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

I feel weirdly inspired to spend 99p on this. It’s been a long day.

Bored by Pym here too. Stay away @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie.

I didn't get past the first few chapters of Golden Hill - it just didn't engage me although I know it's generally well regarded. It's been sitting on the shelf looking at me for years.

Maybe I’m the thread outlier - love Excellent Women, loved Golden Hill 🤷‍♀️

Same here, except I sent my copy off to the charity shop.

I like Barbara Pym's novels. I've read quite a few of them over the years, but then I rather like slightly dull novels about middle aged spinsters, where nothing much really happens. Crampton Hodnet is the one set in North Oxford, and imo is the funniest.

I appreciate the random yoking of Spufford and Pym @AliasGrape it helps this newbie navigate the range of tastes here!

Outlying here with you @TerpsichoreGolden Hill remains my favourite Spufford novel though Cahokia Jazz was a blast, and less tricksy. Red Plenty (the Krushchev fairytale) is still my overall fave.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie what are some of your favourite comic novels, so I can avoid like the plague? 😀

@BarbaraBuncle Agree with Crampton Hodnet being the funniest Pym, but then I have wayward preferences <points to username> And some of her later books are so dark they skew things.

1. Still Life by Louise Penny

2. The Law of Innocence by Michael Connelly

3. A Whispered Name by William Brodrick

Father Anselm investigates the wartime exploits of his late mentor, and the founder and head of his Priory, with regards to his part in the court martial in 1917 of Joseph Flanagan an Irish volunteer. Flanagan was highly regarded and offered little defence only saying that he got drunk. The novel’s timeline moves between Anselm’s investigation and Flanagan’s uncovering the mystery and his motivations. Obviously, the novel covers the horrors of the War, but also loss, sacrifice and personal redemption. Well written, subtle and, of course, sad and emotional. Book three of five.

About Barbara Pym: the first time I tried her novels, I was underwhelmed. Then I tried again after a gap of a few years and suddenly I loved them. It was a bit weird really! But I think after reading a few of her books, I got more used to her dry wit and understated humour, and came to appreciate them more. She is so good at gently exposing human foibles.

And I adore Crampton Hodnet!

Hello, first time poster here! I am a keen reader, but my genre choice seems to be all over the place. I love a kindle unlimited romance interspersed by something a bit meatier, and tend to have more than one book on the go at any one time.

I get through the KU stuff really quickly, which usually bumps up my numbers on this front

Reads so far:

1- Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
2- The Flatshare - Beth O'Leary
3- Flawless - Elsie Silver
4- Heartless - Elsie Silver
5- Powerless - Elsie Silver
6- Reckless - Elsie Silver
7- Eichmann in Jersualem - Hannah Arendt
8- Hopeless - Elise Silver
9- Days at the Morisaki Bookshop - Satoshi Yagisawa
10- Strong Female Character- Fern Brady
11- The Mountain in the Sea - Ray Naylor
12 - The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida - Shehan Karunatilaka
13 - The Belan Deck - Matt Bucher

I currently am working my way though Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraiser, and In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts on audible.

Welcome @RenegadeMrs. I loved the Marie Antoinette book.

Me too. I've tried several times and couldn't make any headway. Lots of people whose views I respect when it comes to books have encouraged me to try again, but I feel weary every time I look at it. Perhaps it's time to let it go into the universe for someone else to enjoy!

Welcome @RenegadeMrs . I love the eclecticism of your list - particularly the Hannah Arendt in among the Elsie Silver - it reminds me (in a good way!) of DD who is a huge fan of those sorts of books but usually has something extremely heavyweight about religious identity or Holocaust theology on her bedside table at the same time. Aged about 12, she was in hospital for a week and when I asked her what she wanted me to bring in one day she said "five Beanos and Anne Frank's diary". And that's been the pattern ever since...

@Welshwabbit N or M is one of my favourite Agatha Christies - I also read it as a teenager and had no idea until years later that the main Tommy and Tuppence books are set in their youth. I started one a few months ago and gave up after a few pages, it was so awful. So I agree that N or M is worth picking up even if you hate T&T!

Welcome @RenegadeMrs !

Welcome to the group @RenegadeMrs

I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one who didn't get Excellent Women in my memory it was universally loved and I was utterly confused about why I found it so dull.

@PepeLePew , love that story about your daughter!

@HenryTilneyBestBoy

Yes! I absolutely loathed Cold Comfort Farm!

Cold Comfort Farm is in my top 10 of all time best reads.

Haven't got round to Excellent Women

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit request for your favourite comic novels to add to my potential loathe list, please 😉

👋@RenegadeMrs fellow newbie. I loved the Fern Brady and Hannah Arendt, and liked Yagisawa from your reads. What did you think of the Nayler and Karunatilaka (both on my TBR)?

@HenryTilneyBestBoy

I don't really have any "favourite comic novels" it's not a genre that I'm very knowledgeable in. I thought Really Good Actually was funny last year. I didn't find CCF amusing in the least, my review is somewhere on last years first thread.

I am a Barbara Pym fan. Loved Crampton Hodnet and enjoyed Excellent Women too. Currently have Jane and Prudence waiting TBR.

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie Mixed feelings about this. It’s in the shoehorning-history line, opening in Nagasaki just in time for the bomb and moving to India to catch partition and New York for the aftermath of 9/11. Hiroko loses her German fiancé to the bomb and travels to Delhi to his sister, subsequently marrying a Muslim member of the household. The two families’ lives then intertwine and we follow the next generation. On the one hand I found this all too stage-managed to be convincing, and felt I would have preferred alternative books, either more depth on the Japan section or more about dilemmas that arise later and are swiftly moved on from. The writing also took me a while to tune into, I frequently had to go back over sentences to read them right. However, I might not have happened upon those alternative books, and this did give a sweep of locations and perspectives that were new to me so overall I’m glad I persevered.

Rental Person who does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto tr from Japanese by Don Knotting This was a quick and quirky read. The author once had a boss who didn’t like his passivity and said it made no difference whether he was there or not. So he wondered if he could make a success of a ‘do nothing’ service, where for the price of transport and food costs he would turn up and offer a ‘zero spec human’ to occupy space and provide only minimal responses. He tweets about these encounters, building a community audience of sorts, and has now had this book ghostwritten. The sorts of requests made are interesting - whether accompanying a client to a restaurant, or going to the home of someone who has lived alone so long they want to know what it feels like to have someone else around, or simply having a sham engagement in the diary to make someone feel able to decline another invitation. The reasons why a rental person is needed also vary - sometimes people don’t have friends to ask, other people have friends but only for sharing particular activities and they don’t want to owe a debt of reciprocity by asking someone to do something outside that boundary.

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

I had a different reaction to the poster who didn’t like this one, I I enjoyed this more. It’s a faux biography about an artist X written by X’s late wife and set in an alternative history of America. The alternative history aspects definitely works better in the first half of the novel when solving the mystery of X’s background but after this it becomes less important to the narrative and takes away a really interesting part of the novel and the reason I very quickly got into the story. But I did like the authors rethinking of the relationship and her coming to terms with some of the parts of the relationship in which the author was being manipulated and not treated very well – however this aspect didn’t really come to any conclusions. I still gave it 4/5 though for the reading experience.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

This was my first audiobook and I think I’ll listen to my older novels via audio in the future as I feel I got more out of this although it did take me ages to listen to (I have a fairly short commute and started this in the summer of 2023). I actually knew quite little of the story before going in and OK while at points Tess did get on my nerves at points (mostly around when trying to tell Angel about her past) but I could sadly see how her first interactions with Alec were going to lead her down a path she was too naive to see and thought it was interesting how Angel liked to think of himself enlightened but in the end has the some view of women as other men of his time.
I didn’t know how this ended and did think Tess’s actions were abit out of character but will still be a bold for me.

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

This is about a young women who has a temp position within The Hague as a translator. This is the standard millennial fiction I’ve been reading over the last few years and while I do think these are really well written I am getting tired of ‘young women gets into inappropriate relationship with older/married/ emotionally unavailable etc men or women. This one did have a good setting in The Hague though.

I think it was me who didn't like Biography of X. I just found all the meta art stuff a bit pointless. But as I mentioned, I didn't really get the "joke"

Welcome @RenegadeMrs . I loved The Seven Moons but know it's quite marmite, what did you think? I also read The Chain-Gang All-Stars but wasn't that impressed.

Am on the fence with CCF and Barbara Pym. They sometimes hit the spot when you just want to read something gentle (and a bit dull).

@LadybirdDaphne It might well be worth 99p. If you give it a go, perhaps you’d like to keep an ejaculation count and report back.

@HenryTilneyBestBoy Other than Jeeves and Wooster, I can’t really think of any comic novels that I like.

Welcome @RenegadeMrs

I hated Cold Comfort Farm but then I'm sure Remus, Eine and I were triplets separated at birth for most books so hey ho.

Steeplechasing around Britain has just arrived. Ah the smell of proper new book is a beautiful thing.

Its arrival may spur me on with Dr. Zhivago. (39% in and it feels like time has stopped every time I read a bit. It's not going to better me though, but Christ almighty, as Boney M would say "oh those Russians" with their 48 names each. I'm rewarding myself by a chapter of Philomena Cunk every 10 chapters of the oviches and the ovkas.

@BadSpellaSpellaSpella the film of Tess is beautiful and despite being 40 odd years old if not more, stands the test of time. Even though I think it was creepy fuck Polanski who directed it. I often reread Tess. Think it's my favourite classic.