50 Book Challenge 2021 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 2021, 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. Could everyone embolden their titles and/or authors as well, please, as it makes the books talked about easier to track?

The first thread of the year is here and the second one here.

Tea then milk. Marmite and mashed banana on toast. With butter.

Just wanted to say Flowers for Algernon is 99p in the kindle daily deals today - heartily recommend it.

Also on the hot topics:

Strawberry jam and then clotted cream.
Tea bag, hot water, milk, teabag out.

Placemarking now I've finished book 4.

Agree tea then milk. Only way to get the colour exactly right. Longing for a toasted scone with melting good yellow butter for elevenses now (but have no scones)

@BestIsWest marmite and mashed banana sounds incredible. Off to try that now. Although I don’t drink milk and just shove a tea bag in boiling water and leave it in which tends to alienate me from the sophisticates.

Thanks for that MamaMewtNewt, I read that (or at least part of it) at school and it really stuck with me so it'll be interesting to read the whole thing.

The Seige by Helen Dunmore.
Not read any books by this author before. I do recall my eldest DD waiting with baited breath for the next installment of her Ingo series to come out many years ago, so I guess I'd put H.Dunmore in the YA category in my head. This was really well written and heart breaking about the seige of Leningrad in WWII. I already knew a bit about the seige and how Hitler had decided to basically eradicate the entire population rather than take over the city first as he didn't want the army to have to deal with feeding and policing a civilian population. The story is told by following 21 year old Anna and her family over the course of a few years. I really liked Anna and wanted her story to continue.

mackerella and cassandre I've only read autumn and winter so far, I do have spring and summer but will read them this year during the appropriate season (I'm just like that I guess )

I read the discomfort of evening for my book group and its not one any of us are likely to forget, I'm glad I read it (it promoted a great discussion) but I can't recommend it to anyone else. One of our book members chucked it in the bin as she couldn't bear to have it in the house!

My friend was so traumatised by The Discomfort of Evening she firmly instructed me to never read it and told me the ending to make sure I wouldn't. And she usually loves a misery fest, so I am steering well clear.

Jam, then (clotted) cream.

No milk, no tea. Lots of black coffee.

9. Only Mostly Devastated by Sophie Gonzales - YA, modern-day 'Grease' storyline, with twist that the romance is between two teenage boys, only one of whom is out. I was charmed by this - it's well written and sensitive and sweet, and the characters are a little less 'golden' than many YA books.

10. The Art of Losing by Lizzy Mason - Another YA (I'm between library orders, so raiding the kids), and this was good too. The 'issue' it tackles is addiction, particularly alcohol. The narrator's younger sister kisses her boyfriend at a party and ends up in a coma after he drives her home drunk and they have an accident. The relationship between the sisters is well done, and the family relationships seem realistic and three-dimensional. My teenager liked both books too.

I'm confused by your coffee Pantone colour, betts, as when I googled it I could only find a purple ! Coffee should be Pantone Black 4c, in any case.

mackerella, after reading Summer I found out from reviews that various characters in it had already appeared in the earlier books, but I had absolutely no recollection of them. Even novels I love I seem to forget so quickly. So I'd like to read them all in one go so as to be more aware of the connections between them.

BadSpella and HeadNorth, it's good to know that I wasn't alone in feeling traumatised by The Discomfort of Evening! It was so bleak that I didn't even mind the ending that much; by that time I'd become fairly desensitised to awful things happening!

I was brought up by fundie Christian parents and the break away was rather painful for me (though it happened a long time ago now). So I always have a degree of identification with stories of children growing up in profoundly religious families. (Tara Westover's Educated, Rebecca Stott's In the Days of Rain, Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.) However, I actually felt sorry when I read it for Rijneveld's parents, as the story clearly drew on the author's own childhood experience, and crikey, it wouldn't be easy for ANY parents to read a book like that, let alone conservative religious ones! I felt that the book set out to be sensationalist and was put off it for that reason. Rijneveld is young though and it will be interesting to what they do in the future.

to see what they do in the future

44. The Mitford Girls: The Biography Of An Extraordinary Family by Mary S Lovell

They certainly are an extraordinary family. I’m not sure you could call them a likeable family though, given all their contrasting politics, but certainly fascinating. I enjoyed learning more about their lives although as I mentioned upthread the book felt very biased towards Diana which may have been because she was still alive, so I would be interested in reading something more recent now they have all passed away. I’ve read a couple of Nancy’s books but will definitely seek out more by/about them - I have Decca’s Hons and Rebels and the letters book mentioned upthread on my wish list.

45. Just Like The Other Girls by Claire Douglas

Una takes a job as companion to an elderly lady, but is perturbed to discover she looks exactly like her two predecessors, who both died in mysterious circumstances. I enjoyed this, particularly as it’s set in Clifton, Bristol, which I know quite well.

SapatSea you're in luck The Betrayal is a sequel to The Siege, I haven't read it so can't vouch for it, but I also enjoyed The Siege so this one is on my TBR pile.

@mackerella

I'm confused by your coffee Pantone colour, betts, as when I googled it I could only find a purple ! Coffee should be Pantone Black 4c, in any case.

It's entirely possible I got it wrong, it was the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep and was in the dark without my glasses.

Coffee should be milky but not too milky.

Now, bacon sandwiches - rind or no rind?

I've just finished book 18 - Brian Bilston's latest poetry offerings in Alexa, what is there to know about love. It's good and some very funny moments, he's really much better at poetry than fiction.

SapatSea you're in luck The Betrayal is a sequel to The Siege, I haven't read it so can't vouch for it, but I also enjoyed The Siege so this one is on my TBR pile.

I can recommend the betrayal, it deals with a different time (the stalin purges) with the same characters.

V strong scone views here. Why would you put cream on first? Butter first, then jam, then cream - otherwise butter and cream merge into one. And obviously milk goes in first, and it has to be loose tea or else what's the point?

BTW it's so nice to be discussing the really important issues

Butter and cream?! No, just no.

Bacon sandwiches - rind as long as it’s crispy. Flabby rind should not be there. White bread, butter, no sauce.

I can't help feeling that Pantone have missed a trick with their mug selection. Surely it would be far more useful to have them in a choice of tea/coffee colour depths, so that the maker could match the strength of the brew to the outer tone.

A colleague of mine had a mug similar to this, which was useful. It would have to be somewhere between 'Classic British' and 'Builders Brew' for me.

At the risk of being run off the thread, I have to confess that the only sort of scone I like is freshly baked cheese scones, with butter. Clearly jam or cream wouldn’t go with a cheese scone at all.

But I dislike cream anyway, so if I had to eat a different sort of scone, cream would be getting nowhere near it.

And now you’ve all got me wanting to eat cheese scones. I’m pretty sure we’ve got all the ingredients needed in the kitchen 🤔

Builder's tea. Yorkshire. American tan tights coloured. I order a 400 bag catering pack from Amazon. (Of Yorkshire tea, not American tan tights)
Scones- don't care as long as it's not strawberry jam which just tastes pink.
I'll take a crispy (ok, almost burnt) bacon sandwich as well.