50 Book Challenge 2016 Part Seven

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the final thread 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, please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read, and to anyone who hasn't posted, feel free to de-lurk and share with us what you've read so far this year.

The first thread of 2016 is here, second thread here, third thread here, fourth thread here, fifth thread here and sixth thread here.

Congratulations Stitches! Welcome little baby Stitch

Aw congrats Stitches & welcome to baby Stitches

Congratulations stitches How lovely.

Cote - Honestly, bin the Sherlock Holmes Simmons. It really isn't worth the investment in time or energy. And Stalin may end up in the shredder too - my heart sinks every time I pick the damn thing up.

Book 122
Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Tales of Life and Death on the Neurology Ward by Allan Ropper and Brian Burrell
Not flawless, but an interesting read. A neurologist recounts various cases, much in the style of the ‘Do No Harm’ and ‘Being Mortal’ etc books. It was interesting. Occasionally I found the narrative voice a bit annoying and arrogant tosser-ish (a recent reading theme for me, sadly), but overall this was a heck of a lot better than the last two books I’ve read. Worth a look if you’re interested in the brain and how it works/doesn’t work but without too much in the way of brain hurty science.

Congratulations Stitches :)

Whoo hoo, well done stitches and welcome to baby ! Love baby news .

Sorry, Stitches - missed your post. Huge congratulations.

A new baby - yay! Congratulations Stitches

Neal Stephenson'a Anathem is £1.59 just for today! Brilliant book. Truly brainhurty. You'll love it

Welcome, baby Stitches!

Thanks all

Aww, congratulations Stitches and welcome baby Stitches. May you have many good years of reading ahead of you both

Now Anathem is the only neal Stephenson I didn't like. It really irritated me!

Just finished An awfully big adventure by Beryl Bainbridge. I'm not entirely sure about this one. It sort of grew on me but I found it hard to pin the characters down and a bit on the surface/substanceless. It was obviously deliberately written in that way and there were a few paragraphs and ideas that will stay with me. But the narrative arc was fairly obvious (even if the ending was infuriatingly opaque in some places and unnecessarily brutal in others), the characters not particularly likeable. In fact, I found it hard to differentiate between most of the theatre crowd apart from a couple of major characters. A bit hum drum for me and also I am sick to death of WWII/post war Britain. Bored to tears with this - it's such a lazy background to a novel. That criticism is less thrown at Bainbridge and more towards the boring booksellers and agents who churn out reams of the damn stuff every year STILL. Which makes it more difficult to pick through to find a good book about something different. Humph.

Off to finish the Dubliners.

How can you use a word like "irritated" about a book that has no "feelz" and is entirely about science?

Maybe that sort of thing is not for you?

Dunno. Just didn't get it. I even bought it in hardback as I was so excited to read it - which I rarely do. Actually, that reminds me that DH has just finished Snow Crash which is the only one of his I haven't read. Will pick that up at the weekend once I finish off Joyce (the Dubliners is okay, not finding it amazing but I went to college in Dublin so there is something enjoyable about revisiting the city in another age and comparing it to when you lived there and then again to when you last visited, like walking through time)

Having hit 100 books I thought I'd look back and see how many were physical books - it's 32. The rest have been read on my Kindle or read as electronic books from the public library via Overdrive on my Macbook.
I wonder if I love my Kindle too much? I fall asleep holding it most nights. Sorry DP.

Of the 100 I have read so far, 41 have been library books - either physical or electronic. So they have been mostly free, except when I forget and accrue fines, which is a lot. Geeky book facts alert!!!

Completed The Couple Next Door and I thoroughly enjoyed it! Did guess who was involved.

Now onto book 55
Small Great Things - Jodi Picoult
I've read every book by this author and I'm hooked on this one already!

I think roughly a third of mine have been physical books, perhaps less actually, and half have been from the library. I don't think I'd have fit in so much reading if it wasn't for my Kindle and kindle app. I think though that people who read a lot, generally read in all forms possible. I still buy books at charity shops, ask for books as presents, and use the library despite doing most of my reading on my Kindle. I am very excited that I'm getting an upgrade to a Paperwhite for Christmas from dh, so I expect to be even more attached, he knows not what he does

Lots of things have been getting in the way of me reading in the evenings this week and I'm getting a bit cranky.

Congratulations Stitch!

I fell off the thread back in February, so sorry for barging back in, but I want to try and make the 50 books next year so figure I should get back on track now.

I won't do it this year as I had a long hiatus over the summer where I read nothing and also got stuck on a couple of books. This is my list so far:

1. The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
2. Inshallah, Alys Einion
3. The King and the Slave, Tim Leach
4. The Taxidermist's Daughter, Kate Mosse
5. The Wild Places, Robert MacFarlane
6. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
7. The Red Notebook, Antoine Laurain
8. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Natasha Pulley
9. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

10. Ghostwritten, David Mitchell 11. The Miniaturist, Jesse Burton 12. Warrior Prince, Ian Skidmore 13.The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy 14. A Darker Domain, Val McDermid 15. The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, Nadia Sashimi 16. The Masked City, Genevieve Cogman 17. Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence 18.All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews 19. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson 20. About The Night, Anat Talshir 21. The Summer Book, Tove Jansson 22. The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood 23. Flowers of the Forest, Elizabeth Byrd 24. S.P.Q.R., Mary Beard 25. The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd 26. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides (reread) 27. A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel 28. Suite Française, Irene Nemirovsky 29. The North Water, Ian McGuire 30. The Separation, Dinah Jeffries 31. Things We Set On Fire, Deborah Reed 32. The Little Friend, Donna Tartt 33. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver 34. The Girl in the Spider's Web, David Lagercrantz 35. The Perfect Spy, John Le Carré 36. Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall 37. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury 38. A Little Life, Hanya Yanagigara, still reading

Thanks to whoever posted the tip about Anathem. I have read most of the older Neal Stephenson books and loved them but was put off buying Reamde when it was on offer by the negative reviews and then regretted it.

Books I have been putting off reading and hope to get to before the end of the year are Under the Skin, A Suitable Boy, and A Winter Book, plus I want to reread Into the Wild.

All of the books bar one have been on kindle. I live abroad and kindle purchases are much easier and quicker than international delivery.

Hmm, inspired by you Whippetwoman I've had a look at my list. I've got 121 books on it (though only counted 110 for my reading total as others multiple re-reads).

Of those:
41% are bought books,
24% physical books borrowed from the library,
15% free online reads (don't ask - I do then if they're any good buy future books by the same authors to salve my conscience),
11% audible,
7% library audio downloads
2% library ebook downloads.

For me the thing that has made a real difference to my reading is actually buying books that I fancy but can't get from the library. Mostly they've come from ebay / abebooks, and cost £2 - £3, so it really hasn't cost me that much, and it's rejuvenated my reading a lot.

However I have just entered the 21stC and bought a smartphone, so I shall see whether I find the screen comfortable for reading and if so try the kindle app & benefit from all the bargain books you lot link to :)

What did you think of Prisoners of Geography, AlteredImages? I've been looking at it but couldn't quite decide (apologies if you reviewed upthread & I missed it).

102. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Cote is right - this is complete tripe. I found Tolle rather more smug and superior in this than he appeared from A New Earth as well. Very irritating.

32 - Rosa's Gold, Ray Kingfisher. I bought this one after reading the sample, which felt familiar. Once I got it, I realised that it was because I had read another book by him a month or so ago. This story is about a man Mac and his experiences as a POW at Auschwitz. Its told through alternate chapters of going back to WW2 and the modern day reading of his memoirs by a 17yo girl who lives in his old house, (similar to the style of the Sugar Men). I did enjoy this, though enjoy seems the wrong sort of expression, because in parts some of the WW2 story is pretty harrowing. The modern story is a useful way of wrapping the story up, but fairly dull. I have to say I skimmed over some of those chapters, to get to the Ww2 ones. I feel like some of this will stay with me longer than other books I've read recently.

Nearly all the books I read are physical books from the library. You can borrow up to 20 books at a time, and I'm normally well up in the teens (including the odd guidebook and cooker book). I loooooove my library.