26ish books 2026

Ooooh hurrah @PinkOrangeRed Relieved that you liked it! Feeling that recommendations are more responsibility than I thought 🤔

22: Less - Stop Buying So Much Rubbish by Patrick Grant
Really interesting book. Main premise is to buy less, buy local and buy the best quality you can. However, for me the balance was too heavy on the history and not enough on the local producers and practical steps for going forward.

23: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
Absolutely loved this one, as recommended on this thread (or maybe even last year's). Fantastic mood, and would be a perfect Autumn/Winter read.

I did not finish Butter, just couldn't get on with it despite requesting it on Libby, returning it and requesting it again!

58 Solito by Javier Zamora. Deeply moving - about a boy who is trafficked into the US because his parents are there and he can't join them legally. It's the author's own story and he went through years of therapy to process what had happened to him. He was from El Salvador and his dad was a political refugee.
59 Kin by Tayari Jones. I liked An American Marriage, but this didn't feel at all original.
60 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. Like a lot of people, this was a quick and fairly easy read. I really felt for her daughter - I have previously cut my mum out of knowing things she didn't need to know, not because she cut me out but because she made everything about her. I think we were supposed to feel sympathy with Sybil. It also made me think about what I might lose if I went blind like her.

Read 3 books while on holiday, very good going for me.

Didn't love any of them, but they were all quite easy to get into.

Margo's Got Money Troubles

A woman starts an Only Fans account after having a baby.

Queenie

The aftermath of a break up

Lily

The life of a girl after she was abandoned at birth.

Book 38: The Inmate by Freida McFadden
A typical Freida book, absurd plot and crazy characters, definitely need to suspend reality when reading this but it was a quick light read and didn’t disappoint with the insane twists!

2026 books so far:
then she was gone
beautiful ugly
the intruder
the shadowman
the family upstairs
Rock Paper Scissors
The Family Remains
The House we Grew up in
It Should Have Been You
Dont Let Him In
Daisy Darker
Someone In The Attic
The Tenant
One Click
The Other Side Of The Wall
No One Saw A Thing
Ward D
My Husband’s Wife
The Silent Patient
The Night She Disappeared
The Divorce
Hide And Seek
None Of This Is True
I Found You
Such A Nice Girl
The Couple Next Door
It Could Have Been Her
It’s Not What You Think
Watching You
The Last Party
I Let You Go
The Sleeper Lies
The Couple At No.9
Everyone Here Is Lying
Famous Last Words
The Third Wife
The Girls

Morning :)
Books read so far:
(1) The French for Christmas by Fiona Valpy
(2) The Outside Boy by Jeannie Cummins
(3) Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
(4) All the Broken Places by John Boyne
(5) A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
(6) Crooked Branch by Jeannie Cummins
(7) Nesting by Roisin O'Donnell
(8) Never Lie by Frieda McFadden
(9) All Her Fault by Andrea Mara (Audio book)
(10) The Locked Door by Frieda McFadden
(11) All the Light We Cannot See by By Anthony Doer
(12) The Book of Lost Names' by Kristin Harmel
(13) The Room on Rue Amélie by Kristin Harmel
(14) The Names by Florence Knapp
(15) The Stationary Shop of Tehran by Marjan Kamali
(16) Her Husband's Lover by Patricia Crouch
(17) Here One Moment by Liane Moriarity
(18) The New Neighbours by Claire Douglas
(19) Don't Let Him In by Lisa Jewell
(20) One Day by David Nicholls
(21) Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
(22) My Brother's Secret by Maggie Hartley
(23) Us by David Nicholls
(24) You are here by David Nicholls

Latest Book.....

(25) The Understudy by David Nicholls

Enjoyable book - bit disappointed by the ending....

Onto the next :)

Happy reading everyone :D

Book 23 The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
This was so good I've moved straight onto the next in the series. One of my books of the year.

24: Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver
I love Barbara Kingsolver - this was the story of a sister who returns to her hometown to look in on her ailing father, and really highlights the complexities of families and what individuals do in good faith but turn out to have lasting detrimental impacts.

22. Old Filth by Jane Gardem. Filth is the nickname of a lawyer / judge who we meet in his 80s. The book flits back and forth telling his (very eventful) life to date. I like Gardem's writing and the way she drops something darkly funny in here and there, and the plotting flowed well. I found it really sad somehow and I don't think you are meant to. There is a lot of grief played out which I wasn't expecting at all.

There are two more books from other characters' perspectives and I am trying to decide if I want to move straight on to the next one, or not. Part of me would happily spend more time with them and in their world so I guess that means I recommend Old Filth.

LemonPandaCub · 02/10/2026 15:36
Book 39 Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney
Loved this book, I do think that Alice writes characters that are hard to warm to but I really enjoyed how this story developed and the twists and turns, the ambiguity of the last page threw me a little but it didn’t make me want to throw the book at the wall like beautiful ugly.

2026 books so far:
then she was gone
beautiful ugly
the intruder
the shadowman
the family upstairs
Rock Paper Scissors
The Family Remains
The House we Grew up in
It Should Have Been You
Dont Let Him In
Daisy Darker
Someone In The Attic
The Tenant
One Click
The Other Side Of The Wall
No One Saw A Thing
Ward D
My Husband’s Wife
The Silent Patient
The Night She Disappeared
The Divorce
Hide And Seek
None Of This Is True
I Found You
Such A Nice Girl
The Couple Next Door
It Could Have Been Her
It’s Not What You Think
Watching You
The Last Party
I Let You Go
The Sleeper Lies
The Couple At No.9
Everyone Here Is Lying
Famous Last Words
The Third Wife
The Girls
The Inmate

33 Silent Bones - Val McDermid
The latest Karen Pirie. I enjoy this series, unlike the Tony Hill & Carol Jordan books which are far too dark and graphic for me. The Karen Pirie books are much better than the TV series (I think the actress playing KP is too young).

34 The Frozen People - Elly Griffiths
First of a new series about time travelling Detectives, also solving cold cases! A quick read but not very convincing. Also, the plot was left very open-ended, meaning you have to read the future books in the series to find out what happens.

36 Circe by Madeline Miller

taken me a long time to get round to this one but I thought it was beautifully written

30 The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

This book surpassed all my expectations. Kristin Hannah is such an amazing author - I didn't want this book to end.

The story follows a family of three who start a new life in desolate Alaska. The man of the family suffered with PTSD from the Vietnam war - the violence and abuse on his wife and child were off the scale. A really harrowing read.

One of my favourites too @h0rsewithn0name though I don’t think any of her others are as good! Several of them are good, just that I read Great Alone first and thought they’d all be that brilliant! Nightingale comes close as does The Four Winds

1. 37 Snare - Lilja Sigurdardottir

Can’t get rid of that random 1.! Quick and different read for me, I read a lot of Icelandic fiction but not normally crime, picked this up in an oxfam bookshop and devoured it. Apparently it’s the first in a trilogy so I’ll look out for others in charity shops

Interesting about the Val Mcdermid, I tried one of the Tony Hill books a couple of years ago and it was as you say very dark, it also seemed dated in the way men treated women (not in a good way). Might try Karen Pirie.

Yes, the Karen Pirie books are not like that at all. I like them.
I also can't read any Karin Slaughter books for the same reason - too dark and graphic.

35 Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
This was a re-read, to remind myself of the story as there's a new film adaptation coming out, directed by Taika Waititi. However, I've just read the reviews and they are uniformly bad, so I won't be going to see it!

Guess id better up it again next year!

23. The Man In The Wooden Hat by Jane Gardem. I did go straight on to the next in the Old Filth trilogy and it was wonderful. I love her style. I can't think what the word is but it's really fluent and she skewers character so well. Well plotted and from the perspective of Filth's wife so there's some story overlap which was satisfying. I loved it but I can't work out how much I'd have liked it without the dynamic of knowing what was going on in parallel for him - overall I think it would work a stand alone.

@DecafSoyaLatteExtraShotPlease
Is that an app? Looks interesting.

Goodreads 🙂

30 Broken Country - Clare Leslie Hall readable enough but didn’t really like it. Struggled to like the protagonist and found it all implausible

24 my Name Is Mackenzie Bly by Lissa Evans. I think this is aimed at a much younger audience BUT it references bands like The Longpigs and has very strong Aidrian Mole vibes - it's narrated by a dungeons and dragons playing 14 year old with lesbian mums and a stoner dad who all embarrass him frequently and make him go on mass camping holidays with kids called Lovage and Reed instead of Malga in a hotel.

Very quick but funny read, quirky and the hardback I have looks fabulous. I would recommend it and can see it being a hit at Christmas for the person you might normally get a jokey book for. To give you the flavour, one mum is plumber with "let me end-a-drain you" on her van, the other teaches at his school and sings in assembly, which is embarrassing, and his best friend is devising a parrot IQ test.

This is interesting, I found it very enjoyable but in an implausible tosh sort of way snd have requestedanother by the authorfrom the library. I know what you mean about the protagonist, a few other characters were ones I'd avoid in real life too! I can very much see that if I'd tried it on another day or time or year I might have hated it.

It reminded me of The Paper Palace a bit of you’ve read that - self-indulgent female protagonist cheating on a husband that appears not to deserve it, and a silly and unlikely ending and characters doing unbelievable things 😅 but, I do think she writes well in this case! I need to learn my lesson really as I don’t often gel with the bestsellers.