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?

Wishing you all the best Owl 💐

Best wishes Owl

Thank you southeast and sending best wishes to @Owlbookend

My list so far:

1. Rory Clements - The English Fuhrer
2. Rhys Bowen - The Proof of the Pudding
3. Janice Hallett - The Christmas Appeal
4. Kate Saunders - The Case of the Wandering Scholar
5. Karen M McManus - One of Us is Back
6. Alex Coombs - Murder on the Menu
7. Richard Osman - The Last Devil to Die
8. Faith Martin - Murder by Candlelight
9. Lindsey Kelk - The Christmas Wish

10. Nathan Anthony - Bored of Lunch 11. Simon Stephenson - Sometimes People Die 12. Hannah Richell - The Search Party 13. Sophia Holloway - Isabelle 14. Cynthia Murphy - Win Lose Kill Die 15. Richard Armitage - Geneva 16. Richard Coles - A Death in the Parish 17. Tom Hindle - Murder on Lake Garda 18. Bill Bryson - A Walk in the Woods 19. CJ Sansom - Heartstone 20. Laura Wood - The Agency for Scandal 21. Laura Wood - A Season for Scandal 22. Sophia Holloway - The Devil You Know 23. Agatha Christie - Sinister Spring 24. Bridget Walsh - The Tumbling Girl 25. RR Haywood - Extracted 26. RR Haywood - Executed 27. RR Haywood - Extinct 28. Liz Hedgecock & Paula Harmon - Death on the Towpath 29. Liz Hedgecock - All At Sea 30. Liz Hedgecock - Off the Map 31. Liz Hedgecock - Gone to Ground 32. Liz Hedgecock - In Plain Sight 33. Finley Turner - The Engagement Party 34. Liz Fielding - Murder under the Mistletoe 35. Peter Robinson - Gallows View 36. Jan Durham - Death at the Abbey 37. Jan Durham - Death at Neptune Yard 38. Jan Durham - Death at the Feast 39. Jan Durham - Death at the Anchorage 40. Jan Durham - Death on the Stella Mae 41. Jan Durham - Death on the West Cliff 42. Jenni Keer - No 23 Burlington Square 43. Izzie Harper - Murder at the Christmas Carols 44. Lesley Cookman - Death Plays a Part 45. Lesley Cookman - Entertaining Death 46. Lesley Cookman - Death Treads the Boards 47. Tom Mead - Death and the Conjuror 48. Tom Mead - The Murder Wheel 49. Helena Dixon - Murder at the Highland Castle 50. Helena Dixon - Murder at the Island Hotel 51. Enid Blyton - Five Go To Smuggler's Top 52. Jenni Keer - At The Stroke of Midnight 53. Benedict Brown - Murder at Everham Hall 54. Benedict Brown - The Hurtwood Village Murders 55. Benedict Brown - Murder at the Spring Ball 56. Benedict Brown - A Body at a Boarding School 57. Benedict Brown - Death on a Summer's Day 58. JM Hall - A Clock Stopped Dead 59. Taylor Zajonc - The Maw 60. CM McDonnell - Relight My Fire 61. JR Ellis - The Canal Murders 62. Lesley Cookman - Murder after Midnight 63. Enid Blyton - Five Go Off To Camp 64. Mark Richards & E S Richards - The Hanged Woman 65. Benedict Brown - The Mystery of Mistletoe Hall 66. Benedict Brown - The Tangled Treasure Trail 67. Emily Organ - The Baker Street Murders 68. Emily Organ - The Curse of the Poppy 69. Emily Organ - The Bermondsey Poisoner 70. Emily Organ - An Unwelcome Guest 71. Emily Organ - Death at the Workhouse 72. Emily Organ - The Gang of St Bride's 73. Emily Organ - Murder in Ratcliffe 74. Emily Organ - The Egyptian Mystery 75. Emily Organ - The Camden Spiritualist 76. Sarah Rossi - What's for dinner in one pot? 77. Emila Hart - Weyward 78. MRC Kasasian - The Montford Maniac

I've read all the Kate Rhodes Scilly Isles books @TimeforaGandT and enjoyed them all at the time. Can't remember a thing about them now or what the difference between them was although I do remember thinking that for a small community they seem to have an inordinately large amount of serial killers...

30. Friends in Napa by Sheila Yasmin Marikar

This was a first reads freebie about a group of university friends who reunite at the grand opening of the Napa winery that two of the group have recently purchased. Old resentments and thwarted love affairs come back to haunt the group and someone will end up dead. I have mixed feelings about this. I'm not completely convinced by the authors idea of how the super rich behave but then again I don't know any super rich Americans so maybe she's spot on. I really liked the cultural mix here. I find a lot of books quite ethnically insular and characters are all white or all Indian etc maybe with one character of a different race included. The main characters here were 50/50 between Indian American and white American and I thought the author did a good job of exploring the issues that can arise, particularly in attitudes to marriage. Overall I liked this book but not enough to seek out anything else by the author

Best wishes @Owlbookend hope that books can be of some help during your treatment.

38. The Mess We're In - Annie McManus. I love Annie Mac and have spent years listening to her radio one shows so was keen to read her book. It is told by Orla, an early 20s Irish woman who has just moved to London to try and get into the music business after finishing a degree in music production in 2000. Her friend's brother is in a band on the edge of success, and Orla and Neema move into their house in Kilburn. There's are lot of parties, drugs and music. Orla ends up working in an Irish pub and as a receptionist for a recording studio. The book is quite evocative of a time and place. I'm a similar age to Annie and hung out at some of the places she mentions in Camden and Shoreditch in my 20s, with a few less drugs! There isn't a huge amount of plot, what there is is basically about Orla valuing herself more and becoming more understanding of the people in her life. I feel like it's probably quite autobiographical. It was an ok read not not one I'll be recommending.

Resolved my phone issues so for once here is my list. It's my 'year of bolds' it seems.

1. The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

1. Dear Fred by KM Peyton
2. Venetia by Georgette Heyer

4. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

1. Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry
2. The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell

7. When the Dust Settles by Lucy Easthope

1. By Your Side: My Life Loving Barbara Windsor by Scott Mitchell
2. Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie

10. Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis 11. A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel 12. Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford 13 Foster by Clare Keegan 14 Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman 15. Wifedom by Anna Funder 16 Emma's Baby by Abbie Taylor 17 Scoops by Sam McAlister 18 The Unwanted Dead by Clive Lloyd 19 The Bridge Ladies by Betsy Lerner 20 All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 21 Charity Girl by Georgette Heyer 22 Stoner by John Williams

Can't be arsed with a list, sorry. It's basically all books everyone else here has already read, that's how I know they are good!

I am behind on my 50 books, probably because I keep picking up big chunky reads. I thought about deliberately going for some short ones but that seems silly. I shall continue to read what I want and never mind if I am under 50.

And best wishes to Owl

19. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This was boosted to the top of my TBR pile after someone on here suggested Adichie was a favourite author of theirs, and I also found I really enjoyed this read. I loved that the book highlighted the flaws of the characters and places, no one and no where is perfect which seems about right to me!

Sending you best wishes @Owlbookend and agree that comfort reads are a good idea in difficult times, take care x

Sorry to hear your news, @Owlbookend, sending best wishes.

33 Sidesplitter by Phil Wang

I am very behind and have only just finished this last Shelterbox pick, well after the discussion on the book. Not laugh-out-loud funny as it promised on the jacket, but I did enjoy Wang's musings about living between two worlds - Malaysia and the UK. It's a bit like a set of comedy sketches - a fair bit doesn't quite hit the mark, but there are some really funny bits (the part about the British gap year students arrested for taking their clothes off at the top of Mount Kinabalu is very well done, for example).

I only joined these threads this year but wishing you all the best @Owlbookend Cheered to see your review of The Ready-Made Family, which I agree is the best 'home' Marlow book (though I read the 'school' ones as a child, so can't be at all objective about those). Edwin is a fantastic example of Forest's realistically loathsome antagonists. Girls Gone By republish the series at the rate of a book/year if you'd like to fill in gaps - they've just started again with Autumn Term. I wish they'd republish her Player books, which are brilliant Elizabethan adventures starring an ancestral Nick Marlow.
Attica Locke sounds appealing too - I love crime/mystery with a great sense of time/place. Will save it for summer holidays when I have more brain for plot.

@cassandre It's totally hypocritical of me not to count books in other languages because I enjoy reading your reviews (and Fuzzy's and others'). But I usually go for utter drivel easy pageturners and it's a rare read that escapes italics to merit a bare 'meh'. Even ones I really like are unlikely to be of much interest here e.g. y'all discussing Annie Ernaux at the Almeida and I'm like.... just bingeing Haikyuu!! (YA sports manga) before the latest UK film release 😅

Have finished:
Enlightenment - Sarah Perry
Context: loved The Essex Serpent, DNF Melmoth through boredom, enjoyed After Me Comes the Flood at the time but retain no memory of it beyond the mood.* *For me, this was a return to form, borderline bold. While set in vividly realistic modern Essex (in 1997, 2007 and 2017), the main characters are frequently described as seeming to be of another time, and there's an unabashed grandeur to both themes and emotions (Love, Faith, The Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything etc.) and the writing itself with its exalted, often biblical in its cadences - as always lovely on landscape and weather but also elegant on astronomy (Carlo Rovelli features prominently in the acknowledgements).
It feels like her most complete work so far, though still flawed: over-serious and over-reliant on annoying token ✨gothic ✨ side characters to achieve the underwhelming resolution of what plot there was - though I recognise that it wasn't really the point. Possibly I'm just too much of an irreligious gutter rat to appreciate this much metaphysical looking-at-the-stars stuff. I did appreciate the Cora-related Easter eggs she chucked in periodically😁

25.Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain Marianne is 15, and head over heels in love with 18 year old Simon. Their romance burns brightly, but soon crashes. The strength of this first love overshadows Marianne's subsequent choices and relationships, until they meet again some years later.

It's Rose Tremain, so it's well written, and the period detail of the 1950s and 1960s is as well captured as in her novels of much earlier periods. There's not much to this very short novel though, and I felt like I wanted more.

Every month I aim to read two physical books I own. They've usually been sitting patiently on a shelf for years. This month the tomes whose time had come were:

65. Fabled Shore, Rose Macaulay
An account of the author's trip along the Spanish costas from the French border all the way past the Portuguese border in the late 1940s. The costas have changed quite considerably since then, so it was an interesting historical document, with scars of the civil war still fresh. She's very keen on ancient ruins and there's a lot about what the Romans thought of the various spots, which occasionally gets laborious to read. She never mentions anything she ate other than some ripe figs. It would be interesting to read this in situ.

66. The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved, P V Glob
Originally written in Danish in the 1960s, this is a very accessible and evocative account of the discovery of bog bodies in Denmark and what we learned from them about life in the Iron Age. I believe this was mentioned years ago on a previous thread, and I snapped it up when I came across it second-hand. Short and very readable.

Going to try The Bog People next after my book club reads

@bibliomania

I'm also trying, rather unsuccessfully, to clear my physical TBR. Have done 3 this month and keep looking at my Kindle

I find that chipping away at the rate of 2 a month is helping, Eine. For me, the challenge is always keeping up with my library books reservations - I currently have 16 checked out and 11 reservations, but I can only check out 20 at one time so need to get through 7 fairly quickly.

20 is very generous. I think it's 8 at mine.

38 You Like It Darker , short stories by Stephen King

40 years with Stephen King and I feel I need to call it a day. I haven’t read his novels for quite a few years now, as they have become as bloated and stinking as the creatures that cavort at the bottom of the Derry standpipe, but his short stories were still just about “the kiss in dark” he described them as in the foreword to a previous collection.
This collection, with the exception of two (‘Laurie’ and ‘The Dreamers’) is drivel. Warmed-up, repetitive dross from the bottom of his fabled story trunks. I think his publishers know this, as it was on offer at £12.50 pre-order.
‘Rattlesnakes’ could have been ok, but for the inexplicable decision to make the main character Vic Trenton, from Cujo, mainly so he could pad it out by rehashing the loss of Tad without actually coming up with anything new on the subject of losing a child.
I don’t even know what he was trying to do with ‘Finn’ set in Ireland I think but a fakey Begorrah! version of Ireland that is an insult to creative writing.
’Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream’ went on and on and ooooooonnnnnnn, like some weird metaphysical trick where a novella in a collection morphs into a 700 page tome.
He’s also still referencing young girls’ breasts for no reason whatsoever and having female characters say shit like “I want to feel you inside me”

It was fun for 25 years or so, Steve-O, but I really must LTB now.

Oh, what a shame Morrigan

Thanks all for the further good wishes & @inaptonym for the girls gone by tip off. Currently listening to The Survivors by Jane Harper, a Tasmanian set mystery/thriller. I’m already about 3 hours in and nothing much seems to have happened. Still it is very good at helping me get off to sleep.

Sending all best wishes to you @Owlbookend

Currently really enjoying The Wager which any TTOD / The Terror etc fans on here should read if they haven’t already!

It's my next Audiobook

@bibliomania and @Mothership4two, after you've read The Bog People, if you haven't already, perhaps try Meet Me At the Museum. It's a beautiful epistolary novel which starts from that book. One of my favourite books ever, I loved it when I read it a few years ago and Radio 4 made a drama based on it which is just as affecting.

I read The Bog People in lockdown, it's fascinating.

94 Shadowlands- Matthew Green
I learned about this book on last year’s thread I think. It looks into towns in the U.K. that no longer exist for some reason- some from flooding, plague, erosion etc. While some of this was interesting (I enjoyed the chapters on Skara Brae and Winchelsea) I think each chapter had too many tangents- historical background which I thought was quite basic and assumed no historical knowledge at all and sometimes digressions on quite dry topics like how to use burgesses to try to estimate population. A Tomb with a View was much better at this sort of social history.

95 Clear- Carys Davis
This short novel has had a lot of love on booktube. Less than 200 pages, it packs a strong punch. John Ferguson, a minister of a breakaway Presbyterian church takes on work from a Scottish landowner and goes to a remote island to tell it’s only inhabitant, Ivar, that the island is being cleared and he has to leave. The first problem is that John doesn’t speak Ivar’s language, the second is that he falls off a cliff and Ivar ends up caring for him in his home. Beautifully written. The ending wasn’t perfect but still a bold for me.

96 The Women- Kristin Hannah
Ive heard a lot about this author and wanted to give this a go so borrowed the audiobook from the library. It tells the story of Frankie (and her friends and colleagues) a nurse from a wealthy background who volunteers to go to Vietnam. The second section of the book deals with her return home. The first half really didn’t offer much new that we haven’t seen or read in a million books and movies and focused too much on romance for my liking. The second half engaged me more- seeing what it was like for a woman veteran of the war everyone wanted to forget. It was diverting enough in an incredibly busy week to keep me listening but I don’t think this author is for me.

Thanks RomanMum, have reserved it at the library.

Those of you that have been reading the Woman's Prize non fiction, which ones would you recommend? I'm thinking of choosing one for my next book club. I haven't read any at don't generally read non fiction so think this will give me the push I need.