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?

1. The brutal telling by Louise Penny

This is Chief Inspector Ganache book 5. In this one a body is found in the bistro in Three pines who appears to be an unknown tramp. I enjoyed this. It doesn't resolve completely which is the first one that hasn't. I think the series has improved but not that much so far. If you didn't enjoy the first one you probably won't enjoy this either. I will keep reading mostly for her descriptions of food and to learn about Quebec. I wonder if something is lost in translation as Americans seem to adore this series.

1. WentTo London, Took The Dog - Nina Stibbe

This was Nina Stibbe's diary of the year she spent renting a room in the house of the writer Deborah Moggach in London. Nina is taking time away from her Cornwall home to come to terms with the breakdown of her marriage, whilst spending some time in London being close to her adult children who are both at University there.

It was, in turns, very funny, and also quite sad. I loved Love, Nina her first book, about the time she spent as nanny to Mary Kay Wilmers's two boys in the early 1980s. Some of those people still pop up here - Mary Kay and her son Sam Frears, Alan Bennett makes a brief appearance, and Stephen Frears. There are plenty of new writer friends who appear, particularly Cathy Rentzenbrink and, of course, Deborah Moggach.

I did enjoy it, but it had a wholly different feel to Love, Nina. This one was more bittersweet, Nina is a menopausal woman in her early 60s, and so a very different person to the carefree nanny/student she once was.

@dontlookgottalook I hated The Silkworm. I think it was probably the worst of the series overall.

2. The Ghost Ship, by Kate Mosse. Third of the Joubert Family chronicles, but I read this as a standalone and it wasn't necessary to have read the others. Louise Reydon-Joubert is an unmarried, wealthy woman in 17th century Amsterdam. She has always wanted to be a sea captain, and as she sails to the Canary Islands on the merchant ship she owns, she gets a taste of the life she longs for. Full of lady pirate swagger, I really enjoyed this and read it quickly. I haven't always got on with Kate Mosse books previously, finding them overlong and a bit frustrating, but when I heard her being interviewed about this it sounded right up my alley, which indeed it was. Probably not a bold in the longer term but certainly an enjoyable romp.

2 The Generation Divide: Why we can't agree and why we should by Bobby Duffy

Does what it says on the tin. A thought-provoking analysis of generational difference and similarities. I particularly liked the parts demonstrating that in some areas all generations go through the same phases and end up in the same place. Some good debunking of myths (the old aren't interested in climate change, millennial are lazy etc) and a heartfelt plea for more intergenerational interaction (with which I very much agree). A bit long and repetitive towards the end but a good read.

3 The Fell by Sarah Moss

Moss's Covid novel brilliantly captures the claustrophobia and drag of late 2020 lockdown. Set over a single evening when Kate decides to break self isolation to walk on the eponymous fell, the narrative interweaves the thoughts of Kate herself, her teenage son Matt, elderly neighbour Alice and Rob from mountain rescue. As in her novel Summerwater, I felt Moss was inside my head at some points. Very, very good, if a little unsettling to be reminded of such a strange time.

1. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

Listened to on Spotify Premium

A fucked up young man marries into a family of close knit sisters. A sequence of events begins to rip the family apart eventually creating enduring rifts.

This is a tough one, I liked it as an audiobook, it was read by Maura Tierney of ER fame, but as a book I found it very flawed.

Individual behaviour, particularly that of Rose and Julia, is baffling and cruel, people just don't behave like that. I couldn't buy into it.
I say that but I guess from threads on here people often do horrid things to each other, it just seemed a bit extreme to me.

It is supposed to be set in the 80s-2008 but feels not modern at all and like it was maybe believable as 20 years earlier. Also whatever comparison there is to Little Women it's a vague one, they are in no way similar.

Did I like it? I looked forward to it at night but I simply felt frustrated, so very readable but flawed it is.

Had my first DNF of the year - Inside Broadmoor by Jonathan Levi and Emma French. I have had this on my kindle for years and thought it might be interesting as I grew up not far from Broadmoor but I couldn’t get on with it at all. I kept going for a while as it’s only short but after being told for the third time in a single page that the population of Broadmoor has dropped from 1000 to 200 my eyes glazed over and I quit at 25%.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit bafflingly cruel are exactly the words I used in my Hello Beautiful review too.

1. The Normal Rules Do Not Apply by Kate Atkinson. Short story collection, supposedly linked but most only very vaguely. All clever and a few that I enjoyed, but I'm afraid it's another book that's confirmed all my prejudices about short stories, that they'd either be better as a short novel or are just downright weird!

1. The Lost Man by Jane Harper. One of her standalone books that doesn't feature a detective. After a man is found mysteriously dead in a remote location of his outback farm, his family gather at Christmas to work out what happened and reveal secrets etc etc. I liked this a lot, very tense and I had no idea what the resolution would be. I was fascinated by the environment and community she described, that I knew nothing about - farms as big as Wales, cows herded by helicopter, neighbours 3 hours drive from each other. Vastness and isolation on a scale I couldn't have imagined.

I’m about to start Edwidge Danticat create dangerously having listened to four books in the “Cornish mystery” series by Carola Dunn and enjoyed them, probably would have enjoyed them more as physical books as I was impatient with the slow narration at times.
Also finally finished Piranesi which has been lurking on my kindle for a while. Didn’t like it at all 😂

The excellent The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is 99p on Kindle ATM. The Magician by Colm Tóibín is also 99p which looks interesting but I havent read it.

I didn't even finish it. It read like a writer's experiment to me.

4 Poirot’s Silent Night - Sophie Hannah
I can cut Sophie Hannah quite a lot of slack because I like her writing style and always race through her mysteries, knowing full well the endings are implausible nonsense 90% of the time. But this was just a bunch of unconvincing characters talking interminably for 300 pages, centring around a plot device Hannah also recently used in The Couple at the Table (was everyone really in the room they said they were when the murder happened?), before Poirot solves it using a clue not available to the reader because it was visual (and the book doesn’t have pictures ). Dire.

The very lovely Impossible Creatures is also in the Kindle sale. If anybody likes reading children’s books or, indeed, has a book reading child, then I’d say give it a whirl.

3 - Bad blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start up, John Carreyrou

Elizabeth Holmes is a Stanford drop out who became the first female self made billionaire with her biotech company Theranos which promised to revolutionise healthcare by creating new technology where one drop of blood could be used to run all manner of tests.

This book is John Carreyrou’s investigative work into proving that Holmes’ claims were frankly made up and that her technology could do none of these things and had in fact defrauded investors to the tune of $1 billion. It is fascinating the lengths Elizabeth and the company went to keep the secrets and I really enjoyed this. There are lots of names and information about labs and blood testing devices that I’m not sure I always understood but my jaw was wide open with the deceit and lies that Theranos used to try and get away with technology that could harm patients.

The book was written in 2018 and had an updated epilogue written in 2019 but things have moved on since then, there has been a criminal trial and Elizabeth was sentenced to 11 years in prison- I would like to have had that acknowledged with a further epilogue but a fascinating read if you like non-fiction.

@HollyGolightly4 I read the first 3 of the DCI Kett series but then managed to make myself stop. I found them a bit darker than I generally like my crime fiction to be

@satelliteheart they get darker still!

2. The Years of Rice and Salt - Kim Stanley Robinson I really wanted to like this and I did enjoy the first 2/3 of it but then it got very dull and the characters became mouthpieces for KSR to espouse his ideas through. Which in small doses is fine but when it runs for page after page it gets tedious. I confess to skipping large chunks where the section began "he opened the dusty old tome and read....".

I think I'll go for something non-fiction next. Or maybe an easier read. Definitely something on my kindle. This was the first "proper" book I've read in ages and I did not rate the experience. My bookmark kept falling out.

@GrannieMainland

I knew I'd seen it somewhere! I must have copied you. It's very true, hopefully you're flattered

@Welshwabbit Sarah Moss is one of my favourite authors. I love the way she can say so much with so few but carefully chosen words.

Thank you so much @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie I've purchased!

4. Giving Up The Ghost - Hilary Mantel. Autobiographical account of parts of Mantel's life. The first part focuses on her childhood, the unconventional living arrangements when her mothers lover moved in and slowly ousted her father.
The second half is about her struggles with her health, namely endometriosis which was allowed by misogynistic doctors to rage through her body unchecked until she had to have a radical hysterectomy and bowel surgery aged twenty seven. Mantel was repeatedly told she was hysterical and her symptoms were psychosomatic. In her final years at university she was on such a cocktail of medication to treat her 'mental health issues' that she ended up as a psychiatric inpatient and missed her finals. She was forbidden by her doctors to think and write.
Filled me with disbelief and rage, along with admiration at her writing. Recommend.

3 Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang

A frustrated young author whose debut didn’t amount to much, is with her much more successful college friend when she dies and steals the friend’s draft for her latest book, which is then a big hit. Lots about the publishing world. Ending seems really weak in what is otherwise a good book.

Peter Ross - A Tomb With A View
Can’t remember who recommended it but this was fantastic. A look at cemeteries throughout Scotland, England and Ireland (disappointingly not Wales), telling the stories of some of the people buried in them.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I didn't feel copied at all, always nice to know when others share your instincts!

@BestIsWest I’m one of the recommenders for that. It is indeed a fabulous book.