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 love a list too. 33 read on the list and 34 on my TBR mountain.

That's one I liked!

@Stowickthevast

I'm inclined to agree RE Cloud Cuckoo Land but I do find myself thinking about it from time to time.

71. Spells & Spice & Everything Nice by Jessica Rosenberg
    Cosy fantasy / romance - third in a series set in a bookshop owned by anxious middle aged witch Juliette. My equivalent to the Little Cornish Teashop genre, & a pleasant way to pass the time.

72. Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan
    Much reviewed on here, so I won't recap, but I thought this was really good & read it in an evening. Definitely a bold for me, & one I'll continue to think about.

73. Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia
    I know a couple of posters really weren't impressed by this book about the human impacts of AI. I agree the prose wasn't the most sparkling, and it was a bit uneven, but I thought it was an interesting attempt to move beyond the US / western European-centric viewpoint of many books on this topic. I particularly liked the chapter on the workers training AI. The final section dealing with LLMs felt a little bit bolted on, maybe as an attempt to make the book more current, but otherwise a good solid read, & I can see why it made the WP non-fic list.

74. The Duke at Hazard by KJ Charles
    I always enjoy Charles' books, particularly when she's in full Heyer-but-gayer pastiche mode, & this was no exception. The young Duke of Severn is overpoweringly surrounded by his loving relatives, & desperate to carve out some independence. He makes a wager with his cousin, that he can live incognito for a month, & uses the opportunity to carry out a mission of his own. In the course of his travels, he teams up with Daizell Charnage, disgraced gentleman & soldier of fortune, & in classic Heyer fashion also encounters a serially eloping heiress. Great fun.

46 on that one (23 on the original) and a good few on my TBR. I see what Stowick means about the recent reads- we all definitely have recency bias- that said I reckon North Woods will stand the test of time.

I've read 15, same as with their official list.

55 You Belong With Me by Mhairi McFarlane

This is the sequel to Who’s That Girl, a sequel that in my opinion, wasn’t really needed. The two main characters are like Gavin and Stacey as everyone else around them is much more interesting and funny. The storyline seemed to consist of the two main characters being jealous and apologising to each other again and again. Not one of the author’s best.

56 Time Shards

This had an interesting concept, time itself shatters and the remaining fragments mean that that dinosaurs, Celtic warriors, a 1950s serial killer, and several marauding armies are all in the mix. This was a bit silly, and the main character was annoying but I kind of enjoyed it, although probably not enough to seek out the next two books in the trilogy.

I have read 26 on the readers’ list and, I think, I had read a surprising 31 on the original list.

50. Henry VIII : The Heart and the Crown - Alison Weir

I have read a reasonable number of books covering this period but this very much focuses on Henry and starts with the death of his mother when he was a child. The key events were all familiar but it did give me greater insights into Henry - his fractious relationship with his father; his intellect and how emotional he was.

Onto something shorter and lighter next.

66. Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Audible)

Oh Frabjous Day, Calloo Callay! I have slain the beast.

A man murders a pawnbroker and her sister and then tediously navel gazes whilst everybody he knows whines at him about what's wrong.

As an Audible it's badly read as well and hard to follow but I did it.

Not without help-- of SparkNotes

Now onwards to anything light!

Thank you inaptonym. I also love a list, although I didn't fare much better on this one - 18 read (cf 17), 3 DNF and 3 on the TBR pile.

@inaptonym thanks for the link. I've read 5 (and DNF one), a vast improvement on the 1 from the other list. Glad to see Piranesi on this list, it's one of my favourites and a book I still think about years after reading.

43. The Double Act - Andrew Roberts

Typos aside (and there were some unforgivable clangers as I mentioned earlier on the thread), this was a reasonable tour round the history of the British comedy duos, from music halls to the mid-90s ish. It was nominally divided into chapters on film duos, sitcoms - a long chapter, alternative comedy, musical acts etc. and charted the history of some lesser known comedians as well as the famous ones such as Morecambe and Wise. The definition of what constituted a double act seemed slightly arbitrary and the tone lurked somewhere between academia and popular culture, but I think this would be readable for students of film studies or the history of comedy. An interesting read but not a bold.

Thanks for the list link will have a look.

Toff Down Pit by Kit Fraser this was mentioned by Tony Parker in Red Hill that I read recently. Fraser was brought up in the family castle in the Scottish highlands, went to public school and started a career in journalism before he was moved to experience life as a coal miner in Tyneside in the late 1970s. Really interesting account, written as letters to a friend, of what the actual work and culture was like as well as something of the life of the community outside work, his efforts to fit in and how he was received (mainly accepted by the end of his 18 month stint). Honest (occasionally too much so) and very readable.

I've read 42 on that list... but some of those were emphatically not bolds for me!

Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh Exploration of the opium poppy through history. Some of this was really interesting, especially the chapters on the opium trade when the British Empire was involved in exporting Indian opium to China; I had no idea how important its revenues were to the empire's financial survival. However, the author initially researched this topic for his Ibis Trilogy novels and his constant reference to them in this text did get slightly tiresome.

Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken Much reviewed already. Despite finding CvT quite insufferable on the radio, I initially enjoyed this and found it an absorbing and accessible read. However, as I progressed I began to find that CvT seemed to lay almost all society's ills at the doors of ultra-processed food and some of his evidence seemed somewhat spurious. For example, his support for stating that UPF can cause stunting is largely that "(i)n the eighteenth century, American men were 5 to 8 centimetres taller than those in the Netherlands. Now from the age of two onwards, the Dutch are consistently taller. By adulthood the average Dutch man is 182.5cm and the average Dutch woman is 168.7cm. Their American counterparts measure 5.1cm and 5.2cm shorter respectively." This may well be true but it takes no account of other factors such as the mass of immigration into the US over the last couple of centuries from countries where people are genetically smaller, never mind that the Netherlands ranks as the country with the tallest average human height.

I'm sure that there is much that is wrong with UPF and it is great that he has given this important issue a much higher profile, but I found that some of his scientific rigour fell short. I have currently abandoned it halfway through, but may pick it up again when my irritation has subsided.

Pat Barker's trilogy: Life Class, Toby's Room, Noonday I started rereading Life Class (I can't remember why) and have got so caught up with it that I continued on with the trilogy. It follows the story of some students from the Slade School of Art from 1914, through the First World War and then the Second. All good, but Life Class is my favourite.

I am currently reading Rural Hours by Harriet Baker - the country lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, and have fallen in love with Sylvia Townsend Warner!

I have just lapped up Clytemnestra the debut novel by Costanza Casati. Yes, it's yet another of those myth reworking from the female perspective novels but I thought this an excellent example .

I liked that, other than the odd almost cynical mention, it was gods free and focused on people. She certainly humanises Clytemnestra and Helen but Helen is a far more hazy figure. The themes of violence and vengeance work well and Clytemnestra is not just some crazed murderess. When you read a lot of these books you no longer know what to think. This seemed a very different telling of Iphigenia's fate, which I think Barker and Haynes both did. Cassandra makes a short appearance at the end. The women are the most important characters by a long stretch. Again in Barker and Haynes they often manage to make Achilles, Hector and so on more interesting and they barely merit mention in this. Achilles just seems a bit wet. Minor criticism ...novel probably too long by 100 pages.

I have already pre ordered Casati's next book. Babylon set , so a new context for me.

48. Fallen Angel by Chris Brookmyre Dual timeline mystery. In 2002 the Temple family are on their annual family holiday in their two neighbouring holiday villas in Portugal, along with the couple in the third villa in the complex, Vince & Laurie. During the holiday tragedy strikes, but is it the tragic accident it looks like? The ramifications echo down the years to 2018 when the Temple family once again gather in Portugal following the death of family patriarch. Neighbour Vince is once again also due at his villa along with his new, younger wife and infant son. The secrets from 2002 finally come to light

This is the first book by Brookmyre I've read but have seen him recommended on here a lot. This book was one of the recent recommendations and I managed to pick it up in the 99p deals. I really enjoyed this and will definitely seek out more by Brookmyre. I thought the writing was brilliant and the storyline captivating. Would highly recommend

I was up to 43 on the readers list, and it definitely included a few I was surprised not to see in the original. I'm vaguely contemplating what my own top 10 would be.

48. Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan. I'm the last person to have got round to reading this Women's Prize winner. It's obviously a very well written book, deeply upsetting in some parts, but I think it was told in such a matter of fact way that I found it hard to connect with the characters. In particular I felt I couldn't quite get a grip on the possible love story. A very important novel, but being honest not one that I was rushing back to read.

49. The Burial Plot by Elizabeth Macneal. Victorian London intrigue. Bonnie is persuaded by her lover and underworld criminal to pose as a lady's maid to gain access to a grand house in Richmond, but it becomes clear he has an ulterior motive. All told against the backdrop of the construction of the big out of town cemeteries in the 19th century, suitably gothic. A classic British narrative about an outsider becoming obsessed with a big house. A romp, but full of plot holes sadly.

33 The Room in the Attic - Louise Douglas This was a gothic dual timeline novel, set in 1993 following the story of a teenage boy sent to boarding school after his mother dies, and in 1903 following an elderly nurse in an asylum (the same building that later becomes the boarding school) who looks after a small child who had been discovered with her mother, both unconscious, in a boat off the nearby coast. The first chapter was excellent, then it got a bit average, but improved again towards the end with a great resolution (as long as you like time-slips - I can see that some people would be quite annoyed by the ending if that isn’t their thing!). The 90s timeline was more interesting, for me, but in the end the two storylines converged satisfactorily. Not a bold but definitely good!

31.Val McDermid Queen MacBeth
Another of the Darklands Tales series I've been working through. A reimagining of the life of Lady McB and a more woman-centric reading of the tale. Wonderful and well worth a read.

32.George Eliot Middlemarch

This has been on my to read list for at least a decade. I can't tell you how many times I have begun reading only to be intimidated and move on. You need to give it about 100 pages and then suddenly there it is. The whole wonderful, terrible, sweep of rural life in the 19th Century. Virginia Woolf apparently called the piece the first novel for adults or similar and I can see why. All the characters are complex, fully realised and fully aware, with the notable exception of Raffles who is not really a character so much as a plot device (WHY????). Anyway, an amazing piece of writing and one that has moved from my to read to my to re-read list without deliberation. I definitely need another read of this.

17 Wonder- R J Palacio
An 11-year-old boy with a congenital facial disfigurement learns about kindness and friendship when he attends school for the first time. Rather lovely, my DD recommended this to me when she was about 12, we watched the film together then I didn't get round to reading the book for 5 years or so.

18 If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
An unnamed reader buys a book titled If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, enjoys the first chapter then discovers a printing error that prevents him continuing further. Returning the book to the shop he is informed that the whole thing was an error and the story he was reading was actually something else, he purchases a copy only to find this new book is nothing to do with what he has already read, but continues anyway until the narrative is interrupted.... and so it continues.

I started out enjoying this rather strange book, shades of Steppenwolf and an imaginative structure but got bogged down in the middle and was quite glad when it ended

19 When we were Romans - Matthew Kneale
Written from the perspective of Lawrence, a 9-year-old boy whose Mum makes the desperate decision to run away to Rome to avoid her ex-husband, taking Lawrence, his 3-year-old sister Jemima, and the family hamster with her. Despite his misgivings at missing school and his friends, Lawrence makes the best of it and enjoys staying in Rome, meeting his mum's old friends and learning about Popes and Emporers with his Horrible Histories books. Once they get settled things take a sinister turn and Mum's paranoia leads to a frightening denouement.

I've read this before and was a little disappointed, but I think this may have been because it didn't live up to English Passengers, which is one of my all-time top 10. Re-reading it after a decade or so gave me a fresh perspective and I thoroughly enjoyed it this time round* *

123 Lazy City by Rachel Connolly
Erin has just moved home to Belfast after the death of a friend. There she deals with relationships of all varieties, religion, her grief and finding her way in the world. This is another of my current obsession with contemporary Irish fiction and I enjoyed this one more than its closest comparator (Exiles by Aimee Walsh) Erin is a sympathetic character and while little happens, I enjoyed spending some time in her world.

124 Boulder by Eva Baltasar
This was longlisted for the International Booker last year and is a short first person narrative telling the story of ‘Boulder’ and her relationship with Samsa who takes her away from the solitary life that rather suited her and towards shared motherhood when Samsa decides to undergo IVF with donor sperm. The language in this is very poetic and raw and some of the sex scenes are too graphic for my (more prudish than I thought) taste. It is thought provoking but I struggled to connect with either of the main characters and the writing wasn’t for me. When will I learn that I don’t like books written by poets (mostly)?! I know I have a few more floating around my kindle so I might read those and not buy and more.

@satelliteheart - I read Fallen Angel recently and enjoyed it too but have also read other Chris Brookmyre books which are quite different so just be prepared for a different style/approach if you are reading others by him.

51. Death in the Spires - KJ Charles

Picked this up via a Kindle deal with no knowledge of author or book but because the synopsis sounded my sort of thing.

Crime fiction set in Oxford in the late nineteenth century. A group of seven disparate students become friends on their arrival at the university in 1894/5 including women, grammar school scholars, a black man, the heir to a marquess. They are a close knit group of achievers - academically, sporting, drama etc. Just before their finals, Toby, one of their group is murdered and one of the remaining six has to be the murderer but the case remains unsolved. Ten years later, Jem, loses his job as a result of an anonymous letter to his employer that he is Toby’s murderer and Jem resolves to investigate his friends and uncover the murderer. Jem puts himself at risk and secrets are revealed.

I enjoyed this - the plot was good and the characters were distinctive but the period setting did not work. The story couldn’t be present day because of some of the plot lines but I am not sure it needs to be as historic as the 1890s - it could have been set 50/60 years later and worked. The dialogue between the characters and their attitudes were at odds with the historical setting. However, I would happily read more by this author.

@TimeforaGandT I always enjoy Charles' books, but I'd agree that Death in the Spires wasn't one of her best. I like her Heyer pastiches (but then I'm a big Heyer fan), particularly Band Sinister but I'd also recommend Any Old Diamonds and the (1920s set) Will Darling books are good too.

I have read 37 of the readers list which is more than the main list (can't recall exactly the total) but I think that's more a reflection of the fact that I tend to read a lot of the big hitting novels that get cut through in the critics list, rather than that these are objectively the best books. Though Just Kids and Empire of Pain are fantastic non fiction reads (I am a huge Patti Smith fan).

@Thewolvesarerunningagain - of all the big "must read" novels, Middlemarch is one of the few I've not read. I have tried, but don't think I've ever got beyond page 80. Perhaps I should give it another go - everyone I know who has read it loves it.

I think we have been mentioned in the Times! Article on "The Reading Arms Race: I've Got Through More Books Than You. Competitive Reading is the latest trend in friendship circled, book clubs and Mumsnet". I can't link to the article as it is behind a pay wall. But it mentions the NYT lists.