50 Books Challenge 2024 Part Two

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the second 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.

The previous thread is here

Finished number 5 today - Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes. I loved it! Rachel has been living the high life in New York and after an accidental overdose agrees to return home to Ireland to rehab. Only she is treating it as a few weeks R&R as she isn’t a drug addict. What follows is Rachel’s journey through rehab and coming to terms with her addiction.

It sounds so serious and it does deal with serious issues in a convincing way but it is also funny and engaging and I raced through it. My only criticism is the ending was a tiny bit twee but I love a happy ending and I loved it so much I could easily forgive that by the time I got there.

This is the second Marian Keyes book I have read this year and enjoyed. I love it when you find a new author and realise they have a big back catalogue to work through! I’m hoping there are a few more gems in there.

@BaaBaaGlitterSheep, Rachel's Holiday is one of my favourite books! There's a follow up released last year - Again, Rachel - which lots of us who loved the first one were quite nervous about, but I actually really enjoyed it.

@BaaBaaGlitterSheep I loved that one. She's recently done a sequel - 'Again, Rachel' which is very good. The Walsh family ones are all readable but Rachel and Maggie are my favourites.

x post!

Great minds and all that

Much mentioned on here - Paper Cup by Karen Campbell. I come from this forgotten corner of Scotland (well, not so forgotten now with the Wigtown book festival) and Campbell has captured the sense of place. The cast of characters rang true too. A beautiful book.

Thanks @noodlezoodle and @SheilaFentiman. I shall check the sequel out.

Aaaargh I am so behind! I hope it's OK to bring my list over so late - it's not very long!

1. The Trial – Rob Rinder
2. The Generation Divide: Why we can’t agree and why we should – Bobby Duffy
3. The Fell – Sarah Moss
4. Impossible Creatures – Katherine Rundell
5. Over Sea Under Stone – Susan Cooper

6. Greenwitch – Susan Cooper

1. The Grey King – Susan Cooper
2. Silver on the Tree – Susan Cooper

I think I reviewed everything but Silver on the Tree in the last thread. Thoroughly enjoyed my re-read of The Dark Is Rising series. Cooper is a lovely, lovely writer and I had forgotten the gut-wrenching tragedy that befalls one of the recurring characters at the end of Silver on the Tree. The descriptions of the Lost Land are dreamily beautiful and the ending is satisfying. I still think The Dark is Rising and The Grey King are the standouts, though.

I have started and not finished quite a few books recently as there's been a lot going on and I've not been able to settle. But I have dived into and am thoroughly enjoying Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

@BaaBaaGlitterSheep @SheilaFentiman
i do rather enjoy how he keeps banging on about how “good looking” Jeremy Hunt is though.

Hahahaha yep. Whatever you say, Rory!!

I'm willing to accept that Jeremy Hunt is better looking than Rory Stewart but no more than that.

I mean… I’d it were at shag, marry avoid situation also including Cameron…

Today I learned of the existence of the National Outdoor Book Awards, which seems like it might be tailor made for @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie...

Their website is v old-fashioned and hard to navigate, but there's a wiki page of all previous winners here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Outdoor_Book_Award

@BaaBaaGlitterSheep
Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, Watermelon, Sushi for Beginners, Last Chance Saloon.

These are great Marian Keyes' books. Last Chance Saloon is probably my favourite on reflection.

They are older ones and tbh, even though I've read a lot of the later ones (except for Rachel Again) I've not liked any of them enough to remember either the title or the plot. But these ones are on my comfort food reread shelf.

@BaaBaaGlitterSheepI recommend reading the other Walsh sister books before reading Again, Rachel. These are Watermelon (Claire’s story), Angels (Maggie), Anybody Out There? (Anna) and The Mystery of Mercy Close (Helen). While it doesn’t really matter, I do think they’re best read in that order because each book does reference events from the previous ones so could be a bit spoilery. Rachel’s Holiday fits after Watermelon but before Angels.

Thanks @ChessieFL . I think I will see if I can get a copy of Watermelon at the library and then work my way through your recommendations from there. That’s most of 2024 sorted!

@BlindurErBóklausMaður not sure why your mention dropped off my last post! Thank you!

I like Marian Keyes Walsh sisters books a lot, the others are alright/pretty good but I still buy anything she releases full price instead of waiting for 99p which says a lot 😁

6. My Grandmother sends her regards and apologised by Fredrik Backman

I enjoyed the Beartown trilogy and A Man Called Ove so snapped this up for 99p.

It's about a 7 year who is precocious and her nutty grandmother, there is a treasure hunt, fairytales which comes to life and a fair amount of danger.

There are a lot of made up words and terms from the fairytales which I just couldn't remember and meant I was a little confused through all of this. I also wasn't 100% sure it was an adults book and googled to see if he wrote it for his granddaughter or something but I couldn't find any info on that.

It's a bit funny but ultimately nowhere near as good as Beartown or as memorable as Ove. I gave it 3.5 stars on storygraph.

For the Keyes fans there’s a new one out in April, My Favourite Mistake, which is another Walsh sisters sequel, catching up with Anna’s story.

I'm another fan of the earlier Marian Keyes books, (although a few years back I re-read Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married and sort of wished I hadn't). I think I've read them all though agree that the Walsh sister ones are the strongest, I DNF Grown Ups a few years ago, I just couldn't bring myself to care about any of the many, many characters - it was on audible though, I think if I'd read it rather than listened I may have pushed through to the end.

I've said it before on here but some of Jonathan Harvey's novels remind me a bit of Keyes, a bit hit a miss maybe but I did like All She Wants in particular.

Another Marian Keyes fan here. Although, I'll confess to a DNF - I couldn't get through The Mystery of Mercy Close. It took me ages to get into it, and then I drifted away from it and lost interest. I will give it another go, though.

I think her novels are lovely, and nowhere near as light or fluffy as the covers would suggest. This Charming Man was all about domestic violence and was quite upsetting. My favourite, though, will always be Rachel's Holiday.

8.Black Dogs by Ian McEwan
Jeremy is, shockingly for a McEwan protagonist, a clever, middle aged, upper middle class chap with an attractive partner. He reflects back on the history of his late in-laws Bernard and June from the second world war up to the fall of the Berlin wall. The couple parted following an incident on holiday in France, after which June goes all spiritual and Bernard very much doesn’t.

WHY do I persist with McEwan? The first couple of his that I read were decent (Enduring Love, Amsterdam) and so I persisted with a bunch of his others (Sweet Tooth, Atonement, The Comfort of Strangers, Saturday, On Chesil Beach, The Children Act) despite all the evidence that the first two were exceptions to the rule.

No one in one this has a proper personality. The plot is daft – June’s reaction to The Event doesn’t really make any sense. I think it's possible that the Black Dogs referred to in the title, which do physically appear in the book, are supposed to be some kind of clever metaphor for the horrors of war that I don't properly understand, but I think it's also possible that it’s a load of old bollocks.

This thread is so dangerous. Every time I come in here I add another 5+ books to my list

I mean… If it were at shag, marry avoid situation also including Cameron…

Whoa, that's a tough call right there @DietCokeandHulaHoops

It's only/already February so I'm going to keep 'reviews' brief 😅 I should think my latest reads have been discussed already anyway but do @ me if anyone wants to chat about:

14. Julia Boyd, A Village in the Third Reich
Team 'even better than the excellent Travellers'.

15. Caroline O’Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
16. Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends (R)
O'Donoghue was an obligate bookclub read which I was surprised to enjoy so much that I went back and revisited the somewhat similar CwF (first read when it came out). Yep, still hated everything about that one except the actual writing.

17. Marisa Meltzer, Glossy: Beauty, Ambition, and The Inside Story of Emily Weiss's Glossier
Included the full cumbersome subtitle because the joy (schadenfreude) I derived from this forgettable book was primarily due to EW clearly keeping MM very much outside everything, leading to whole chapters being spun from them being in the same room once at an industry event 20 years ago, and what a source once mentioned seeing on EW's cousin's neighbour's college roommate's boyfriend's Facebook in, like, 2005?

18. Edith Wharton, The Old Maid
Non-millenial palate-cleanser. But more emotionally tortuous relationships between privileged women, oops. Thought it was shaping up to be nastier than it was but it went for the gently-subversive thing instead.

For current reads, I've gone further back in time in search of Women with Even Realer Problems: The Revolt by Clara Dupont-Monod (Eleanor of Aquitaine) and Eve Bites Back by Anna Beer (eight women writers who have been neglected or misread or who AB just felt like writing about). And to redress the gender imbalance, Blood, Sweat and Pixels by Jason Shreier (development of 10 of the most popular games of the last 10 years).