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

@Kinsters i like the sound of that. Another added to the TBR pile

@LadybirdDaphne Suzy Edge lives locally to me and is lovely but Mortal Monarchs was bit too gruesome for me - if very educational about Harold not being shot in the eye.

I was disappointed by it, but mainly because the blurb led me to believe I was getting something that it didn't deliver and I felt hard done by. Parts of it have stuck with me though. Her other book Peaces was completely batshit, but was an enjoyable reading experience if you didn't spend too long trying to work out what was going on. I've just put myself in the advance queue for her next release despite knowing it will be a bewildering experience that I need to just roll with.

Oh I am out of step with the consensus here but Brooklyn is one of my all time favourite books! There is a sequel out this year which I'm looking forward to a lot. Of Colm Toibin's other books, I really enjoyed The Blackwater Lightship and one set in Argentina whose name I can't remember.

I always want to like Helen Oyeyemi but I just find her writing too weird. I have a book of her short stories which I got on a bit better with in small bursts.

1. Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. I know many will have read this already, I was inspired to learn more about the opioids crisis after reading Demon Copperhead last year. I don't do very well with non-fiction but this was extremely readable, full of interesting anecdotes and absolutely damning about the Sacklers. I did feel it went on a bit and I lost track of the various legal cases brought against the family, but I think that is down to my poor concentration as the writing was excellent.

1. Snow, John Banville

I don’t think I would quite call this a murder mystery because, although it undoubtedly is, it is more complex, dark and brutal than the set up would suggest. An elderly priest has been murdered in a country house. The detectives who have been dispatched at Christmas to solve this murder become embroiled in longstanding family and religious tensions.

Dark and disturbing. I don’t know if I would recommend it. I didn’t enjoy it as such....

9. 56 Days, Catherine Ryan Howard

This was more of the typical murder mystery set up. Brutal but didn’t ask too much of the reader (unlike Snow). Zipped along and the reveals were pleasingly done. It carried out the conventions of the genre. Which Snow didn’t. Which made it more fun and enjoyable but also more flimsy.

Here’s my conclusion. Irish Murder mysteries to use the metaphor of snacks. Snow was a handful of almonds- plenty to chew on, nourishing, enjoyable in a sort of ‘feels like it is probably quite good for you’ way. 56 Days was a piece of victoria sponge. You know what you are getting, nothing too complex, enjoyable at the time but you aren’t left with much else.

I might theme my entire reviews for the year on snacks. Or maybe I should write them after lunch and not before it.

And onwards. I gave in and bought The Running Grave. It was inevitable. I’m LOVING it. So much so I am listening to it normal speed as I want to savour it.

Babel. Ugh. I’m only 50 pages in and it’s a slog. I’ve been told the second half is bad. I’m not enjoying the first. The footnotes are pissing me right off. I’ll persevere though.

@GrannieMainland
Empire of Pain was one of my stand outs last year. I have recommended it to a huge number of people and it has genuinely changed my prescribing practice (as an HCP). In fact I wrote it up for CPD last year for my appraisal.

I like your analogy of snacks to describe Irish murder mysterious @elspethmcgillicudddy!

I have read Snow and 56 Days. I liked Snow more than 56 Days but I prefer darker and more complex reads, a chewier read, if you like :) I also liked April in Spain and The Lock-Up. I like John Banville when he writes his detective series but I ran into problems with The Singularities so I'm not sure about his other books yet.

8. The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie This month's read christie challenge book and I picked it up on Kindle for 99p which was handy. It's the first Tommy and Tuppence book where they investigate a criminal gang attempting to overthrow the British government. I found this completely farcical. They quite frankly would not survive this investigation. They would both have been killed. Also the "twist" was so fucking obvious from about halfway through the book that the fact it took them so long to work it out is frankly embarrassing. I hope there aren't anymore t&t books in the challenge as I don't want to read anymore

The Colony by Audrey Magee just finished this and found it quite a slog. Took me ages as I didn't care enough to want to read it. Not a favourite, I have also lost count of what number I am on, already

1. The dictionary people: The unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie

26 chapters (one for each letter of the alphabet) about the people who sent in words and their sources to a postbox in Oxford to help the creation of the OED in the late 19th century.

This was a clearly a passion project for Sarah who had worked for the OED and has seen the archives of these handwritten skips and addresses. I enjoyed it. Definitely one to read in chunks and some of the links and chapters were a bit tenuous but generally an interesting read.

1. The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada

Three workers at a factory are not sure what they are doing and what the factory does. This was a very short Japanese book and reminded me of the show severance. It's not clear which of the three are narrating each chapter till it tells you what job they are doing which is probably the point. An interesting one on the meaninglessness of work but I was hoping for a more satisfying ending.

I've read quite a lot of Colm Tóibín and enjoyed his earlier novels. I didn't like Brooklyn, I thought Eilis was incredibly passive, she's given more agency in the film thankfully.

A History of Burning - Janika Oza
An Indian teen is tricked into taking a job on the East African Railway in Kenya. Boy meets girl and they settle in Kampala and start a family. Their daughter's and grandchildren's fates are determined by the changing political landscape as colonial rule ends and Ugandan independence brings the brutal dictatorship of Idi Amin. The South Asian expulsion forces them to flee and scatters them across the world.

I found this a bit of a slog. 10 narrators and spanning 100 years, it felt overlong and trying to do too much. I know a few people have said recently this was a DNF and I can see why.

If the place/period is of interest then I'd recommend We Are All Birds of Uganda - Hafsa Zayyan.

@Cherrypi I can recommend The Dictionary of Lost Words, a fiction set round the first OED. I'm also looking forward to reading The Surgeon of Crowthorne which is sitting near the top of my TBR, a non fiction about one of the volunteers. Two library books to read first.

Slips not skips. Ooh thank you. She mentions that book when they come up in her book.

Place marking.

I really disliked Brooklyn.

Liked Snow a lot, but not Murder in April.

I'm reading the latest Andrew Taylor novel in the Ashes of London series and finding it pretty terrible.

I've added Liza's England to my wishlist but can't say floating heads makes me want to (re)start Winter. I've already tried about 4 times.

@Welshwabbit /@ÚlldemoShúl – thanks for the recommendation for Vaseem Khan. The second in the series is currently a 99p special, if you’re a kindle person.

14. Standing Still – Caro Ramsay – book 7 in the Anderson and Costello police series set in Glasgow. Quite a short book compared to previous ones. I rattled through the first six books in 2022 and then forgot about them. Enjoyable, nothing fancy.

@BlindurErBóklausMaður I can see why not! I think it's possible the whole thing only worked for me because I was ill...

@Welshwabbit following your mention of Pat Barker, you might enjoy one of her other books, Blow Your House Down. Its a really fantastic portrayal of working class women during the time of the Yorkshire Ripper. One of my favourite books

Thanks @BuffysBigSister, I was eyeing that and Union Street up on Kindle this morning, so might take the plunge!

@TabbyM Glad to hear Suzie Edge is a good ‘un! I can take a fair bit of medical gruesomeness (but since I had my daughter find novels with children in peril almost impossible to get through.)

@Welshwabbit thanks again for the recommendations- I must keep an eye out for any other crime books you recommend! (Btw I like Pat Barker too and you’ve reminded me I must read the rest of the Regeneration trilogy.
@Tarragon123 thanks for the heads up- I’ve picked up book 2 which I’ll save as a treat for next month.

@BuffysBigSister has beat me to it but I’d definitely recommend both Blow Your House Down and Union Street. They’re both excellent at detailing the struggles of northern working class women.

14. Werecockroach by Polenth Blake Rin moves into a new flat, with two slightly odd new flatmates. Then an alien spaceship arrives in the sky, and their day only gets stranger from there onwards. This was a very funny little SF novella, with good characters & a nice tight story despite the short length.

11. A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel
Another holiday purchase after the recommendations on here (plus I read the earlier Travellers in the Third Reich a couple of years ago), and I also am bolding this. A deceptively simple writing style that I imagine takes a long time to refine. And a deeply engaged picture of one Bavarian village, already developing out of conservative rural tradition to a tourist resort, and how its people lived between 1933 and 1948. I don't quite understand how the authors found this village to write about - maybe I missed it. The range of experience within it and its strong archives make it an amazing choice.