50 Books Challenge Part Three

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the third 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 first thread is here and the second one here.

The Wager was a book of the week on R4 recently, @Piggywaspushed - I enjoyed it a lot. Might well get round to reading it as well!

I tried starting The Wager last week but kept falling asleep over it. Not the book's fault.

This is largely why it takes me so long to complete books Remus. I have to keep rereading pages.

16. Everywhere I Look - Helen Garner

Spotted by chance in a charity shop and read almost in one sitting. I’m a big fan of Australian writer Helen Garner’s non-fiction books following two high-profile court cases, Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief - I haven’t read much of her fiction but I like what I’ve seen.

She has an acerbic eye, a bracing wit, and pulls no punches in this collection of assorted short pieces, some of them diary entries, some accounts of people she’s known, and others random jottings. She’s especially good on children (she’s put in the hours with grandparent duty), and her observations on being an older woman - she’s now in her late 70s - are spot on. I do love it when a random book turns into a great read, and I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Thanks@Southeastdweller just purchased when the dust settles 😁

All good wishes to your and your DC @BarbaraBuncle. I've never got on much with sci-fi either so will crack on with my review.
13.Freya by Anthony Quinn Freya is the headstrong, ambitious daughter of a successful London artist. The book follows her as she heads to Oxford in 1945 after a spell in the Wrens, and moves into journalism, encountering a number of scandals both personally and professionally.

I loved this. Freya is complex, often difficult, and not always kind to those she loves. There's a great cast of supporting characters gathered mostly from the arts. The struggles of the gay community in post-war London are sensitively depicted, and the grimy underbelly of Fleet Street gives it some grit.

It's technically the second in a trilogy, the first being Curtain Call, which I also loved. Curtain Call however focused on Freya's father Stephen, and I think this works very well as a standalone if you haven't read the first.

28. Erasure by Percival Elliot

Monk writes high brow literature about things like Aeschylus and Aristophanes - he is not particularly successful and keeps being told to write about "the black experience"

The success of a book which he believes represents everything he despises prompts him to write a parody of his own.

A lot of this is a critique of the literary scene. I found the parody section painful to read. The parts of the novel which centred on his caring for his Mum with dementia were far more interesting to me. I don't think I'm the intended audience of this book and that's fine. I may or may not seek out the film American Fiction which is out now and based on this book.

It's actually Percival Everett my mistake

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit i might be seeing American Fiction tomorrow and I was just thinking that your review sounded similar 😀

Best wishes BarbaraBuncle 💐

A couple of short ones here:

A Chess Story by Stefan Zweig tr. from German by Alexander Starritt (also published as Royal Game) Thanks to those who recommended this gem. It’s a novella first published in German in 1941. A chess grandmaster on a boat sailing from New York to Buenos Aires is an object of fascination to his fellow passengers, but it turns out there’s someone else who may be able to match him. This is compelling and fascinating given its date and that it brings in Austrian resistance to the nazis and psychological breakdown.

The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith. This play is a retelling of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath tale. I don’t know my Chaucer but this version is approachable enough with Alvita being the 5-times-married larger than life Wife talking about life and love and friendship and misogyny. Also streamed the play via the National Theatre subscription service.

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa. Translated by Stephen Snyder

Narrated by the Housekeeper this describes the relationship that develops between the Housekeeper and her young son and the Mathematics Professor she works for who suffers from short term memory loss. Not a lot happens but the book is filled with love. Delightful.

This is what happens when I go shopping without my children. Charity shops are dangerous and now the TBR pile is out of control

15 The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck

A disparate group of passengers travels on the titular bus. The scene is set before the journey, exposing the tempestuous relationship between cafe owner and occasional bus driver Juan and his wife Alice. The cafe's staff, Pimples (or Kit) and Norma are drawn into the journey for different reasons. The passengers all have their own stories and difficulties which unravel as the bus flounders.

There's no real destination to reach in this book, but I liked it. The characters are largely unpleasant but you understand why. Steinbeck is good at humanity, and at moments of humanity amongst his bleakness. And his descriptions of the Californian landscape are spare and beautiful.

Love a good haul @MrsALambert

Great hall @MrsALambert . I’m reading The Worst Witch at the moment with my daughter. We happen to have it in paper and on the Kindle so I was reading along whilst she read out loud. The texts were identical except for one change, in one version Ms Cackle had a pink dressing gown and one a grey. It’s such an odd thing to change 😬

That is an odd thing to change. I’ve been trying to get my DS into them. He’s got ASD so can get very stuck on books and I’m not getting anywhere. I loved them as a child though so I shall persevere

@Welshwabbit I read The Wayward Bus as a teenager and remember loving it.

I bought a Mhairi McFarlane book that I don't have yet in the monthly deals. I absolutely spotted Wayward which I read recently and is a reasonable though not outstanding witchy novel, and The Mercies which is the best witchy novel I've read.

14. Inland by Tea Obreht. Finally a bold book for me this year! I've had this on my kindle for ages and finally decided to read it. It's a sort of western, following two timelines of a woman living in a frontier town in Texas during a drought, and a wanted man travelling round the south western states on the run from the law. It's based around the absolutely extraordinary true story of the brief period when the American army imported large numbers of camels from the Middle East to help move supplies round the desert. In some ways it's quite a weird book, lots of ghosts and conversations with dead people, but also just an incredibly evocative story about life in the American west, especially for women and immigrants.

20. The Dry - Jane Harper the first in a trilogy I believe. I read this after really enjoying The Lost Man by the same author but this one just didn't do it for me. The crime was too horrible which put me off from the begining, the town it's set in didn't seem to have any redeeming features and I just didn't like any of the characters in the same way I did in The Lost Man. I'll probably read the second in the series eventually as I really did love The Lost Man but I'll be quicker to put it down if I don't like the way it's going. It was only 99p on kindle which was a good deal and I definitely got 99ps worth of enjoyment from it, I was just hoping for more.

The World we Make by N.K. Jemisin

Sequel to The City we Became
I didn't like this as much as the first one, but it got me out a slump for a bit. It needed editing and I'm probably not young or hip enough to have understood some of it, especially as I've never been to New York. I enjoyed it though, it's essentially a love story to the city, with added tentacles.

Great haul @MrsALambert , I am reading Gone Girl at the moment, saving what I think though until I have read it.

Placemarking for now. Thanks @Southeastdweller for the new thread.

I've namechanged since the last one. I was Icelandic. Now I'm a quote from the magnificent Peter Ross.

Ooh @CornishLizard , I didn't know it was possible to stream the Wife of Willesden via the National Theatre website! I will do that. Thanks so much 💐

What a beautiful name it is @ASighMadeOfStone ❤️

I'm insanely chuffed that Peter himself "liked" my review of Steeple Chasing on Goodreads earlier today. 😁