50 Book Challenge 2020 Part Four

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fourth 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, the second one here and the third one here.

What are you reading?

Don’t know if anyone else read this but thought Becca Rothfield’s take on the flaws in Rooney’s work was interesting
thepointmag.com/criticism/normal-novels/

Hello all, just popping in to say hello before I catch up with the thread(s) as it's over a month since I last posted . My reading has slowed to near zero over the last month, but I've got a backlog of reviews from March and April which I'll post later. Hope you're all well!

@PepeLePew

I have had Innocent Traitor on TBR for YEARS, you have not inspired any enthusiasm to alter its status

I would not rush, Eine. Slightly I wasted my time.
Arghhh - I have wanted to read Broken Greek and was doing so well not checking the monthly deals. But if it is discounted then it would be almost rude not to buy it. Wouldn’t it??

Oddly, it was recommend by a usually very reliable book friend. I've false started with it at least twice before returning it to TBR. 🤔

Hallo mackerella!

I picked up Helen Dunmore's Exposure in the sale. My resolution not to buy any books this year has been blown right out of the water. I'm justifying it with the fact that I'm not shelling out for parking or lattes at the moment.

30. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain de Botton

Decided to give this a go finally as it's been sitting on the shelf for about a decade, and I thought it would be useful as I'm spending a lot of time thinking about my career direction at the moment. I was expecting a philosophically-minded exploration of what makes for meaningful work. Instead, it was a series of essays in which de Botton went on various jollies to watch people at work (apparently you have to go to the Maldives and French Guiana to do this). These were then written up in a wry, gently mocking, extremely pompous and only occasionally amusing style. Really quite an odd book. On the plus side, it didn't take long to read and half the pages were taken up with photos.

I got the first in Ellie Griffiths Brighton series in the sale. I love the Ruth Galloway books but these have never appealed. Still, at 99p.

Still not sure about Bel Canto. I like bits of it.

I’ve also downloaded Proof which was one of my favourite Dick Francis books.

Um.... @nowanearlyNicemum this prompted me to go and check and I am mildly mortified to see there are 460 unread books on there and only about 100 read.

It is however the fruit of about 8 years of kindle purchases which makes me feel slightly less guilty. Things haven't really changed since teenage me had a Saturday job in a bookshop and used to spend at least half my wages on books...

Pepe that's why I bought Broken Greek - what else can you buy for 99p that will be anywhere near as entertaining?! It really would be rude not to.

noodle how large is embarrassingly large? (please make me feel better!!)

I daren't say how many but it's ten years worth of kindle buying and is larger than the previously mentioned list.

Pepe The Alison Weir book has been languishing unread on my Kindle and I suspect it will now languish there for some time to come.

One more recommendation from the Kindle monthly deal - Just For One Day by Louise Wener of Sleeper might appeal if you like the Pete Paphides book. I really enjoyed it, partly for the honest account of what it was really like to be a one-hit wonder, but also as a memoir of growing up in the eighties/early nineties.

49. Lost Girls by Robert Kolker

This book is the source material for the recent Netflix film of the same name starring Gabriel Byrne and Amy Ryan.

It tells the story of five victims of the Long Island Serial Killer who is still unidentified.

All the girls were sex workers, which meant as each disappeared, police showed next to no interest in their cases, until their bodies were found.

I also read Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker about a month ago, which was brilliant and absorbing. I have to say, had I read Lost Girls first I might not have done. It is not nearly as well written.

The film focuses mainly on Shannan Gilbert, so I was able to follow her sections better.

The problem is sadly, I felt that accidentally or unintentionally as Kolker writes about each girl, perhaps in the style he chooses, they literally become indistinguishable from each other:

Very sadly, the girls had A LOT in common from poverty to neglect to abuse to absent parents, drugs and unwanted pregnancy. Alongside these unifying similarities Kolker includes so many names of friends and family members, as well as working aliases and pimps, you become a bit bogged down in wait? WHICH girl is this one again? Which I feel does all of them a disservice.

I feel he could have done more to illustrate that these were five individuals all undone by a predator.

Their unifying factors do end up with this sense of shrugging inevitability, girls like those, with mothers like those, what more could anyone expect?

That the police might not use it to not bother doing their jobs would be a fine start.

Not well written, the film was very good though.

New rule. I can’t and won’t check the Monthly Deals but you all do it and report back and I shall shop that way . Off to buy the Louise Wener book as I loved Sleeper back in the day.

I have 130 unread books on my kindle, so the answers above have made me feel much better about this

I received my Kindle for my birthday 3 years ago and to start with I was quite disciplined about not buying too many books. I noticed that my addiction to 99p deals was getting worse and when I started this year with 65 unread I decided that one of my reading goals for 2020 would be to end the year with fewer unread.

This just means buying less than I'm reading, right?

Well here we are 4 months later and I now have 86 unread books on my kindle - aaaargh! However, with libraries having been closed since March 16th I'm justifying having my own personal library to browse through when I want my next fix . Oh, not to mention my own personal library of real books but I simply haven't got time to count those!!!

Thanks for that review of the Alison Weir pepe

I quite like what I have read of Alison Weir, I like the nonfiction she writes -as 'easy armchair history' as my dd with her history degree sniffingly calls it. I am reading her fiction series on Henry VIIIs wives, and have the one on Katherine Howard on pre-order due out next month. I always thought she was slightly less trashy than Phillippa Gregory (who I also quite like when I want something easy to read).
Do you think she is getting quite popular and the publishers are demanding she turns out quantity now rather than quality?

How can I tell how many of the books on my Kindle are unread? I can see in my Amazon account that I have bought 552 ebooks but no idea how many of them I have read.

I don’t know how credible her historical fiction is, BookWitch. I did enjoy her novel about Elizabeth and Seymour years ago and my sister, who is a history teacher, tells me she often recommends her non fiction to her GCSE students.

I should be fair to her - as I read it believing it was Ms Gregory I was thinking “this is actually much better than her usual nonsense”. It was just the dialogue which was really quite absurd. And she’s quite honest about which elements were real and which were invented or speculative (E.g. that Lady Jane found the first warrant for Katherine Parr’s arrest when it was mislaid by Henry’s officials).

I've done some quick calculations and would say my Kindle holds 93 read books (54 per cent), 35 partly read (20 per cent) and 45 not read (26 per cent). That's not so bad - I think I'm fairly realistic about whether or not I'll read a book. I do feel that I should go back and finish the partly-read books, but it"s harder when you've lost the momentum.

Keith, I just scrolled through my Kindle and added up. There's probably a better way...

I delete the books from my kindle when I've read them so I could go to Amazon and look how many books I've bought and then take off how many books are on my kindle. At least, I could until I ran out of space on my kindle and told it to delete content older than 3 months. I used to add them to a 'read' collection but stopped bothering a while back.

I'm about to make you all feel a LOT better about the number of kindle books you have. I currently have over 750 kindle books and that's just the unread ones...

Keith when I finish a book I select 'remove from device'. You can always download it again if you want to re-read.

I was feeling bad about having 158 unread kindle books but the above numbers are making me feel much better!

I am a geek, so I have my kindle books organised into categories. One of my categories is unread books - as soon as I buy a book it goes in there and I only move it to one of the other categories once I’ve read it. This makes it easier to find books again in the future - if I can’t recall title or author I can usually at least remember what type of book it was (crime, chick lit etc) and just look through that category rather than having to trawl through everything.