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

@BlueFairyBugsBooks Oh dear. I hope I haven't accidentally kicked the hornet's nest with this one. Some books do seem to be triggers for energetic debate 😆

@elkiedee am always in London :-)

I totally understand retaining the anonymity. I was on a thread here about 10 years ago and ended up having a whale of a time with the women I met, still see some of them now.

For those that are interested, I can do any both weekends after 11 August.

A meet up sounds great to me. I think London sounds easier for most people but I could do London or Bath. I have three weddings this year and a couple of trips planned but I could do July or August on a weekend!

I have finally finished book no.4. and I can say that I enjoyed Monica Heisey's Really Good, Actually a lot less than most of you! I spent soooo much of the book being infuriated by all the characters. Literally all of them. Wanted to give them all a good shake. Nearly DNF'd on several occasions but each time she pulled me back in with a particularly witty observation. This is far from awful - but really just not for me, actually.

Three Hours was a bold for me last year….

Laughing at the idea of London being central for a meetup. I'll be on a Scottish island for half of August but would be up for a meet in either the central belt of Scotland or the north of England at a different point of the summer.

@nowanearlyNicemum

I'm one who loved it but there's more than one naysayer on the thread. She had me with the takeaway debacle I really laughed at that.

I’m a tentative maybe for a summer meet up. I’m a 4 hour train ride from London and we haven’t made any holiday plans for the summer yet so not sure when I’m free yet.

I don't think anyone said it is central. It's just a location that is easy for most people to get to, especially as there are people from outside of the UK. I'm based in the north but a train to London isn't too bad.

I may be able to pop to London. I'm not far away.

I have just finished James O'Brien's How They Broke Britain, another political present from the DSs to 'make up for Rory the Tory'.

It wasn't covering anything new but getting everything about the usual suspects all in one book is both enraging and rather deflating. Interesting though.

A couple of the chapters are a bit dull and the one on Corbyn doesn't really hang with the rest. O'B is known for not liking him and it shows whereas he is more forgiving of Cummings, in a way : he admits his own background isn't too dissimilar to many of his targets. I thought the Prime Minsters We Never Had was less cliched, more nuanced and more interesting on Corbyn.

Of course, he pulls no punches on Johnson! And his stuff on the BBC is eye opening.

Nervous but intrigued, I think I could be brave enough to join a meet-up in Bath or London.

I'm near Bath but could do London. Last time I did a meet up on here was when ds was a 👶 and it was a local group

13. The Secret Network of Nature by Peter Wohlleben trans. Jane Billinghurst
    How everything in nature is connected in unexpected ways. The part I found most intriguing was how trees can communicate with eachother through roots and fungus.
    Quite interesting but I wasn't keen on the writing style.

14. Uprooted by Naomi Novik
    Every ten years a man called the Dragon takes a girl from the village. Seventeen year old Agnieszka is afraid that this year it will be her beautiful best friend Kasia but things don't go as expected.
    I thought I would love this; a fairytale with a strong female protagonist but it was a bit of a slog to get through. The writing is good but the plot just seems to ramp up too quickly, with too many extra characters suddenly appearing.

15. Where the River Takes Us by Lesley Parr
    In the Welsh valleys in the 1970s thirteen year old Jason and his older brother Richie are struggling after the deaths of their parents and Richie's lack of work due to strikes and three day weeks. When Jason and his friends hear rumours of a big cat living wild, with a cash reward for anyone who can photograph it they go on a mission to find it.
    It's a fun adventure story for nine to twelve year olds, but also about living with grief and friendship. Nice story.

16. Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake

17. Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake

18. Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake
    The birth of Titus Groan, heir of Gormenghast sends ripples through the castle, affecting the coldly ambitious kitchen boy Steerpike, Titus' teenage sister Fuschia and a widowed young woman of the outer dwellings, Keda among others.
    I read these as a teenager and had forgotten how good they are. I love the language used, words like fuscous and gulches.
    The first two books are grotesque and gothic. There's a definite change of atmosphere in the third, which is just strange.
    The trilogy is an unusual fantasy, with a cast of fascinating characters.

I have been very lax with reviews but I am currently finding 18. Bringing Columbia Home by Michael D Leinbach (and others) very interesting.

It is the account of the aftermath of the atmospheric break up of the Columbia space shuttle on re entry in Feb 2003. The lead author was launch director of the shuttle programme and a key player in the search effort. If you liked the Feynman account of the Challenger investigation, you will like this.

13 Hungry by Grace Dent

I enjoy Grace Dent's restaurant reviews and like her on Masterchef, and I also enjoyed this memoir. I'm a little bit younger than Grace and grew up in a very different household (parents big on self-sufficiency and growing your own veg in the countryside), but I still recognise the foods from my childhood and enjoyed the nostalgia. She writes with great warmth and affection about her family, and with an underlying edge about the limited prospects working class kids had growing up in the 80s. As another woman who moved away from home to "make it" in London, I empathised with the period when she watched herself lose touch a little with her family because everything was just too exciting. The book ends with a description of her father's dementia, which is very sad, but her love for him remains evident throughout. I forgot to say very funny too, but of course it is.

I am in London so would be very up for a meet here!

I'm also intrigued by a meet up! I'm an introvert too but I would love to meet people on this thread. Also, the fact I'm American means that I probably don't come across as an introvert to most British people 😂.

@InTheCludgie thats a shame about the Stewart O'Nan but I can see why you might be finding Wish You Were Here a bit slow. I really liked it but then I’m a sucker for that kind of quite leisurely American family-driven novel. I really loved Last Night at the Lobster too.

There is another book featuring the character of the widowed grandmother - Emily, Alone - but tbh I couldn’t really face that. He’s written a book about F Scott Fitzgerald, West of Sunset, which I’ve got but haven’t read yet. Maybe that’s worth exploring?

@bibliomania said it was central at 17.24 yesterday. It's really not. For example it's an 8 h bus trip from Glasgow and would take even longer by train.

I'm not saying it shouldn't be in London, I'd just rather it wasn't described as 'central' when it's in the SE corner of the country. Manchester would actually be more central with similar travel times from London and the central belt of Scotland.

@JaninaDuszejko i think that the central was meant in contrast to Bath, given Mr B’s bookshop in Bath was the first proposed location.

@JaninaDuszejko
London has decent train connections to lots of places, so is more 'central' in terms of travel to many people than somewhere like Bath, or even Manchester.

Wherever is picked, some will and some won't be able to make it. Maybe organise a Scottish one too, if that appeals to you more.

@nowanearlyNicemum I wasn't a huge fan of Really Good Actually - a bit too much millennial angst for me - but I did love Sorrow and Bliss which Eine hated so swings and roundabouts.
I taught the DDs the alphabetical story game from S&B and we still play it.

I'm persevering with the ejaculation lit of The New Life but it's not really doing it for me. I seem to remember lots of people raving about it on insta last year but am now wondering if they were all gay men.

I'm in London generally but no idea what we're up to in August as haven't booked a summer holiday yet. In fact there's talk of going to Scotland so I may be up for that one instead! Have also attended MN meet ups before for s style & beauty thread ( when I was more stylish than now) but not sure if it would work for books. Generally everyone just drank a lot!

@Stowickthevast

Odd isn't it? You would imagine a person would like both or neither Really Good does have a plot though. The alphabet game was cool.

Central if you take into account that not everyone is in the UK, @JaninaDuszejko

I've finished two books recently, and gave up on one.

20. The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfield. An early book of hers, following a young woman as she navigates relationships through her teens and twenties, watching her friends and family do the same. It feels like a collection of linked short stories, some stronger than others, and doesn't always hold together well as a novel. The good bits are very good though - I especially liked the opening chapter, focussing on the summer Hannah spends living with her aunt while her parents split up, and becomes obsessed with reading about Julia Roberts' wedding.

21. Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid. Slim but powerful, a coming of age novel about a teenage girl in Antigua who suddenly finds her relationship with her beloved mother breaking down when she turns 15. I liked the writing but could have done with a bit more detail on why and how she came to be so in conflict with her mother.

And I've closed The Furies by Katie Lowe after 80 pages. Should be completely up my street, witchy teenage girls at an exclusive boarding school, but unfortunately nothing at all has happened to draw me in yet.

@Welshwabbit thanks for the Grace Dent review! I picked that up in a shop today and almost bought it, except my TBR pile is already shameful! It looked good though!