50 Book Challenge 2018 Part Eight

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the eighth (and probably final) thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2018, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, it’s not too late to and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.The lurkers among you are also very welcome to come out of the woodwork and share with us what you've read!

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

How have you got on this year?

[RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie]

And I think pretty much everybody but me liked that silly astronaut and his potatoes. More child-man in a spacesuit than rugged, but would fit the 'Not what the Daily Mail would imagine MNers reading' sort of vibe.

[BestIsWest]

And Ready Player One

[RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie]

Yes to Ready Player One.

Touching the Void would probably be another one, but those of us who would read that sort of thing probably read it long before these threads began!

[SatsukiKusakabe]

I didn’t think Ready Player One was all that great but it was ok. Likewise Martian.

[PepeLePew]

Loved all of these! And Touching the Void is one of the few books I’ve reread and reread. Perhaps I’ll give Meg a go, on the basis of this.

[VittysCardigan]

Despite having seen The Meg twice at the cinema (very disappointed that at no stage did Jason Statham punch a shark) i have bought it on kindle. Thanks for the excellent review Scribbly

[cheminotte]

Impressed by people posting lists of 100+ . I think you must spend a lot less time on Mumsnet than me!
Currently at about book 35 so unlikely to make 50 what with job, kids and errrr Mumsnet.

Most recent:
31. Simply irresistible- romcom
32. Les joyaux du paradise by Donna Leon. Not her usual characters but still set in Venice. Ok, good ending
33. Why I’m no longer talking to white people... - recommended on here loads so I finally borrowed from library and was not disappointed
34. A trick of the dark by Val Mc Dermid - my new favourite author, only discovered this year and have read about four or five of her books
35. The postmistress - really good book set in 1941 in London, Cape Cod and wartorn Europe.

[noodlezoodle]

Absolutely loving this conversation about The Meg, which sounds wonderfully bonkers.

@ChessieFL I have just started reading Panic Room. I'm on chapter three and I'm already a nervous wreck!

[ChessieFL]

[southeastdweller]

46. Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn. A newspaper reporter in contemporary Chicago is asked by her editor to return to her hometown in Missouri to write a story on the murders of two preteen girls. When she returns, she finds herself dealing with her demons and her dysfunctional and estranged family who continue to screw with her head.
    
    This was one of the best thrillers I've read for ages, mainly because the main character is written so well. With all the domestic/psychological noir books I've read that have come in the wake of Gone Girl, the authors are incapable or unwilling to plumb the depths of the dark and ugly sides of their main characters, but not Flynn, and her books are much better for it (though not read Dark Places yet). The story is absorbing and the imagery sparingly used and always effective. This is only £2 on Amazon, btw, and £3 in branches of Fopp. A really impressive debut novel.

[exexpat]

I've been reading lots but am very behind on reviews. Here's my list to date, with brief reviews of the last few to catch up. Highlights (and most recent) in bold:

1. The Dark Flood Rises - Margaret Drabble

1. The Loved One - Evelyn Waugh
   

3. The Middlepause - Marina Benjamin

1. The Wall Jumper - Peter Schneider
   
2. The Gustav Sonata - Rose Tremain
   
3. First Love - Gwendoline Riley
   
4. The Furthest Station - Ben Aaronovitch
   
5. Quiet - Susan Cain
   
6. Death and the Penguin - Andrey Kurkov
   

10. The War on Women - Sue Lloyd Roberts
11. Harmless Like You - Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
12. Selfish People - Lucy English
13.How to Stop Time - Matt Haig
14. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
15. The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
16. The Vanishing Box - Elly Griffiths
17. Rosalie Blum - Camille Jourdy
18. Addlands - Tom Bullough
19. Saplings - Noel Streatfeild
20. Butterflies in November - Audur Ava Olafsdottir
21. All Passion Spent - Vita Sackville-West
22. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler
23. The Cherry Blossom Murder - Fran Pickering
24. Venetia - Georgette Heyer
25. I Feel Bad About My Neck - Nora Ephron
26. The Keeper of Lost Things - Ruth Hogan
27. The Miniaturist - Jessie Burton
28. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
29. Black and British: A Forgotten History - David Olusoga
30. Shadow Dance - Angela Carter
31. The Descent of Man - Grayson Perry
32. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
33. Cousins - Salley Vickers
34. Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk - Kathleen Rooney
35. Flaneuse - Lauren Elkin
36. August is a Wicked Month - Edna O'Brien
37. Miss Mole - EH Young
38. I Contain Multitudes - Ed Yong
39. Starter for Ten - David Nicholls
40. You Don't Know Me - Imran Mahmood
41. In The Light Of What We Know - Zia Hayder Rahman
42. Mirror, Shoulder, Signal - Dorthe Nors
42.5 I Murdered My Library - Linda Grant
43. We Have Always Lived In The Castle - Shirley Jackson
44. The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas
45. Blaming - Elizabeth Taylor
46. Bonjour Tristesse - Francoise Sagan
47. Happy - Derren Brown
48. Travellers In The Third Reich - Julia Boyd
49. Night Letters - Robert Dessaix
50. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
51. The Ginger Tree - Oswald Wynd
52. Under the Tump - Oliver Balch
53. The Reading Party - Fenella Gentleman
54. Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders
55. Why I Am No Longer Talking To White People About Race - Reni Eddo Lodge
56. The Awakening - Kate Chopin
57. The 7th Function of Language - Laurent Binet
58. The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes
59. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - Gail Honeyman
60. The Lonely City - Olivia Laing
61. In the Darkroom - Susan Faludi
62. Hotel Iris - Yoko Ogawa
63. The Librarian - Salley Vickers
64. The Devil's Mask - Christopher Wakling

65. Ghost Wall - Sarah Moss
Latest novella by author of Night Waking, Bodies of Light etc. I am a big fan of hers, and this was up to her usual standard. Teenage girl is dragged along by her abusive, domineering father to spend a couple of weeks with a group living an iron age re-enactment in Northumberland. I find Moss is very good at writing teenage girls/young women.

66. Out of Time - Miranda Sawyer
Another addition to the mid-life crisis genre, by a music journalist who spent a lot of her 20s and 30s fully immersed in the music and rave scene, but is now a middle-aged, married mother of two and wondering how she got there and what she is doing with the rest of her life. I had a very different experience of the 90s but could still empathise with the 'how did I get here?' side of things.

67. Often I Am Happy - Jens Christian Grondahl
Written as a long letter/series of letters by one woman to her best friend, who died 30 years earlier in a skiing accident with the first woman's husband, with whom she was having an affair; thirty years later, the first woman has just been widowed for a second time - she married her best friend's widower. Life, relationships, grief, dealing with adult children etc in Copenhagen. Thoughtful.

68. Mrs Dalloway - Virgina Woolf
Classic, which I am sure I read as a teenager, but it makes an awful lot more sense now that I am the same age as Mrs Dalloway.

69. My Cleaner - Maggie Gee
Ageing middle-class English writer summons her old cleaner/mother's help back from Uganda to help when her adult son is in the throes of depression. A few too many stereotypes for my liking, and the plot was fairly predictable but still a good and eventually uplifting read.

[exexpat]

Just scanning the thread so far and seeing some other Barbara Kingsolver fans - has anyone got/read her new one Unsheltered yet? It came out this week.

www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/books/review/barbara-kingsolver-unsheltered.html

She is one of the few authors I love enough to find it hard waiting for the paperback to come out, but I haven't succumbed yet.

[cheminotte]

Ooh I love her too exexpat , thanks for the tip.

[Indigosalt]

exexpat I have ordered Unsheltered from the library. Had a quick browse through it on display in Foyles and it looks good. Hoping I don't have to wait too long!

[SatsukiKusakabe]

Saw it in the shop today - too many books I want to read currently in hardback. However have got Shardlake and Melmoth by Sarah Perry.

Currently reading Milkman on Kindle and delighted with it so far, quarter way through. Clever and funny.

[Terpsichore]

Mention of Barbara Kingsolver reminds me how much I enjoyed her first novel, The Bean Trees, and its sequel, Pigs in Heaven. Well worth seeking out for anyone who hasn't come across them.

[AliasGrape]

Thank you for the new thread south

51. Conversations With Friends Sally Rooney
@Wildernesstips said above that’s she like this she just wasn’t sure why.
I’m kind of the same, I read it thinking that the narrator and her friends were all quite tedious hipsters, super impressed with their own intellect and just generally very unlikeable. The drama all felt really low stakes and not worth the pages of navel gazing. The narrator in particular took herself so hugely seriously and reacted to fairly mundane events as though she endured such hardship, and yet did absolutely nothing to improve her situation and made really odd decisions that seemed to be based on nothing more than wanting to look cool. Although she was very young and I found it completely believable she’d be that way. I kind of hated it but also found it well written and funny in parts and I wanted to know what happened (not very much!)

My list so far:

1. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief - Rick Riordan
   
2. Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders
   
3. The Ice Princess - Camilla Läckberg
   
4. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine- Gail Honeyman
   
5. The Silkworm - Robert Galbraith
   
6. The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
   
7. Career of Evil - Robert Galbraith
   
8. The Wicked Boy - Kate Summerscale
   
9. The Wonder - Emma Donoghue
   

10. Just One Damned Thing After Another (The Chronicles of St Mary’s) - Jodi Taylor
11. Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn
12. The Shadow of the Sun - Ryszard Kapuściński
13. Everything I never told you- Celeste Ng
14. The Wee Free Men - Terry Pratchett
15. The Minority Report - Philip K Dick
16. Old Rose and Silver - Myrtle Reed
17. David Copperfield- Charles Dickens
18. Early One Morning - Virginia Baily
19. Money for Nothing - PG Wodehouse
20. All for Love - Dan Jacobson
21. Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon - Jane Austen
22. The Heist - Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg
23. 84 Charing Cross Road - Helene Hanff
24. Bridget Jones’ Baby - Helen Fielding
25. Swimming Lessons - Clare Fuller
26. The Inside-Out Revolution: The Only Thing You Need to Know to Change Your Life Forever - Michael Neill
27. Snow Falling on Cedars - David Guterson
28. The Lesser Bohemians -Eimear McBride
29. Brooklyn - Colm Tóibín
30. A Reunion of Ghosts - Judith Claire Mitchell
31. A View of the World: Selected Writings - Norman Mitchell
32. The Woman in Cabin 10 - Ruth Ware
33. April Lady - Georgette Heyer
34. I’ll give you the sun - Jandy Nelson
35. Little Fires Everywhere- Celeste Ng
36. The Beauty Myth - Naomi Wolf
37. Circe - Madeleine Miller
38. Guilt - Amanda Robson
39. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz
40. Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
41. Sleeping with Dogs: A Peripheral Autobiography- Brian Sewell
42. The Boys in the Boat - Daniel James Brown
43. Our Spoons Came From Woolworths- Barbara Comyns
44. Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People About Race- Reni Eddo-Lodge
45. The Penelopiad - Margaret Atwood
46. Winter - Ali Smith
47. Burial Rites - Hannah Kent
48. These Broken Stars - Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner
49. The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
50. Oranges are not the only fruit- Jeanette Winterson
51. Conversations with friends - Sally Rooney

[PepeLePew]

110 Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan
This was picked up at a branch of Smiths in a code red book emergency - had gone out without my Kindle and needed something to read. As such things go it wasn’t at all bad - Kate is a QC passionate about prosecuting sex offenders and James is a junior Tory minister accused of rape. While the ending left a lot to be desired I really enjoyed her depiction of life at Oxford in the early 90s, which was spot on, as was the extraordinary entitlement - to women, to bad behaviour and to success - of many of the men there. And the links to #MeToo made it a timely read, although implausible to think that in 2017 you could get through a book about government without any mention of Brexit.

111 Emperor of all Maladies by Siddharta Mukherjee
This is billed as a “biography of cancer”, which doesn’t do it justice. It was absolutely fascinating - Mukherjee is an oncologist but also writes beautifully about our relationship with cancer, death and medicine. I learned enormous amounts about clinical trials, evidence and gene therapy without ever feeling I was reading a text book. I would recommend this without hesitation to anyone with even a vague interest in the subject or science writing in general.

Now, onto The Meg. I have high hopes after chapter two, and am currently curled up on a sofa in a Welsh cottage hoping the children will ignore me for another couple of hours :-)

[Annandale]

32. Front Row by Beryl Bainbridge A symptom of feeling daunted by big novels and seeking out an easy read - yes it was easy, but not very satisfying. A collection of Bainbridge's theatre reviews for The Oldie from 1990 to the 2000s. Marked by frequent complaints about where and when she can't smoke. I did like her undimmed passion for live performance and her deadpan writing style. Made me want to go to the theatre.

[MuseumOfHam]

54. Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan This was the long escapist saga I thought I wanted. It was OK. I wanted to just go with the flow and enjoy it but the clunky and clichéd writing kept jolting me out of it. I'll give it a bonus point though for the title describing what it's about. I like that. None of this Behind the Scenes at the Museum that doesn't even have a museum in it.

[virginqueen]

Hi All
I'll post my list soon, but just have a few to add.

45. The Last Hours - Minette Walters
This is set during the plague and follows the efforts of the lady of the manor to keep her tenants safe, while also introducing some socialist ideas and challenging the feudal system.
Lots of interesting characters, and information about life in those days. This is the first of a trilogy, so I look forward to the next one.

46. The Mandibles - Lionel Shriver
Set about 20 years in the future, this looks at how people cope when the dollar starts to fall. Some original ideas but I felt the ending was a bit drawn out. I also find her books overlong.

47. Paper Ghosts - Julia Haeberlin
I read her first book, Black eyed Susans , and thought it would make a great film. This one is the same. A good thriller in which the sister of someone who was murdered years ago kidnaps the murderer from an old people's home.

48. The One - John Marrs
Another good thriller. People can find their exact match, the one, through a simple DNA test. This can make relationships - or break existing ones.

My reading has got behind as I've been busy with my daughter's wedding. It was wonderful by the way. Nothing went wrong, which is surely some kind of record !

[virginqueen]

I can never get my list looking neat, like everyone else's. Don't know what I'm doing wrong🤐

[nowanearlyNicemum]

36. Three wishes - Liane Moriarty
Set in Sydney, Australia, this is a story of triplets, their complicated relationships with each other - and those around them. Very quick and easy read, just what I needed. Quite amusing in places.

[ChessieFL]

171. The Rotters’ Club by Jonathan Coe
     
     Coming of age story set in the 1970s. It was ok - a bit amusing but not laugh out loud as the blurb suggests.
     
     
172. Dissolution by C J Sansom
     
     First in the Shardlake series which I know is well loved on here. This was a bit slow to start but improved a lot in the second half. The historical detail really made the scene come alive for me. I didn’t absolutely love it but I enjoyed it enough to try the next couple in the series.

[YesILikeItToo]

I need a bit of help with The Overstory by Richard Powers. I want to know if Patricia’s research is based on the current real understanding of tree science or if it’s a bit science fiction or alternate? Anyone read it who knows what I’m talking about? Or - if you’re a botanist, let me know!