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.

Muggle - What did you particularly enjoy?

Museum that is very pleasing regarding your perfect gender balance!

I won't be able to finish any more books this year, so I'm on 55 for 2016 (compared to 57 in 2015). But this year I am pleased with myself for reading more non-fiction than usual.

Here's my final list for the year:

1. Why be happy when you could be normal? by Jeanette Winterson
2. Skellig by David Almond
3. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
4. An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield
5. The Skeleton Cupboard by Tanya Byron
6. Wild by Cheryl Strayed
7. Fat Chance by Nick Spalding
8. The Exclusives by Rebecca Thornton
9. The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett

10. The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe 11. Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver 12. Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss 13. Romantic Outlaws: the Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon 14. Behind Closed Doors by BA Paris 15. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald 16. The Night Rainbow by Clair King 17. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood 18. Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges 19. Heat Wave by Penelope Lively 20. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness 21. Things We Have in Common by Tasha Kavanagh 22. Bitch in a Bonnet by Robert Rodi 23. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett 24. The Tent, the Bucket and Me by Emma Kennedy 25. All Fall Down by Jennifer Weiner 26. The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds 27. Shakespeare by Bill Bryson 28. A Year of Being Single by Fiona Collins 29. Travelling to Infinity by Jane Hawking 30. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 31. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy 32. Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Marukami 33. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers 34. The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge 35. The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett 36. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas 37. Black Water by Louise Doughty 38. Outline by Rachel Cusk 39. Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller 40. An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks 41. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante 42. Born to Run by Christopher McDougall 43. I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh 44. Life Moves Pretty Fast by Hadley Freeman 45. Families and How to Survive Them by Robin Skynner and John Cleese 46. After You by Jojo Moyes 47. The Hare With The Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal 48. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari 49. The Stranger in My Home by Adele Parks 50. The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin 51. A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold 52. Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth 53. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot 54. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra 55. This Charming Man by Marian Keyes

And my top five for the year are:

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
Why be happy when you could be normal? by Jeanette Winterson
Black Water by Louise Doughty

See you all on next year's thread!

Museum - You might find my review of I Am Pilgrim interesting

Enjoy This Thing Of Darkness. It is brilliant.

Welcome okkito and welcome back muggle

Hi all, I posted briefly back at the start of the year - I used to be a big reader years ago but had fallen out of the habit and wanted to get back to it. I didn't do brilliantly at the startof the year but did read a good few as the year went on, I don't have my list handy (it's on my work PC) but will post it next week if that's OK.
Most of the books I read are on the lighter end, I love crime and thrillers, but interested in trying other stuff too.
I just wanted to thank you all for the posts and discussions and recommendations, I've really enjoyed the threads and I promise I'll come out of lurker mode and post a bit next year!
I bought The Essex Serpent too so am interested to see whether I like it!

I'd just like to say thanks as well -as a lurker on this thread. I've enjoyed several books as a result of recommendations on this thread and will endeavour to post more on the 2017 thread.
I've set myself an ambitious target of 75 for next year (provided Audible counts!- I always have one on the go on Audible and one on kindle (and fairly often a real book too!)

Thanks, Tara! I was determined.

Satsukiand Stokey, I'm really curious to know how you'll find Swing Time. The book isn't cheap here, either, but I was lucky that mine was 40% off in a bookstore promotion. I ended up paying roughly £12 for my copy.

And hello to all the new and returning posters!

Have recently enjoyed His Bloody Project!

Other highlights if the year for me have been some of the psychological thrillers by Paula daly and Clare mackingtosh.

-nothing to envy
-the thread by Victoria hislop
-the secret history
-the goldfinch is my absolute favourite
-the little house by Philippa Gregory
-things we have in common by Tasha kavannah I raced through
-the snow child - would never have read if I hadn't seen it on here!
-every single Sabine currant book, particularly lie with me
-the lie tree
-the trouble with goats and sheep
-company of liars - would also never have read if I had t seen here
-rubbernecker- Belinda Bauer
-disclaimer
-hausfrau (loved this)
-the year of the runaways was my first book of the year and I enjoyed that

Next year I really want to read commonwealth, a place called winter and get into Sarah waters books. I own all the titles so no excuse! Also need to persevere with all the light we cannot see.

muggle it's taken me a while with All the Light, but halfway through now. It's so stop start that you need to give a good chunk of time to otherwise I find I just don't pick it up.

museum I might go and look at my gender balance now

35 out of 66 were written by men. Quite interesting because I would say my choices are quite random in that way.

Mine was 33 women, 22 men.

Only 4 out of 62 books I've read this year were written by women. I'm about to finish another one, which will make it 4 out of 63.

2/4 were non-fiction that I enjoyed: The Epigenetics Revolution & The Year Of Living Danishly

2/4 were fiction, one of which was awful (Dauhter Of The Winds) and the other so-so (Ancillary Justice).

Mine were 64 by women out of 112, so roughly even.

Interesting Sadik - I wouldn't say that mine is an even split, but it's actually a similar percentage to yours. (Mine is 60/40, yours is 57/43.)

Yeah, about that perfect balance thing. Your list Tara reminded me I have definitely read Wild by Cheryl Strayed this year, but have clearly forgotten to put it on my overall list. So I think I read 76 books with the women very slightly in the lead. Apologies for false gender balancing claims.

Cote interesting that you picked up all those errors in I Am Pilgrim but still thought it was a pretty good thriller. I know nothing about Turkey, but the wide range of subjects covered by the book included one I do know a lot about, and I noted errors of terminology, as well as the whole handling of the subject not ringing true. I decided to let it go, along with other improbable plot points, for the sake of entertainment. But how annoying that the author can clearly weave a complex plot together, but doesn't think his readers are worthy of a bit of research and fact checking.

I did not like the roles assigned to women of all races. I thought for the most part the attitudes to foreigners reflected the characters' attitudes, but I could not forgive the inclusion of the 'comedy foreign' character who spoke funny English. That he felt the need to include this sub-Enid-Blyton device to 'amuse' his readers suggests he doesn't think a lot of those readers.

Fair point, Tara - I reckon it wavered back and forth around the 50% mark through the year though (tend to have a run of one author) - and all the books I have lined up right now are by men.

Fair enough, Sadik. I would say mine is always weighted towards women, as it includes a few chick lit books and I read a bit of (mildly) feminist literature too.

Mine is almost exactly split 50/50 too which I also find very pleasing.

I have a few to update which I will do later but I suspect I haven't quite made the 100 I was hoping for this year.

"how annoying that the author can clearly weave a complex plot together, but doesn't think his readers are worthy of a bit of research and fact checking."

My thoughts exactly, Museum. I hate that sort of thing. If you are writing about a foreign city in a foreign country, it's not enough that you have maybe been there once on holiday. The manuscript must be checked by a local for errors.

In my previous book Mongoliad #2, it really jarred to see a Mongol overhearing someone say she rather he and understanding the woman was there or some such. There is no he/she in Mongolian, just like in Turkish, and there never was.

In another book about a near-future Istanbul, one character refers to the robot as "he" and the other says "Isn't it interesting that we tend to talk about robots as male?". No such conversation is possible in the Turkish language! You literally would not be able to say these sentences.

53. A Discovery of Witches (All Souls Trilogy, Book 1) by Deborah Harkness.
54. Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, Book 2) by Deborah Harkness.
55. The Book of Life (All Souls Trilogy, Book 3) by Deborah Harkness.

My last books of 2016 is a re-read of the All Souls Trilogy. Vampires, witches, demons and humans in intrigue, battle and love. Fabulous escapism and has cheered me up!

Very happy reaching over 50 books this year with my non-fiction picks much more engaging than the fiction. I wonder what 2017 will bring.. 📚📚

I received three books for Christmas:

1. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin.
2. Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter.
3. Tigana by Guy Gavriel Gay.

Out of the 55 books I have read this year 23 were written by women. Similar percentage to you two, Sadik and Tarahumara.

Book 132
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human cadavers by Mary Roach#A good book to end 2016 on, considering how many wonderful people have died this year (still sad about Alan Rickman). This is an informative, interesting and amusing, whilst not being irreverent, look at things that have been done, can be done or might ultimately be done, with dead people in the name of science and perhaps ultimately ecology. I enjoyed it immensely.

For my list, 32 out of a 132 were women, I think, based on a v quick tot-up.

And my last book of the year is.....

63. A book about ultramarathon running by Someone I Know

Sorry about the secrecy but I fear being outed big time if I write about it publicly on here..

I loved this book. It is a sincere and quite surprisingly emotional account of the author's journey from couch potato to doing double ultra marathons in several sleepless days & nights in the space of a few years. It is a cross between Born To Run and Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It goes into great detail about what it is like to scale steep mountains in the dead of night in some of the most hostile trail ultras like Western States 100 (miles) and Ultra Trail Mont Blanc, and the human stories interspersed in the book are just beautiful.

I would be happy to share details of this book by PM with those of you interested in it (I'm looking at you, Tarahumara )

Me please! Sounds right up dp's street.

47 male authors to 78 female (some novellas in that total).

4 non-fiction, which is a lot lower than the 25 I was aiming for.
Roald Dahl Going Solo
Atul Gawande The Checklist Manifesto
Henry Marsh Do No Harm
Benedict Carey How We Learn
(All male non-fiction, I did buy some books by female authors rec'd on this thread, so will prob go into 2017).

Probably last book of the year:
Genevieve Cogman The Burning Page
Third in the Invisible Library series - fantasy series much reviewed earlier in this thread. I enjoyed this - if you liked the earlier books this is much of the same.

I think women wrote 33 or 34 of the 50 books I read. My top 5 are:

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter
The Master by Colm Toibin

I'd like to up my essay reading this year; I already have Zadie Smith's and Siri Hustvedt's on the pile. Also, I'm going to read Middlemarch, probably a chapter or two a night.