50 Book Challenge 2020 Part Ten

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the tenth (and final?) 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, it's still not too late to join, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

The previous threads of 2020:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

I've just checked and these threads this year have moved more quickly than any other year since they started back in 2012! We'd never reached ten threads in any other year.

Merry Christmas 50 bookers, and thanks for yet again making this thread one of the loveliest spots on t'internet.

I've been given Spring by David Szalay by one of my lovely SILs, and a Diana Henry cookery book by the other. Plus an Amazon voucher for Kindling. I hope that you've all been given thoughtful and interesting books for the reading year ahead .

I did very well with my book haul!

Nigella’s Cook, Eat, Repeat
Dickens at Christmas
White Silence and Dark Light by Jodi Taylor
How To Behave Badly in Renaissance Britain by Ruth Goodman
Long Road from Jarrow by Stuart Maconie
Haven’t They Grown by Sophie Hannah
The Village News by Tom Fort
The Gran Tour by Ben Aitken
Ex Libris by Michiko Kakutani
Unnatural Causes by Dr Richard Shepherd
Josephine: Singer Soldier Dancer Spy by Eilidh McGinness
Back To The Future: The Official Hill Valley Cookbook
Back To The Future: The Ultimate Visual History by Michael Klastorin
Friends Forever: The One About The Episodes by Gary Susman, Jeannine Dillon and Bryan Cairns

That little lot will keep me busy for a while!
Merry Christmas fellow 50-bookers.

Wow, Chessie, that's quite a haul!

Merry Christmas 50 bookers. Just a couple of books under the tree for me, but in book-adjacent presents I also received The Princess Bride board game which is based on the book - v intriguing and looking forward to playing!

Hope everyone's had a festive day! My top present was Sue Black's new book, Written in Bone. I also got lovely hardback editions of Robert Harris' Cicero trilogy. (I suspect there may be a few books waiting for me at my parents' too, but could be some time before I can get those...)

Happy Christmas all. Minimal book haul today, but dd did get me 3 of the Martha Wells Murderbot novellas. Fortunately we narrowly avoided a straight swap of the same book (I got her Gideon the Ninth which was on her possibles list for me - she's already halfway through & says its very good). Hope you all had a peaceful & safe day :)

Merry Christmas from a lurker.

I have had a shite year, but this thread, the chat & the recommendations have been a wonderful place to be. Thanks to so many of you & southeastdweller for keeping this going.

I got two books for Christmas - French grammar, beginners & intermediate by Frederic Bibard. They look great & are a big push/hint about the direction my new life is going to take me! My spoken french is OK, I can hold my own in most situations but these books willl sharpen up the difference between 'en' & 'Y', and other things, which I need badly.

Merry Christmas to all 50 Bookers and lurkers! My only books this year were from DH but I'm very pleased with them: I'd already dropped hints about the Nigella and The Life Project (as reviewed on here by Blackcountryexile - thank you!), and he found the others in the local Oxfam shop

My pile is dwarfed by DD'S, though

Happy Christmas everybody! You'll understand my long absence when you see what I've been reading...

43. The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
    The third instalment of Mantel's extraordinary biographical fiction about Thomas Cromwell.
    By the end of this I understood why it had such mixed reviews. There were huge patches of it that I really loved; I felt as if I were really living in a Tudor world and it hung together. But I ended up more distanced from it. I got less interested in the device where Cromwell goes to visit a woman in order to hear her views, they started to blur into each other. It did get too discursive at times. And something of the gamy intensity of Mantel's style seemed to get diluted eventually. God, though, it's hard to be picky about any part of this trilogy, it's an extraordinary achievement throughout and I feel lucky that Mantel is a novelist whose body of work spans my life.

44. Coming Home by Rosamunde Pilcher.
    Again. I probably read it every couple of years but not usually start to finish like I did this time. I'm tired and I need comfort. It actually seemed less ridiculous this time, which is a bit worrying; something about a family story seems more important than usual.

45. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald
    I have a new beau so am reading books he likes But this was pretty fun. IM wrote a very specific book, a super-detailed progress through the Beatles' actual recordings, how they were done and what was happening both in their lives and in the wider culture at the time. He's very pro Ringo, very pro George Martin and harsh on both McCartney, Yoko Ono and to some extent Lennon. It feels like it's trying to be objective but remains very emotional. Can't honestly say I read every single word.

46. [Self published book by a friend of mine about widowhood]
    I won't go on about this as I'm not prepared to out my friend who wrote this. I'm also a widow but it made me realise just how individual both relationships and grief can be as I recognised very little of her experience. However, I did totally see it as her authentic voice and so enjoyed reading her love story. I'm also pretty impressed with the quality of her writing. Makes me wonder, could I do it?

47. [Self published family history]
    Another one I'm not prepared to out! A biography of my great grandmother. Absolutely riveting as it's full of semi-scandal and my relative waited for an entire generation to die before publishing it! Very interesting though on a particular woman at an interesting time in history.

Hoping to make it to 50 by the end of Thursday!

In the meantime - my book haul was a bit disappointing. English Passengers which I read years ago and a Bruce Chatwin book - I have never ever managed to get into travel writing, though I will try I guess. Ah well, I'll have to buy my own...

Happy Christmas all, hope you've had a lovely day and your plans haven't been too disrupted by Tiers and Lockdowns.
I don't think I'm going to make it to 50 books this year, but that's okay, I'll cope!
Latest reads have been:
45. The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman the blurb states:
It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond this world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed - within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it.
His only defence is three women, on a farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a fable that reshapes modern fantasy: moving, terrifying and elegiac - as pure as a dream, as delicate as a butterfly's wing, as dangerous as a knife in the dark.
I think this description promises more than the book delivers. I'd class it as a young adult novel that deals with witches and monsters in a magical realism way but it was quite enjoyable.

46. A Christmas Carol free on audible and read by Hugh Grant, who is not the best narrator I've heard of this seasonal offering but ACC is always perfect Christmas listening.

I did try to listen to Shuggie Bane but found it a bit too gritty and depressing for the time of year and the current climate!

I received Things I learned on the 6.28
Have any of you read it?

80. Thinking about it only makes it worse - David Mitchell

A compilation of some of his newspaper columns. I have dipped in and out of this between other things as it’s a bit much to read them all back to back. Not laugh out loud but wryly entertaining and interesting to see (as these are historic) how things have changed/panned out. He was joking about Prime Minister Johnson in 2016.....

This will be my last book of the year as I am currently reading A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel which is nearly 900 pages and can’t see myself finishing it in the next week.

I am pleased to have hit a round number and am 10 up from last year. Will do my compilation of best reads for the round up at the end of the year.

Three short books to add - it's not so much that I'm trying to reach a particular target, more that my concentration isn't great.

131. An Almost Perfect Christmas, Nina Stibbe
Short Christmas-themed stories to try to get in the mood. Not bad - I enjoyed the account of her mother's annual struggles with the turkey.

132. Shelf Respect, Annie Austen
Stocking-filler type book. Short essays on topics such as the perils of lending books, quotes from famous people about the joy of reading, lists (eg books found in bin Laden's hideout).; Shallow but right for the moment.

133. The Fly in the Ointment, Alice Thomas Ellis She wrote short, quirky books, done of which I love (The 27th Kingdom ) and some of which I don't quite get. This feel into the second camp. Half-English, half-Egyptian has got herself invited to an old acquaintance's house in the run-up to the wedding of the old acquaintance's daughter. Knowing the enterprise is doomed, she takes a hand. It's the third in a trilogy, and I've clearly missed too much by not reading the earlier two.

So many typos. Combination of fat fingers and not wearing glasses. Bloody middle age.

Merry Christmas to all 50 bookers and thank you for your company in this horrible year.

My Christmas haul included I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke plus I treated myself to Against The Grain by James C Scott, Exterminate All The Brutes by Sven Lindqvist and Digging Up Mother by Doug Stanhope.

In 2020 I spent too much time doomscrolling and not enough time reading hence not getting anywhere near 50, a ratio I'm aiming to reverse in 2021.

Currently reading two books - Broken Greek by Pete Paphides which is lightweight but enjoyable nostalgia, and London Belongs To Me by Norman Collins, an epic and very funny tale of the lives of people living in a South London rooming house in 1938-39. Don't think I will finish either by NYE so going to shamelessly use them for a good head start towards next year's target

I spent much of yesterday (when I wasn't cooking and eating Christmas dinner) sitting by the fire reading an appropriately seasonal book:

102: Fell Farm for Christmas - Marjorie Lloyd

I must have picked this up at a charity shop somewhere, as I tend to do with vintage childrens' paperbacks whenever I see them, as it has £1.99 pencilled inside the front cover (the cheapest copy on t'internet I could now find is £30-ish) - anyway, it's one of a series of three published in the 1950s, all featuring the five Browne children - two pairs of teenage boy-girl twins, Pat and Kay, Jan and Hyacinth, plus their little sister Sally. Their parents are in India and they live in London in the care of Aunt Gretchen, but holidays are spent in the care of kindly frankly unbelievable Mr and Mrs Jenks at their remote farm in the fells of the Lake District.

This is a book in which the saintly children are left to roam free and unsupervised in a way that's surely unthinkable nowadays, with nary a Health & Safety assessment in sight. They go on immense hikes (8 or 9 miles is dismissed as 'just a walk') kitted out in their gabardines, resorting to oilskins only if temperatures drop to permafrost levels, and take prodigious packed lunches provided by capable uber-provider Mrs J. Along the way their various adventures include foiling a band of ruthless sheep-rustlers and getting lost in a total white-out snowstorm - the danger of actual death is cheerily downplayed and soon they're back in front of a roaring fire drinking cocoa and munching biscuits, unharmed bar the odd minor flesh wound. Mountain Rescue would be called out for less in this day and age but hey ho. All these high-jinks are illustrated with actual maps of the area the children visit, plus charming line drawings by the author, who'd studied at art school and was a teacher in a former life. Unintentionally amusing to a modern reader, but it also plucked a chord of sadness within me that such sweetly innocent times have disappeared.

@bibliomania I'm reading short stories at the moment as well, originally to up my number of books but having done that I've found some good collections on kindle unlimited which I am trying to make the most of as it's free until March.

Nuts at Christmas was a laugh out loud comedy of errors which is timely and really amused me. It's about a group of husbands who are despatched on xmas eve with orders to get a xmas tree and the resulting mishaps, or more accurately, total f* ups that they have.

The Empire of Light: and other short stories by Adela Steventon is a great little collection, published this autumn. It's everything from a murder to a challenging new pet, a black panther in town and a man trying to diet. Some have a twist in the tale, some don't. I'd recommend this one.

35. The Chimes by Charles Dickens
Trotty Veck, a ticket porter, delivers messages to various well-to-do folk, all of whom lead him to belief that the working classes unworthy of a place in society. He dreams of what happens to his friends and family if they give up hope of a better life.

Literally and metaphorically a poor man's Christmas Carol. The social and moral message is far heavier handed here than in the the latter. I think this will probably be my last book of the year, so miles off 50 this time round.

On to An American Marriage next.

Terps I loved the Fell Farm books as a kid though was somewhat sceptical overall too

57. Inland by Tea Obreht. A modern wester following the stories of two protagonists - cameleer bringing a camel inland and a frontier woman waiting at home getting thirsty for her husband and sons to bring water home. This was quite a plodding book, interspersed with dramatic violence and ghosts. I did find some parts rather impenetrable but on balanced enjoyed the experience. I think I’d have enjoyed studying it to get more out of the layers.
58. Ghosts Dolly Alderton. A women’s fiction book following a central character on the ‘strangest year of her life’ following turning 33. Probably not one for those not keen on the recent self indulgent millennial books discussed here. Her weird year was pretty normal, a bit of ghosting, struggling with diverging friendships and online dating. I don’t think the authors attempts at poignant writing really worked. Also why she felt compelled not to name dementia as it is during these sections confused me. The protagonist was a food writer who didn’t really talk about food. There wasn’t any humour in this book despite the front cover reviews. I do think Alderton comments well on real life experiences of women in their 30s but this annoyed me.

I haven't heard of the Fell Farm books before, how do they compare to the Swallows and Amazons series?

I look forward to your review of London Belongs to Me, MegBusset - I've seen it recommended by one of my favourite authors, & have been meaning to look out for it. I love Absolute Beginners by Colin McInnes, & wondered if it might have something of the same feel.

Also interested to see what you think of the John Cooper Clarke, which I loved to start with but thought dragged a bit overall.

bett I have to confess that I never read the Swallows & Amazons books (heresy, I know!) but they're often compared, I believe. The main difference I guess is that the Fell Farm books aren't boaty but hike-y . But otherwise rather similar in feel I reckon. Certainly in terms of the Lakes setting and, erm, the potential for danger to life and limb or death

Behind with both Christmas greetings and reviews, but hoping everyone enjoys whatever they're reading today. I have a third share of Troubled Blood and A Promised Land but as I'm not first in the queue for either it will be well into the new year before I've read them.
81 Hercule Poirot’s Christmas Agatha Christie
A classic, country house seasonal mystery. I read this for a book group, having not read any Agatha Christie for many years. I was struck by the crispness of the writing and the way she creates place and character in relatively few words , in comparison to contemporary mysteries which often go all round the house for 350 pages and don’t achieve any more.
82 The See Through House Shelley Kline
A memoir of the daughter of an artist and designer, who commissions a unique, modern house , which stays in the family until after his death. The author recounts the many ways in which living in an unusual house, which was her father’s pride and joy, has shaped her life. The book is also a study in grief, as she mourns the deaths of her parents and makes the painful decision to let the house go. This is a beautifully written book and I admire how honest the author is about the challenges of caring for an elderly, much loved but completely inflexible parent. I would like to know more about how she has dealt with the process of selling the house and moving away .
83 The Sanctuary Murders Susanna Gregory
The 24th in a series of cosy mysteries set in 14th century Cambridge. These have been annual reading treat for me over many years but sadly I think this series has run its course. However I’m wondering if the driver for the plot; troublemakers who provoke racial violence , is a timely political comment.
@mackerelfa
I hope you enjoy The Life Project. It was a review on here that inspired me to read it.