50 Book Challenge 2022 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 2022, 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.

If possible, please can you embolden your titles and maybe authors as well of books you've read or going to read? It makes it much easier to keep track, especially when the threads move quickly at this time of the year.

Who's in for this year?

Glad your DH liked the Crater School @Welshwabbit The sequel is just as good :) I got the recommendation from KJ Charles' best books of 2021 & there's quite a few others on there I fancy

1. How To Read A Novel by John Sutherland

Sutherland has written quite a few literary criticism books, including a few literary puzzle books like Who Betrayed Elizabeth Bennet? and Was Heathcliff A Murderer?. This book covers the process of reading novels, although it also talks about how you choose a novel in the first place. It touches on all sorts of things - book reviews, films of books, pen names, whether errors are deliberate or not, the medium of the book and so on. I found this really interesting with lots to think about. However, there are quite a few spoilers about the various novels he discusses. The book was written in 2005, published in 2006, so it doesn’t cover any novels published in the last 15 years. It’s interesting to see how things have changed since then - although ebooks did exist then the Kindle wasn’t released until 2007 so they weren’t much of a thing, and audiobooks were still just on cassette or CD so not very widely listened to. Some of his predictions haven’t quite come true! Worth a read if you like books about books.

Welsh, I find it very endearing that your DH likes the Chalet School books! Where do I find a man like that?

Thanks @Sadik, I'll check that out! Yes @bibliomania it is quite endearing! I've actually never read them (Agatha Christie was my equivalent teenage obsession. Probably says a lot about both of us!)

@BookBanter that is exactly what I hated about On Chessil Beach, so annoying when characters don't just communicate.

@cassandre You make some fair points. It could be that I was expecting a different type of book, and that coupled with a general dislike of the style of the author meant that the choking incident was just the point where I realised this was not the book for me. You are right about the narrator stating shocking things in a matter of fact way and I perhaps found this jarring.

Hmmm interesting re the comparison between consensual vs violence. I had a hard time with a woman, who has written two books about the death of her aunt then telling us about being choked during sex, but then like I say I didn't finish the book so missed the later ambivalence you mentioned.

I have to agree, the author was searingly honest. I just didn't want to hear what she said I guess.

Certainly the issue in On Chesil Beach is a lack of communication. However, for me this is reasonable because they’re a young naive couple, they don’t actually know each other that well, and don’t really know what to expect from marriage and sex. It’s reasonable in that context that they don’t know how to communicate with each other. I haven’t read the Holly Seddon book that BookBanter refers to but their review mentions it’s the couple’s 10th wedding anniversary so you would expect them to be able to communicate by that stage so in that context I would find a lack of communication much more annoying! Having said that, probably about 90% of plots would disappear if everyone just told each other what was going on all the time so we should probably all be grateful to some extent for a lack of communication!

Book 3 was Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie a re-read and old favourite her books remind me of 1930's screwball comedies.
Book 4 Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness number two in the Discovery of Witches trilogy, I have had these on my kindle for years, read the first one over Christmas. This takes Diana and Matthew back in time to 1591 to try to find a book. I enjoyed it and am looking forward to the third and final one.
I am also reading A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel in paper form, which I am loving but it's too big to carry around

Can I join please? I'm downloading Bad Blood on my Kindle and looking forward to reading it!

1. Watching Neighbours Twice a Day by Josh Widdicombe. Very enjoyable, as I’m just a couple of years older than JW, and also had a relatively rural childhood, so my frame of reference culture-wise is very similar.

Am about half way through number 4 of 2022, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, approximately a million years after the rest of the world, loving it so far. This is my second book of the year by the same author, and I can see me seeking out more of her work.

2. Lethal White - Robert Galbraith I bloody loved this book. I simply can’t justify buying the next Strike book until payday with the amount of unread books I have in my house so I’ll wait. The first half annoyed me as I felt like it was too long, I found myself wondering if it needed to be the doorstop it is. But now I’ve finished I’ve decided I love it and would happily read it again.

5/5

Have finished number 2. The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley
A reread for me for my book group. Very good if you like folk horror, Wicker-manny type stuff and also like a book that leaves you asking more questions than it answers. A creepy, slow burner of a literary horror.
A boy (the narrator) goes on a pilgrimage type holiday to The Loney, a remote part of Cumbria, with his religious family, including his brother Hanny, who doesn’t talk and attends a SEN school, their new priest, Father Bernard and other parishioners. There they hope Hanny will be ‘cured’ by a holy spring and their faith.
However, they aren’t made to feel welcome by some of the locals and something strange seems to be going on at a house at the very edge of The Loney. Also, the parishioners are haunted by their own past, about what happened to their previous priest, Father Wilfred.
Intriguing, ambiguous and beautifully written. The characters are vivid and the landscape is too.
Most people at my group enjoyed it very much, with just a couple wanting the horror to be a bit less subtle and more in their face.
I’m now reading The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck so I’ll see you in about five years. Not really, I’ve got to read it by next Tuesday (another for my book group but I’ve read it before so it shouldn’t be too hard going - amazing book though!).

@minsmum have you seen the Discovery of Witches tv adaptation? I often don't love a program when I've enjoyed the books but I think this is really well done and the cast is absolutely stellar.

@noodlezoodle no I haven't yet, I am waiting until I finish all three books then I will binge, I am glad to know it's good though, thank you

Welcome OddSocks, that’s a cracker of a book! Lots us on here loved it (and I’m afraid I also got completely addicted to the recent podcast).

boiledegg I do agree Foster is a beautiful little book and to be honest I don't begrudge the price. It was well worth it .. not all books that length would be. And thanks for clarifying that the two women were sisters as I had somehow not picked up on that detail. They were obviously keeping their distance from the girl's parents, presumably because of her father's personality and behaviour .. his veiled comment towards the end of the book was cruel in the extreme.

minsmum you are a better woman than me if you are loving A Place of Greater Safety. On paper it should have been just my sort of book as I love France, like history and had read HM's Thomas Cromwell trilogy with great enjoyment. But I struggled with APOGS as I simply couldn't differentiate between the three main characters. I was constantly checking which was which and I just got fed up in the end. Does it get easier?

Remus one less person with an interest in Bob can only be a good thing

1. Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann

I felt a bit exhausted by the end of this book. It's a coming-of-age story written and set between the wars. Judith is a lonely child from a wealthy but rather neglectful family, who becomes obsessed with the children next door, a group of cousins who spend the summer holidays with their grandmother. They disappear for years, she weaves all sorts of imaginings around her possible future relationships with them; in her late teens they all encounter one other again, and the story goes on from there.

There's a lot of thwarted young love between Judith and several of the boys, described in very flowery language. It reminded me of the dialogue in a certain sort of film of the time, where the hero clasps the heroine to his chest and grinds out "You little fool! Don't you realise that ... I love you!" and she beats her tiny fists on his chest before melting against him.

There's a lot of thwarted lesbian love as well, which must have been pretty progressive for the time. According to Lehmann herself, It was discussed, and even reviewed, in certain quarters as the outpourings of a sex-maniac. Apparently it earned her enough money to enable her to leave her husband and run off with a struggling artist - it sounds as if her own life was fairly eventful as well.

It's a real period piece and interesting in that respect. I won't be reading another book of hers though. I'm off to read Jane Harper's latest Australian crime novel now, for a fast-moving plot and a lot less teenage angst.

2. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

First time reading. I loved this.

Although some of the language and attitudes are appalling from today's point of view, it's quite obviously of its time, and and 1930s Alabama was not a friendly place for black people.

I loved the kids characters, Scout especially. I enjoyed her fights against being a lady and her adoration of her dad.

Came on to add my review and added the Rwanda book with the long title to my TBR list. I'll never get to the bottom of it

Definitely need to think about some audio books for longer drives this year (if I can stop singing 90s indie long enough!)

1 Vaxxers - Dr Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green

Good start to 2022 reading year, I picked this up in the Waterstones 1/2 price hardback sale after Christmas. Contains the full story of the Astra Zeneca vaccine; I'd heard a half hour radio programme with Sarah last year and I was intrigued to hear more.

It doesn't shy away from scientific detail, but explains technical detail and concepts in as an accessible way as possible. You are taken on a journey of the highs and lows they have experienced in the past 18 months. I felt so proud of what they achieved for us all in such a short period and how stressful that must have been, carrying the world's hopes on your shoulders. A solid 4 star read for me, though feel I know enough about making vaccines for a while!

On to A Gentleman in Moscow next....needs no introduction and looking forward to my first novel on my new Kindle Paperwhite,

AliasGrape - Elif "Shafak"s (her name is Şafak) book really grated on me last year. My review wasn't very forgiving:

10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World by Elif Shafak

Where to start...

This was a lot like A Thousand Splendid Suns in the sense that it bore little likeness to the country it supposedly represents, written in English for the foreign market by an author who grew up outside said country, and I detested it for many of the same reasons.

There is a lot that doesn't make sense in this book, but my personal hate magnet was the impossible names. There is no way in this word or next that a woman would be known as "Leila" in Turkey, since Turks will try to pronounce it phonetically as "Leh-ee-la" and fail, because they can't say a vowel sound after another. The name would be pronounced and written Leyla, as that name is indeed everywhere in the country. The explanation in the book is ludicrous: "She would laugh and say that one day she went to the bazaar and traded the 'y' of 'yesterday' for the 'i' of 'infinity'.", except that there is no 'y' or 'i' in the relevant Turkish words.

It is also literally impossible for her to have legally changed her name's spelling to Leila, in a country where all names mean something, there are no made up names, everything is written phonetically, and there was an actual law until 2003 or so that said you can't have a foreign name.

"Zaynab122" is also impossible. The B at the end would inevitably be pronounced as p, and anyway she would be known as "Zeynep", a common name in Turkey. "D/Ali" is even more ridiculous - Nobody would say the "dash" and it would be Dali which sounds like Deli = Lunatic.

The author knows all this as a native speaker who has lived in Turkey for some years, but she is selling a bullshit story to foreigners so all is well as long as it more or less fits their prejudices and misconceptions - such as newspaper editors not choosing a recent picture of Leila because they "worried that the sight of her heavy make-up and conspicuous cleavage might often the nation's sensitivities" which is rubbish. Since at least the '70s, make-up, cleavage, short skirts, bathing suits, and even regular page 3 girls have been a regular feature of Turkish press.

The more I read, the more her bullshit story grated. "Yet she was no David; and Istanbul, no Goliath"? Excuse me? I am willing to bet real money that no poll would show more than 0.01% of the population in Turkey has even heard of the David vs Goliath story. Certainly no barely literate girl of an illiterate mother from a far Eastern corner of the country, born at a time when no foreign books and certainly not the Bible would have been available, who didn't even complete elementary school, would have been aware of that Bible story.

No less ridiculous is the idea that there would be regular boats of asylum seekers ("Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis, Somalis...") in the '70s that sometimes capsized off the shores of Kilyos, north of Istanbul. First of all, there were no such refugees coming through Turkey to pass to the West at that time, or at any time until recent. Second... Have you seen the map? WHERE would they go to seek asylum on a boat in the Black Sea? Soviet Union? Romania, Bulgaria or Ukraine, all three of which were under Communist rule?

Pathetic. If you want to read books about Turkey that are not so full of nonsense, try Orhan Pamuk.

@CoteDAzur oh dear! Good to hear the other side I guess, I’ll hold my hands up I don’t know the first thing about Turkey so wouldn’t have realised any of your points.

4. This Tender Land - William Kent Krueger

My first fictional book of 2022!

I really enjoyed this. I'm concerned I'm going to show my ignorance here but here goes ; I think it was loosely based on Homer's Oddysey....the main character was called Odysseus and it's about him and his close friends all going on an odyssey. Maybe I've guessed that wrong though as I have never read Homer's Odyssey!!

Anyway, it follows four orphans in the USA during the Great Depression. Very evocative with nods to great American classics as well as (I think ) the Greek classic. It explores faith and the goodness and generosity of people who are already down on their luck. Also taught me a little more about US history, some of which is obviously horrific.

Really enjoyed it and I don't know if I'm doing it justice with this review , but it was cheap on Kindle yesterday, and definitely worth a go.

1. Animal - Lisa Taddeo. This was a very intense read. I'm not sure if anyone reviewed it last year, although I'm sure lots of people read Three Women her previous book. This is her first novel and is written in the first person by Joan who's driving to LA after seeing a man shoot himself in front of her while she's having dinner "with another man, another married man". We find this out on the first page and it sets the scene for the book which is filled with casual sex, sexusl abuse in many forms, murder, miscarriage and one liners. Some of the writing and descriptions are amazing and intense. In the first chapter, she describes a young man working in a shop "picking a pimple and staring at me. There are a hundred such small rapes a day." Joan is completely uncensored and callous but also fragile. It's a fascinating read but I'm not sure the story entirely works.

1. Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

I liked this one, although it was too long and the first half was surprisingly dull. She can definitely write but needs a better editor!

The story was interesting, the characters quite vivid and realistically flawed. It was head and shoulders above Gone Girl. If only it were about 200 pages shorter...

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie

I found Perdido Street Station unreadable, but absolutely loved The City and the City (but don't get Cote started on it!)

You called?

It is my pleasure to share my review from 2016 with the thread:

CoteDAzur Mon 18-Jul-16 23:17:30

35. The City & The City by China Mieville

Well, this was disappointing. "Weird lit" about two cities co-existing in different realities (dimensions?) on the same area - it should have been perfect for me. But wasn't.

It started out quite well, the idea was original, and the author can clearly write, but it just rambled on for hundreds of pages about how they just all saw everyone and everything in the other city but had to "unsee" them all consciously lest they be in "breach" and get hauled off by "Breach" to some other dimension, never to be seen again. 400 pages of blabla and none of this is explained. It just muddles along for about 300 pages and then what little story there is gets explained (yawn) in a hurried way. The End.

I know that this book has its devoted fans and I'm prepared to accept that this might be another "jazz" subject (I just don't understand how jazz is music, when all instruments play unrelated tunes in different rhythms. Or why anyone would want to listen to it), but dull books that make no sense are just not my thing. I honestly can't forgive the author for having made no real attempt at explaining any of the crucial questions:

• How did these cities diverge?

• What came before them? (The culture that left the artefacts in archeological sites)

• What are the special powers attributed to these artefacts? (Alluded to but never really spelled out)

• What does it mean that there are two alternate realities/dimensions/cities when (1) they all see each other clear as day, (2) they can physically cross over whenever they want, (3) they have to "unsee" in time not to get run over by cars in the other world, (4) they can only tell who is in which city from their clothes, and (5) even viruses cross over all the time.

• Why the hell is it not "allowed" (by Breach) to see the other side, let alone visit? What seems to be the problem with seeing them, since they are all visible? confused

• Who are Breach? Don't they have a life? Why the hell do they care so much if people in one city see those in the other city? Do their nappies get in a twist when viruses cross, too?

I'm not recommending this but YMMV.