50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Three

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Humans have left earth and are colonising space when they come across a moon they call Shroud with possible resources to extract but it may also have life...

This was so imaginative. I am in awe of how Tchaikovsky can write so convincingly about an alien moon and species and it's proper alien and different, not just a variant on humans.

However I find his books difficult to get sucked in to, i quite describe it well, but I think it's something in the sentence structures or it's too deep sci fi for me but I find myself not always sure what's happened in the last page and occasionally having to go back. So it's good, but not a bold.

Invisible Girl by Lisa Jewell

A girl goes missing and we get chapters from lots of different points of views and all more inter connected than you'd expect. Of course, not all is as it seems.

For all I found Shroud difficult to get really drawn in, this is very readable. Jewell writing just makes me feel at home and I sped along finishing it very quickly. All the loose ends were wrapped up a little too neatly for my preference. A solid 3.5 stars, will read more of hers.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupiesorry to hear things aren’t great- hopefully the crime fiction is helping distract if nothing else.

Re present tense, I too didn’t like it at the start but it’s so prevalent now that I’ve become used to it.

I’ve finished two more and had a DNF. The DNF is The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznohorkai- book club buddy read. The writing is nice and there’s some dark humour but it just jumps from person to person with a vague feeling of tension which I suspect may never actually build to a climax. It’s an allegory (which I hate) and I think I’m just not smart enough to get to grips with the rest of it. I got to page 103 and gave up when I was dreading opening the book.

31 Mrs Dalloway- Virginia Woolf
A reread which I’ve reviewed on here before for book club. Still sublime. Still in my top 5 reads of all time.

32 The Director by Daniel Kehlman
Set during the Second World War, The Director tells the story of GW Pabst, a movie director who left Nazi Germany only to flop in America. When he returns to help his elderly mother in Austria to find an old people’s home, he becomes trapped and ends of making films for the Nazis. The first 35% was hard going- jumping perspectives and timelines but once it settled down it was a great read- the writing often aping film making and exploring themes like perspective, memory and blame. First read from the International Booker longlist.

Dropped off the last thread a bit and see I’ve missed a fair bit of this one too, so off to catch up.

After struggling to read for a few weeks for one reason or another, I’ve devoured John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs - Ian Leslie over the weekend. A recommendation from these threads, and I absolutely loved it.

That was my eleventh book this year so far.

14 The Lost Rainforests of Britain - Guy Shrubsole
Temperate rainforest used to cover around a fifth of Britain - mostly in western coastal areas. It’s a unique habitat that’s been at risk ever since Neolithic farmers started clearing land for agriculture, and especially since the introduction of sheep, which munch innocent saplings down to the ground.

Guy Shrubsole can write well and restoring forest habitats is undoubtedly A Good Thing. What’s less good is neo-colonial English outsiders telling Welsh hill farmers to change their traditional (but sheep-centric and therefore evil) way of life, without outlining in any viable detail how they’re meant to make a living or making any effort to conciliate and work alongside them. According to Shrubsole, sheep aren’t traditional in Wales anyway, because they were only introduced in the 1200s and they’re not in the Mabinogion. Right.

If George Monbiot gets on your tits, so will this.

15 The Midnight Library - Matt Haig
Shallow self-help disguised as a novel with no literary merit.

16 The Wager - David Grann
Historical 1740s sea peril, told as rip-roaring narrative non-fiction complete with shipwreck, mutiny, unreliable narrators spinning self-justifying tales in their log books, and rumours of cannibalism? NOW you’re talking. Probably first bold of the year.

Dead Heat - Sabine Durrant

A washed-up journalist is invited to stay with his rich friends in Greece, where they all get caught up in the life of the even richer man next door. Inevitably things go wrong but who is to blame? I liked the Greek setting of this but the ending was a bit too ambiguous for my liking.

The Mercy Chair by MW Craven
A bout of insomnia means I’ve finished this. It has a deliberately odd structure, which I didn’t love, and more twists than a twisty thing with a very special reason for being twisty. It got very silly indeed by the end and I guessed most but not quite all of the twists.

Another RWYO for me.

28 The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin

Three generations of women are forced to confront their difficult relationships when they hear that their grandson / son / brother Declan is dying and wants to spend his last days at his Granny’s home. This isn’t a cosy story where everything is neatly resolved, and all issues swept away, but I found it all the more emotional and real because of that. It was beautifully written and the characters just felt so complex and rounded. I absolutely loved this and it’s a bold all day long.

A Month in the Country - J.L.Carr

This was highly recommended by 50 Bookers so I won't say much about it except that it wasn't what I expected from a 100 page novel about a visit to 1920s rural Yorkshire. I will be thinking about this for some time. I was shocked to find it was written in 1980! Thank you to everyone who mentioned this. What an immersive and beguiling story.

Taking of books in the present tense.

11 Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito
A Victorian governess psychotically kills everyone.

This was one for book club. It was at least short written with the brevity of a James Patterson novel. Not for me but definitely lives up to it's title.

Another one here who dislikes books in the present tense. I don’t automatically avoid a present tense book but it makes it more likely it will be a DNF.

Thanks @Benvenuto Interested to read your thoughts on The Bloody Boring Butler

The Botanist by MW Craven
Readable enough but overlong and so many characters that I had to keep reminding myself who was who. A couple of nice touches - an Andrew Tate inspired character called Kane Hunt particularly amused me.

Sorry to hear things are tough @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie- sending sympathy.

@Frannyisreading- really interesting to hear about the ballet. When I listened to the RiH podcasts last year & read John Guy’s biography it did feel like Mary’s story is so eventful that you just could not make bits of it up - but then there’s a long tradition too of authors embroidering the truth going back at least as far as Schiller (usually by inventing a meeting with Elizabeth).

28 . Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguo or Is the Butler Boring?

Much debated on here. This wasn’t for me - I could see why people might like it due to the writing style, but for me as well as the Butler being boring, I viscerally didn’t like his subservience to the aristocrats he served. Also, remembering the older generations of my family who lived through the 1930s (neither boring nor subservient & who had to deal with some highly challenging circumstances due to the political & economic situation at that time), the Butler really doesn’t seem plausible as a working class character.

Just finished The Sellout by Paul Beatty which I enjoyed a lot; very funny and edgy. Now just starting Eurotrash by Christian Kracht and am also about 65% of the way through the audiobook of Godsgrave by Jay Kristoff, the second book in the Nevernight trilogy. I don’t love Nevernight as much as his Empire trilogy, but still fun.

I agree with the presence tense irritation. I always think its a bit try-hard and screams creative writing course graduate. I like old fashioned past tenses too!

The present tense in Wolf Hall drove me crackers, but the ‘he’ thing annoyed me even more, I think.

Ha ha @Terpsichore your antipathy to present tense novels sounds even greater than mine!

If you're a genius, you can get away with it. I'm thinking of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. But if you're not a genius, maybe you should think twice.

It just feels like an attempt to make ordinary prose sound more literary and highbrow.

@Tarragon123Done!

Just catching up to the thread after a busy weekend

I’m sorry everything is shit @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie

@ÚlldemoShúl Thank you
@Tarragon123will try!!

I could not agree more, @cassandre , so if that's weird, count me in! Modern fiction selection for me is largely determined nowadays by a simple 5-second process: open book; see that book is in present tense; close book; discard book.
The End.

Thanks for all the good wishes. I’m still burning through the Washington Poe books.

@DesdamonasHandkerchief glad I'm not the only one!

Some novels mix perspective and tense, and that appeals to me more.

Seeing your post has reminded me that I've also managed to keep up with the Tale of Two Cities read-along, so maybe I'm reading more than I thought! I'm loving that read-along btw ❤

I find novels written all in present tense really irritating too, I didn’t know WDS was written that way. Bumping it down the TBR!

Sorry to hear some of you are having a hard time at the moment, I know it took me a long while to get over my broken ankle, it wasn’t just the physical healing but it hit my confidence too. I hope you all get through the tough times as best you can.

27 The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff

Geeta is ostracized by most of her village due to the suspicion that she has killed her absent husband. She has an uneasy association with some of the women as they are all part of a loan group that lends to women. When some of the women in the village ask for Geeta’s help in ridding them of their own terrible husbands she begins to come out of her isolation and realises how lonely she has been. The book covers the patriarchy, sisterhood, love, abuse, religion and the caste system. While I really liked this I’m not sure yet if it will be a bold.

As as aside, de Waal's novel is in the present tense, and the longlist book I'm about to read next (Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy) is also in the present tense.

I think I have a weird aversion to novels written in the present tense, and every year, SO MANY of the Women's Prize novels do this! Argh! Yes, sometimes it can be very effective, but it always gives me the sense that the novel has come out of a creative writing workshop somewhere. I'm fond of old-fashioned past tenses.

Thank you @Southeastdweller for the new thread (which is moving along at the usual breathless rate!). @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie and @Terpsichore I'm thinking of you both 💐

@Welshwabbit I love The Fire Next Time. When I read it, I was very struck by how relevant the ideas in it remain today.

I'm not reading as much as I wish I were at the moment. Work is getting me down a bit, as it typically does at this time of term. Looking forward to the Easter break and some happy guiltless uninterrupted reading! After not starting Les Miz till mid-February though, I've now almost caught up to where everyone else is, and am hoping to join that read-along soon.

My list so far:
1 Le jeune homme [The Young Man], Annie Ernaux
2 Mauvais élève [Bad Pupil], Philippe Vilain
3 Immaculate Conception, Ling Ling Huang
4 A Month in the Country, J. L. Carr
5 Triste Tigre [Sad Tiger], Neige Sinno
6 Seduction Theory, Emily Adrian
7 Remorse, Alba de Céspedes, trans. William Weaver
8 The Spoilt Kill, Mary Kelly
9 Artemisia, Letizia Treves et al
10 In the Darkroom, Susan Faludi

I'm also interested in the Women's Prize for Fiction longlist, even though every year I tell myself I'm not going to get sucked in. I'd read only two on the list this time, the ones that were shortlisted for the Booker: Flashlight (loved it) and Audition (meh).

Have read one more book since the longlist came out:
11 The Best of Everything, Kit de Waal 4/5
Women’s Prize longlist. A young Black British mother meets the orphaned grandson of the man responsible for killing her lover in a car accident, and gradually becomes a mother figure to that boy as well as her own. At the beginning I thought that the story was shaping up to be too sentimental, but as things evolved, the narrative gained more darkness and complexity. By the end I liked it very much. Incidentally, I reread my review of de Waal’s The Trick to Time (which I read years ago), and my review of that book said very much the same thing! De Waal writes very well, and her main characters are sympathetic and convincing.