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?

Recommend me please a good fantasy book

If you haven't already, the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, by Steven Erikson. It is mammoth but amazingly good.
The companion books, the Malazan Empire by Ian C Esslemont are much quicker to read and very ejoyable too.

Finished my second book of the year, Lisa Jewell - The Third Wife. Enjoyed this overall, it was an easy read, though the ending annoyed me in some ways.

4. Good Omens - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

A book that has been lurking in my TBR drawer for some time. Tried a TP many years ago and just didn't see the love, it was ok, that was all (can't even remember which one it was).

Despite my reservations I enjoyed this more than I thought I would, clever, witty and genuinely funny in places. It charts the build up to the end of the world from the point of view of a diverse cast of characters, angelic, demonic and mortal. Great story, tight plotting and a satisfying conclusion. Glad I took the plunge: this Schrödinger's butler was very much alive.

8. Ballad For Sophie by Filipe Mello and Juan Cavia

Blurb from Amazon: A young journalist prompts a reclusive piano superstar to open up, resulting in this stunning graphic sonata exploring a lifetime of rivalry, regret, and redemption. 1933. In the small French village of Cressy-la-Valoise, a local piano contest brings together two brilliant young players: Julien Dubois, the privileged heir of a wealthy family, and François Samson, the janitor’s son. One wins, one loses, and both are changed forever. 1997. In a huge mansion stained with cigarette smoke and memories, a bitter old man is shaken by the unexpected visit of an interviewer. Somewhere between reality and fantasy, Julien composes, like in a musical score, a complex and moving story about the cost of success, rivalry, redemption, and flying pianos. When all is said and done, did anyone ever truly win? And is there any music left to play?

I’m a fairly recent convert to graphic novels (my husband loves them and chose this one for me) and it’s taken me a while to get used to the way that the pictures contribute to the story and to stop tearing through, just reading the words and skimming the pictures. I loved this graphic novel, although the animation did remind me of the Professor Layton games, and found it pretty emotional at points.

Also if you have Kindle Unlimited I have just seen that this is free there.

"I'm glad you like Book 4. What did you make of the ending?"
@JennieTheZebra initially I was disappointed - in fact more earlier on, that the ambiguity about JEDD Mason's nature had gone. But in retrospect, we're reading a history told by an unreliable nature from the perspective of the winners. From that perspective, assuming that they are still (absolute) rulers at time the history is being propagated, an unquestioned acceptance that JM is alien / god would be a useful position. What were your thoughts?

I've started the Shackleton one and it's heavy (as in weight), so I may be some time as I can only hold it for so long at a time!

I read The End of Mr Y years ago. Just done a search and my judgement was essentially that were some moments of genius, but it ended in a, 'Rambling, silly old mess.' I have vague memories of there being a train, but that's it!

2. The Green Mile by Stephen King

This is a re-read on my way through reading Kings back catalogue and how much I love this book is also basically the reason I'm doing it. It's one of his best and I was crying on the train at the ending which I obviously knew but sort of forgot.

It's one of his human books, but with an element of the supernatural and for once it isn't drawn out and no overly detailed background descriptions.

I think I'm going to watch the film again soon.

I won't try and describe as I'm sure everyone knows the plot well enough, and if you dont, I won't spoil it for you.

5 stars.

That graphic novel sounds great @MamaNewtNewt I've only read Persepolis but would like to try others. Not sure about them on a Kindle though? I normally find things like maps don't work very well.

@MerriFond have you read Robin Hobbs? They're my favourite fantasy books. Start with Assassin's Apprentice.

3. Sad Cypress -Agatha Christie One of the lesser known Poirots, this definitely is a slow start with the Belgian not appearing until part 2 but still a wonderful read and had me wanting to know whodunit. Read as part of the Christie readalong challenge.

4. Bizarre England: Discover the country's secrets and surprises - David Long. This was a kindle unlimited read and although some anecdotes were interesting i found that the writing style dropped a fact or information without delving deeper. As a quick overview it was OK but found it was perhaps meant to dip in and out of rather than read as a whole.

4 Just Kids by Patti Smith

I bought this after it was recommended by various people on threads passim and odd though it may sound, I didn't really expect to like it. I thought I'd find it a bit self-indulgent and irritating and also probably quite a lot above my head, not being an artistic type myself. I know you are all thinking I should have trusted the 50 bookers, and you would be right. Although it's fair to say that I did find parts of it pretentious, it didn't matter at all, because in this book, Smith captures perfectly what it is like to be young, and to believe you can do anything. To believe wholly in the worth of your vision and not to be deterred by anyone. As if that wasn't enough, she also manages to paint a luminous portrait of her creative partnership with Robert Mapplethorpe, which transcended their earlier romantic relationship (which ended when Robert started a relationship with a man). Her love for him shines through the pages and the end is, inevitably, a little bit heartbreaking. Mostly, however, it's an exhilarating surf through people and places I'd mainly never heard of, but it really didn't matter, because it all sounded so amazingly cool and (not always the same thing) so much fun.

7. So Sweet a Changeling - Ruth Adam

I went on a bit of an internet quest to find more novels by this writer after reading A House in the Country (based on Adam's own experiment in communal living during the war) when it was reprinted by Furrowed Middlebrow. She was an interesting writer who was very involved in women's lives and how to improve them; she also wrote a series of student nurse novels for girls that reinforced the message that they could have careers.

This adult book is very much an 'issue' novel and in fact I kept thinking it would have made a cracking film - though maybe a bit too frank for 1954, when it was published. It centres on pretty though unreliable flibbertigibbet Cherry Miller, who's pregnant, unmarried and in a fancy nursing home - and who, when her boyfriend sends for her, literally thrusts the child into the arms of fellow-patient Alma - who’s just lost her own baby and is yearning to be a mother - and disappears.

But it isn’t that simple, and Alma and her husband, Bernard, cherish the baby through the series of heart-wrenching events that follow, as Cherry changes her mind repeatedly about whether to agree to adoption - eventually taking the desperate step of going on the run when it seems that Vicky (as they call her) is about to be taken from them for good after all.

That all sounds very dramatic but actually this was a well-written and totally believable narrative, showing a creditable amount of sympathy for the maddening Cherry, who's clearly a victim herself of the social hierarchy of the 50s which ensured that women were at the bottom of the heap and fatally dependent on the men in their lives. But the real stand-outs were the unassuming Alma and Bernard, who had a quiet dignity that grew into something almost heroic by the end.

@Stokey I've not read loads of graphic novels but my husband is really into them and for the past couple of years has bought me some for Christmas / birthdays. Maus by Art Spiegelman is brilliant (based on his father who is a holocaust survivor, the Nazis are drawn as cats and the Jews as mice) and Becoming Unbecoming by Una was one of my favourite books from last year and I think about it often. Here's my review in case it helps:

Beautiful, stark, heartbreaking, hopeful and poignant. The author sets their own experience of sex-based violence against the backdrop of being a teenager in Yorkshire, during the Yorkshire Ripper murders. Using stark illustrations, alongside text, Una explores misogyny, the narrow corridor in which women can exist without being “sluts” and the shame, that is mercilessly used by predators to target and silence women and children. 

The sections on Una’s own life were incredibly sad but it is the final pages of the book that have stayed with me. Thirteen portraits of middle aged women, doing normal things, cuddling a grandchild, watching TV, working in an office. The things that the women killed by Peter Sutcliffe might have been doing had he not crossed their paths and taken their lives. I keep going back to look at them. They are beautiful.

So glad you loved Just Kids, @Welshwabbit. It is one of my favourite books. She's a huge hero of mine.

I have A Woman's Place by Ruth Adam in my TBR pile, published by Persephone Books. I'll bump it up the list because she sounds like someone I'd enjoy reading from your review, Terpsichore.

Added Just Kids to my tbr list - thanks @Welshwabbit.

Finished my second book last night The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn and I absolutely loved it, very emotional ending though, I was going to start reading something else right after but I was too much in my feelings to read anything after that.

Next I'm reading the books DD got for Christmas (Alex Rider: Secret Weapon then a book from the Murder Most Unladylike series. She loves to chat about the books with me, and is impatient for me to read them already!) while I wait for my reservations to arrive in the library.

@ClaphamSouth that’s one I haven’t read, though I’ve spent far too much money truffling around on the internet digging up copies of her now-scarce novels! Just bought another actually 🫢

A House in the Country is worth reading - predictably enough, she ends up doing all the cooking and the housework in the shared house experiment, so it all falls apart eventually.

Truffling about for books is an excellent description!

I've just found (and bought) A House in the Country on kindle, thank you for the recommendation.

Also bought! I trust Terp's recommendations - we have overlapping tastes.

Sorry, both! I am a bad influence! 😬

Finished book 4... the much hyped Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It follows a group of friends and sometimes lovers over several years as they start and then become very successful at designing video games.

I'm a big fan of the 'young people meet at university, lives continue to intertwine over the decades' micro-genre so this was right up my street. I've never played a video game in my life but I was fascinated by all the discussion of how they are devised and built. There is a lot of tragedy but I felt it came down just the right side of being exploitative, though I can see why others might not agree with that.

Not all of the characters were equally well developed which was a shame, and the writer was probably trying to cram too much in, so I occasionally lost track of things like what people had called their dogs or whether minor characters were married or not.

There's an experimental game based section towards the end which I can imagine divides opinion but I thought was brilliant and original.

Overall I loved reading this, woke up at night thinking about the characters, and fully expect to see it on some prize lists!

I was hesitating over that one @GrannieMainland but your review has made me think I’ll give it a go.

(by give it a go I mean add it to the several hundred sat waiting on my kindle and maybe get to it at some point in the future - I’m so behind!)

I finished Tomorrow x3 yesterday as well and agree with Grannie's review.

It's not great work of literature, but it's really compelling and rattles along. If you were vaguely into video games of that era then there's a lot of relatable nostalgia in there. Despite the trauma, it's not miserable. I really liked this and it's not something I would usually pick up.

Tomorrow X3 sounds great, will definitely add it to my list