50 Books Challenge 2023 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 2023, 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?

Sounds like I made a good choice. Vernon God Little sat on my book shelf for about a decade before it got charity shopped unread. I had a feeling I’d hate it.

Oooh, how exciting! I hadn't clocked that today is the day. Fantastic - except I've been waiting for the sequel for so long I've realised that I've forgotten the plot of the first one, and I gave my copy away to a friend 😭

Would you mind letting me know if she gives you some prompts along the way - or do I have to go and read the first one again? Which won't be hardship tbh.

Thank you and happy reading!

@TattiePants I did exactly the same with my copy!

Vernon Godlittle is the worst book ever written, I loathe it

Vernon Godlittle is the only book I have ever thrown away

3: Deanna Raybourn - Night of a Thousand Stars

I really like both of the Deanna Raybourn Veronica Speedwell and Lady Julia series, this relates to the latter - it's another one of the 'feisty heroine defies the conventions of her age to have adventures' type books, this one set in the 1920s. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the Lady's Guide to Fortune Hunting (such as @AliasGrape and @SapatSea!) - it's 99p on Kindle at the moment too. Incidentally it looks like there will be a Lady's Guide sequel, or so it looks like on Goodreads

I find it really hard to deal with anything child-related too Alias - Cedric Diggory's death nearly breaks me in book and film form! I even found it hard to watch The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe recently @BestIsWest - I thought I'd watch and check it was ok for DTS2(7), who is a sensitive little soul - and for some reason the evacuees scene at the train station really got to me. Obviously I knew about evacuation but for some reason putting it together with DC of the age of mine completely hit me about how hard it must have been for parents and children...

I'm clearly better at sticking to the Whimsical Bay type stories, excellent description @SolInvictus

The Leigh Bardugo books sound great @BoldFearlessGirl, I'll have a look for those. They may be quite similar to Maureen Johnson's Shades of London series, which is more YA but very entertaining!

Have just finished
2. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade runner)
Enjoyed it more than I thought I would despite absolutely none of the characters being sympathetic. The world Phillip K Dick conjures up is so soulless and dark that the central motif of empathy is a bit of a horror show. Who would want to have empathy in such a world?
The novel mixes in some scenes which are hallucinatory which i ploughed through rather grimly. I can see why they are necessary though. The philosophical questions at the heart of the novel, around what it is to be human, have been covered in sci-fi so frequently that it has become a common place of the genre but I guess that wasn't the case in 1968 when this was first published.

@agnesmartin you could Google reviews with spoilers and a synopsis? Absolutely not a ‘just Google it!’, I’ve done that for sequels where I can’t quite remember some plot points.

I remember really enjoying Vernon God Little but I can’t remember a single thing about the actual contents.

3. (I think) A Keeper by Graham Norton. I haven't read any of his books but I am a fan so hoping I enjoy it

3. The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly
I thought this was a really good read. Lots of twists and turns, although maybe a few too many. It did get a little convoluted at times.

The story revolves around the relaunching of a picture puzzle book with clues to find the parts of a skeleton, the last part never having been found, due to a tragic accidental death. There's lots of press interest and interest from online forums where the "bonehunters" have discussed ever increasingly outlandish theories about the clues.

I thought it was very well thought through and well written. A good page turner.

Next up is Troubled Blood by JKR aka Robert Galbraith.

Ah, of course! Hunt out the spoilers. Thanks - don't know why I didn't think of that!

@Thewolvesarerunningagain Do Androids Dream of Electric sheep is a great book. I've enjoyed all PKD books I've read although some are harder work than others.

1. The Witch of Tin Mountain by Paulette Kennedy. This came up on my Kindle recommendations, one of those free pre-release books that come with Amazon Prime. A tale of witches and curses in the rural Ozark mountains, across two timelines in the 1880s and 1930s. The story gallops along I guess; not really my cup of tea.

10. Paris by Julian Green and JA Underwood (trans). First re-read of the year, a favourite I return to when it's been too long since I've visited Paris. An odd kind of "travel" book, since it's really nothing of the kind. Instead, just a series of impressions of the city, from someone very familiar with its streets and spaces. Also, how Green feels about Paris is a reflection of how I feel about my home town, London. "Paris is a city that might well be spoken of in the plural, as the Greeks used to speak of Athens, for there are many Parises, and the tourists' Paris is only superficially related to the Paris of the Parisians. The foreigner driving through Paris from one museum to another is quite oblivious to the presence of a world he brushes past without seeing. Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well. The soul of a big city is not to be grasped so easily; in order to make contact with it, you have to have been bored, you have to have suffered a bit in those places that contain it. Anyone can get hold of a guide and tick off all the monuments, but within the very confines of Paris there is an other city as difficult of access as Timbuktu once was."

11. Roadwork by Stephen King. Inspired by the Rage/Bachman chat on here last night. I first read this in my teens, and last read it in my twenties. It still holds up I'd say. There isn't a breath of monsters or anything like that - it's a very human story. It's so well constructed. From the very beginning, when the protagonist buys guns for no obvious reason, it's clear that a train has been set in motion. And, George Dawes is a fantastically unreliable narrator. I think I read somewhere that King is a huge fan of Du Maurier, and it shows.

In fact I've just looked back and before Rage, @StitchesInTime mentioned The Running Man from the same collection, commenting, "It’s fast paced, and as you’d expect from a Stephen King book, there’s a lot of violence and bad language right to the end" and while this book too does have a lot of violence and bad language, weirdly I wouldn't characterise it that way. But, how much of that is that whole unreliable narrator thing? Clearly George is unreasonable in almost every way, and yet, it's impossible not to feel some sympathy in the midst of everything else.

Think I may need to re-read the rest of the Bachman Books now...

Have now finished:

3. Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries edited by Alan Taylor

i know these have had mixed reviews, and although I did really enjoy reading them, my own thoughts are a bit mixed too. What I really liked, particularly in the earlier entries, we’re the many tiny, passing reflections on ordinary life including mentioning Midland Bank, a Benetton on every corner, renting a video and retrieving a Filofax(!) in the middle of an earthquake - although he’d upgraded to a Psion organiser (remember those?!) around the time of a letter earthquake. In 1996 he looks himself up on the internet and finds 368 results… weird how much the world has changed in such a relatively short time.

there was an awful lot of flying here, and flying there. Because they were, after all, his personal diaries, the footnotes are very much needed at times in order to keep up because it often reads like a long stream of name dropping. However…
It did strike me how those in the entertainment industry don’t really “name drop” other celebrities. They are their working colleagues, and as with all of us, some working colleagues can become close friends. Just like for the rest of us though, there are clearly some people he spends time with that he is less keen on! But with the length of the book, the constant lists of names and locations did get a bit tiring.

Overall It was an enlightening insight to how life really is for hose with a high profile, with glimpses of the very normal fears and faults that they share with everyone else. Of course, actors are living with those things under much more scrutiny than the rest of us, as Alan drily notes himself. I think it works best as a book dipped in to over a longer time period (I read it alongside my second and fourth reads if the year.

4 The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex

This was much reviewed on one of these threads I think a couple of years ago. It covers the mystery if three men who go missing from an off shore light house, set years after it happened. I enjoyed this but it was far from a stand out for me. At times it felt like it demanded more concentration than a book of this type should and the conclusion wasn’t really that exciting - it felt like the author kept throwing little extras in to try to make it more exciting.

Another Vernon God Little hater here.

1. The Crow Road: Iain Banks.

I finished this last night and I'm tagging @EineReiseDurchDieZeit and @noodlezoodle as they both commented on it recently.

I thought this was good. Like noodle, I like an intergenerational family saga and I hadn't read one in a while, so I enjoyed that. It took me a while to figure out the relationships and I found the change of perspective confusing at first, as you did, Eine. It took me a while to get into it.

The pace of the book was leisurely, but the dialogue was witty. I didn't think there was too much extraneous waffle. There was just enough extraneous waffle talk about religion and life after death, in my opinion. I liked how Prentis came round to his father's way of thinking towards the end of the book.

Was Prentis a wee shite? I wouldn't have said he was a terrible wee shite, but a fairly typical young man. However, that part where he engaged in reckless driving with Ashley in the passenger seat really annoyed me, when he wanted to make a point about Fergus's car accident.

Uncle Rory's disappearance kept me interested in the plot and I think that was plausible. I also liked the descriptions of scenic Scottish places and the folklore. An awful lot of whisky was consumed.

Altogether, a good read. I wouldn't go and plan a reread of this, but I might read more Banks another time.

Onwards to Annie Ernaux and 'Les Années'.

@Wafflefudge, I'm definitely planning on reading more PKD. I can't get over his description of The Scream, which Deckard sees when he goes to retire Luft

The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vest soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature's torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; than man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by- or despite- its outcry.
'He did a woodcut of this,' Rich said, reading the card tacked below the painting.

Absolutely chilling, so clearly encapsulates the character of Rick, and yet PDK uses this as an almost throwaway vignette. Wow!

It also made me pause to think of how Munch's work is now degraded into a funny meme!

I havent read that one, but I have read The Swimmer and Home Stretch and enjoyed both.

5 Field Work: What Land Does To People & What People Do To Land - Bella Bathurst

This was a Backlisted recommendation, I think - I'm not sure I would have picked up a book about farming otherwise, but I really enjoyed this. It's a very readable book about what it means to be a British farmer in the 21st century, through the stories of those working on the land.

Like @BoldFearlessGirl and @DuPainDuVinDuFromage I enjoyed JD Kirk's contributions on that thread and on the strength of it have bought the first two of his series. I think they'll be my train reading this weekend.

@StitchesInTime , they truly are a magnificent series! Cressida Cowell is very good at writing back to her young fans, you know. With illustrations...

1. The Marriage Portrait - Wow. As with Hamnet, her writing creates such an incredibly immersive world that I felt I could hear and smell everything going on around Lucrezia - the tastes and textures and the quality of light.

I did struggle to connect for a while, as being told the ending at the start can form an impediment to being swept along by the story, but by midway through I was resenting every real-life interruption that kept me from the book.

Since buying 6 books when deciding to thin my bookshelves 🙄 I seem to have purchased another three - two by Natalie Haynes following my enjoyment of Stone Blind last year and The Brexit Tapes by John Bull - that was a crowdfunder type thing I contributed to, so I guess it barely counts as "buying".

Or at least that's what I'm telling merself.

2 Human Croquet. I was slow to get into this but after the first 100 pages or so I was absolutely hooked and read it in two afternoons on the sofa. It was funny, sad, intriguing all at the same time. So many themes mean that I'm sure that if I reread the book I'd find things I missed.

It's been a long time since a novel has hooked me in so much (and I have missed that)

Brilliant

The school I went to is on The Crow Road . There is quite a well known Glasgow expression but it's been ages since I read the book and I can't remember if the book accounts for its title and I don't want to Piggysplain if it does...

Away the Crow Road = dead?

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh glad you enjoyed it

2. Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk
A mixture of ruminations on travel and the body and fragments of fiction. It didn't always feel very coherent, but maybe that was the point. It was a bit of an effort, but it did make an impression on me. Translate from Polish, so that's already one more book in translation than I managed all of last year.