50 Book Challenge 2020 Part One

[southeastdweller]

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

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2020, 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.

Who's in for this year?

I have started Good Omens last night.
It’s been on my TBR list for YEARS and I’ve put it off as I’m not a fan of Pratchett and the loss is all mine. It’s SO funny.

7 - the girl you left behind - Jojo Moyes

This one was slow to get started but when it got going really good with the stories mixing together

Do we count Little Women/Good Wives/Little Men etc as one book or more?

Best I'd count them as separate books...planning to read them soon but a couple to finish first. So many books, so little time!

Yay!
On no 3 already in that case ?

I'd like to join in please! I'd love to read 50 books this year and clear some of my TBR pile (which is more of a hoard) but Moby Dick and a couple of Robert McFarlane books are on there so I might not make it. I read 40 last year. So far I have read Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter and am 2/3 of the way through Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham. I haven't read the rest of the thread yet, sure I'll be adding plenty more books to my list when I have.

1. The Familiars - Stacey Halls

Early 1600s, a young rich woman engages a midwife who is then implicated in the Lancashire witch trials. She tries to help her while dealing with her own issues of a difficult pregnancy, an interfering mother and a disinterested husband.

Entertaining enough, decent pace and plot, but nothing to rave about.

1. The Hunting Party - Lucy Foley

this obviously needs no introduction. Multiple POV, with changing timeline. It's fine for this sort of thing, decent enough writing, drags out the mystery until the end. OK for a bit of mindless entertainment.

I need to get off the chewing gum novels chosen for popularity rather than quality. I always feel a bit left out with the more casual readers amongst my friends if I am not up to date with the latest bestseller in the supermarket type books, but there are too many 'meh' reads to my start of year. I had such grand plans! I am aware this makes me sound like a terrible snob, but like a few other of the high volume readers last year I want to read better rather than more.

I am still diligently plodding away with Frankenstein which is simply brilliant, but struggling with tiredness for print books at the moment as I am not sleeping at all well. The fact that she was 18 when she wrote it is making me feel very inadequate!

Best definitely 3 books!

I've been inspired by this thread to start my first audible book. I'm listening to Sapiens which I'm really enjoying. I don't get a lot of time where I can listen to books so might take me a while to get through!

Best I’d count Little Women etc as separate books.

I’m feeling a bit left out with The Hunting Party chat. I got it out from the library, was quite enjoying reading it and speculating about the identity of the victim and killer. And then I had to return it halfway through reading it because another library user had reserved it
An unfortunate hazard of using the library!

See I would count them as two because LW and GW are separate books in the UK but not in the US and they are US novels

Jo's Boys and Little Men definitely 2 though.

Stitches I hate it when that happens. It takes every fibre of my being not to send it back with a post-it tucked inside saying "he dies" whether he does or not.

stitches what's the penalty for returning a book late despite it being reserved by someone else? I plodded through a book just before Christmas and it was reserved and overdue. I am half embarrassed/half not embarrassed to say I just kept it till I was finished. I couldn't stop on Page 400 ( Children of Time if anyone's wondering. I had to find out if the spiders or humans won!)

Fortuna

Jane at my library the fines for overdue books are 22p a day, up to a maximum of £6.

More than I was willing to incur for The Hunting Party, I’m sure it’ll be back on the shelves sooner or later.

1. The Fishing Fleet by Anne de Courcy. Enjoyable nonfiction about the women who went or were sent to British India to marry. This can be taken as a history of almost incredible colonialist racism and privilege, but it focuses much more on a gossipy glimpse of a lost world. I have family connections with India so it was even more interesting.

3 was Outlander. Started terribly, if I hadnt heard so much praise for it I would have abandoned it. Really glad I didn't as it was absorbing - not sure if it was good but certainly enjoyable. Includes horrific rape and abuse though (that bit I obviously didnt enjoy!)

4 was Nurse On Call. Its billed as memories from a 1950s district nurse but it is more biographical than that - only a small part was to do with district nursing. A lot was about training which I found interesting and she is comfortable to read. There are some fairly shocking tales and one that had me openly weeping.

I'd say go for both - neither will take much brain power which may be what's wanted after the lofty times some of you are reading!

2. The Hunting Party – Lucy Foley

This has been much reviewed already, last year and on this thread so all I will say is that it was a pleasant enough, undemanding read ideal for this time of year. Worth the 99p on kindle deals.

First reads of the year now down the hatch. I've read 5 e-shorts in the "Six Tudor Wives" series - those which accompany or link to the first two novels/wives which is as far as I've got. They're each very short, but I'm tracking my reads via the Goodreads Challenge linked to my Kindle and it's automatically counting each as one book. I've increased my challenge total by 5 to make up for it - so now aiming for 45 books in the year including those.

First proper read:
1. I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death - Maggie O'Farrell - I absolutely devoured this, I love O'Farrell's writing style and the glimpses she gives of near-miss moments are amazing. She has a wonderful way of casting out from the main hook, weaving around it and then working her way back to the main narrative again which I find absolutely enthralling. Some of the stories moved me a great deal, especially those concerning parenthood. I've read two of hers before - The Hand That First Held Mine and This Must Be The Place, loved both and can see some of the links from her own life via this book. Must look out for others (when I get through my 100+ TBR pile that is...)

Also meant to say I'm rereading/relistening to Wolf Hall as well - I like to sync-read between Kindle and Audible for things I know will bear rereading. I tend more towards non-fiction for audiobooks in general though, find it difficult to keep a handle on plotlines in fiction when listening. I have a 40-mile round trip in the car 3 days a week which helps with this! Trying to get through this and Bring Up The Bodies in the same way before the final part of the trilogy is published in March. Pondering whether to pre-order the hardback...

Bit behind in my reading because I'm still on my Xmas travels and not getting as much me-time as usual, but finally finished 1. The Secrets of Blood and Bone - Rebecca Alexander, the second in an urban fantasy trilogy with an interesting twist on vampire folklore. In sixteenth century Venice, sorcerer Edward Kelley can't escape from the blood-drinking monster he has created in Elizabeth Bathory. Meanwhile in the present day, Jackdaw Hammond is troubled by her own sanguinary urges, and gets mixed up with new neighbours who are a bit on the wolfy side... Thoroughly enjoyable page-turner if you like this sort of thing, although the dialogue can be unintentionally hilarious (a serious relationship chat has the immortal line, 'We can work on this... This is possession.')

Now on to Little Women for book club. Very relieved to learn from this thread that I only have to read the first half of my edition as part two is actually Good Wives

Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver is certainly different from her other 2 books. But I am enjoying it, I grew up in The Fens, so it's a familiar setting.

Re: library books with readers' notes written in - the funniest I ever saw was The Mistress (Victoria Griffin), an account of the 'other woman' in history and literature with an autobiographical element. A reader (presumably a wronged wife) had scribbled her bitter sweary thoughts all over the end papers; the library had tippexed them out but she'd inscribed them with such venom they were still clearly legible.

1. Bookworm by Lucy Mangan. Much reviewed last year on here. Journalist Mangan’s memoir of childhood reading covers so many books similar to my own (Blyton, The Railway Children, Forever, Sweet Valley etc) and it’s so warm and nostalgic. I think enjoyment increases with the amount of cross over you have in your own reading. I’m younger and so felt the gaps of Jacqueline Wilson, Harry Potter and Animorphs. However, never have I felt a book speak to me so much in the ‘struggles’ a bookworm can face. The joys and pressure a bookworm’s children can face is touched upon and I found this particularly relatable.

I’d totally forgotten about Ralph in Forever and was cackling loudly at this section.

On the subject of notes left in library books, some crackers here:
www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/inside-the-minds-of-oxford-scholars-pictures-reveal-amusing-note/my-pizza/
My favourite being this in Mary Shelly's Frankenstein:

Easing myself into the new year with a couple of short YA books:
1. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaimen this was okay, some nice ideas and lovely illustrations from Chris Riddle. A toddler finds his way to the local graveyard on the night the rest of his family are brutally murdered. He is taken in and kept safe by the ghosts in the graveyard but the murderer is still out there looking for him.

2.	<strong>Holes</strong> by Louis Sachar, the palindrome-ly named Stanley Yelnats is sent to Camp Green Lake for a crime he didn't commit. Once there he, and the other inmates, are instructed to dig physically punishing five foot wide and five foot deep holes every day on the dry lake bed, reporting any interesting finds to the Warden. In tandem to Stanley's story the reader is told the historical story of his ancestors and the area around Green Lake. It's a very satisfying little book with an immensely satisfying tying up of all the loose ends at the end. 

Like many others I'm now reading The Hunting Party having picked it up cheaply on Audible and also finding it on BorrowBox as an ebook. I probably wouldn't have bothered if I'd read more recent reviews, but I'm 25% in now so ploughing on.