50 Books Challenge 2024 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 2024, 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?

Should have carried on reading and seen the other comments about Still Life. Glad to see they might get better if I try some more but not glad the Agent Nichol plot never improves!

I have some reviews carried over from last year (not numbered...). Reading resolutions this year are to start, carry on with and finish Middlemarch, and read more non-fiction. I picked up a stack of reservations from the library yesterday that I'd placed over the Christmas period so I'm looking forward to diving in.

The Making of the Modern Middle East by Jeremy Bowen
History and politics interspersed with personal reflections and anecdotes. I found this very interesting and very informative. Bowen has a point of view, which he’s not afraid to express, but his long period of time in this region as a BBC correspondent means it’s hard to argue with his perspective. The Arab Spring part, in particular, made for very difficult reading – so many people coming so close to real change only to find that taken away and many of them left in an even worse place.

The Long Shadow by Celia Fremlin
Imogen’s husband is dead. Probably. Imogen’s role in that is under scrutiny from various people, and her family has descended over the Christmas period to help her. Will they ever leave? What do they want? What does Imogen know and what exactly is going on in the house? This was creepy and dark and a great Christmas read.

An Immense World by Ed Yong
A great way to end the year – how do animals experience the world and what is different to what we understand? Yong makes a compelling case for each species having just the senses it needs to navigate the world it lives in. To be honest, that’s really the message of the book – the rest is “just” a series of well told stories about the natural world. But that’s plenty – it’s well done, lively and engaging and I really loved it.

An Eye for an Eye is our next book club read @Bookworm1993. It's not my usual kind of book and it's a bit disheartening that you DNF. Will crack on with it though. MJ Arlidge generally gets positive reviews on here, shame this one sounds like a dud.

Had a little spree in Waterstones with my gift cards…..

Some have had mixed reviews on here. In Memoriam has been much praised but it wasn’t until I had the physical book in my hand that I thought Hmmm yes, this DOES look right up my street!

@AliasGrape I presume Strike needs a shower and his stump his hurting? I think Troubled Blood is my next one when I can bring myself to do it. Won't be yet.

I think I might also need a HP break after finishing HBP last night. I immediately started TDH but my mind was already not on the task in hand so I might read something on the Kindle first to refresh my palate.

I think I read one of the early Val McDermid's years ago for a book club. It was atrocious. Lots of homicidal goings on in a boarding school. Like Malory Towers the lesbian years.

@BlindurErBóklausMaður 🤣

@BlindurErBóklausMaður - not yet surprisingly but then I didn’t read that much last night! So far he’s just overweight and with pube like hair but somehow still strangely sexually magnetic. Robin’s strawberry blonde hair was also much present.

I got When the Dust Settles last night and agree it's outstanding. I'm about 50% in and stayed up late reading it. I'm finding it a very emotional read. I'm about 12 months younger than the author and from a nearby area so her frames of reference for various events are similar to mine. My brother was at Hillsborough (thankfully not physically injured) and I remember us praying in primary school for the dad of a boy in the year below me who was in a coma. I also have experience of her work through my RAF service and in civilian aviation. One of my many airport hats was to man the Family Reception Centre should the worst happen. I'm also religious about never leaving the house without ID. I'm very thankful people like her exist and her compassion shines through.

A couple of short non-fiction books for me to get the year started:

2 A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. This is mainly a comparison of men and women writers and the difficulties facing the latter. I'm sure it was ground breaking back in the day, and it's good to remind ourselves of how far we have come with gender equality.

3 A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney, about the death of his 2-year-old son. A favourite on this thread last year and I can see why. Desperately sad as you'd expect, and also at times darkly funny.

Katheryn Howard, The Tainted Queen by Alison Weir; the fifth in her Six Queens series.

This was readable enough, but less good than the previous four books. I can't quite put my finger on the reason. Perhaps, because KH's life was so short (she was less than twenty when she was executed, having been queen for just a year) there may not be much in the way of historical record to underpin a fictional reimagining.

The style is akin to Philippa Gregory - less historically convincing and even a bit Mills and Boon in places - and there was some rather clunky dialogue. I'm sure getting the balance right in historical fiction can be tricky, and I don't expect "prithee" or "Gadzooks" to feature, but the phrase "How come ..?" really didn't strike the right note, and there were one or two other jarring examples. The editing could have been more thorough there.

That's all quite negative .. but in fact I did enjoy the book, and the powerlessness of a young girl being used as a pawn by the powerful senior members of the family for their own advancement is convincingly described.

A bit less fumbling and lusting and a bit more about the political manoeuvring in the court would have made a better book for me.

I'll go ahead and read the sixth to finish the series; I hope she returns to form.

@BlindurErBóklausMaður I would so read Malory Towers: the Lesbian Years

@FortunaMajor It will certainly be an overall bold for you then. Often, books lose something in the second half, but definitely not the case here.

Can’t remember who said they’re readying themselves for The Running Grave but I thought it was dreadful, even worse than Ink Black Heart and I wouldn’t have thought that was possible!

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie

Gosh I thought ANYTHING better than Ink Black I ended up getting quite into Running Grave

I was so…fucking…booooooooored by the tracksuit dude.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie I was thinking the same re Malory Towers.

Interested to hear what you think of Cursed Bread @MorriganManor . It was one of the few Women's Prize ones I didn't get round to as it was never reduced and didn't really appeal. I thought In Memoriam was excellent.

5.The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid Changez leaves Lahore to study at Princeton on a scholarship and subsequently works for a successful finance company. His view on life in the USA begins to change after 9/11. Changez recounts his story in a one-sided conversation with a stranger, addressing the second party as "you", after his return to Lahore. The other party is American, yet the voice and views and Changez's alone.

This was great. Hamid captures a strong sense of unease experienced by Changez as a result of his dual identity, as he starts to enjoy life in the US, but wants to stay close to his Pakistani roots. There is rich symbolism in Changez problematic relationships with his girlfriend and employer, both first welcoming, before expecting him to change, and then rejecting him. The back and forth narrative meant that there were no great surprises in where things ended up, but there was still enjoyment in seeing the pieces fall into place. And the one-side, unreliable narration left a pleasing amount of ambiguity.

@highlandcoo Thank you for reviewing the Weir. I have a love-hate relationship with Tudor fiction to rival this thread's feelings on JKR 😁so should probably stick with her nonfiction. Gareth Russell's biography of KH is both sympathetic and has exhaustive detail on the court politics if you haven't read it.

@HenryTilneyBestBoy I haven't read it; thanks for the recommendation. I usually prefer fiction, trusting that AW's research into the background is pretty accurate however this last novel has stretched my credulity just a bit!

3 The Second Sleep - Robert Harris
In 1468, a young priest makes his way to a remote village to bury its parson - and then you can’t say much else about the plot without giving away the twist that happens about 40 pages in (and which the whole world probably knows by now anyway, since this was published in 2019). There was an interesting base concept here, and some engaging characters, but I’m not sure Harris had a clear idea of where he was going with it. There doesn’t seem to be enough plot to occupy the interesting (but not quite fully formed) world he’s created. Page-turning final third rushes to a thudding damp squib of an ending.

Now I’m halfway through Poirot’s Silent Night by Sophie Hannah, so I don’t expect it’s going to be my week for satisfying endings.

Does anyone include books they have read to their children in their count? I'm currently reading My Hamster has talent to one child and the Secret Seven to the other. Secret Seven is a classic so I guess I might get away with it but while I am Loving the Stinky and Jinks series.....adding them feels a little like cheating when everyone else is reading grown up stuff! 😂

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson A parapsychologist invites a couple of "sensitive" souls and the heir to the house to spend a summer in the apparently haunted Hill House. I'm not very good with the supernatural (which I find - totally irrationally - quite frightening) but this was just the right side of scary. This was my first Shirley Jackson and I very much enjoyed her wonderful, and at times witty, writing.

4 The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
In the 1970s a body is found in a well in Chicken Hill, Philadelphia. The book then flips back to the 1930s where it tells the story of Moshe and Chonda- the Jewish owners of a theatre and the grocery store of the title- and Nate and Addie- a black couple who work for them, and eventually the story of who is in the well. It’s quite slow-moving but despite some heavy themes it’s ultimately uplifting with its focus on community. It’s been very hyped and I don’t think it fully lives up to that but it’s an enjoyable read and McBride has a very distinctive voice.

5 Strong Female Character- Fern Brady
Much reviewed, this autobiography of the comedian is a good read. And even better listen- she narrates it herself. It’s an interesting and sometimes upsetting insight into the reality of growing up as an autistic girl and woman. I learned a lot from it.

@LadybirdDaphne I couldn't agree more on Second Sleep. I love Harris's writing, and think he typically does plots really well. Conclave and Fatherland being two recent examples I've read. And this should have been so good, because the concept was so great, but it all just fell apart in a big mess towards the end, and I was bored and fed up by the time I got to the end.

@Hoolahoophop my days of reading to children are behind me, but I would have included anything substantial (chapter books with the exception of the Rainbow Fairies series which I'd exclude on principal (it was, in the end, the way I got DD reading because I said I refused to read any more of them aloud and that if she wanted to know what happened to Lola-Lynn the Laptop Sodding Fairy she needed to learn to read and read them herself. And it worked, as she's now studying Eng Lit at uni). I do include children's books these days if I read one. Some people do, others don't - similarly I think people have different views on novellas, audiobooks etc. The beauty of this thread is there really aren't any rules.

Running Grave was so superior to Ink Black Heart that it nearly restored my faith in the series. I listened to them both as audiobooks, so that may have had something to do with it, because IBH was spectacularly ill suited to audio. But I just thought everything about it - plot, writing, lack of tedious superfluous detail - was better. It was still far too long and baggy but it's about the journey, not the destination for the Strike books, right??

I really can't get in to the Strike novel's, although I love Harry Potter. Having said I wasn't going to read thrillers this year I've just read 2:

1. The Making of Us - Lisa Jewell

An early one of hers, so you can tell how she's developed as an author since.

1. Wrong Time, Wrong Place - Gillian McAllister

A murder mystery which goes backwards, as the heroine tries to prevent it from happening.

Now I will attempt Ruth