50 Book Challenge 2020 Part Two

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the second 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.

The first thread of the year is here.

What are you reading?

@MamaNewtNewt and @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie

If you are big Wilkie fans then Drood by Dan Simmons is a must, Wilkie is a main character in it and is consumed to an almost pathological degree by his professional jealousy towards Dickens

I thought it was brilliant

@VeniceBeach Fingersmith is one of my favourite books, I read it in one none stop sitting, couldn't put it down.

@FortunaMajor I took note of it because it made one of Barack Obama's recommended list. I will give it 100 pages and see how I get on but it's The Plot Against America next which several people on the thread have already prewarned me is a shocker 👀😱😭

So many years since I read Hitchhikers, but I loved it back in the day (and could probably still quote chunks if I tried ). I suspect it's one of those things where either it hits the sweet spot for you or just doesn't work. (A bit like Terry Pratchett - I really struggle with his style, despite the fact that in theory he ought to be spot on everything I like in an author.)

OT, but when dd started studying Further Maths, the Christmas set homework was - for any who hadn't already - to read the HHGTTG series.

I have just finished 10. The Chalk Man by C J Tudor.

I absolutely love this book. I didn’t want it to end. I found myself completely wrapped in the characters, not least because they are written to be roughly the same age as I am and so the references and context strike a real chord with me.

The story is expertly written and the twists and turns of the narrative are credible, engaging and gripping. I love the macabre dark side to the story which is creepy and unnerving without being gratuitously gory. This is a world of dangerous fairgrounds, brooding woodlands and musty churches: gothic without pastiche.

This is without a doubt my favourite read of the year so far.

I forgot to add, following on from some posts on this thread, that it reminded me of The Wasp Factory (which I really must read again because it has to be almost thirty years since the first time I did).

1. If you sit very still -Marian Partington

This is a book about grief written by one of the siblings of a victim of the West’s. As the victim of a very violent crime and having suffered a sudden and expected loss, I really really wanted to love this and have been meaning to read it for years but I couldn’t quite click with it. I found some of it very moving and particularly enjoyed sections. Other times I found her a bit holier than thou when she went on about homeopathy at several points (which I think is twaddle anyway) and meditation retreats in Nepal. It was readable enough but it’s been on my TBR list for so long I’d probably built it up too much.

Anyway. Next on the list is Nine Perfect Strangers

1. Grief Is The Thing With Feathers - Max Porter

I'm sure lots of you have read this but I hadn't got round to it until now. I loved the poetry of it - more of a prose poem than a novel really - and enjoyed how different it was, and how simple but moving.

7: Lady in Waiting by Anne Glenconner. Really fascinating book, although i can't help but feel she gave up a lot of her life in looking after others and catering to their whims - Princess Margaret, and Anne's eccentric, temperamental husband. Very interesting, funny and sad though - a good read!

Not much reading going on here but I am managing to keep up with all of your reading news! Just wanted to share these two beauties that I received for my birthday this week

Sister by Rosamund Lupton

I haven't seen many reviews for this book or author, but was given to me at Christmas. I really enjoyed it, it had me gripped from the start. It's difficult to say much withiut giving too much away, the reveal of what happened to the sister and who was involved didn't come as a suprise but I didn't see the twist coming until a page or two before it happened. I'm going to be looking out for more books by the author for some holiday reads.

I'm still sloooooooowly making my way through all of Barbara Pym's novels - slowly because I don't want to come to the end and be left with no more of these wonderful books to discover. But I have ticked another off the list:

16: Some Tame Gazelle - Barbara Pym

This was Pym's first book, written when she was in her 20s at Oxford, and not published until years later. Middle-aged sisters Harriet and Belinda Bede live a refined life in a small village, much occupied with the church and their daily round (and, as always in Pym's books, with food). Curate-mad Harriet is loved from afar by Count Riccardo Bianco, who regularly proposes marriage and is regularly refused. She's often to be found at her continual task of 'strengthening her corsets' with elastic, then shoving said garments inadequately under a cushion when some clergyman or other comes to call . Quieter, literature-inclined Belinda has loved the pompous Archdeacon Hoccleve for thirty years, since they were at university together, and now has to content herself with listening to his sermons and worrying that his wife Agatha's slapdash housekeeping isn't good enough.

Pym based all the characters on people she knew, projected comically into the future - Harriet and Belinda were herself and her sister Hilary, with the others based on her university friends. It's broader and much less subtle than her later writing but still delicious in its wit and absurdity.

Some Tame Gazelle is my choice if I'm cast away on a desert island, Terp. She is the world's best chronicler of the under-appreciated pleasures of unrequited love.

For Hitchhiker's Guide, there's not much point reading for plot and certainly not for character development. It's the kind of book you either enjoy on a paragraph by paragraph level or you don't. It's not worth persevering with if you don't enjoy the first few pages - it keeps on being more of the same. I did enjoy the series, but I think it's best read in youth.

Beautiful books, Nice. I loved the Anne Bronte when I read it a couple of years ago. Have never even tried Anna Karenina. I was going to say "to my shame", but you know, so many books, so little time, so no shame.

Eine, I've added Drood to my list of library requests. I have 17 books checked out and 15 on reserve, which is unarguably excessive.

So last year I attempted 50 Book challenge but failed rather miserably with 29 books only. I tend to listen to audibooks on the commute but last year I discovered podcasts so my 'reading' took a bit of a nosedive mid-year! This time I'm hoping to do a book each week on average - trying to have one audiobook on the go, along with one normal paperback/kindle book to read at bedtime.

My list so far:

1. Educated - Tara Westerover
2. My lovely Wife - Samantha Downing
3. Prison Doctor - Dr Amanda Brown
4. Postmortem - Patricia Cornwell
5. The familiars - Stacey Halls
6. Memoirs of a geisha - Arthur Golden (currently reading)
7. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens (almost finished!)

My favourite so far has been My Lovely Wife... though I really enjoyed listening to Educated on audible.

Last years favourite by far was The Hearts Invisible Furies by John Boyd. Just delightfully epic, devastating and in part hilarious. Possibly one of my all time favourites!

biblio it's very poignant to think of the 20-something Barbara/Belinda trying to rise above her desperate unhappiness at unrequitedly loving Henry Harvey/Archdeacon Hoccleve by turning the whole wretched situation into fiction and projecting them both into a future where they were middle-aged and accepting and things didn't hurt so much. She does it magnificently, though.

I agree that Hitchikers is probably more enjoyable when young- I loved it then but am not sure if I would now. Also possibly, as i was young a very long time ago, other people may have done similar things, so it may not have that really lovey new, novel, exciting feel to today's readers.

9( Educated by Tara Westover I know a lot of you have read this,but if not this autobiography of a girl who leaves her strict mormon family for an education (including a stint at Cambridge) is fascinating, harrowing and inspiring- if it was fiction you might also think too farfetched. Definitely worth a read.

Terp, it's poignant to some degree, but that's undercut by a robust underlying sense that marrying her difficult loved one wouldn't have been a bed of roses either. She plays with the wistfulness rather than fully subscribes to it. You could see it just as a psychological defence, but it feels more authentic than that.

Obviously it still hurt a lot at the time though. She learns to dance with it.

@nowanearlyNicemum

I also collect that range, high five, they look so pretty on the shelf

The Anne Bronte is one of my favourite books, ever

10. The Farm by Joanne Ramos

Last year's "new Margaret Atwood" sort-of-dystopia du jour, this book's world is in reality only a very small step from where we are now. It's about surrogacy business, where rich couples pay to have their babies carried by "Hosts" who live at Golden Oaks Farm, a kind of golden handcuffs prison. At least that's ostensibly what it's about, but I found the race and class dynamics and the personality of the central "villain"/protagonist Mae, the manager of the Farm, to be much more interesting. I really enjoyed this until the epilogue, which I felt was far too pat and messed around a little too much with the intriguing Mae character. A good page turner, but I felt the author wasn't quite sure what she wanted to say or do with her ending.

Oh, I completely agree, biblio - I think by the time the book was finally published she knew she could never have married HH. And they did stay friendly all their lives.

Anyway, I've just raced breathlessly through something that was a 99p deal a few days ago and which couldn't possibly be more of a contrast to Pym :

17: The Lying Room - Nicci Gerrard

Neve Connolly has three children, a depressed husband who doesn't pull his weight, a chaotic house to run and a job to hold down. Then something very bad happens, which she must keep secret from everyone she knows. Soon she can hardly remember which lie she's telling to which person - and to the police.

Can't say more as it would be a massive spoiler but I really enjoyed this, regardless of some less-than-enthusiastic Amazon reviews. I do like NF's books generally though. OK, the conclusion was a bit far-fetched but I was willing to suspend disbelief.

12. The running hare. The secret Life of farmland, John Lewis-Stempel

Thanks to @NewYearsHumberElla
recommending this on the first thread I picked up a copy from the library. I really loved it. The author is a farmer but doesn't like the effects that aggressive farming has had on wildlife. As a bit of an experiment he leases a field, farms it the old fashioned way and the book maps its story. The writing is very poetic without being overly flowery. This is a subject that could be dry and a slog to read but it's not, I found it so interesting. I returned the book today and ended up picking up another one by him called Pond Life, I don't think I will find that one as interesting but I'm hoping to be proved wrong!

8. American Gods by Neil Gaiman

   This is the story of Shadow, who is told that his wife Laura has been killed, just before he is released from prison. Without any real direction once he is released, he starts working for the mysterious Wednesday as a general assistant and bodyguard. They are going on a road trip visiting various mysterious and quirky characters. Shadow learns that these people he is meeting are old gods, fallen from popularity and adoration, and now living (relatively) average lives. Wednesday (also a god) is trying to rally the troops against the new gods of modern life. There is going to be a war and Shadow is now involved despite his better judgement.

I really enjoyed some parts, especially the parts when Shadow was with laura and the dynamic they had with each other, and I liked the chapters in Laketown, the small town with its own mysteries, where Wednesday sent Shadow to hide out. I found some parts dragged a lot though.
I really wanted to love this book. It had everything I usually like in a book. I like Neil Gaiman as a writer, I really enjoyed his Norse Gods book. I loved the idea of the old gods in competition with the "new"gods of cars, money, internet and media etc.
It started promisingly, well written, just the right amount of "What on earth is happening here" to keep me interested. That said, I do like to get an explanation at some point, even if the explanation comes out slowly. I am just left with so many questions. I have decided that I don't like books that I don't know what is going on by about two thirds of the way through.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit - sooooo pretty aren't they. I went to primary school with the lass who designed the covers. They are a bit £££ but that's what birthdays are for, right? So glad my family picked up on the fact that I might possibly have grumbled a little teeny weeny bit after not receiving any books at all for Christmas

I've been wanting to read the Anne Brontë for ages - so good to hear it seems to be a favourite with many of you.
Similarly, Anna Karenina has been on my TBR list forever so I thought this might spur me on to actually read it!!

Oh I could bore for England about the Tenant Of Wildfell Hall I wrote my dissertation on it.

Charles Kingsley said : "Every man should read this book, and every man should prevent his wife from reading it"

It is IMO the first feminist novel

I loved HHGTTG when I read it as a teenager after my father introduced me the radio programme. I've never read it again as it's tied up with memories of my father and I don't want to spoil that in case it's not as good on a re-read.

A few years ago I read Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found which is a R4 book of the week, I see it's 99p today for the kindle. It's an excellent book and I recommend it:

At twenty-six, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's rapid death from cancer, her family disbanded and her marriage crumbled. With nothing to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to walk eleven-hundred miles of the west coast of America - from the Mojave Desert, through California and Oregon, and into Washington state - and to do it alone. She had no experience of long-distance hiking and the journey was nothing more than a line on a map. But it held a promise - a promise of piecing together a life that lay in ruins at her feet.

I'm currently reading Once Gone which is book 1 in the Riley Paige mystery series by Blake Pierce. Incidentally it's free for the kindle at the moment along with several other of his/her (not sure which) books. So far it's good. It's also in paperback so it's not a kindle self published one like the literary gems of Paula Pantsdown