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?

biblio re. My Phantoms I feel bad if I’ve deterred anyone from a book that others have enjoyed, and which I admired on many levels. I think Fortuna enjoyed it? I’ll look out for future reviews with interest but personally will be pleased to get it out of the house!

I absolutely loved both Possession many years ago and The Children's Book more recently.

@BestIsWest - I do know what you mean about The Man In The Brown Suit, and it is probably one of my least favourite Christies, but I think it does have two redeeming features - Anne Beddingfield (the heroine) is quite fun and spunky and I also enjoy Eustace Pedler. I am generally not a fan of her thrillers (The Secret Adverary is IMO worse, and The Seven Dials Mystery is also extremely silly), but I don't think Brown Suit is the worst of them. Not much of a recommendation @bibliomania, still, but maybe a little more positive!

1. A wedding at hedgehog hollow by Jessica Redland

Read this on my Kindle in the bath 😊 have read the rest of the series this is book 4. Really easy read centred around a hedgehog sanctuary. This one was a little more gritty than the previous ones although none are really gritty, all a bit twee tbh but a lovely escapism read. Although they've been written in lockdown the author specifically hasn't set them in lockdown if that makes sense.

I think they are only on Kindle, possibly self published.

[quote highlandcoo]**@Fortuna, I found Eileen very very bleak. I'm OK with violence and peril and unhappiness but my memory of Eileen is fairly unrelenting misery with no relief and I just felt worn out by the end.[/quote]

According to my IRL book club, I only read very miserable books. I often lament if anyone picks something with a happy ending. I find cheerful books unbalancing

@Fortuna

can I recommend The People's Act of Love by James Meek. Made me want to slit my wrists.

@Cornishblues

biblio re. My Phantoms I feel bad if I’ve deterred anyone from a book that others have enjoyed, and which I admired on many levels. I think Fortuna enjoyed it? I’ll look out for future reviews with interest but personally will be pleased to get it out of the house!

I thought it was excellent. I come from a very dysfunctional family and it read as very true to me. I could identify with a lot of it. I'd say it's definitely worth a read, but sometimes 'enjoy' isn't the right word for some books.

@highlandcoo

*@Fortuna*

can I recommend The People's Act of Love by James Meek. Made me want to slit my wrists.

Perfect! Thank you.

They can't understand why I choose to read about suffering, death and misery. I can't see the appeal in the schmaltzy mild peril/ minor setback then everything resolves far too neatly and everyone lives happily ever after books that they choose. We read Anxious People last year and the ending was so sugary sweet that I wanted to throw up. I've banned any more Beth O'Leary books and anything with a three word title in yellow font.

I love Gone Fishing with Bob and Paul, and enjoyed the book that accompanied the programme (I listened to the audiobook of it read by the two of them - realistically, they could have been talking about anything and I'd have enjoyed it; they're just so jolly together) and have And Away lined up as my next audible listen. I don't actually know how I'll get on with it as I only really know Bob from Gone Fishing and Taskmaster but I'm looking forward to it. I imagine I'll seek out some Vic and
Bob stuff to watch afterwards.

I am also doing the Agatha Christie challenge and am partway through The Man in the Brown Suit. I always prefer the Poirot or Marple books but I agree with welshwabbit that Anne Beddingfield is a good protagonist. Embarrassingly, I am finding the plot rather confusing so I obviously need to focus more - hopefully there will be a good recap when the big reveal happens!

There were some fun moments with Anne in The Man In The Brown Suit but I got bored of her quite quickly and just couldn’t wait to finish it. I did like the bits around Victoria Falls.
I quite enjoyed The Seven Dials one but it was years ago now.

@Tarahumara

I absolutely loved both Possession many years ago and The Children's Book more recently.

Me too. In fact I read The Children's Book mainly because of people here talking about Possession and it made me think that I really need to read more of A S Byatt's books. Might be time to read a third if my TBR pile wasn't so enormous.

I loved To Say Nothing of the Dog but I read it while in Oxford last summer (including during a glorious day punting on the Cherwell) so was very much in the mood for her Oxford pastiche. Doomsday Book is sitting on my TBR shelves.

I was debating reading The Man in the Brown Suit soon also, however while I'm a Christie fan i've not read any of her Marples or standalone books (have spent years slowly reading through the Poirots and still not finished with them!) so may leave it a while yet, it seems there are much better books of hers out there to be reading first.

The other ones the Christie challenge recommends for this month are Mystery of the Blue Train which I reviewed a couple of pages back and is quite fun, Murder in the Orient Express which is good if you don't know the story, and Appointment with Death reviewed by @LittleDiaries. And actually since its books inspired by her travels, you could really read lots of others. Would recommend any of the above over The Man in The Brown Suit.

@ChessieFL

Jon O'Farrell drives me nuts with his shoehorning in of really cringey jokes. Things Can Only Get Better is one of my most read books of all time (I reread it before each general election (fingers crossed I'll be getting it down soon!) and some of the passages in that are pithy, and hard-hitting and just brilliant. Then he drops an eye-rolling forced bit of hilarity in. Gah. (I actually enjoyed the second history one more than the first, but possibly because I remember lots of the actual events)

I’ve got The Man in the Brown Suit waiting for me at the library but am inclined to read one of the others now. I’d like to start with a good’un!

I’ve also got Death on the Nile waiting. I very vaguely remember bits of the tv adaptation but am looking forward to the film coming out, we have a fabulous Art Deco cinema nearby that I want to go and see it at.

19. Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima
    This is set in the dying days of the Japanese aristocracy. A young man is sent to the palace to be brought up in the court of the Emperor, despite not being of noble birth. He has an affair with a young princess which has implications for her formal engagement to someone else.
    It's part of a 4 part series which looks at class, society and western influences on Japanese culture and values. There is a running theme throughout the 4 as the main character ages, but I don't think I'd bother with the rest. While the writing is good, the plot was glacial and sadly there wasn't enough of anything else to keep me wanting more. I think overall they are meant to be very good, but not for me.

20. Ex Libris - Michiko Kakutani
    Literary critic for the New York Times discusses the 100 books she would recommend. I'd originally started What to Read and Why by Francine Prose but that felt very preachy and dry whereas this was an much more enthusiastic tour of books. I've read many that she listed, but it was interesting to hear her take on them and I've picked up a few more that I'd like to read from it.

I’m intimidated by A.S. Byatt. If you were to recommend one of hers to ease me in, which would it be?

Sadik - I should have read the online reviews What fooled me was that it was published in the SF Masterworks series.

I'll have to read a Neal Stephenson book to forget about this foolish excuse for a SF "classic".

3. The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North

I quite enjoyed this story, it felt quite original to me. The main character is cursed and on the run and how he deals with it and tells his story drew me in.

However with Claire North I am always a little disappointed that I'm not reading First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August which remains pretty much a top 5 book book for me and none of the rest of hers are quite as good. But I will keep reading them all to check!

11. The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil
My DGM, on being taken to Fountains Abbey, exclaimed, “You’ve brought me all this way, and they haven’t even finished it!” This was a 1130-page unfinished novel (there are apparently 100s of pages of drafts and notes as well); Musil began it in 1921, and was still writing it when he died in 1942. I have not spent quite so much time reading it, although it felt like it at times.
Set in Vienna in 1913, the hero, Ulrich, is searching for a purpose in life; he is self-analytical to a fault. The plot, such as it is, mainly involves his reluctant appointment to a committee searching for the best way to celebrate Emperor Franz Joseph’s 70th year on the throne; this is highly ironic because it would have fallen in 1918. I enjoyed the witty accounts of the motley selection of people brought together and their discussions. I was less enamoured of the lengthy philosophical musings on the meaning of life, morality etc. I’m just not a philosophical person, and I sometimes found them hard to follow: maybe they work better in the original German?
This is considered one of the great works of modernism. I don’t regret reading it, but I would hesitate to recommend it to other readers. Proust, by comparison, is a far easier and more rewarding read.

@ChannelLightVessel that's been on my TBR for years but I've never quite got up the courage to attempt it. I can't say your review has given me much confidence 😆

Meg, maybe it’s just me, but I suspect it might be preferable to try one of his shorter, finished works.

3. A Theatre of Dreamers, Polly Samson

I struggled with this whilst reading but the setting of the Greek island of Hydra get me reading (I've mentioned upthread that I have an affinity for narratives about islands). The story follows a 19 year old Erica who in 1960, goes to Hydra when her mother dies and she is left a small amount of money to live her dreams and a book arrives from her mother's old friend Charmian Clift about the island. She joins the 'foreign colony' of writers, poets and artists. I didn't know who lots of them were and who were real people and who were not which I think might have made it a more interesting read. At its heart it is a coming of age story. I think Samson overcomplicates the prose at times and because it is a sort of stream of consciousness sections don't always connect. I have been inspired to read some of Clift's work if I can find it, and I really liked the last 25%.

IntermittentParps Of the two I've read, I would say The Children's Book is a lot more accessible, although still a bit of a doorstop!