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?

@Tarahumara - 100 years of Lenni and Margot made me cry. A great book (but finished it on NYE so can’t count it for this year!)

I agree Remus the is a whole chapter in The Woman Reader about men telling women what to read

@WellThatsMeScrewed I think you mean @Purpleavocado, not me

Thank you @FranKatzenjammer !

I've only read two Sarah Moss books but really enjoyed both, especially Summerwater. I want to read The Fell but I don't really want to pay £8.49 for such a short book. Perhaps it shouldn't matter, but it bothers me. I'll wait to find it in a charity shop or for it to come down in price. If that takes too long I'll consider paying to reserve it at the library (Oh how I miss living somewhere where library reservations were free!)

5 Faking It another self indulgent re-read by Jennifer Crusie
6 Book of Life by Deborah Harkness the last in the Discovery of Witches trilogy, thoroughly enjoyed this. It reached a very satisfactory conclusion, I have had this on my kindle for years not sure why I hadn't read it before.
7 Not Quite Forever by Catherine Bybee quick fun read
8 Not Quite Perfect Catherine Bybee
9 Vine Street by Dominic Nolan crime novel that moved back and forth
between the twenties, thirties, sixties and two thousand. It was a decent story but didn't really grab my interest.
10 Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie. Min is dumped by her boyfriend just before her sisters wedding. A fun read as I said before I love these books and when I can't concentrate they are perfect.

My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley I’d been looking forward to this slim novel as I like a good dissection of family dynamics and this was as intimate and easy to read as I could have hoped for. Unfortunately, I found it unbearable. We follow a woman who is wholly estranged from her father and has only minimal contact with the rest of her family. I found the earlier chapters about her dreaded childhood contact time with her father the most wincingly readable. In her adult life she has shrugged off virtually all contact with her family except for a grudging annual birthday lunch with her mother, a virtually friendless soul who is rejected by everyone she tries to connect with. I found it difficult to watch the protagonist witnessing her distress and keeping her distance. It added to my discomfort that I wasn’t sure whether I was expected but failing to empathise with the daughter as a damaged product of a dysfunctional upbringing - but one who seems to have successful career, social life and relationship (the reader is kept at a distance too). Thoroughly looking forward to returning this to the library and having it off my hands, so clearly it has elicited an emotional response!

I'm stealing the blurbs for these next two as they are both a bit 'out there' to describe.

17. Eileen - Ottessa Moshfegh ^The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene at the prison, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. But her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.^

Very slow burning book that explores the intricate thoughts of a very disturbed young woman. Moshfegh seems to excel at writing these incredibly complex and fascinating psychopaths. It's a lot of work to get to something actually happening, but the descriptive writing is brilliant, atmospheric and oddly compelling.

18. *Freshwater - Akwaeke Emezi
19. ^Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side." Ada begins her life in the south of Nigeria as a troubled baby and a source of deep concern to her family. Her parents, Saul and Saachi, successfully prayed her into existence, but as she grows into a volatile and splintered child, it becomes clear that something went terribly awry. When Ada comes of age and moves to America for college, the group of selves within her grows in power and agency. A traumatic assault leads to a crystallization of her alternate selves: Asụghara and Saint Vincent. As Ada fades into the background of her own mind and these selvesnow protective, now hedonisticmove into control, Ada's life spirals in a dark and dangerous direction.^

I would say this is one that I admired rather than enjoyed. There is something in the writing, but it took me a while to get into as it's very surreal at the start. Definitely worth persevering with, but a very 'modern art' feel to the writing. It was not listed for the Booker Prize, but feels like it should have been.

4. Fantastically Great Women Scientists and Their Stories - Kate Pankhurst

I don’t usually count the chapter books I read to DD (usually involving talking animals, or humans who can talk to animals, basically non-human linguistic ability of some sort), but this is a non-fiction chapter book so I feel justified. Covering the lives of eight female scientists, it charts their biographies, discoveries and the prejudices which many of them faced. I learned a lot - it has Rosalind Franklin and Marie Curie, but I’d never heard of Tu Youyou or Janaki Ammal.

My DD is five and listened along happily enough (she wants to be a paleontologist, doctor or pizza chef, so I was aiming to give some encouragement with the first two!), but this would work well for a 8-11 year old who could read it to themselves.

The science seemed solid to this reasonably well-informed lay person, although I was a bit shocked to see Marie Curie hiding radium from the Nazis when they invaded France in 1914! Also, the Tu Youyou chapter is pretty grim, featuring the starvation and repression of Chairman Mao’s regime - maybe skip this if you’re reading to a younger child, as I failed to!

14. An Utterly Impartial History of Britain or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots In Charge by John O’Farrell

This is the history of Britain (up to 1945 - there’s a later book covering everything after that) written in an amusing, jokey way. Despite that I found this really hard going although I can’t put my finger on why. I felt it didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know and the constant jokes do get a bit wearing. I did finish this but it was a bit of a struggle and I decided not to bother with the next one.

15. 46% Better Than Dave by Alastair Puddick

Kindle unlimited book. Dave is quite happy with his life, but then a new man moves in next door who has exactly the same name, and everything in his life is better than Original Dave’s. This sends Original Dave into a spiral of competing with New Dave where he constantly comes off worse. This was quite funny but the main character is so annoying and does such stupid things that it’s hard to feel any sympathy with him. The ending is all too neat for my liking.

16. All The Lonely People by Mike Gayle

Hubert is a lonely elderly widower. He’s been lying to his daughter about his active social life, so when she says she’s coming to visit Hubert decides he needs to try and make some friends so she won’t know he was lying. There’s quite a lot wrong with this book - the whole idea is rather twee, especially the cringy Campaign against Loneliness that gets set up, and the way Hubert became friends with the first person just didn’t ring true. Hubert is Jamaican and to illustrate this he constantly says ‘me’ instead of ‘I’ (e.g. me went to the cinema last night) which got very irritating particularly as the other Jamaican character didn’t speak like that. Having said all that, I actually really enjoyed this. I liked Hubert and I was rooting for him to make friends.

Stayed up late last night finishing 5. And Away Bob Mortimer’s Autobiography

I really liked this, as I’d expected to, and as @highlandcoo correctly predicted, my Bob love has only increased.

Vic and Bob were huge for me as young teen, I loved them the way most of my school mates loved their favourite bands. I saw them live a few times, my relationship with one of my sisters is still mostly Vic and Bob quotes to this day (she’s in my phone as the fakey cake maker). Quite a lot of other horrible shit was going on for me at the time and they brought silliness and fun and hold a special place in my heart. I’d forgotten quite how big they got actually.

1. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

I would recommend this book if you enjoy long hours of boredom with the occasional gore.

A historian travels back to Middle Ages during Black Death, where she gets stuck for a few weeks as her time is also busy with a short-lived viral pandemic.

It sounds gripping, doesn't it? Well, it isn't. In a book about time travel to the dark ages, the most exciting thing that happens is a professor leaving a hospital without being properly discharged. My pearls are suitably clutched

Instead of anything remotely interesting, thrilling, or insightful, the reader gets hundreds of interminable pages about cows getting in the way, whiny children and bitchy women. In the Dark Ages. I'd laugh if I were not so bitter about the hours I spent reading this rubbish

This book was published in 1992, 8 years after William Gibson's Neuromancer brought about the new age of SF, when Neal Stephenson's brilliant Snow Crash also saw day. Its pointless bleating is painful in contrast, and the author presenting the professor as worrying about what Kivrin must be thinking of him rather than putting together an actual plot is the perfect example of why I don't like books by women authors

The not-so-subtle parallel between her professor sending Kivrin to plague-ridden Middle Ages and God sending his son Jesus to die among people is cringetastic.

It was rather visionary of the author to predict that people would whine about toilet paper when under pandemic restrictions, but that is about all I'm taking away from all 608 pages of this very poor excuse for a time-travel novel.

I really loved Doomsday Book and the rest of Connie Willis's time travel books (well I'm not that keen on To Say Nothing of the Dog). I agree that it's not an action packed romp through the Middle Ages, but because I'm interested in the period I quite enjoyed the fact that it was more character driven and a bit of a study of day to day life. It's a good while since I read them though so might be time for a re-read to see if they still hold up for me.

Every time I contemplate reading Doomsday Book I look at the online reviews and decide it's probably not for me Cote so I think this might definitely be a 'you read it so I don't have to' moment

I'm currently reading Alan Duncan's diaries (In The Thick Of It) which are dreadful but strangely compelling.

Connie Willis is definitely a slow burn and I can absolutely see why she is not for everyone.

Thanks for the warning about The Man in the Brown Suit, Best - it is currently awaiting collection in the library, so I'll give it a go, but with duly modified expectations.

Cornish, you've made me think twice about My Phantoms. I had previously reserved in the library but I don't think I fancy it any more.

Currently reading Coastlines, by Patrick Barkham. This does what it says on the tin - the author visits various parts of the English and Welsh coastline owned by the National Trust and talks about his own childhood visits to the seaside and bringing his own small daughters (who were largely unimpressed). It's well written and so far, it's hitting the spot.

@PermanentTemporary I think I read Possession at uni too, although about 10 years after you…never seen the film but I have not heard good things about it so won’t be seeking it out! I’m enjoying the re-read so far…

@FortunaMajor - I was going to pick up Eileen after finishing Circe funnily enough. I quite like a slow burn book thankfully!

3. Bad Blood by Lorna Sage

Memoir of growing up in rural north Wales and the authors teenage years and pregnancy at 16 during the 1950s. The early days in Wales reminded me abit of Cider with Rosie in parts (village plays, roaming around etc) but the second part of the book I found alot more interesting. Good reminder of how much has changed for women and how revolutionary the introduction of the pill really was.

4. The Best Catholics in the World by Derek Scally

A look at how the Catholic church was able to hold so much power in Ireland with the help of the state and general population to possibilities to how Ireland could perhaps deal and move on from the Catholic scandals. This is quite an indepth book looking at the introduction of Christianity in Ireland to the education in schools on theological matters. As I'm neither Catholic nor Irish I had to read this very slowly to take everything in which I found ultimately well worth it.

5. All that Man is by David Szalay

Nine short stories about different men in Europe during different periods of their lives (the man in the first story is in his late teens and the last story a different man is elderly) I almost got rid of this book as the synopsis didn't sound particularly appealing but I'm glad I didn't. I enjoyed all of the stories and there was alot of humour in them. Essentially the conclusion to be taken from this book is 'most men are dickheads but by the time they realise and want to change its too late'.

I thought Possession was great but really struggled with The Children's Book for some reason. I was trying to read it on my daily tube journeys and maybe it just wasn't suited to that.

@AliasGrape I'm so pleased you enjoyed And Away. I have a real fondness for Bob too. What's stuck in my head most from the book were his attempts, as a little boy, to make his mum happy after his dad died. Really touching. And it was fun to be reminded of the different shows we used to watch years ago. I also liked how non-celebrity-like he was, preferring to stay at home with his family and having only gone to one (or was it none at all?) dinner party in his life.
Have you been watching Gone Fishing with Paul Whitehouse? I was delighted to discover it.

@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.

Have you been watching Gone Fishing with Paul Whitehouse? I was delighted to discover it.
I know you weren't asking me, but feel I must answer –it is wonderful, isn't it?!? If you've only recently discovered it and have lots to watch, I'm very envious!

It's such a lovely programme. I'm rationing it; still lots to watch

Lucky you!

@highlandcoo yes that stuck with me too, very sad. I have similar memories of excessive worrying about my mum and feeling responsible for her, which I'm sure isn't what she wanted. I hadn't realised how much he struggled with his shyness either.

I have watched some of the Gone Fishing early series, I then started watching it with my husband and somehow or other we haven't gone back to it for a while so this was also a reminder for that, which Im looking forward to.

There is a Gone Fishing book for those enjoying the programme - I haven’t read it though so can’t say what it’s like! DH enjoyed it though.