50 Books Challenge Part Eight

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the eighth 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 , the fifth one here , the sixth one here and the seventh one here .

What are you reading?

130. The Woman In Blue by Elly Griffiths

Ruth Galloway #8

Nelson investigates a death at Walsingham. The usual suspects come along for the ride.

I have to say that this one was quite weak and there were signs of diminishing returns for the first time.

It IS #8 and it must be hard to find stories that involve both leads

Five more books til I finish for the year!

I too have a literary-inspired tattoo! Perhaps if there’s a 2025 meet up we can all compare ours!

Excellent idea. I will try to be brave enough if there's another meet up!

PSA: The Years, by Annie Ernaux that I know was well
liked, has transferred from the Almeida to the Harold Pinter for anyone in or heading to London.

The Truth About Melody Browne by Lisa Jewell

This was an intriguing read. Melody has no memory from her early years and then an incident sparks recollections.

Having started reading Lisa Jewell back in her early days of Ralphs Party I stopped buying them as I (mostly) grew out of chick lit, I am delighted to find that actually she and I grew together and there is a whole load of books for me to go to back to. I shall keep grabbing them when I see them for 99p.

87. The Christmas Murder Game by Alexandra Benedict

On Christmas Eve, Lily returns to her childhood home, a stately home turned hotel, along with her cousins, to participate in the Christmas murder game. This is a family tradition which used to be used for the cousins to find their Christmas presents, but this year, as the last remaining member of the previous generation has just died, they're playing for the title deeds of the house. Lily is also there to uncover old family secrets, all the answers of which are hidden in her aunt Liliana's clues. Whilst playing the game the cousins are completely cut off from the outside world to prevent cheating. Unfortunately they soon begin dropping like flies and the game turns into an utter bloodbath

Yet another Christmas crime book from this author and I probably need to save the final one for next Christmas before I launch my Kindle through the window in frustration. I'm not sure why these books make me so angry when I read plenty of crime novels which are also badly written with poor proof reading and editing, but something about this author really riles me up. I think it might be her weird anagram thing, it makes her come across as if she thinks she's so incredibly intelligent, so when her efforts fall flat I find it more offensive than just joe bloggs author making mistakes. Once again her weird obsession with hidden anagrams leads to grammatical errors as she desperately shoehorns her anagrams into the text and her attention to detail is SEVERELY lacking. She can't keep her own timeline straight and that really winds me up. Example (will try to avoid spoilers): person 1 is murdered outside a certain room. The body is moved that night. TWO DAYS LATER, the clue leads to the room which the body was blocking the entrance to (ie the clue was placed after the body was removed). Narrator notes it's a good job body was moved to allow clue-leaver to access the room. Then narrator inexplicably forgets that the murder took place TWO NIGHTS PREVIOUSLY and discusses why clue-leaver didn't hear anything last night if person 1 was murdered right outside the room they were in.....wrong night love, that's why. This is not the narrator making a mistake, it is the author fucking up her own timeline. There are, unfortunately, other examples of this.

I found this book was so incredibly insane in terms of the sheer number of deaths and how many murderers were contained in one family, even without all the other errors and issues it was just too much

My reading has slowed right down now as I've been stuck in bed with the flu and really struggling to concentrate on anything. I tried to download audible to have my first go at an audio book but didn't have enough storage on my phone so had to settle for listening to podcasts instead. I'm slowly improving now so can hopefully get another couple of books in before the end of the year

Couple of short ones as I’m trying to hit 70+ for the year (and a longer one that’s been on the go for a while).

67 So This is Christmas – Brian Bilston
Gently funny poems celebrating the Christmas season, quite a few based around the lyrics of festive pop songs. Prufrock’s Christmas stood out as a technically brilliant parody of T.S. Eliot. I also liked this haiku:

No I would not wish
For Christmas every day
But I think Roy Wood.

68 Foster – Claire Keegan
This and Keegan’s other novellas have been sitting on my kindle for a while. Well-deserved thread favourite – a vivid slice of striking realism.

69 The Deorhord: an Old English Bestiary – Hana Videen
Hmm, not as good as The Wordhord and took me quite a while to get through. Brings together Anglo-Saxon thoughts about animals (real, mythical and what-the-hell-is-that), with a focus on the Old English vocabulary used to describe them. The problem is that most Anglo-Saxon texts are religious in origin, so the understanding of the natural world is heavily allegorical: animals are either emblematic of Christ (dove, deer, phoenix) or Satan (wolf, dragon – and whale, obviously). Medical texts added some light relief. An inordinate number of remedies seem to involve sceap’s tord (sheep’s turd).

Same re the Ralph's Party days! And I have Melody B on my list to read this Xmas.

291. Double Takedown. Kevin G Chapman. Yet another crime series that I've only read one random book of. I think this was book 6. Despite only finishing it a couple of days ago I can't remember much about it. An actor was killed 18 months ago, police are investigating the murder. More people are killed, mainly from drug overdoses. I liked all the theatre references.

292. The Santa Secret. D Thrush. Probably should have DNFd this one. Clara and Nick meet at the winter Olympics. She's an ex skater, he's a bobsledder. Oh, and his dad is Santa and he's set to take over one day. It sounded so good, a nice easy Christmas read. Total fluff, but that's good at times. But it just didn't grip me. And at times didn't make sense. Like when Clara was dismayed that the party she planned worked out.

113. Animal Life - Audur Eva Ólafsdóttir, translated by Brian Fitzgibbon. This short novel could be a good choice for someone looking to boost their numbers before Christmas. It is more musings than actual plot though. It's narrated by Dyja, an Icelandic midwife in a long line of midwives, who lives in her great aunt's, Fifa, house. Fifa was also a midwife and, when she died, left a box of her writings to Dyja. The book is mainly Dyja going through these writings and trying to work out what Fifa wanted to say about birth, death, coincidence and light. It's set just before Christmas and lots of the text is about the role that light plays in our lives - against the long Icelandic nights -, as well as man's role in the natural world, and how much better animals are equipped to cope. Events do happen in the book but they're incidental and told at a reported distance. Nonetheless, I really liked this and got into the atmosphere, maybe reading it near Winter solstice helped.

@MegBusset – A Place of Greater Safety has been added to my wish list. I’ve not come across any other HM books, except for the Wolf Hall trilogy which I loved and the Margaret Thatcher one, which I haven’t.

@ÚlldemoShúl – When the Dust Settles was my book of the year. I now immediate think of Lucy when there is a major incident. Was just thinking of her over the weekend, with all the relatives in Syria searching for their disappeared.

@TimeforaGandT – I’m loving the Slow Horses on Apple TV. I can almost smell Jackson Lamb from the pages of my book!

115 The Lantern Men - Elly Griffiths (Ruth Galloway 12). Much of the same. I’m not sure how many more times Ruth can get herself into scrapes to be rescued by Nelson. Anyway, I think I need to take a break from Ruth, Nelson, Judy, Cathbad etc. It took me nearly a week to complete this book. Not like me.

I'm going to crack on with my Kindle challenge. I'm currently reading 2, Real Tigers (Slow Horses 3?) and The Nightshift Before Christmas, which is the book that I have the longest on my Kindle. Its a short one, so I wanted to get under 40 by the end of the year.

I went to add this to my wish list and see I have some of her other books. I'll read one next I think. Thanks

A Child’s Christmas In Wales - Dylan Thomas

More of a short story really but I’m counting it again this year. I love it more every year as I get older. It makes me smile -
‘and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why’
and it makes me sad -
’there are always Uncles at Christmas… trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion’
and yes there were when I was little and the smell of cigars will always remind me of them.
I pass the house Dylan Thomas grew up in most weeks so I can almost see the street covered in snow and the postman slithering down the hill and the little boys waiting for cats.
Lovely.

That's lovely, Best.

96. A Few Green Leaves - Barbara Pym

Finally catching up with the last few scraps of Pym I haven’t read. This was her final book, published in the year of her death, 1980, and set slightly earlier, sometime in the 70s. Even so, it feels like a long-vanished era - despite its setting in a small Oxfordshire village (very like Finstock, where Pym herself lived, and in fact gleaned considerable inspiration), it could almost be a novel of the 30s or 40s aside from the odd mention of computers.

Anthropologist Emma (already this is echt Pym) comes to spend the summer in the cottage owned by her mother, university lecturer Beatrix, so she can work on her latest studies. Instead she finds herself sidetracked into observations of the local inhabitants, from the handsome-but-helpless widowed rector, Tom, and his sister Daphne - forever pining for Greece - to hedgehog-loving Miss Lickerish, smugly self-satisfied food critic and ex-clergyman Adam Prince and pushy doctor’s wife Avice Shrubsole (again, could the names be anything but Pym?!), who has her beady eyes set covetously on the rector’s beautiful house.

Nothing dramatic happens; nothing is especially resolved, and this all feels very much like a faded photocopy of vintage Pym, but I still felt fondly disposed towards it, and all her eccentric characters going about their quiet lives.

Somebody PLEASE recommend me an absolute page turner, I'm really struggling to get started on ANYTHING!

What's your tolerance for being terrified out of your mind, @EineReiseDurchDieZeit?
I'm half way through Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen and I can't put it down. But it's the most frightening thing I've ever read and I know it's going to haunt me for months.

A definite no thanks Pepe

You Are Here by David Nichols or Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers @EineReiseDurchDieZeit but only if you like other stuff by them. Playground kept me engaged too.

If you want crime, I quite like M W Craven. They're bingeable, the first ones The Puppet Show.

Weirdly I also found the Dorothy Whipple a page turner but realize I may just be a bit odd.

A bit left field, but did you like the Chalet School books as a child Eine ? If so, I zipped through the Crater School series by Chaz Brenchley.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit Annie Bot by Sierra Greer was a page turner for me- a sci fi/ feminist very light read but enjoyable.

Also love a detective fiction to get lost a bit- I know you’ve read and enjoyed my go to recommendation of Jane Casey so maybe try Cara Hunter or William Shaw. Or for an oldie (but good) Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe- a thousand times better than the old tv series.

I've read You Are Here but not Shy Creatures @Stowickthevast

I didn't @Sadik I was more Malory Towers and St Clare's

@ÚlldemoShúl I'll have a look at Annie Bot

@PepeLePew I have that on TBR mountain. It sounds fascinating but I'm just not sure I can cope with the fear just now!

344 Back to the Future by George Gipe

Novelisation of the film. Love the film but this wasn’t great - the author inexplicably changed scenes and the characters didn’t come across like the film characters.

345 The Virgin Mary’s Got Nits by Gervase Phinn

A collection of anecdotes and poems relating to Christmas. Most of the anecdotes are from his time as a school inspector. Lightly amusing.

346 Dead Behind The Eyes by Ian Moore

Second in the series featuring half French half English detective Matthieu Lombard. Here he’s investigating murders that appear to be linked to an animal rights group. I like the French setting and the characters but the story was a bit slow for me.

81 Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers
The author is an expert at quietly revealing the lives of ordinary people, often with a wry, understated humour. I liked Small Pleasures but found this one even better.
William Tapping is discovered after an incident at the house he shares with his last surviving Aunt. Selectively mute, unkempt, unknown to anyone for over two decades, he is transferred to a psychiatric hospital. It being the early 1960s Westbury is uneasily balancing the methods of ECT and blackout drugs with a more enlightened approach. Part of the the latter is Helen, an art therapist, who has been having a long term affair with Gil, one of the senior doctors there.
The narrative moves from the book’s present day (1964) to the 1930s, gradually revealing why William ended up like he did. In the wrong hands this could have ended up mawkish and sensational but Chambers avoids this.
Just about everyone is connected in some way and I did find it a little ‘convenient’ at first, but then we are talking about a time of relatively low mobility for many people. I also remembered growing up next to a psychiatric hospital (an ‘open’ one) and how so many people in the community either worked there or were outpatients. There was even a scandal I won’t go into, but it was cloaked in exactly the sort of stealth gossip some characters in this novel are so afraid of.
It’s full of her customary warmth and curiosity about people and I found it charming, deeply affecting at times and difficult to put down. I’ll have to add it as another bold at the end of the year!