50 Books Challenge 2024 Part Five

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fifth 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.

Some of us bring over to the new thread lists of the books we've read so far, but again - this is your choice.

The first thread is here, the second one here , the third one here and the fourth one here

What are you reading?

I think most people have read Denise Mina's Rizzio but it is £1.49 today on kindle if you haven't and want to do so.

This is spot on. There's a lot that's interesting in there but it does get a bit mixed up with her own hang ups and issues (albeit I'd be pissed off if people kept muddling me with the anti-me). I think "could have been a blog post" is true of so much non fiction, though!

Yes I would still recommend it but it was a bit of a mishmash and thus not a bold

Ah, Doppelganger was a bold for me! I loved it from start to finish; I found it very thought-provoking. I liked the way she interpreted the notion of having a 'double' in so many different senses.

I also thought she used the Naomi Klein / Naomi Wolf mix-up as a jumping-off point, rather than engaging in much discussion of Wolf herself. The book was quite dignified/restrained in that regard. To be honest, the snarky side of me could have done with more discussion of Wolf, because I'm kind of fascinated by what a card-carrying conspiracy theorist she has become, after at one point having had the respect of the academic community. Honestly she's a car crash. She's been on Twitter this week (Wolf, not Klein!), grandly explaining why it's a good idea to read the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew rather than in the original Greek (she seems to think the Hebrew is more authentic than the Greek?). That's relatively minor though compared to some of the other stuff she has come out with.

Anyway I'm a fan of Doppelganger even though it spent relatively little time dishing the dirt on Wolf. In fact I have a ticket to hear Klein speak next week! I have a feeling she'll be an interesting speaker.

39. The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu, translated by Joel Martinsen (no. 2 in The Three Body Problem series) I didn't love the first 50% which I found a bit dull and I thought there were some glaring plot holes. Having said that I gave it 5 stars on Goodreads as it's such a fun idea and the space battle was fantastic!

@cassandre

Oh I'd definitely pay to hear her speak she's very erudite

43 Neither Here Nor There - Bill Bryson

Wasn’t quite so enamoured of this European travelogue as I usually am of Bryson - perhaps it was the slightly disjointed nature of the narrative as it skipped from one country to another, but it rarely seemed to get beyond shallow observation and crass national stereotypes. Still very funny at times though.

Crikey lol... I dont have a list as such, i just pick a book up i fancy at the time.
Ive got 10 on coffee table to read but im not going to list 50, even though i have got at least 50 to read lol.

@Loubelle70 the idea is you just list the books you read as you read them. The aim is to read 50 books during the year but of course some people read less and some people read a lot more! I've got loads of good recommendations from this thread.

I'm glad to hear that, Eine, because I couldn't convince DH to come with me, or any members of my RL book group! 😂Never mind.

Btw, I agree that the 2015 adaptation of And Then There Were None is great; coincidentally, I just saw it this past Christmas. It was much better than the most recent telly adaptation, Murder Is Easy, which looked nice visually but was almost completely lacking in suspense. Too bad!

And while I'm stringing together random comments, I wanted to say to @inaptonym that reading YA sports manga in the original Japanese is a level of cool that I could never hope to achieve 😮

Just a quick thanks to @RomanMum - currently meeting Meet Me at the Museum and it does make a perfect follow-up to The Bog People. Each book has enhanced my enjoyment of the other.

I heard Naomi Klein interviewed on the radio when she was promoting her book. I thought she was very interesting. I'd like to read 'Doppelganger' but I really need to get through a few books before buying any new ones.

Doppelganger was definitely a bold for me. While in many ways it read like a collection of essays with a loose theme, I didn't find that a problem. I had it on audio, which I felt worked particularly well.

I've ground almost entirely to a halt on reading with a combination of work plus election obsessing. I re-read a couple of Georgette Heyers that I don't have on paper picked up in the cheap deals (Faro's Daughter and The Black Moth) but that's about it.

Otherwise I'm still crawling through Braiding Sweetgrass & reading all the bits that annoy me out to my poor DP interspersed with a book of Rainbow Rowell short stories from the e-library.

You're welcome Biblio!

Hello! I saw a link to this thread on a different post, and I thought it would be full of my people! Hello all! I'm a pretty quick reader so I'm on my 44th book of this year. I read a mixture of different books so am looking forward to seeing inspiration from other people!

Currently reading The Lost Storyteller by Amanda Block.

Welcome @ginsparkles and what a great name!

Hi @ginsparkles

Welcome to the thread

Usually at the start of each thread posters will list all the books they've read that year and make any "standout" titles, bold.

So, calling a book "a bold" means you love it

Any bolds this year?

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I'm just about to head out for a horse ride, but I will post my list and standouts afterwards

More time than I thought before I need to be at the yard so here we go!
I love a good murder mystery or physiological thriller type and the "Bones" books by Kathy Reichs are some of my favourites, I read a few last year and decided to buy them and read them in order this time round !

1.	Murder in Merrywell by Jane Bettany 
2.	Extraordinary People by Peter May 
3.	Alphabet Weekends by Elizabeth Noble 
4.	Coffin Road by Peter May 
5.	Murder at the Theatre Royale by Ada Moncreiff 
6.	Queen Bee by Jane Fallon
7.	<strong>You by Caroline Keynes</strong>
8.	I&rsquo;m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy 
9.	Black Fell by Mari Hannah 
10.	Horse by Geraldine Brooks
11.	Before the coffee gets cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi 
12.	Hidden Bodies by Caroline Keynes 
13.	Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier 
14.	I was Jane Austin&rsquo;s Best Friend by Cora Harrison 
15.	Three Card Murder by Jenny Blackhurst
16.	A Death In Diamonds by S J Bennett 
17.	<strong>The Guilty Wife by Elle Croft</strong> 
18.	Just Got Real by Jane Fallon 
19.	Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday
20.	The Bone Collection by Kathy Reichs
21.	Brooklyn by Colm Toibin 
22.	What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty 
23.	The Killer in the Snow by Alex Pine 
24.	Rainbows End in Ferry Lane Market by Nicola May 
25.	Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs 
26.	The Forgotten Garden by Sharon Gosling
27.	Death Du Jour by Kathy Reichs
28.	The Last Letter From London by Pam Lecky
29.	Lie To Me by C J Cooper 
30.	Homecoming by Kate Moreton
31.	Starting Over at Halesmere House by Suzanne Snow
32.	Over sharing by Jane Fallon 
33.	The Post Birthday World by Lionel Shriver
34.	Under a Greek Moon by Carol Kirkwood 
35.	<strong>Zero Days by Ruth Ware</strong>
36.	Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
37.	The Farmhouse of Second Chances by Helen Rolfe 
38.	The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz by Thomas Geve 
39.	It Ends at Midnight by Harriet Tyce 
40.	<strong>Verity by Colleen Hoover</strong> 
41.	The lemon Tree Cafe by Cathy Bramley
42.	<strong>Everyone Here is Lying by Shari Lapena</strong>

Welcome, ginsparkles!

My latest round-up:

67. Over My Dead Body, Maz Evans
Woman attempts to solve her own murder from the afterlife. Reminded me of the TV series The Good Place, if you added in Whoopi Goldberg from Ghost and made them all English. There were a few nicely acerbic comments along the way and overall I enjoyed it. The author usually writes YA fiction, so everything was nicely tidied up and lessons learned by the end. A decent beach read, if only I had been on a beach.

68. Wayfarer, Phoebe
Non-fiction - woman reflects on the death of her mother and on her own awful boyfriends while walking pilgrim paths around the UK. It's the sort of thing I usually like, but this didn't do much for me. Her writing is okay, readable journalistic prose, but nothing special. She doesn't evoke the places all that well, and while I don't doubt the author's personal experiences, they were tidied up neatly into the formula used in the genre: if you're 80% of the way in, you know that redemption is around the corner. And boom, there you go.

69. The Antique Hunter's Guide to Murder, C L Miller
Utter dross. Cosy crime - woman follows clues left by murdered mentor to discover something or other. All the heady realism of Scooby Doo, but with less convincing characterisation. Something something big house, something something pool of blood, something something locked cellars blah blah blah.

70. Streets of Darkness, A A Dhand
Down the mean streets of Bradford, a man must go alone. Yorkshire noir. Original in some ways - our hero is a Sikh married to a Muslim and Bradford makes for a fresh setting - but cliched in others: our hero is a renegade cop (the word seems right as American movies are a clear influence), his boss is days from retirement, there are unlikely alliances and various other things that it would be a spoiler to list. On the whole I thought it was decent crime fiction.

71. Two Sisters, Blake Morrison
Memoir of the author's sister, and, to a lesser-extent, his half-sister. The former suffered from alcoholism, the latter died by suicide. This had a luke-warm reception on here, but I was quite engaged by it. It does feel a bit padded out with stories of other famous(ish) brothers and sisters, but I was interested in the author's questioning of what makes us turn out the way we do.

72. Meet me at the Museum, Anne Youngson
Recommended by RomanMum as a follow-on from The Bog People. An English woman and a Danish man, a curator at the museum that holds Tollund Man, send each other a series of letters about their lives. This was wistful and resisted any neat endings and I really liked it.

73. The Man who went into the West, Byron Rogers
Biography of the Welsh poet R S Thomas. The biographer served his subject well by not taking him entirely seriously, and viewing his "wild man of the west" persona as being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Interesting reflection on what it means to belong in particular place. This was great.

Welcome ginsparkles!

I finished my latest book and I’m not sure that it’s a book hangover that’s making me a bit meh about the other books I’m reading
97 The Moonstone- Wilkie Collins
It was a Collins (The Woman in White) that got me back into reading classics last year so I’ll always be grateful to old Wilkie for that as I’ve read so many I’ve enjoyed over the last 18 months. This is another rollicking read- A moonstone looted from the remains of an Indian temple is left to Rachel Verinder and delivered to her by her cousin on her birthday. Then it goes missing…
Its very of its time but very enjoyable. I don’t normally like cozy books but Collins’s wit and warmth make his an exception. Bold and open to any recommendations anyone has of where to go next with Wilkie.

Now I’m listening to You like it Darker by Stephen King (meh @MorriganManor called this one correctly- King has lost his touch I reckon) and reading Cloistered (which I’m not enjoying at all- should I DNF?)

For me, Cloistered heated up a bit in the second half when the "wrong" person was appointed Mother Superior and it all got a bit Orwellian. Might be worth a skim through to that bit even if you don't bother with the rest, Úll (and I've only just realised what language your name when I was working out how to abbreviate it!)

23 Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott
24 Period Piece by Gwen Raverat

I wasn't even going to review these, as they are extreme re-reads (ie I know them practically by heart) and I may even have noted them previously on here. But in fact I haven't read either for a long time, and certainly not cover to cover. And it turned out to be interesting that they are about relatively close periods of time. Eight Cousins describes a year in the life of Rose, a Massachusetts orphan living with her great aunts and her uncle, published in 1874; Period Piece though published in 1952 describes Gwen Raverat's 1880s childhood). There is even the Yankee link - Raverat's mother Maud du Puy was from Philadelphia, and she discusses the contrasts of her mother's culture and upbringing with her own.

The interest for me was in the contrast. Louisa May Alcott; reading again that every fault in a child is down to not enough prayer, too much coffee, tight stays, drinking, smoking, penny dreadful novels, and the wrong educational theories. And then Gwen Raverat's deliciously acerbic post-war view of the same time and those theories, making it clear how ludicrous and hypocritical most of it was, while also showing that it is still possible that even the brave post war world might have its own ludicrous hypocrisies.

Eight Cousins is still pleasantly sensual - my favourite bits in Alcott always involve unpacking boxes and cupboards. Period Pieve is just hilarious. Probably one of the funniest books ever written imo, and with SUCH an acid tang.

Thanks biblio- looks like I should try and stick with it a while. Will give it another go on tomorrow’s commute.
Yes re username- Irish for ‘Apple of my eye’ for anyone who doesn’t speak it (I would guess grammatically incorrect though- I was never great at grammar in Irish) My favourite term of endearment for DH.