2025 Reading Challenge discussion
ARCHIVE 2015
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James' 52 in 2015.
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1/52
4/5 Liked it, just didn't quite love as much as his first, which I think is inevitable due to the first focusing on a part of his carer we didnt know about and this is much more celebrity driven, but still contains plenty of laughs.
2/52
5/5 Ashamed to say at 25 and being a long time fantasy reader this was my first Pratchett and a loved it, arcane, stupid, satire that hit the spot.
3/52
2.5/5 My first literary book of the year and its very hard to review as almost a month after finishing i'm still not sure I actually enjoyed it or gained anything; its a problem I've had with Faulkes before in A Week in December. A Girl follows Anne a naive young women in 1930's France who moves to a small provincial area and works in a local hotel, whilst being wooed by a richer man. The novel just lacks something, the killer edge, the thing that pulls you in and makes you think. Even the critique of the social and political situation of 30s France just fall flat. Its no Birdsong and that may unfortunately may be what I say about all Faulkes, I dont't know if he can ever deliver that again. (I've got Charlotte Grey on my list to read this year so hopefully that can restore my faith)
On a slight postscript to The Girl some of the reviewers of it hate the ending, I loved it.
4/52
>5/5 Best book I've read in a while, a piece of literature that fits a lot into its small size. The plot surrounds the political awakening of Pererira, an obese middle ages widower, in Portgual at the outset of World War Two, but also touches on grief, loneliness and living under a dictatorship. The style is slightly weird (might be the translation), told in a 3rd person account as if the narrator had been told the story, but the prose is beautiful and with only a short passage Tabbuchi can set the scene of a late Autumn in Lisbon on 1939.
In the UK this year Hachette are releasing hardback Judge Dreed which I'm collecting, read two of these so far5/52 and 6/52
4/5 and 3/5
7/52
3/5
This has been on heavy rotation in the kindle deals for a while so I thought I'd give it a go, and and it was ok, a little flat in the middle and too fast at the end, but overall a decent story.
8/52
5/5
Best novel I've read, the cover quote says 'ishiguro meets walking dead', which just about covers it,an absolute must read. Melanie is a young girl who spends her whole day tied up and muzzled to a chair,little she does she understand this is because she is a zombie in an army facility as she is also very clever and able to learn unlike most after the event. Featuring a tight varied cast who all have varying motives and unreliable stoues, and with an outstanding end to the novel that made me smile I would and already have been recommending this to anyone who will listen
That's a great description of The Girl with All the Gifts! I love Ishiguro.I ended up giving that one four rather than five stars because I thought the very beginning and the very end were BRILLIANT but the middle was just solid.
I actually do agree about the middle, it kinda just plods for a bit and gets stuck in a transition from the enclosed beginning to the end section, just slowly developing characters without much going ok on. I think what pushes this up to the great novel for me is the wonderfulness of the beginning which I can't really think has been done so well anywhere before and the ending which is brilliant. It must be very difficult to write something new in the zombie genre and although Carey does borrow some elements I can't see many people who read it not at least enjoying it. Shame it wasn't as widely read last year as its classed as a genre piece which a lot of people avoid like a plauge.
So much genre fiction is really great literature/storytelling that people miss out on because of biases like that.
9/52 and 10/52
Trash 3/5 Greatcoat 2/5
So ill start with Trash, which as I got a free copy off and decided to give it a go, given it's pedigree and awards as a Childrens novel. Its set in the Phillipines (although this is not overly played on and the Author said he wanted to make it lool like it could be any city) where three children who live on a trash dump find a valuable wallet and map that drags them on an adventure and in trouble with the Police. To be honest at the start the style grated as it flipped hetween several narritve points but the story is very well told and worth and afternoon read.
The Greatcoat; sigh. Helen Dunmore is one of my favorite literary authors, having read The Lie, The Seige and The Betrayal. This was just awful utter tripe. It was one of the fist books published under the Hammer imprint of horror film fame, but fails to be scary or exciting. The plot is a young woman moves into her first home during the 1950s with her new doctor husband who works all the hours under the sun. One night being extremely cold she gets a Greatcoat out of the cupboard to sleep under which awakens a dead ghost (Alec) frkm a nearby World War 2 base who beleives she is someone from his past and still thinks its before the mission thst killed him. The prose is nice the plot is not.
11/52
4/5
Read for March's Ocsar challenge, first time since school. I think there are many authors who could learn a thing or two about prose from Gatsby (see previous post!), so rich and textured. I think the main and flaw with Gatsby is that every single character is utterly deplorable, debauched and self absorbed. The issues dealt with that bore most students in to a lesson draining sleep are faily narrow but still overall interesting, the roaring twenties, the American Dream and its failure, prohibition and most importantly something I think we all do at some point in our lives; yearning back to that past life, recapture that memory, which is never. same second time around.
12/52
4/5
Joss Wheden and XMen, whats not to love? This series loosely follows Morrisons run on New Xmen but can easily be read as a stand along with a bit of background knowledge into the past. This is a great start to the series and has far better artwork than the New Xmen.
13/52 
This second volume from Joss Whedon, contains an arc based around the X-men's Danger Training room becoming a sentient killing being with the ultimate akm of killing its 'father' Xaiver. I found this volume a bit of a let down after the strong questions raised in the first, although by the end you are left wandering about what Xavier has done and where Frost stands. The arwork is still strong and probably the best version of the Beast so far
3/5
14/52
I was given this to read by a friend and more than likely would have missed it otherwise, I had already wrote it off as a supermarket best seller that was not very good like most of the crime procedurals they sell; silly me. One of the comparisons Ive read since is Gone Girl; which is understandable but wrong. They share a female author, female protagonist and they are both crime novels told from the protagonist point of view rather than the police, in terms of plot they vary greatly.
The Girl on The Train, starts with Rachel who is a drunk, divorced, unemployed wreck in her mid 30s who everyday keeps up the pretense of going to work on the train. Each day the train stops at a junction giving Rachel a glimps into a house four doors down from martial home. Over time this beomces the focus of her day, those few minutes a constant in her life and she sets up lives and names for the couple that live there, projecting the perfect marriage she no longer has. One day Rachel sees something in that house (plot spoiler) that drags her back into the road in which she used to live when the girl she calls Jess goes missing. There are two other women who tell the story in this novel, Megan who is the girl that goes missing, this story starts from a year before the event and build up to that night and Anna, who was the other women in Rachel's marriage, who picks up a few chapters.
Although I worked the twist out about half way through I still finished reading in a day, the pace of the writing never slows down or lets go of the narritve its a very well contructed novel, with varied cast of utterly dislikable women. Rachel, the drunk who cant sort her life out, (you can either feel sorry for her or hate her) Megan, the cheating wife and Anna the new wife. I found some of the character development worked really well from even some of the small details in the narritve. Rachel has a low self worth and when she talks of her ex husband he 'fucked her' and their marital arguments where usually down to her. Megan on the other hand whilst she has her own problems sees her sexual life as 'we had sex' equals and copes with her demons better than Rachel has done in the most part.
Well worth a read.
15/52
5/5
Once again beautifully presented in these new editions. Unlike the first couple of this collection all parts of this story are strong telling not only the origin of Dredd but also how the judges came to rule mega city one and what happened after the disaster. not only is the artwork some of the best 2000 ad have presented so far this has a plot that does what a great comic (but too few comics do) and important questions.
Wonderful
2025 Reading Challenge
Books mentioned in this topic
Judge Dredd: Origins (other topics)The Girl on the Train (other topics)
Astonishing X-Men, Vol. 2: Dangerous (other topics)
Astonishing X-Men, Vol. 1: Gifted (other topics)
The Great Gatsby (other topics)
More...
I'm not really following any arbitrary rules, except to always have a paperback in my pocket when Im out and about and to try and not to include any single issue comics I read. Ill be reading a whole mix of books that have gathered on my shelves/Kindle and as will be soon evident from the 9 I'v already read up to now I jump from genre to genre and try to finish every book I start no matter how awful (50 shades and Vampire Diaries being notable exceptions to that rule)