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?

104 Great Expectations- Charles Dickens
I reckon I’m the oldest person in the world to read this for the first time! The story of Pip, who grows up in relative poverty, envious of neighbour Miss Havisham and in love with her adopted daughter Estella, who then discovers he has ‘great expectations’. This was enjoyable enough and only my second Dickens. I preferred the first (Bleak House)

Then I DNFed Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang- a dystopia where food has become scarce and smog covers most of the earth. A chef gets a job in a small independent country controlled by a billionaire who has access to many varieties of plants and animals to eat. The climate theme is heavy- handed, the prose too purple and the characters too flat. Not for me.

105 Slough House by Mick Herron
I enjoy these so much I’ve been eking them out. The ‘slow horses’ are the losers from M15 who have been sidelined after making various cock ups. In this instalment, they are in danger from a pair of assassins. This was a Peter Judd/ Diana Taverner heavy episode so quite political but as always, good fun. It’s left on a cliffhanger so I’m not sure how long I can hold off reading the next one, which is the last one currently available.

39. Real Murders (Aurora Teagarden Mysteries #1): Charlaine Harris.

Aurora 'Roe' Teagarden is a librarian living in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, who belongs to a club called 'Real Murders' that meets once a month to discuss real murder cases. This is a harmless occupation until one night when she finds a member dead in a manner that eerily resembles the case they were about to discuss. Other copycat murders ensue and Roe must discover which member of the club is playing this deadly game; one that casts every member in the club as either a potential suspect or the next murder victim.

My dh bought me the first four of this series in a huge hefty omnibus at a jumble sale. I'll probably read it gradually and then redonate it or use it as a doorstop This is a three out of five read. Entertaining enough as a quick read but also potentially annoying if it had been any longer which thankfully it wasn't.

Clara I hope you feel better soon.
TheWolves I thought 'The Bookshop' was very good. I enjoyed* *it as well. Must read 'Offshore'.

29.Broken Light by Joanne Harris Bernie Moon is approaching the menopause, and feeling left behind by life. An invitation to a school reunion and the murder of a local woman awaken her long-dormant ability to see inside people's minds.

This was an odd book. I enjoyed the magic realism that Harris employed in the Chcolat/Lansquenet series, which worked in the whimsical setting. It was less successful here in the more prosaic English suburbs. I also found that Harris's attempts to deal address the problems of misogyny and violence against women were a bit clumsy and verged on lecturing. Definitely needed a bit more show and a bit less tell.

I'm in the middle of this . 'hot flashes ' is mega annoying me. Why not flushes? And if I have to read dopamine one more time....

40. No One's Home by D. M. Pulley I've tried to read this about 4 times and, being a massive wimp about ghost stories, I've always abandoned it. This time I was determined to finish it and finally managed it. This is a multi-timeline novel following a mansion in Shaker Heights, Ohio. The book jumps about between the house's various owners mostly focusing on the Rawlings family in 1922-1931 (the original builders), the Klussman family in 1972-1990, the Martin family in 1994-2016 and finally the Spielman family who buy and renovate the house in 2018. The Spielman family are the main focus of the book, with teenage son Hunter trying to uncover the house's mysteries and dark past. Is the house haunted? Is it cursed? Is there an intruder?

Once I got past my initial terror this was actually an enjoyable read. It's well written and the author manages to give each character their own distinct voice despite how many there are

Thrown - Sara Cox

I really enjoyed her second book Way Back but this one wasn’t very good. Full of cliches and bad unoriginal puns. It tells the story of four women at pottery classes but really didn’t go anywhere or resolve the stories very well. As if it was written by a different person to the second book.

Sure not unconnected with her time as host of the Great Pottery Throwdown, so I guess it was a quick one to turn round…

@Terpsichore yes, she credits the original female judge Kate Malone as being an inspiration to her and thanks her for her help. Maybe she had to get all the bad puns etc out of the way for the first book so she could improve.

45 Making It So - Patrick Stewart

I needed an easy read for a trip away, and frankly to have a break from quite a lot of Holocaust related reading. This was just the ticket, a fun luvvie-fest that I could hear Sir Pat reading in my head.

26. Gather Together In My Name by Maya Angelou

This is the second part of Angelou's memoirs and it's pretty hard hitting. The first book was so poetic I couldn't put to down. This instalment is full of how poor people made money to live off in previous generations. It was a hard way of life.

Not as good as the first, but I'm definitely going to keep working through the collection.

Some very easy reads from me lately. Haven’t the energy for anything too heavy right now

58 The Children’s Nurse - Susan Macqueen
This is the story of Susan who worked as a paediatric nurse at Addenbrookes and Great Ormond Street Hospital from the 1970s onwards. This was alright, quite interesting especially as both my boys have had surgery at Addenbrookes but felt like quite a light touch that only skimmed the surface.

59 Breathtaking - Rachel Clarke
Rachel is a doctor in a hospice and wrote a diary of sorts from January 2020 to April 2020. I watched the TV adaptation of this which was different in a lot of ways but you could really feel Rachel’s frustration coming through.

60 An innocent baby - Cathy Glass
Darcey-May was born to 14 year old Haylea who wants nothing to do with her. What unravels is a very dark story of sexual abuse and incest.

61 Hidden - Cathy Glass
Tayo is very polite and well behaved despite spending five years living with a drug addicted mother who made him work in sweatshops and abandoned him for days on end.
I'm enjoying Cathy’s books and I keep finding them in charity shops. Will keep my eye out for more as each one feels so different yet with the same sad threads running through them

46. Dancing into Battle - Nick Foulkes

This is the third book about the Battle of Waterloo I’ve read in the last few years, and they’ve all been interesting in different ways. This one focuses not so much on the battle itself as on the extraordinary, even surreal disconnect between one of the bloodiest and fiercest events of the 19th century, in which tens of thousands of men died in the space of a single day, and the glittering social life in the run-up to it in Brussels, just a few miles away from the field of combat, where the English military commanders - most of them members of the aristocracy - were living with their families. The officer class of the army wasn't a trained profession and pretty much the only qualification was to be a titled favourite of the Duke of Wellington's, who held absolute sway and was regarded as the saviour of England and the only man capable of defeating Napoleon.

This is really engagingly written in pacy style, and full of contemporary accounts which give it great immediacy. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys this period of history.

47. Nicholas Nickleby - Charles Dickens

Finished for the current readalong. Loose ends satisfactorily tied up. Thoroughly enjoyed it!

Just catching up on the (very fast moving) thread after a weekend in Norfolk.@Stowickthevast as a huge Claire Keegan fan I was intrigued by your description of Mammoth "It's like the anti - Claire Keegan." Should I embrace it or avoid it do you think?!

74. Highly Desirable, The Secret Agent
Anonymous author spills the beans on life as an estate agent in London's super-prime property market. I was hoping for a salacious account of super-rich crassness, but it turned out to be a surprisingly touching slice of life. Writing in the form of a diary, he shows a genuine affection for his colleagues - who in other hands could have been figures of fun - and for many of his clients. He also muses about whether he should move countries to reunite with the man he fell in love with years ago. This was rather sweet.

Good Evening, Mrs Craven, Mollie Panter-Downes
Collection of short stories originally published in The New Yorker between 1939 and 1944 about contemporary life in wartime England. I'm not adding a number as it's a reread, although I was well into the book before I realised that. It's strange, as I really enjoyed the stories and I don't know why they didn't stick better. The stories are very much tailored to their main audience of Anglophile Americans, but they are often amusing and sometimes touching.

75. Ancestors, Alice Roberts
I don't get on with Alice Roberts - she writes the kind of book I want to read, but I find her prose dull. I skim read Crypt recently but didn't count it given how much I skipped. For whatever reason, I found this one engaging enough to stick with it. It's an account of what we can learn from prehistoric burials. A lot was familiar - hello again, Amesbury Archer and Red Lady of Paviland - but I was interested in her account of archaeological fashions and how hard it is for us to be aware of how our own cultural assumptions colour our understanding of what we dig up. This also came up in River Kings, mentioned above, which I personally did like, but I can that it wouldn't do much for someone without an existing interest in archaeology.

76. My Turn to Make the Tea, Monica Dickens
Published in 1951, this is her "lightly fictionalised" version of her experiences working in a local newspaper and living in a boarding house. An enjoyable read and evocative of its time.

77. Young Queens, Leah Redmond Chang
A joint biography of Mary Queen of Scots and the two other queens she knew from childhood, her mother-in-law Catherine de Medici, who married the King of France, and Catherine's daughter Elizabeth, who married the King of Spain. It was useful to get a wider European context for Mary's life and that of Elizabeth I. However, I did find the 400 pages of this to be a bit of a slog.

78. I am Missing, Tim Weaver
More adventures for the missing person investigator, this time trying to find the identity of a man who has lost his memory. Not bad - some atmospheric moments and original settings, and it feels it's doing something a bit different to the standard police procedural.

@bibliomania that's exactly how I feel about Alice Roberts - I love the idea of her books but I don't think I've ever managed to finish one.

@bibliomania

Yeah, with River Kings it wasn't my choice and really not my thing. So I don't know how to judge it within the wider context IYSWIM

It's a shame, isn't it Kinsters - I think she churns them out quite fast and she's just not a great prose stylist.

Eine, I think with non-fiction especially, it takes a pretty exceptional author to appeal to an audience that isn't already interested in the topic.

46 Life On Mars: Blood, Bullets and Blue Stratos - Tom Graham

Am going through somewhat of a Life On Mars / Ashes To Ashes obsession phase so thought I’d give this ‘official’ LoM novel a go, written by the brother of one of the series writers and set after the end of season 2. Not likely to trouble any awards lists (I’ve read better fanfic tbh) but a fun enough way to spend a little time with the Gene Genie.

@MegBusset I'm currently on series 2 of Ashes to Ashes on my Life on Mars / Ashes to Ashes rewatch. That's a shame the book isn't very good, but I doubt it can be as bad as the US version of Life on Mars. 😊

@MamaNewtNewt i am just pretending the US versions don’t exist!

44. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown a reread from many years ago that I remembered enjoying. So many plot holes.

@Boiledeggandtoast it's Claire Keegan like in that she writes very short novellas that pack a lot in. But subject matter is far more visceral, but I thought the writing was still amazing just in a very different way. It was very original, give it a go!

Did anyone read Pearl which was on the Booker longlist last year? I'm about 30% through and a bit bored....

Thank you Stowick, I've added it to my wishlist!

Hi everyone. Just popping in to say hello. I’m still in a reading rut and it feels very strange to not be on here, but I’m really hoping that the summer holidays will fix me. I hope everyone is well.

All good here Remus. Part of life's rich pattern maybe - reading is only one part of life.