for his wife, Amy Dudley. The strong connection between Elizabeth and her principal adviser, Sir William Cecil, features heavily. The Elizabeth in this novel is the younger more vulnerable ruler rather than the fearless dominant force we are often presented with. An enjoyable read - not as gripping as 'The Other Boleyn Girl' though.

Book 5 - The Tea Planter's Wife' by Dinah Jefferies. The novel describes how Gwen Hooper, 19 and newly married, arrives in colonial Ceylon to start her married life with her older husband, Laurence, living on the tea plantation his family have owned and run for a number of generations. Gwen struggles to settle as her Laurence in Ceylon is not the easy-going man she had met and fell in love with in England. Shocking secrets on both sides and unwelcome interference from Laurence's sister complicate their married life. I liked the descriptions of colonial Ceylon life and understand a number of the political incidents reported in the novel are based on real life events. There is a lot of discussion in the book about the cultural differences between the sinahlese and tamil workers and the upper class English colonial life. Again a fairly light read and I found myself racing through the book.

Posting so as to have this on threads I'm on again. In the middle of 2 books, but not making much headway with either. Sigh.

*4. Chasing The Dead by Tim Weaver
*
Debut novel by the author. A thriller about a newspaper journalist who becomes a private investigator following the death of his wife. Really good. The plot twisted and turned and I was pleased I didn't guess the ending until I got to it. It's the first in a series so I will look forward to reading some more later in the year.

1. Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

I loved the magic realism of this novel, about a girl, Tita, who is forced to remain single and care for her mother, and watch the love of her life marry her sister. In fact I loved almost everything about the book except the man Tita loves, so the book wasn't quite perfect for me, but could have been.

1. The Ghost Fields -Elly Griffiths, one of the Dr Ruth Galloway forensic archaeology series. I love these books. Not too challenging when you want something not brainhurty (my brain is still aching from Cryptonomicon) and I really like Ruth as a character. They are written in the present tense which usually irritates me no end but it suits these books.

Thanks tumbletumble and wiltingfast for recommending the Tanya Byron-I bought it yesterday too, sounds just up my street.

I really liked the Tanya Byron book The Skeleton Cupboard when I read it. She gives a really good insight into life as a psychologist. A good companion read, which I found fascinating also, was The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz, who is a psychoanalyst.

Have just finished 6. Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg. Not much to add to previous reviews except to say that it narked me somewhat that amongst all this going on about balancing work and family she casually mentions that she fires up her laptop again once kids are in bed, can't take a full vacation or weekend, etc. I don't want that kind of life even if I have mostly got what I want in career negotiations, and I felt she undid her good points in one fell swoop.

Have already started reading 7. Thrive by Arianna Huffington (in similar vein to Sandberg but more about sleep, wellbeing, mindfulness etc) and listening to 8. Victoria: A Life by A.N. Wilson (biography of Queen Victoria).