50 Book Challenge 2021 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?

whippetwoman I can really recommend Into the Silence by Wade Davis. The subtitle is "The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest" and it describes the expeditions to climb Everest between 1921-24 in the context of the time immediately after the First World War (20 of the 26 British climbers had experienced the worst of the fighting). I thought it was brilliant.

Thank you @Tanaqui - it’s nearly two months since my last Dick Francis so I will be reading another one soon. I think (but am too lazy to get up off the sofa and check my bookcase) that Banker is next.

[quote EineReiseDurchDieZeit]@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie

It's been MANY years now since I read Alias Grace but I remember it as being challenging. The Netflix series was quite a fair adaptation I thought.

Atwood is "hard work" I think. I haven't completed The only one I love is Handmaids Tale, the last one I read before The Testaments was The Heart Goes Last and I thought it was woeful.

I keep thinking I NEED to complete The Maddadam Trilogy but its that long since I read Oryx and Crake I need to reread it and I can't face it.

There's a lot of you're SUPPOSED to read Atwood around Atwood I think. [/quote]
I disliked Oryx and Crake but can't remember why. The 2nd one was okay but not okay enough to make me want to read the third.

@Boiledeggandtoast

whippetwoman I can really recommend Into the Silence by Wade Davis. The subtitle is "The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest" and it describes the expeditions to climb Everest between 1921-24 in the context of the time immediately after the First World War (20 of the 26 British climbers had experienced the worst of the fighting). I thought it was brilliant.

Yes, yes, yes. It's superb.

I need a bit of help fellow 50-bookers. I've just finished reading a book which had a bit of a depressing ending and was ready to start on Patrick Gale's A Place Called Winter but understand this book isn't the most uplifting of subject matter either so think I will give it a miss. Got killer PMT at the moment, which makes me feel overly emotional, so just don't feel up for another depressing read just now!

I have several unread books, mix of library and Kindle so will pick one of these, am hoping someone can recommend one that isn't too hard-going emotionally:

Paul Torbay - Girl on the Landing
Elizabeth Strout - Olive Kitteridge
Sally Magnusson - The Sealwoman's Gift
Philip Pullman - La Belle Sauvage
Rosamund Lupton - Three Hours
Ragnar Jonasson - Snow Blind

Doesn't need to be an 'uplifting' choice as such, but definitely not full of despair! Thanks

Definitely not Three Hours. I was like a wrung-out dishcloth by the time I finished reading that.

The Sealwoman’s Gift maybe?

I've been feeling a bit ill today and have really enjoyed slowly catching up with the thread, and all the foggy, mountainous, Nige chat. Has picked me up no end. Thanks all.

Pea souper and mountain books have all gone on the tbr as I also loved Into Thin Air, and whilst having no particular devotion to London, am interested to read about it with regards to that perspective.

I do like Nigel. He just seems so lovely and nice that I can forgive him any pretentiousness or reliance on obscenely expensive candles. And his carrot hummus recipe in Christmas Chronicles is divine.

@LadybirdDaphne and @whippetwoman I got The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs for Christmas and am really looking forward to it.

Thanks Saucery - I will leave Three Hours for the time being also, wrung-out dishcloth is not a good feeling at the best of times!

I am in the middle of Three Hours at the moment. Very tense and I'm going to be glued to the sofa this afternoon until I've finished it. For anyone who's worked as a teacher, imagining yourself in the position of being responsible for keeping children safe from a gunman in a lockdown situation just makes your blood run cold.

The Girl on the Landing - although there's killing in it, I didn't find it unrelentingly depressing, maybe because it was less like real life. In fact there was one very darkly comic moment that made me laugh out loud. It's a bit creepy, but not deeply disturbing.

Olive Kitteridge might be my choice if you are looking for something far removed from a depressing read. I agree with the PPs who think it's an excellent book.

Thanks guys, looks like there are definitely a few in my pile that I can read before tackling A Place Called Winter and Three Hours

@InTheCludgie, 3 hours also made me cry, so definitely not that! But A Place Called Winter wasn't totally bleak iirc. I haven't read any of the others!

@Mumtotwofurbabies The Instiute is definitely going on my TBR pile. Have read some great reviews about it. Got a voucher for Xmas for caboodle so will try and buy this. My last Stephen King was The Shining so good and such a different ending to the film.

1. Spring Garden, Tomoka Shibasaki

A Japanese novella, published by Pushkin Press which I picked up last year when they were doing daily 99p deals.
I'm not really sure about this. It's about a bachelor who lives in a block of flats which is due to be torn down once the remaining tenants' rental agreements have come to an end. He becomes involved with the exploits of a woman who lives in a flat at the opposite end of the building to him, who seems somewhat obsessed by a sky blue house they can see from their balconies. She's desperate to get inside and have a look to see if it matches up to the photograph book she has of the house and it's previous occupants.
It's all just a bit..odd. I'm not really sure what the point of it was. It's sparsely written, and is a bit cold in tone. There isn't much of a plot either, it's more a snapshot of a few weeks in the character's lives, with no particular story arch.
All that said, it wasn't a bad book or anything, I'm just not sure I really got much out of it. Perhaps the deeper meaning just went over my head.

Am now reading Red Rising by Pierce Brown and am loving it. Nearly done, and irritated to see that the sequel is £5.99 on kindle. I only buy kindle books when they're discounted right down to 99p, or at most, sub-£2, so am wondering whether the next one is going to end up being my first ever pricey kindle purchase.

5. Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

I liked this very much, but (perhaps because it was more of the same) not quite as much as the original. Olive remains a fantastic character and I enjoyed many of the new stories and characters introduced. I particularly liked the segment on the Larkins' daughter and lawyer, and Cindy Coombs' story. I also liked the fact that the end of the book tied up with one of the two other Strout books I've read. I am a fan of inter-relatedness in authors' books (really loved reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series after The Stand, for example), so I suspect I shall be reading more of Strout's books; I have already seen that The Burgess Boys links to an intriguing set of characters featured in Olive, Again. My only criticism would be that a couple of the incidents and characters felt rather more shoehorned in than in the first book, which flowed very naturally.

@InTheCludgie I really liked A Place Called Winter, but it is a bit on point at the moment as it is all about the Spanish Flu, so I think you are probably right to want to leave it for a while. I second Olive Kitteridge as non-depressing!

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I know what you mean about Atwood. The only one of hers I really love is Cat's Eye. But I read Hag-Seed last year and it was a revelation. So much fun!

Book No. 2 'Home Stretch' by Graham Norton was a poor follow up to 'Hamnet'. The characters all seemed very one dimensional. It whiled away a couple of hours but I wouldn't recommend it particularly.

I seem to have read all my Christmas books now and have nothing in reserve. That was very careless of me - I wasn't expecting to get through 'Home Stretch' so quickly.

Might see if I can fire up my ancient kindle. It's the original kindle with keys instead of touch screen. The kindle itself works fine but the charger's a bit dodgy - takes hours to charge it. And I haven't used it in months so I'm not sure where the charger is.

I'm interested in 'Shuggie Bain' and 'The Salt Path' for my next reads. The Clive James poetry book someone mentioned earlier in the thread sounds interesting. Also the fog book - I like a good non-fiction from time to time. 'Into Thin Air' was an excellent read.

1. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy. Recommended by several of you on the last thread, I can add to the chorus of praise. This is truly moving and inspirational.

The main 'protagonist' of A Place Called Winter actually was a wrung out dishcloth. I wanted to slap him. Also the Spanish Flu features, so not a great choice for escapism from current woes. Overall, I just wouldn't go there. I'm an outlier on this, as it's generally well liked on this thread, but I hated it.

@Taytocrisps it was The Fire of Joy by Clive James and was lovely.

Thanks @SatsukiKusakabe

I have met Patrick when he toured A Place Called Winter and he explained what went into writing it. It still left me cold.

I loved his companion pieces Notes On An Exhibition and A Perfectly Good Man though

@whippetwoman my favourite mountain book is 'The Clouds on both sides' a biography of Julie Tillis who was the first woman to climb K2. I listened to the first part as an audio book while on a weekend bouldering in Fountainbleau with her son and a group of us. I purchased the book to finish it as soon as I got home.

I enjoyed reading Andy Kirkpatrick book (books? He might have done more than one) as he grew up near where I live now. He isn't a 100% likeable character.

I moved from mountain climber books to John Muir who is basically the founder of American National Parks and originally from Scotland. He led an interesting life.

I started with A Perfectly Good Man which I really loved, then read Notes On An Exhibition which I liked well enough, then A Place Called Winter, which, as mentioned, I hated, so am getting increasingly diminishing returns from him.

Tayto thanks for the great review of Hamnet. I have it on my TBR this year and am really looking forward to it now.

1. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby. This short memoir includes the author’s (successful magazine editor)thoughts following a massive stroke whilst he is suffering ‘locked-in’ syndrome. He can only blink one eye and communicates that way.

This was really interesting. Hearing about the challenges he faced - friends that couldn’t get to grips with his blinking language, a fly that he couldn’t budge. I’m sure he was an arrogant fellow before but this makes his complete loss very stark - a scene where he drives past his old office is very powerful.

I was interested in the types of loss - he misses travel and restaurants a great deal. As well as much bigger things like privacy and freedom. Interesting to read in lockdown.

@InTheCludgie

I need a bit of help fellow 50-bookers. I've just finished reading a book which had a bit of a depressing ending and was ready to start on Patrick Gale's A Place Called Winter but understand this book isn't the most uplifting of subject matter either so think I will give it a miss. Got killer PMT at the moment, which makes me feel overly emotional, so just don't feel up for another depressing read just now!

I have several unread books, mix of library and Kindle so will pick one of these, am hoping someone can recommend one that isn't too hard-going emotionally:

Paul Torbay - Girl on the Landing
Elizabeth Strout - Olive Kitteridge
Sally Magnusson - The Sealwoman's Gift
Philip Pullman - La Belle Sauvage
Rosamund Lupton - Three Hours
Ragnar Jonasson - Snow Blind

Doesn't need to be an 'uplifting' choice as such, but definitely not full of despair! Thanks

I'd go for Three Hours. Although it's gory crime, it's very fast paced and will keep you wanting to keep reading. It's the best thriller I've read in many a long year.

apologies for dissing Olive Kitteridge. I explained myself badly. I didn't mean it was chick lit- I meant that just as BJ spawned a thousand chick lit titles, there seem over the last few years to have been a similar (but different genre approach) run on NameSurname of women book titles.

I agree about Margaret Atwood. I read tHT in long ago 1991 and tbh, wouldn't reread or watch though I know it's "important". I just can't get into dystopia somehow.

@ForthFitzRoyFaroes

The main 'protagonist' of A Place Called Winter actually was a wrung out dishcloth. I wanted to slap him. Also the Spanish Flu features, so not a great choice for escapism from current woes. Overall, I just wouldn't go there. I'm an outlier on this, as it's generally well liked on this thread, but I hated it.

I was really disappointed with it. It's the sort of thing I should have loved - long, cold, isolated setting etc, but I found it really frustrating.