50 Book Challenge 2017 Part Eight

[southeastdweller]

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

The first thread of the year is here, the second one here, the third thread here, the fourth one here, the fifth one here, the sixth one here, and the seventh one here.

How have you got on so far this year?

Hello everyone! Gosh it’s been a long time.

I am a bit sad a frustrated that I won’t make the 50 book target as I was doing so well. But I suppose giving birth to a human does divert one’s attention somewhat. On a very positive note, I shared my read list with my post-natal group and many books have been bought, borrowed etc. So I suppose I should be proud of that.

Anyway. I finished a book. And here is my updated list

1. The Muse - Jessie Burton

1. Gone Without a Trace - Mary Torjussen
2. Flesh Wounds - Christopher Brookmyre
3. Phantom: a Harry Hole Thriller - Jo Nesbo
4. Dead Simple (Roy Grace Series) - Peter James
5. All Good Deeds (A Lucy Kendall Thriller) - Stacy Green
6. The Turtle Boy - Kealan Patrick Burke

8. His Bloody Project - Graeme McRae

1. The Rosie Project - Graeme Simsion

10. The Last Day of Christmas: The Fall of Jack Parlabane (short story) - Christopher Brookmyre 11. Tales of Protection - Erik Fosnes Hansen 12. The Wall of Sky, The Wall of Eye - Jonathan Letham 13. Ready Player One - Ernest Cline 14. The Essex Serpent - Sarah Perry 15. Gallows View (inspector banks series) - Peter Robinson 16. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler 17. Dead Man's Prayer - Jackie Baldwin 18. As the Crow Flies - Damien Boyd 19. Head in the Sand - Damien Boyd 20. Kickback - Damien Boyd 21. Swansong - Damien Boyd 22. Dead Level - Damien Boyd 23. Death Sentence - Damien Boyd 24. The Cold Cold Ground - Adrian Mckinty 25. The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender - Leslye Walton 26. The Hanging Club - Tony Parsons 27. The Crow Trap - Ann Cleaves 28. Hurrah for Gin - Katie Kirby 29. The Outsider - Albert Camus 30. Stardust - Neil Gaiman

31. Telling Stories - Ann Cleaves

The first book I have finished in months thanks to the 4 month sleep regression/general bone tiredness.

I loved it. Weirdly as the second Vera book it was more like a first. We got more of Vera’s hidden character, her fears and anxieties which weren’t present in the first at all. The story was very compelling and I genuinely had no idea who done it until it was revealed. I will certainly keep reading this series as I found myself mulling over the plot in idle moments

Urgh. My post reads horribly. What I meant was that I was proud of my achievement reading so much and how grateful I was of this thead for the encouragement, enthusiasm and new ideas.

I got that Passme! I read virtually nothing for months when DD was first born, just couldn’t concentrate on anything longer than a magazine article.

I have the Matt Haig book on my wish list - doesn’t sound promising! I’ll still give it a go though as I’ve never read him before and I do like a bit of time travel etc. I’ll wait until it’s cheap though!

I read Dead Fathers Club many years ago and rather liked it. I must go back in the thread to work out what the chat is

40. Clouds of Witness Dorothy L Sayers Lovely comfort reread. Lord Peter has to clear his brother of murder. Exactly what I wanted - easy and a bit silly, (Peter's miraculously cured broken collarbone always strikes me as odd for an author who's so good at details), very satisfying. I'm very fond of early Sayers and silly-ass WImsey, and this was a perfect escape book.

65 (I think): The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe. Fabulous book!
It’s NYC in 1952 (it was written in the early 1950s and was considered rather risqué for its time...) and the book follows the lives of four young women in their early twenties as they navigate their first jobs, workplace politics, lecherous bosses, engagements/broken engagements/marriage/affairs and friendship. It’s like Mad Men but in print. (Indeed Don Draper is seen reading the book in one of his scenes!)

I managed about a page and a half of The Humans.

I love the sound of The Best Of Everything, EmGee. Will seek it out.

Do Best!

Matt Haig....the same who wrote The Boy called Christmas? Just started reading this with the DC.

61. Exposure by Helen Dunmore Nominally a spy story, set at the beginning of the cold war in London. The spy plot takes a back seat to conveying the domestic life and feel of the times, and really developing a few key characters and their relationships. Enjoyed this, and didn't guess where it was going. Felt it ended a touch too soon, going out on a dramatic high note at the expense of clearing up a few loose ends and saying what happened to the characters as a result.

62. Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt Hated this. Set in the kind of feudal hierarchical society (with trains of course) that allows male authors who (I imagine) are either scared of women, or haven't met many women, to assign them only to the roles they feel comfortable with, e.g. the mother, the temptress, the crone, while their childish male characters can get on with having a boys own adventure. Drivel along the same lines as that Jasper Fforde thing. This is slightly better written, with slightly less try hard wit, which unfortunately meant I actually finished this.

EmGee I read Haig's A Boy Called Christmas to my dds last year and this year they have asked for his next one (The Girl Who Saved Christmas iirc). It's all sorts of warm feelings, sentimental, happy ending, talking animals, aaaaawww that's nice, which they really loved, and I rather enjoyed reading to them. Perfect Christmas evening fodder. Little do they know I'm doing that first and then cracking on with The Dark Is Rising (inspired by MegBusset) which is somewhat less of the warm fuzzies

I follow Matt Haig on twitter and he comes across as a really lovely guy. He still suffers badly with depression and anxiety and yet battles daily with the most hideous trolling from people calling him a snowflake liberal and much worse etc etc. I don't know how he continues to post with all the abuse he gets. I'm going to stick to reading his children's book from now on though. He writes kindness well, I'm just not a big fan of overdone kindness in my adult book choices (although I can understand why people would want to read nice uplifting books).

A Boy Called Christmas is a genius concept for a book. Haven't read it, but I was given the sequel for Christmas last year and thought it was utter drivel. Sorry! I'm really, really not the target audience though.

125. Vanilla Ride, by Joe R Lansdale
East Texas crime noir, with lots of shoot-outs and comic dialogue. I read the first of the series around the time it came out in 1990, and this more recent instalment is as gleeful as ever. The violence is more graphic than I like (although he doesn't do gloating accounts of violence against female bodies that I hate - this is "I kicked him in the balls then shot him in the head" type of thing). The two central characters are a pair of buddies, the white narrator and his black, guy friend - their affection for each other is a big part of what makes this series appealing.

110: Footsteps in the Dark – Georgette Heyer
Heyer does ghost/adventure story. Loved this. It’s essentially Famous Five for grownups; it was very silly, very predictable, very snobbish and very good fun.

98 Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds by Cordelia Fine
Winner of this year's Royal Society Science book prize - an examination of the idea that gender dynamics are an inevitable result of biological sex differences, and specifically the influence of sex hormones.

A bit disappointed by this. I didn't feel it brought much new to the party over and above the same author's earlier book Delusions of Gender (which is excellent, and should be read by everyone).

I'm on holiday this week and reading as much as I can, but it's gradually dawning on me that I'm probably not going to make it to 50 books this year. I'm definitely not going to finish the full Goodreads 'category' challenge although I'm hoping to make it through the main part of the challenge (40 books, but some of what I've read so far doesn't fit a category).

My list so far and some recent updates:

1. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
2. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
3. A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy
4. The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Society
5. Our Kind of Traitor by John Le Carre
6. The Woman in Cabin Ten by Ruth Ware
7. Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler
8. The Martian by Andy Weir
9. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

10. Disrupted by Dan Lyons 11. The Trespasser by Tana French 12. We are Okay by Nina Lacour 13. Ides of April by Lindsay Davies 14. The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty 15. The Night Manager by John Le Carre 16. 111 Places in New Orleans That You Must Not Miss 17. Celine by Peter Heller 18. The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connolly 19. The Girls by Emma Cline 20. Last Breath by Robert Bryndza 21. Feminist Fight Club by Jessica Bennett 22. American Gods by Neil Gaiman 23. The River at Night by Erica Ferencik 24. In Farleigh Field by Rhys Bowen 25. The Hate U Give by Angie Thompson 26. Brushback, by Sara Paretsky 27. The Silence Between Breaths, by Cath Staincliffe 28. A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab 29. Perennials by Mandy Berman 30. 84, Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff 31. The Lost City of Z, by David Grann 32. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, by Sydney Padua 33. Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren 34. Good Kings, Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum

35. The Late Show, by Michael Connolly. I love his Harry Bosch books so I was excited to give this a go - new series with a woman detective as the protagonist. I enjoyed it, but her character wasn't really developed much - however I think I felt the same with the first few Bosch books so perhaps this will improve as we go. I'll certainly read the next one, if there is one.
36. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, by Samantha Irby. Memoir/essays, some of which I found really funny and some of which I found unbearably sad. Not a comfortable read but interesting.
37. The Power, by Naomi Alderman. Much reviewed already on this thread. I really enjoyed it, it moved along at a pretty fast clip and I'm still thinking about it a few days later.
38. Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan. Complete fluff. Mildly entertaining but far too long and much given to endless descriptions of lavish houses, couture fashion, etc. etc. I read this lying on a sunlounger and if I'd been at home I don't think I'd have bothered finishing it. Won't be hurrying to read any more in the series.
39. Dark Suits and Sad Songs, by Denzil Meyrick. One of his DCI Daley series - I really love these, extremely easy to read but very well plotted.

Did not finish - Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death and Jazz Chickens by Eddie Izzard. Borrowed this from the library for the 'audiobook' category of the Goodreads challenge. Couldn't get on with it at all. I think I was supposed to find all the rambling part of the charm. I most definitely did not. Still haven't managed to listen to an audiobook, think I'm going to fail on this category.

noodle, if you like David Attenborough, he reads his autobiography wonderfully as an audiobook - I can't imagine anyone wouldn't like it if they enjoy his work.

It's called Life on Air btw.

51. Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban

Not sure I can do justice to this haunting and unsettling novel but will give it a go. Part of the SF Masterworks series, it's set thousands of years in the future, in a post-apocalytic Kent which was the Ground Zero for a nuclear detonation which sent mankind back into the Iron Age. There's a loose kind of government which spreads its messages across scattered settlements through travelling puppet shows, and folk memories of lost technologies are mixed with remnants of Christian stories and older folk myths. The most astonishing thing about this book is the language it's written in - a kind of decayed English - which was clearly an influence on Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell says as much in his afterword to my edition.

Anyway, this is one of those books which makes most others seem really inconsequential, and I can't recommend it highly enough to fans of speculative fiction, dysopian fiction, David Mitchell, and anyone with an interest in what can be done with the English language.

Thank you Sadik, that's an excellent suggestion. I adore David Attenborough so I'll give that a go.

That book sounds right up my street, Meg

Riddley walker is amazing Cote, I doubt you'll be disappointed

an update from the slow readers' club. Work is insane at the moment and, shamefully, I'm A Celebrity is my trash TV weak spot, so I'm not getting much reading in. Anyway:

39. A Murder of Quality by John le Carre Stella Rode is a defiantly non-U misfit at the very establishment boarding school where her husband works. When she is found murdered, George Smiley is called in by an acquaintance of Stella's who knew Stella was in fear for her life.

A proper, old fashioned detective story, without a hint of espionage. Nicely structured whodunnit with the tension in all the right places.

Artemis Andy Weir

This is by the author of The Martian - it has the same attention to scientific detail but here it seems more integrated. I loved "the sciencey bits" in The Martian, but those who were put off by them should probably give this a go. No potatoes appear.

If what you didn't like about The Martian was the narrator's voice though - then it may not be the book for you. The narrator of this is a young woman living on a lunar colony, scraping by working as a porter & making a bit of money smuggling contraband (like cigars) on the side, and while she is a different character to the main character in The Martian, there are similarities in the voice/occasional crude humour.

Unlike the Martian, Jazz is not isolated but in the middle of the small society she grew up in, where everyone knows her, knows her dad (who she has argued with), remember all her teenage fuckups and remind her about them, etc.

It's essentially a caper story - fast moving, funny, and irreverent. I stayed up rather too late to finish it.

I didn't like Riddley Walker.