50 Books Challenge 2024 Part Six

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the sixth 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, the fourth one here and the fifth one here.

What are you reading?

Feeling quite complacent that I only have 102 unread books on my Kindle. Still feels achievable - I just have to read faster than I buy….,

Thanks @noodlezoodle you have made us all feel better 😀

I have 790 on my kindle, I worked it out of I never but another book I will have to love to 150 to read them all

I was going to refer myself to Bookbyers Anonymous but at least I've made you all feel better!

I have had three kindles across this time so I wonder if the 'unread' count is per device - because I have the kindle app on my phone but never read books on there, and it says 0 read, so perhaps things aren't as dire as they seem.

Thanks @SheilaFentiman , that sounds really interesting!

Just in case we all need more unread - The Wasp Factory is 99p today (I have read this, my copy is languishing in my mum's house, though)

@DuPainDuVinDuFromage I love that biography of Bess of Hardwick. We went to Chatsworth and Hardwick not long after I read it and I bored all my family talking about her. With all the TV series and films made about the Tudors I'm amazed no-one has made one about Bess of Hardwick. An absolutely fascinating woman.

The Wasp Factory is the most disturbing book, maybe that I've ever read. It's been a long time and one image in particular still stands out

I saw the Wasp Factory in the deals earlier - the fact that it was the 40th anniversary edition was almost more disturbing than the book itself! I'm tempted to buy it for a reread as I first read it in the early 90s aged 18. I'm also feeling rather angelic with only 132 unread Kindle books!

Thanks for linking that article @noodlezoodle . It's good that it's raising awareness of vestibular migraines, although there was obviously a lot of other stressful stuff going on in his life that exacerbated it. When my attacks first started, I was very grateful to have an understanding employer which meant I had the space to recover, which you don't have as a freelancer.

@JaninaDuszejko absolutely, her life would be perfect for a tv drama! As a minimum I think she deserves an episode of the You’re Dead To Me podcast! I’d love to visit Chatsworth and/or Hardwick Hall.

I'm also feeling quite angelic with 'only' 128 unread books on my Kindle. However, I've only been using a kindle for just over a year and have also read 90 books on it so have bought 220 books in that time. Even if I say they were all 99p (they weren't) that's a fair chunk of money and we won't discuss how many physical books I've also bought.

I've got 1,123 unread on mine 😳

In my (slight) defence, a great many of those are books I bought for my late mum, who shared my account - I bought the books for her to read. For some reason I don’t understand, hers are showing up as unread on my device (I don’t have an actual kindle, I read on my iPad and phone using the kindle app) - though I know she did read them.

I vote one of these for a 50B meet up 😀

@Terpsichore 😱😀

If she didn’t read right through eg cos there was an acknowledgments page she skipped, it wouldn’t mark them as read.

I do also have a few kids’ books on mine that are unread. But I am mostly responsible for the TBR pile

Feel smug with my 306 unread. I suspect that quite a few are sporting biographies that my DF downloaded and never finished off properly.

I do have about 500 samples that never made it to books. With there was an easy way of getting rid of them

If you go onto manage your content and devices on the website, you can filter by “samples” and do select all and delete.

I deleted quite a few that way!

Ooh, I’ll try that in the morning, thanks @SheilaFentiman

186 unread on my kindle. I absolutely dread to think how many physical books I’ve got to read though, I’m addicted to buying books.

80 Born a Crime - Trevor Noah
Trevor’s memoir about being born to a black mum and a white dad in South Africa during apartheid. I like the way Trevor writes, he is funny and very relatable especially when talking about his teenage years.
This was a bold for me. A lot of my family have lived in South Africa, during and after apartheid so I have some knowledge of how things were but nothing compared to what Trevor experienced growing up. How he escaped growing up furious at the world I do not know as I was furious on his behalf for most of this book.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I’m sure I know which image that is. The whole book is disturbing, with flashes of horror and humour, often in the same sentence. An absolute masterpiece. I reread it every couple of years.

55 Enlightenment by Sarah Perry
My, but this was a slog to get through! Set in three consecutive time periods, with visitations from the ghost of a sad woman in an unhappy marriage who only wants to pursue her vocation of astronomy. Everyone is unhappy, all the way through. Resolutely, grindingly, resentfully miserable. There seems no love for any of the characters, they are all painted at their worst, which made me feel bad for loathing Grace and wanting to smack Thomas. The only person I felt a smidge of sympathy for was Anne, dragged away from her little classroom in the hills to serve her selfish prig of a brother in the name of Family and God.
There’s even a tragic tramp, a pungent, unintelligible deux et machina and a fairytale hag in the form of Lorna (her perfume smelled of baby powder? Why didn’t you say? OH YOU DID, OVER AND OVER!).
Fittingly, it was a bit like sitting through a long church service when you don’t believe in the version of God the tedious man at the pulpit is battering you over the head with - too invested to leave, too bored to care.

I'm obviously an outlier here, I've got 36 unread books on my kindle, and all bar 3 or 4 of those are definitely DNFs.

My amazon wishlist is (much) longer, but I should prune it - realistically if I've not read a book within 6 months of adding it, I probably never will.

My unread physical pile is all either DNFs that I should get rid of, or gifts that I'm really not inspired by. (Though I liked the read first chapter + page 50 approach & should do it with the rest of them & either read or rehome.)

Enjoyed that scathing review, Morrigan!

"realistically if I've not read a book within 6 months of adding it, I probably never will" - I feel great triumph when I finally read a book that I added years ago, *Sadik."

If we're counting, I have 337 read books and 291 unread books on my kindle, so I'm counting that as winning. That's after some judicious pruning. Faintly horrifying that this means I spent well over £600 on kindle books - probably more like £1k given deletions and non-99p deals - but I've had it for nearly 10 years which isn't so bad.

Loved Born a Crime, MrsALambert. By a neat synchronicity, it's also on today's 99p deals.

Having felt my last read (The Bone Clocks) was too baggy, I felt the next was too sparse - I am the Goldilocks of the reading world.

102. Assembly, Natasha Brown
This is a very short book narrated by a young black woman working in financial services in London, spending a weekend with her posh white boyfriend's family. It centres on the discomfort - indeed, the dis-ease - of being bombarded with messages to assimilate while never feeling as if you belong. I thought it was a bit too bare - I wanted more literary flesh on the bones.. Give me characters or plot or humour or pleasurable prose, something to wash down the message.

103. Madensky Square, Eva Ibbotson
Ah, finally Goldilocks sinks into something just right. I've commented on this author sticking too determinedly to the Cinderella formula. Here she breaks out of it to do something a bit more grownup. It's Vienna, 1911, and a dressmaker decides to keep a diary for a year, recording her own life, her neighbours and customers. It took me a little while, but by the end I was charmed and moved. There were moments when it reminded me of Cranford, albeit with more adultery and memories of murderous Cossacks.

@Terpsichore I share my account with my husband and all his books show up as unread on my account (even if he has read them - because I haven't) meaning I have 475 unread. Which is annoying as in reality I am never going to read most of his! I still have plenty of my own unread, mind😳

I misread - 473. Because that makes it so much better...