50 Book Challenge 2020 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 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 and the second one here.

What are you reading?

I've heard very good things about How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee

I've got to take 3 suggestions for selection to my next book club meet. Rules are: 3 books I haven't read that are out in paperback. I might snatch them off this list. Someone else will then choose from my 3. Feeling the pressure and frustrated I can't pick something I've read and know is good.

We had a huge cull a few years back, but there’s still loads of books here. The thought of counting them is a bit daunting, but adult books alone number in the hundreds.
New books keep sneaking in...

I counted my books just over a year ago and had well over 1000, not counting kindle (there’s another 300 or so on there). That doesn’t include any of husband’s or daughter’s books so I reckon we have well over 2000 altogether. I do try to have a clear out every so often and when I’ve read a book think very hard about whether I’ll really read it again, but the number never really goes down. I like looking at my books though so I like having them in every room and would feel sad if I was forced to cull them further!

I just picked up Where the Crawdads Sing for 99p on the Kindle Daily Deal.

Ooooooooh, thank you FranK. Have nabbed that :)

We recently did some building work and I got a lovely new bookshelf out of it

Museum I'm curious to know which book you're thinking of in the last bit of your review of the Patrick Gale book?

Thank you squiz81. I found it really interesting and moving, and I don’t read huge amounts of non-fiction as a rule.

Lovely shelves tarahumara, quite jealous of their neatness.

As I say they're quite new. Plenty of time to get messy!!

Museum I'm curious to know which book you're thinking of in the last bit of your review of the Patrick Gale book?

It's Never Let Me Go. Not comparable at all in terms of style or content. But Patrick Gale is clearly a strong writer who is great at writing characters, and the previous books of his I've read are peopled with strong, quirky, flawed but sympathetic characters. So presented with the character of Harry, who has so little agency, lets others make decisions for him, lacks self-insight and anything interesting to say or think about the situation he finds himself in, I'm inclined to think that Patrick Gale wrote him that way deliberately, as he is such a capable writer. But why? I was thinking that was never going to work, and then thought of Never Let Me Go, where Kazuo Ishiguro has done exactly that. It works for me in NLMG because it adds a dreamlike sense of dread, mystery, and inevitability to the fate of the narrator and her friends. But it certainly didn't work for lots of people on this thread, and it doesn't work in A Place Like Winter.

I'm salivating over those bookshelves @Tarahumara

I'm a third of the way through Ben Okri's The Famished Road and not really enjoying it but also finding it impossible to put down

The move has given me space for a another bookcase 😈😈😈😈

eastie77 The Famished Road was one of my worst reading experiences ever. Hated it. But finished it

I just opened that link to how many books you should own, and promptly closed it again after reading in the first paragraph that Marie Kondo thinks 30 is about the right figure.

If I tried adding a couple of noughts to that, and maybe changing the 3 at the front, I'd get slightly closer to how many books are in this house.

Thirty?

I knew I would never get on with Marie Kondo when she suggested ripping pages out of books. Sacrilege!

Very nice, Tara!

I've just done a quick tot up and estimate 3,500 physical books here - which is quite a lot for a 3-bedroom late 60s semi! No wonder the house is permanently a tip

I did get rid of hundreds of books a few years ago, but an equivalent number seems to have crept back in - I'm clearly very slow on the uptake because it's only just dawning on me that this needs to be an ongoing process if I'm to make any process. Every now and then, DH tries to get rid of a pile of books that he's finished with and I swoop on them crying "noooo, you can't get rid of that, it's a great book/I haven't read it yet/it's a classic". I'm obviously both obstructor and enabler in our household .

I think getting rid of books is hard for me because it feels as if I'm shutting the door in a particular part of my life - not only the memories associated with those particular books, but also the memory of the kind of person I was when I last read them. I'm trying to be more realistic about this and had a breakthrough recently when I got rid of all my Martin Amis novels (which I really enjoyed as an over-serious undergraduate) because I realised that I had no desire to read them now, and they were just taking up room that could be used for more congenial authors! Ditto with all my Old English and Middle English texts (apart from Chaucer and Malory) - I've finally accepted that I'm not going to read the Pearl manuscript or Piers Plowman ever again, and that's ok. Twenty-five years ago, I was someone who eagerly grappled with these texts, and now I'm not - but that doesn't reflect on me as a person or invalidate my previous experience. (God, I'm shallow, aren't I?) So I'm trying to make my bookshelves more "live" - more of a botanic garden than a herbarium - by clearing away everything that I'm never going to want to read again...

Love those @Tarahumara, Mike are similar but with far more added toddler crap sadly.

I couldn’t get on with The Famished Road at all. One big awful trip.

Oh god, I left a book group after they made me read The Famished Road and I realised that it might be like that every month, judging from the earnestly appreciative noises the others made in the discussion afterwards. I also loathed my experience of reading it, Satsuki.

You can't have an empty bookcase, Eine - quick, get some more books!

I don't have a vast number of books, due to moving a lot and relying heavily on the library. My ideal personal library is small but perfectly formed, consistently entirely of books I love and plan to read again. I feel slightly aggrieved at my tbr shelves, as they may contain certain books that don't deserve a spot. I also have shelves of travel books for the trips I dream about taking one day....

I read Marie Kondo’s book ( The Life Changing Magic of Tidying ) a few years ago, and my recollection is that Kondo thinks that 30 is the right number of books for her.

She doesn’t specify book numbers for other people - talks instead about only keeping ones that spark joy - but recommends keeping your collection small.

That bit about how she’d been tearing interesting / useful pages out of books was completely bonkers though.

@mackerella

Two of my shelves are already doubled up, but play my cards right and I'll have 3 free shelves

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

This is my second Anne Tyler and I have a growing suspicion that no one writes family dynamics, domestic environments and funny yet realistic dialogue better than she can. This is a slow traverse across a family and its history, the weird and winding roads that led to its being, and the mistakes and transgressions everyone makes against the people they ultimately love. It is about messiness and forgiveness, not earth shattering, but if you like amusing and twisty family sagas with pin-sharp attention to detail that really bring into focus the thoughts and motivations that drive people’s actions, without needing it to be particularly eventful, then she is very very good at it.

Thin Air by Michelle Paver

I read Dark Matter toward the end of last year and this is very much in the same vein; in fact there is almost a copy and paste quality to the main events, however this is set up a mountain and that was set near a pole and that makes all the difference. I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as DM, but still Paver is writing the sort of thing I really like as a non-taxing read in between heavier things. I don’t get on with crime but slightly schlocky gothic spooky mystery stories are my thing. A group of men, including two brothers at odds with each other, set out on an expedition to climb Mount Kanchenjunga, following in the footsteps of a similar, ill-fated, trip 30 years previously in 1907. Strange goings-on go on, and they might just find out the truth about what happened to the last lot of intrepid, poorly-prepared adventurers that went this way. All good fun.

Incidentally, does anyone have any good recommendations of other novels set in this kind of milieu - mountaineering or polar exploration? There’s lots of good non-fic but I don’t come across many of this type of adventure fiction and would like more.