50 Book Challenge 2021 Part Eight

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the eighth (and probably final) 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, it’s not too late to and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.The lurkers among you are also very welcome to come out of the woodwork and share with us what you've read!

The first thread of the year is here, the second one here, the third one here, the fourth one here, the fifth one here, the sixth one here and the seventh one here.

How have you got on this year?

1. Outlander, Diana Gabaldon
2. Diary of a Provincial Lady, E M Delafield
3. The Duke & I, Julia Quinn
4. Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
5. Us, David Nicholls

6. The Autumn of the Ace, Louis de Bernieres

1. Migrant City: A New History of London, Panikos Panayi

8. Frenchman’s Creek, Daphne du Maurier

1. The Outsider, Albert Camus

10. The Battle of Green Lanes, Cosh Omar 11. Malamander, Thomas Taylor 12. Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens 13. The Interest, Michael Taylor 14. Twenty Years After, Alexandre Dumas 15. The Disappearance of Emile Zola: Love, Literature and the Dreyfus Case, Michael Rosen 16. Gargantis, Thomas Taylor 17. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Marina Lewycka 18. The Uses and Abuses of History, Margaret Macmillan 19. The Wrong Side of the Table, Ayser Salman 20. Stoner, John Williams 21. A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Reptile Room, Lemony Snicket 22. The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, Julia Laite 23. A Series of Unfortunate Events #4: The Wide Window, Lemony Snicket 24. The Alienist, Caleb Carr 25. Mixed/Other, Natalie Morris 26. The Viscount Who Loved Me, Julia Quinn 27. A Series of Unfortunate Events #4: The Miserable Mill, Lemony Snicket 28. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee 29. The Holiday, Guy Bellamy 30. The Austere Academy, Lemony Snicket 31. Mr Loverman, Bernardine Evaristo 32. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy 33. The Ersatz Elevator, Lemony Snicket 34. The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford 35. Straight Outta Crawley, Romesh Ranganathan 36. Someday in Paris, Olivia Lara 37. The Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark 38. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, Balli Kaur Jaswal 39. The Vile Village, Lemony Snicket 40. Catch-22, Joseph Heller 41. The Hostile Hospital, Lemony Snicket 42. The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy 43. Dona Flor and her Two Husbands, Jorge Amado 44. The Carniverous Carnival, Lemony Snicket 45. Pride and Prejudice, Jame Austen 46. The Island of Missing Trees, Elif Shafak 47. The Slippery Slope, Lemony Snicket 48. The Light Years, Elizabeth Jane Howard 49. The Grim Grotto, Lemony Snicket 50. The Penultimate Peril, Lemony Snicket 51. What is History, Now?, Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb (eds) 52. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley 53. The End, Lemony Snicket

My bolds.
@PermanentTemporary thank you for collating. Sorry for the way the system failed. I have a sibling who I lost in a similar way.

Really hope to join you all next year.

I’ve had a disappointing year and haven’t kept a list. I can’t honestly say that anything has stood out fiction wise but I’ve gone for easy reads in the main.
Non fiction wise I enjoyed
The Life of Stuff - susannah Walker
The Madness of Grief - Richard Coles
Hungry - Grace Dent

Snuck in a couple of last minute reads...

41. It Takes Blood And Guts - Skin

The Skunk Anansie singer's autobiography, read mainly for nostalgia as I worked in the music business in the 90s and knew some of the people involved. Little literary merit but an easy read alongside something a lot more heavy...

42. The Only Plane In The Sky - Garrett M Graff

Lots already said about this oral history of 9/11 so not too much to add, a shocking and sad read but shot through with heroism and kindness.

About two-thirds of the books I read were by female authors; just under half was non-fiction.

My favourite fiction was:
The Pull of the Stars, by Emma Donohue and The Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis.

Non-fiction:
Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer
A Bit of a Stretch, Chris Atkins
The Anglo-Saxons, Marc Morris

I'm currently really enjoying *The Wisdom of the Ancients, by Neil Oliver." The man can write, and it's nicely bookish too.

Just finished the truly excellent Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn. This has less breadth and reach than Caroline Criado Perez but more depth and detail and is a trawl through history, finding pretty depressing patterns.

It is an eye opener in places - particularly on the ambiguities of early health feminists and birth control pioneers who were also blatant eugenicists. It throws a spotlight on many of the tensions within feminism, including issues about the recognition of women who are not white. However, it also looks at the issues surrounding the mystification of pain and medical intervention , especially in affluent white women. Some pretty shocking stuff about experimentation on women , including the 20th century and, of course as highlighted by CCP, the lack of inclusion of women in medical trials - and the treatment (or lack thereof) of 'hysterical' female illnesses. Cleghorn focuses on how so much of medicine is paternalistic and focuses on women as reproductive entities. It is sad how modern some of her examples are (eg the total exclusion of women form HIV research)

It's s sensitive, yet angry , book. The author herself has Lupus so writes about her own experiences passionately.

It is churlish to point out what is missing as it is a long book! She would have to write a whole other book if she wanted greater global coverage, for example, so focuses almost entirely on the UK and the US. She spends a long time on the (absorbing) Victorian era, perhaps at the expense of the equally fascinating modern era.

She can't spell discreetly though! I am quite squeamish and the opening 100 or so pages did have me feeling rather faint at times...

(ps none of the very small passing comments about transwomen or people with ovaries bothered me and only seems to have bothered one person on Amazon. She explains her focus on women who are born female briefly and sensitively at the outset)

Hello 50 bookers. I received just two books for Christmas plus a Waterstone's voucher.

I've been an irregular poster this year as I have got into a cycle of posting, lapsing, feeling guilty about coming back and then finally posting again. Permanent heartfelt to you, and thank you for collating the annual bolded list. My standouts this year were:

The Way of All Flesh - Ambrose Parry
The Heat of The Moment - Sabrina Cohen-Hatton
Expectation - Anna Hope
Dolce Vita Confidential - Shawn Levy
In Ghostly Japan - Lafcadio Hearn
The Dreamers - Karen Thompson Walker
Maigret's Memoirs - Georges Simenon
Miss Benson's Beetle - Rachel Joyce
Quite - Claudia Winkleman
Around The World In Eighty Days - Jules Verne
Madam, Will You Talk? - Mary Stewart
The Only Plane in the Sky - Garrett M Graff
Leave The World Behind - Rumaan Alam
The Break - Marian Keyes
The Wolf Den - Elodie Harper

The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett
Reread of an old favourite.

Why Buddhism Is True - Robert Wright
A look at secular Buddhist thought and practice from the perspective of evolutionary biology. More fun than it sounds and very enlightening (no pun intended).

The Good Thieves - Katherine Rundel
Wonderful children's book by the writer of Why You Should Read Children's Books Even Though You Are So Old and Wise.

Work - And Other Four Letter Words - Joseph Millson
This is my read of the year and led to much Muttley-sniggering. Millson is primarily a theatre actor, though he was apparently a regular in Peak Practice and Doctors and for some reason I thought he was a chef. I know nothing about theatre but he gives a fascinating account of what acting actually involves, from the rehearsal process to experimenting with the role on stage each night and the relationships that form within theatre companies. He is also very funny and writes movingly of his relationship with his father and children.

The Professor and the Parson - Adam Sisman
The true story of a man who, with varying levels of success, claimed over a period of forty years to be an Anglican priest (he was ordained but defrocked) and to have had a successful academic career at Oxford and several other institutions. He was also convicted once for bigamy, though he seems to had six or seven wives in total and may not have divorced all of them. I work at a university and read this with my head in my hands at times, as it is all too easy to see how this happened.

I think that's my lot for 2021. I have finished 63 books in total and have a couple more on the go. I like to carry over two or three unfinished books at the end of the year so that I get a couple of early finishes.

@Boiledeggandtoast I love a podcast, that sounds really interesting, especially given Russia's posturing at present. I was also going to recommend a podcast if you're into them @Sadik. I really liked The Missing Crytoqueen and Sweet Bobby.

@PermanentTemporary so sorry about your husband. I was having a conversation with a close friend who suffers from depression about Queenie. She said one of the things that struck her was that the main character was able to get help while my friend struggled for years to get any referral from the NHS.

Will consider my highlights and post soon,I feel like it's been a really good year for books for me and most of my highlights have been books published this year.

Just doing a big review dump here so that I can move into 2022 unencumbered.

63. Involuntary Witness, by Gianrico Carofiglio (trans. by Patrick Creagh). 3/5
    Lent to me by a friend. Less a whodunnit than a courtroom thriller. A satisfyingly multi-layered main character, and an implicit critique of the racism endemic in the Italian legal system.

64. Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. 4/5
    This novel gave me plenty to think about. It’s a mark of Ishiguro’s talent that he can create a first-person narrator who is a robot, and whose voice as a robot is (mostly) convincing, so that I turned the pages without questioning this premise. Yet Klara is also extremely sympathetic, and certain humans fail to measure up in comparison, which is perhaps the saddest thing about the story. Some of the social critique is quite damning, such as the parents who are literally willing to make their children ill in order to ensure that their offspring are intellectually superior.

65. Self-Compassion, by Kristin Neff. 4/5
    An American self-help book about how to be kinder to yourself. As someone who struggles a lot with perfectionist tendencies, I liked this a lot.

66. Jeune fille au balcon, by Leïla Sebbar. 4/5
    Sebbar writes wonderful collections of short stories, often about women in France and Algeria, and this collection (which I don’t think has been translated into English) was no exception. Particularly interesting was a story based on the real-life photography of Marc Garanger, who was commissioned by the French government in 1960 to take photos of Algerian village women who had been forced to remove their veils. I googled his name after I read the story, and there is so much anger, protest and resignation in these women’s faces. It feels ethically wrong to look at their photos, knowing that they didn’t want to be photographed and that the photography itself was an act of violence, but at the same time the photos constitute a powerful record of French (male) oppression and Algerian (female) resistance.

67. Beautiful World, Where Are You?, by Sally Rooney. 4/5
    This novel is quite ‘meta’, and feels self-referential, in that it’s a novel about how a young woman novelist acquires an unsought level of celebrity. I didn’t love it as much as Normal People, but I liked it better than Conversations with Friends. Rooney’s voice is distinctive and she has a real knack for making the familiar strange, such as when she describes the way people scroll through social media on their phones, assimilating all kinds of different information in seconds without ever changing expression. I liked the ending of the book as well.

68. Dusty Answer, by Rosamond Lehmann. 3/5
    This novel is fascinating in many ways (same-sex attraction, women students in 1920s Cambridge), but the style alienated me a little. The descriptions are very flowery, and the protagonist is quite self-absorbed. On the other hand, it captures the intensity of adolescent feelings very well.

69. Oh William!, by Elizabeth Strout. 5/5
    I loved this novel, which I suppose confirms me as a diehard Strout fan. I also loved My Name Is Lucy Barton, to which this book is a sequel. Strout shows how the effects of childhood trauma carry on affecting adult life, but she also shows how Lucy has been able to build a rich life of her own, despite her vulnerabilities, and to forge strong relationships with her own children. So this is a hopeful novel. Strout is just remarkably good at exposing the delicate clockwork of human relationships, and creating characters who make their way through the world with a compelling mix of blindness and insight.

70. The Promise, by Damon Galgut. 4/5
    A very skilfully written novel that moves from apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa. I particularly liked the way each section of the novel features a new religious figure (evangelical pastor, priest, New Age guru and so on), yet the character who is the most ethical in the book, the unsubtly named Amor, doesn’t seem to subscribe to any religion at all. It is Amor who is determined to keep the promise of the book’s title. She is almost too good to be true, but the juxtaposition between her quiet determination and the chaotic, messy lives of the rest of her family is a moving one.

71. Troilus and Cressida, by Shakespeare. 5/5
    Read because my son is working on this play for a school project. It’s a strange and messy play, one that famously eludes neat categories of genre. But the way Shakespeare retells the story of the Trojan war is, unsurprisingly, weird and wonderful. None of the heroes (with the possible exception of Hector) are very heroic, and Cressida herself is marvellous, her supposed sexual promiscuity matched by her razor-sharp wit.

PermanentTemporary, I'm so sorry about your DH. A younger medievalist colleague I follow on Twitter lost her husband in very similar circumstances this year -- shortly before taking his own life, he had tried to access help and was not taken seriously by the NHS. Mental illness is terrible when it transforms us and our loved ones into people who are not themselves.

@Boiledeggandtoast I've just seen that Dusty Answer was one of your books of the year; it must have been your recommendation that made me read it! Our taste seems to be quite similar in many respects (I love most of your other top books, at least the ones I've read), so I'm not sure what happened with Dusty Answer. I have the feeling that if I had read it when I was younger, I would have loved it. Maybe I'm too old and cynical now. It does have a very distinctive feel to it, and it reminds me a bit of a 1920s version of The Secret History -- one young character on the outside of a glamourous circle of young people, wanting to be part of the group.

@MaudOfTheMarches I'm so pleased to see someone else who read The Professor and the Parson - I spent most of it with my jaw on the floor at the sheer brass neck of the so-called Rev. Though there did seem a certain grim humour in the fact that Hugh Trevor-Roper was then so comprehensively taken in over the Hitler diaries. Ouch.

I've done more leisure reading this year than ever before. This was also the first year I participated in this thread. This was not a coincidence. Thank you, everyone, for so many great recommendations and thought-provoking reviews!

I asked for and received no books for Christmas . But this is probably a good thing as my TBR piles are pretty out of control.

Here are my bolded books, and yes, I know I bolded a ridiculous number of books this year. I'm just very enthusiastic, what can I say?

Fiction:

1. Mémoire de fille (A Girl's Story), Annie Ernaux
2. La Femme gelée (The Frozen Woman), by Annie Ernaux
3. Foreign Affairs, Alison Lurie
4. Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin (plus the subsequent books in the Earthsea series)
6. Aeneid, Vergil, trans. by Shadi Bartsch
7. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
8. The Door, Magda Szabo
9. The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett

10. The Unseen, Roy Jacobsen, trans. by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw 11. The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford 12. Frère d’âme (At Night All Blood Is Black), by David Diop 13. Crampton Hodnet, by Barbara Pym 14. Oh William!, by Elizabeth Strout 15. Troilus and Cressida, by Shakespeare

Non-fiction:

1. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
2. Guest House for Young Widows, Azadeh Moaveni
3. Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman
4. My Name Is Why, Lemn Sissay
5. Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir, by Marina Warner
6. The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan

Terpsichore, my DH read The Professor and the Parson and was equally agog!

Terps and Cassandre I felt quite sorry for Hugh Trevor-Roper over the Hitler diaries. Where I work currently we have a couple of people who regularly pop up in similar circumstances, though not so extreme. I recognise the pattern of becoming aggressive when challenged and creating a lot of work and upset. You have to deal with them fairly and, of course, you never know what difficulties someone is facing, so I do have sympathy.

Maud, your haul reminded me I've been wanting to read Hidden Hands. May have bought myself a little present....

cassandre I think we do have quite similar tastes - I wasn't sure whether I was "allowed" two books by the same author and would otherwise have included A Girl's Story by Annie Ernaux too; I gave it 9/10 but it was pipped by The Years with 9.5/10.

I'm sorry you didn't enjoy Dusty Answer so much. I read it during the Covid lock-down and loved it because I found it very nostalgic, though whether that was for life at the time it was set or for my own lost youth I don't know - perhaps a bit of both.

Stokey After posting, I started on Series 2 of The Big Steal while cleaning the bathroom. It's just as good but focuses more on more recent political opposition to Putin.

Hi Biblio yes, I'm pleased with that one! My first choice was Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, which I see Terpsichore has acquired, but I couldn't get a copy in time for Christmas.

I've not read as much as I did before I started my part-time MSc a few years ago and haven't been keept a list for a while. But looking at the books I've read on Goodreads, these are my highlights from the 31 I've read:

All at Sea - Decca Aitkenhead
Beautiful World, Where Are You? - Sally Rooney
This Much is True - Miriam Margolyes

Looking forward to seeing the compiled list of bolds @PermanentTemporary

I don't think I'll finish another book this year, so here is my final list for 2021:

1. Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee
2. A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler
3. My Wild and Sleepless Nights by Clover Stroud
4. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy
5. Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith
6. Somebody I Used to Know by Wendy Mitchell
7. Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid
8. The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson
9. Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton

10. All That Remains: A Life in Death by Sue Black 11. I Thought I Knew You by Penny Hancock 12. Red Dust by Ma Jian 13. Sun Fall by Jim Al-Khalili 14. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 15. Passing by Nella Larsen 16. The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers 17. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi 18. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke 19. The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite by Laura Freeman 20. When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson 21. The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble 22. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez 23. The Origin of our Species by Chris Stringer 24. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett 25. Long Bright River by Liz Moore 26. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson 27. Longbourn by Jo Baker 28. Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze 29. The Life Project by Helen Pearson 30. Republic of Lies by Anna Merlan 31. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi 32. The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy 33. A History of the World in 21 Women by Jenni Murray 34. No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood 35. My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell 36. How to Make the World Add Up by Tim Harford 37. Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker 38. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo 39. The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer 40. Apeirogon by Colum McCann 41. The Only Plane in the Sky by Garrett M Graff 42. Ouch! Why Pain Hurts, and Why it Doesn't Have To by Margee Kerr and Linda Rodriguez McRobbie 43. My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent 44. The White Lie by Andrea Gillies 45. The Appeal by Janice Hallett 46. Evening in the Palace of Reason by James Gaines 47. Small Island by Andrea Levy 48. We All Know How This Ends by Anna Lyons and Louise Winter 49. The Five by Hallie Rubenhold 50. How Hard Can It Be? by Allison Pearson 51. Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman by Richard Feynman 52. Happy by Derren Brown 53. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser 54. Fifty Fifty by Steve Cavanagh 55. The New Wilderness by Diane Cook 56. Court Number One: the Old Bailey Trials that Defined Modern Britain by Thomas Grant 57. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Top five fiction:
Transcendent Kingdom
Piranesi
The Dutch House
East of Eden
Three Hours

Top five non fiction:
Invisible Women
How to Make the World Add Up
The Life Project
Virginia Woolf
The Only Plane in the Sky

The weird thing about my stats is how unintentionally similar they are to last year! I have hit my reading sweet spot.
Total books 57 (last year 57)
Fiction 51%, non fiction 49% (last year 54/46)
Women 63%, men 37% (last year 68/32)
I have managed to read more BAME authors this year (18% compared to 9% last year).

PermTemp I am very sorry to hear about your husband. We lost 2 male cousins to suicide about 20 years ago and access to help was woefully poor then and even worse now. The devastation it causes to the family left behind is palpable.

Thank you for collating the bolds.

I seem to have lost the necessary punctuation marks in my main list to denote bolds etc, so will have to go over my full list and add them back in.

My absolute stand out fictions this year are

Lucy Ellman - Ducks, Newburyport
Salena Godden - Mrs Death Misses Death
Sarah Winman - Still Life
Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire
John Milton - Paradise Lost

Non-fic
Derren Brown - Happy (this was a life changing book for me)
Garrett Graff - The Only Plane in the Sky
Helen Joyce - Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality
Abigail Shrier - Irreversible Damage
Philippe Sands - The Ratline

I could easily bold many more, but these are the 5 of each that were the very best of the best.

I'm on around 220 books for the year, not counting the 23 Enid Blyton book binge I had in the summer.

I've decided I want more poetry in my life next year and was wondering if anyone can recommend a collection of the very best English poetry please? I read A Poem for every Day of the Year last year and wasn't keen, but it was a funny year all round.

@PermanentTemporary.
129) (perhaps) We are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker. Rather good speculative fiction, will just check which of you lovely lot recommended this upthread.

Permanent, I'm so sorry to hear about your DH. I lost a friend in similar circumstances and it was very hard knowing the system let him down.

I will come back with reads of the year when I find my list, but just dropping in to post what I assume will be my final reviews. Can't see me fitting in another book this year.

96 HHhH by Laurent Binet
The story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by the Czech resistance. This must have been recommended to me by someone on here and I will try to keep better track next year. I loved the experimental narrative style. Heydrich was a horrible horrible man even by the standards of his contemporaries and the story of the plot and its aftermath is an extraordinary one. Would recommend.

97 The Hopkins Manuscript by RC Sherriff
This was a wonderful serendipitous find. I read and loved A Fortnight in September and thought this would be similar. Apart from a certain wistful quality it could not have been more different but this was a wonderful and transporting piece of early science fiction. What would happen if the moon crashed into the Atlantic Ocean (spoiler: nothing good) and how do people react to the threat of apocalypse? This was an immensely good read and one that I am surprised isn’t better known.

98 Bridgerton by Julia Quinn
Enjoyably fluffy. No surprises having seen the tv show.

99 The Tent, the Bucket and Me by Emma Kennedy
This was more of a “started so I will finish” than anything else. The first chapter made me cry with laughter but the endless stories of falling into disgusting pits while camping in the rain got a little tiresome.

100 Vaxxers by Professor Sarah Gilbert and Dr Catherine Green
I flew through this - it’s an easy read but very informative. I’m taking part in a drug trial at the moment so this was enlightening on that front but also a clear and concise rebuttal to anyone who says the vaccine isn’t safe because it was rushed. The authors go painstakingly through the whole process and show how no steps were skipped. A great and important book, which would do a good job of addressing concerns of someone who may be mildly vaccine hesitant.

And the list:

1 There Are Places In The World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness by Carlo Rovelli
2 The Gifts of Reading by various authors
3 Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon
4 Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
5 The Promised Land by Barack Obama
6 The World According to Garp by John Irving
7 Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin
8 The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene
9 Acts and Omissions by Catherine Fox
10 Changing Places by David Lodge
11 The School at the Chalet by Elinor M Brent Dyer
12 At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald
13 The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
14 Unseen Things Above by Catherine Fox
15 A Month In the Country by JL Carr
16 The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili
17 The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon
18 In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden
19 Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman
20 The Truants by Kate Weinberg
21 And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts
22 Loved Clothes Last by Orsola de Castro
23 Against Nature by JK Huysmans
24 Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr
25 Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser
26 Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
27 Look At Me by Anita Brookner
28 The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown
29 Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
30 Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
31 Realms of Glory by Catherine Fox
32 Diary of an MP’s Wife by Sasha Swire
33 Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers
34 The Cactus by Sarah Haywood
35 Family and Friends by Anita Brookner
36 O Pioneers by Willa Cather
37 Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
38 The Midnight Bell by Patrick Hamilton
39 Rivers of London by Ben Aaranovitch
40 Latecomers by Anita Brookner
41 Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
42 Monday Morning by Patrick Hamilton
43 H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald
44 Luster by Raven Leilani
45 Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper by Donald Henderson
46 More Than A Woman by Caitlin Moran
47 Howards End Is On The Landing by Susan Hill
48 Failures of State by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott
49 Insignificance by James Clammer
50 American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
51 Hungry by Grace Dent
52 Material Girls by Katherine Stock
53 The Address Book by Deirdre Mask
54 Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier
55 Nomadland by Jessica Bruder
56 Tales from Lindford by Catherine Fox
57 The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns
58 The Other Side of the Coin by Angela Kelly
59 In Praise of Walking by Shane O’Mara
60 Quite by Claudia Winkleman
61 Who Is Rich by Matthew Klam
62 Chip Shop in Poznań by Ben Aitken
63 Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins
64 Summerwater by Sarah Moss
65 We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch
66 Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel
67 Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman
68 Premonition by Michael Lewis
69 Bay of Angels by Anita Brookner
70 Learning to Swim by Clare Chambers
71 House of Trelawney by Hannah Rothschild
72 The Fortnight in September by RC Sherriff
73 The Only Plane in the Sky by Garrett M Graff
74 Nine Perfect Strangers by Lianne Moriarty
75 A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
76 The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley
77 Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
78 My Ántonia by Willa Cather
79 Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes
80 The Furies by Katie Lowe
81 Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
82 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
83 The Children Who Lived in a Barn by Eleanor Graham
84 Bedsit Disco Queen by Tracey Thorn
85 Starlight by Stella Gibbons
86 Trans by Helen Joyce
87 Parents’ Guide to ADHD medicines by Prof Peter Hill
88 Pandora by Jilly Cooper
89 The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex
90 The Weil Conjectures by Karen Olson
91 Vida by Marge Piercy
92 There Are Crocodiles In the Sea by Fabio Geda
93 The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
94 And Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris
95 The Long Weekend by Adrian Tinniswood
96 HHhH by Laurent Binet
97 The Hopkins Manuscript by RC Sherriff
98 Bridgerton by Julia Quinn
99 The Tent, the Bucket and Me by Emma Kennedy
100 Vaxxers by Professor Sarah Gilbert and Dr Catherine Green

Don't think I'll finish the book I've just started in the next 2 days so this will be my complete list. I'm sure some of the bolds have changed over the year.

1 Hilo Waking the Monsters by Judd Winick
2 The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami. Translated by Allison Markin Powell
3 Hilo Then Everything Went Wrong by Judd Winick
4 Three Apples Fell from the Sky by Narine Abgaryan. Translated by Lisa C Hayden
5 Hilo All the Pieces Fit by Judd Winick
6 Days of the Bagnold Summer by Joff Winterhart
7 The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold
8 Serpentine by Philip Pullman
9 Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot
10 Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
11 Bright by Duanwad Pimwana. Translated by Mui Poopoksakul
12 The Politicization of Mumsnet by Sarah Pedersen
13 The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré
14 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
15 The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
16 If Not, Winter. Fragments of Sappho. Translated by Anne Carson
17 Freedom Bound: Escaping Slavery in Scotland by Warren Pleece
18 The Abyss Surrounds Us by Emily Skrutskie
19 Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
20 On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden
21 Black and British by David Olusoga
22 The Vegetarian by Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith
23 Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez. Traslated by Christina MacSweeney
24 Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea by Teffi. Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson and Irina Steinberg
25 Susanna Moodie, Roughing It In the Bush by Carol Shields and Patrick Crowe. Illustrated by Selena Goulding
26 Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
27 Ms Ice Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami. Translated by Louise Heal Kawai
28 Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
29 Old Baggage by Lissa Evans
30 To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
31 Heartstopper Vol 1 by Alice Oseman
32 Heartstopper Vol 2 by Alice Oseman
33 Heartstopper Vol 4 by Alice Oseman
34 Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym
35 The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah. Translated by Geoffrey Strachan
36 The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend
37 The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey
38 Heartstopper Vol 3 by Alice Oseman
39 The Provincial Lady in America by E. M. Delafield
40 Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
41 Earthlings by Sayaka Murata. Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
42 The Employees A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn. Translated by Martin Aitken
43 Butterflies in November by Auđur Ava Ólafsdóttir. Translated by Brian FitzGibbon
44 The Country of Others by Leïla Slimani Translated by Sam Taylor
45 Period by Emma Barnett
46 Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi Translated by Marilyn Booth
47 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
48 The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein
49 Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights by Helen Lewis
50 The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky. Translated by Tim Mohr
51 Material Girls. Why Reality Matters for Feminism. Kathleen Stock
52 Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
53 The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
54 A Maigret Christmas and Other Stories by Georges Simenon. Translated by David Coward

81% female authors, 33% translated fiction, 15% non-fiction. Best fiction: The Country of Others, Best non-fiction: Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea. I always love these threads, there's so many interesting recommendations. Thanks to southeastdweller for running them.

Argh! Forgot to add my final book.

*55 Vaxxers by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green. Bit of a busmans holiday for me but good to get some more of the story around certain issues (there was much gossip at work about the half dose issue at the time so interesting to read Cath's take on it). That'll bugger up all my percentages now!