50 Book Challenge 2017 Part Three

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the third thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2017, 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.

The first thread of the year is here and the second one here.

Bloody hell, Best. HOW have you read so many??? Am in awe!

I dunno Remus, I am normally way behind you. Mostly taking refuge in crap hiding from Trump and Brexit I think. I've read 5 Agatha Christies this year and they only take a few hours really.

Fair enough! I think Age of Wonder slowed me down a bit, and I also haven't done much reading over the last couple of weeks, as I've been feeling a bit brain dead - maybe Agatha C is the answer!

Think I might have a recount though just in case. I'm really enjoying the Agatha C's though. Haven't really read them since I was a teenager.

Sadik, I really enjoyed reading Wishful Drinking a few weeks ago - hope you do too. I bought Postcards from the Edge last week when that was also on the 99p Kindle Daily Sale.

Just checked and I was at 26 this time last year, so am definitely on a go slow. Finding it harder and harder to find anything that appeals (or at least that I haven't already read!).

Thanks, have got wishful drinking - I enjoyed Postcards From the Edge last year, that is a novel so interested to see the memoir.

The Language of Jane Austen turned up from Abe books today, for about two pounds, thanks for the recommendation, remus.

Oh, sad I missed Postcards from the Edge - remember enjoying the film a lot years ago.

I've now got an embarrasment of books as I had to go to the optician in our county town & realised I could go into the library there. So I've filed Wishful Drinking for when they have to go back and am now reading Faulks on Fiction, with The Essex Serpent, On Liberty by Shami Chakrabarti and Being Mortal queued up for afterwards :) Enjoying Faulks on Fiction so far (had a suitably nice wait in the opticians to get it started).

I was only on 16 this time last year (Stasiland) so I must have miscounted somewhere along the line.

Satsuki - Hope you enjoy it. I thought it was excellent.

Have compiled my list and there is a lot of lighter stuff on there and some very short reads. I've also remembered that Cote got me to read Cryptonomicon and the Turing biography last year which took about a month each. Both excellent but challenging.

1. Grayson Perry - Playing to the Gallery
2. The Emperor of All Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee
3. The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins
4. Ready Player One -Ernest Cline
5. The Essex Serpent
6. The year of Living Danishly - Helen Russell
7. Misery - Stephen King

8. Night Waking - Sarah Moss 9. Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland - Sarah Moss 10. A Cotswold Killing - Rebecca Tope 11. End of The World Running Club - Adrian J Walker - DIRE 12. Funny Girl - Nick Hornby 13. Mockingjay 14. Slade House - David Mitchell 15. The Mirror Crack'd - Agatha Christie 16. Bridget Jones' Baby 17. Truly, Madly, Deeply - Liane Moriarty 18. Where'd You Go, Bernadette - Maria Semple 19. Lord of The Flies -William Golding 20. Death On The Nile - Agatha Christie 21. The Tidal Zone - Sarah Moss 22. Murder on the Orient Express -Agatha Christie 23 News From Berlin - Otto de Kat. 24. The Little Seaside Kitchen - Jenny Colgan 25. His Bloody Project - Graeme Macrae Burnett 26. Ghosts of Everest 27. To Kill A Mockingbird -Harper Lee 28 A Caribbean Mystery - Agatha Christie 29 Forensics - The Anatomy of Crime -Val McDermid

My word you chaps are powering through.

I am on Ready Player One and I confess that it has been a slow burn. I am enjoying it very much now and t is properly tickling my geeky bone but at the beginning I was a bit .

Bought a shed ton of cheap thrillers from amazon the other day as well as I am slowing down and feel I need to revert to type to speed me back up again and get the juices flowing.

It's taken me annhour to catch up with where I left this thread! I have refused to note any recommendations at all today as my to read pile is too big!

8. Love You Dead by Peter James. A Roy Grace detective story- number 12 I think of his Brighton based series. I quite enjoyed the first few, got half way through the sixth or seventh and just gave up- too wooden, too formulaic- but this one wasn't too bad, and I do like a British detective story as a change from all the Jack Reacher types I read!

11. Raven Black Ann Cleeves And another recommendation from here - thankyou. I have already read more varied stuff this year so far than I did in the whole of last year - and I thought I was doing well last year!! My first encounter with Ann Cleeves - and it was good. Just what I needed....

A murder mystery from the cold bleak Shetlands. I've got a stinking cold so read this from under my duvet in a couple of sittings. An atmosphere to rival any scandi-drama.... I enjoyed it - it rattled along with believable characters who had no need for off the wall exaggerated flaws - though there is interest and depth and I will read more to see how the characters develop. I haven't seen the spin off TV series but prefer to read my murder mysteries. There were clues to whodunnit but it was well written and unfolded with suspense ....good!

And I probably cant count it as 'read'- but I watched Spotlight after seeing it recommended here too. Well - what can I say. Real life investigative journalism at its best. Gritty, determined doggedness won out at the end of the day.

And I'm keeping my eyes straight ahead so that I dont pick up any more for my tbr pile. The Jane Austen is £22 for the kindle version on amazon at the moment!!

Carrie Fisher next maybe.....

16: The Way of Wyrd by Brian Bates. This is half-novel, half-historical imagining of Anglo-Saxon shamanic sorcery. The author is an ex-university professor who has extensively researched the shamanic culture in Middle Earth. So it's a bit clunkily written (he's no novelist) and is also, if like me you are a hardened sceptic, rather unbelievable. I mean, I believe there were Anglo-Saxon shamans and that they believed in the things in the book and carried out spells and so on, but I don't believe that it really worked. But interesting and a really long bibliography at the back for anyone interested in researching it further.

12. Weavers by Aric Davis This was an impulse 99p offer, and a quick read, so I'm not going to be too hard on it. The concept is that a few people have telekinetic powers. They vary from person to person, but those that keep their powers into adulthood often turn bad due to the pressures. There is also a US agency who wants to round these folk up and put their powers to work. It opens with a girl in Dachau in 1945, then jumps to 1999 and a girl discovering her powers, and a young man who has already gone to the bad side. It was well written but I have two big issues with it. So much gore and unnecessarily high body count; we get that he's gone bad, enough. And from about 70% the threads of the characters were really coming together, it was working up to a good conclusion, and it just stopped. I presume to allow for a sequel, but the lack of ending was a big disappointment.

Yay! New book by Neal Stephenson is coming out in June

Museum - I read & reviewed Aric Davis's A Good And Useful Hurt on a 50-Book thread back in 2014. It had some interesting sub-plots (serial killer, tattoo parlor, tattoos made with a dead person's ashes, etc) but ultimately didn't go anywhere. It seems a common problem in his books.

"I've also remembered that Cote got me to read Cryptonomicon and the Turing biography last year which took about a month each. Both excellent but challenging."

Part of my cunning plan to slow down you fast-readers

Catching up a bit - again...

Book 9 the food of love' by Amanda Prowse. A MN giveaway. The first I'd read by this author. Covers the topic of a mother dealing with her daughter's battle with anorexia. I thought it dealt well with the initial denial and the fallout and effect on the rest of the family as a lot of attention was focused on the younger daughter. The style was a bit light in parts but it was well-researched. Some other reviewers felt that not enough was written from the younger daughter's perspective but I felt that was intentional as the novel
was showing the effect of 'anorexia arriving' into a household on family life.

Book 10 The Woman Who Went to Bed For a Year - Sue Townsend i really enjoyed this book. Tempting as it is to take the odd afternoon off Eva takes this to full extremes and literally spends a year in bed. Again it is interesting to see how this affects other family members in her life.

Books 11 and 12 are Mansfield Park and Jilly Cooper's Wicked! both on the go due to forgetting a book on half term break.

16. Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata
Goodreads describes this as “a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan” but I would describe this more as "man faffs about with Geisha’s in the mountains and nothing really happens”.

17. Perfume: The Story of a Murder – Patrick Suskind
The idea of this book is clever and unusual; that of a man who navigates the world primarily by smell. I also thought this was an extremely well written novel, set in 18th century France, but I was not compelled to pick it up – probably because the character of Grenouille is just so (deliberately) unlikeable. So good, but also somehow not good. I think I am the only person left alive on the planet to have never read this.

18. My Heart and Other Black Holes – Jasmine Warga
YA book about suicidal teens which sounds awful but I loved this. However, I am partial to a good bit of YA. It was only 99p on Amazon and worth every penny. For fans of YA only as it is very YA-ish. You know what I mean.

19. The Examined Life – Stephen Grosz
The psychoanalyst looks back over some of his cases and describes his patients and the outcomes. I really enjoyed this and found it to be an interesting insight into both the process of psychoanalysis and some of the outcomes of treatment.

Well I have slowed right down and for that I can only blame Sapiens and My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante that I am reading at the same time.

It's got to the point with Sapiens that I am reading 10-20 or so pages a night but it still feels a chore. I am disappointed so far with My Brilliant Friend. I have coveted it for ages and just assumed I would love it. I'm sticking with it in the hope that, like the Cazalet books, something will just click and I will be enthralled and on fire to read the remaining three in the quartet. I know life is too short to read books you don't like but I feel strongly that I need to stick with these two to the bitter end martyr.

I enjoyed the Elena Ferrante books but felt that they do suffer a bit from 'translater-ese'. No spoilers...... They feel rather stilted quite often. The guy who translated Karl Ove Knausgård was pretty good apart from the speech which just wasn't right. People constantly saying stuff like "How long have you been going out with her by the way?" There must be some particle in Norwegian that represents 'by the way' which just isn't directly translatable.

I've read the first two Elena Ferrante books and enjoyed them but they are so slow moving and detailed that I am basically reading one a year!
So I'll be on to number 3 sometime in 2017...

7 The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul by Douglas Adams.
Hadn't read one of his books since I was a teenager and had this sitting on a shelf having picked it up somewhere or other secondhand. A Dirk Gently book I mostly enjoyed it. I enjoyed the surreal style and his turn of phrase, for example regarding one author a character says, "I don't know why I still read his books. It's perfectly clear that his editor doesn't." I couldn't help thinking of this thread! The plot was a great idea but it felt like Adams ran out of steam and rushed the conclusion. It also irked me that the FTSE quoting girl appeared to have just been abandoned by the protagonists. I was really disappointed so next I read:

8 Only You can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett. Another secondhand 50p purchase. This is definitely a children's book but written by one of my favourite authors. So my contribution to the children's book debate would be that a choldren's book from a loved author beats and adult book that's badly executed! Interesting central concept but it's the children themselves and the considerations of war in real life that are the best parts. Manages to convey things to the reader without talking down to them or feeling like moralising. It sadly solidified for me what I felt about The Shepherd's Crown as well; for a Pratchett book it felt like less than it should of been but I feel churlish for that because the fact is the author was dying! Would recommend it for any DCs, just get them to read briefly about the Gulf War and Stormin' Norman first or they will be seriously confused!

9 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie. Love a good Christie, doesn't hurt that I hear Joan Hickson as Miss Marple when I read it. Amused by the idea that the two boys were allowed to see the corpse. "AIBU To object to Police showing DS and his friend a weeks old dead body?" Surprisingly gentle murder story as per usual but with Miss Marple sending in someone else to find evidence of the murder her friend witnessed. Thoroughly enjoyed it.