50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Three

17 Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
This was shortlisted for the Nooker in 2005 and I may have had this copy since back then - it had fallen down behind a shelf of books and I only found it when I was clearing stuff out last week.

I don't want to give too much of the plot away, as part of the delight of this book is discovering who Arthur and George are and how their paths crossed.

It is based on a true story and the only reason I haven't given it a bold is because I got a bit bored with the legal stuff (it features a famous trial).

Descriptions of Victorian and Edwardian England are great.

I’m another one with Lonesome Dove on the shelf as yet unread.

My latest read was The Trees by Percival Everett. This had also sat on the shelf for a while - it was recommended on A Good Read and I’d bought it but I was avoiding actually reading it because of the subject matter. I finally picked it up looking for a page-turner with more depth than my recent reads.

Money, Mississippi is where the horrific real-life lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till took place in 1955. In the novel, set during Trump’s first presidency, Money is the scene of murders of White people. On each occasion the badly beaten dead body of the same Black man each time is also found at the scene. The book proceeds as a satire on racism and police collusion and is often splutter-out-loud funny, alongside the deadly serious indictment of decades of lynchings going totally unpunished.

I am glad to have read this and didn’t find the fictional murders too gruesome - the presentation is so satirical that you’re not really asked to believe in them. The real life crimes are obviously harder to contemplate, but these aren’t described gratuitously. I enjoyed the first three quarters more than the last. I think I preferred this to James which I didn’t rate as highly as others did, and it filled the brief of being more than just a page turner. Happy to go back to something fluffier next though.

the main character is very dull. He must be very attractive as women kept throwing themselves at him despite his poor conversational skills.

No, just written by a man, it's a fantasy for them.

18 Flesh by David Szalay
Last year's booker prize winner. A man goes through life saying okay and things happen to him

What an odd book. It was very readable for a prizewinner but the main character is very dull. He must be very attractive as women kept throwing themselves at him despite his poor conversational skills.

@MonOncle I enjoyed Project Hail Mary and found it very funny. Not as good as The Martian though (that goes for the book as well as the film).

25 . On The Calculation Of Volume IV by Solvej Balle

Tara Selter continues to live in limbo in the 18th November. In this instalment she meets more people in the same position

I have to say I found this dull and think that the series is increasingly diminishing returns for me.

Each instalment is less than 200 pages, and I have to think “No, just release this as a full novel instead of dribs and drabs, stop messing about”

That said there was a cliffhanger on this one so I probably will read #5

Oops, I accidentally said young brothers when I meant young nephews! His brother's son's, murdered and served to their father for dinner.

What a monster.

I really loved The House of Doors and it's one of the few books my husband and I both like! I liked the central female character. But this thread proves how very different we all are in our tastes. I hope Tan Twan Eng finishes his next book very soon!

Absolutely. The sense of a cursed palace was almost palpable. I was reading about Atreus in the museum. Made it all much more immediate!

@Welshwabbit I LOVED The Gift Of Rain and The Garden Of Evening Mist but House of Doors not so much

@Welshwabbit , I found the ghost voices and handprints of the murdered boys in Agamemnon's palace so eerie!

I had forgotten it was Agamemnon's father, Atreus, who was the one to murder his young brothers and feed them to their father, cursing the whole line. That really ramped up the creeping sense of dread for me.

26 The Voyage Home by Pat Barker

Third and thus far final instalment in Barker's series of novels about the women of Troy. This one is told from the perspective of a different character, Ritsa, Briseis's closest friend. In her previous life, Ritsa (who is middle-aged) was married to a healer and picked up his skills; in the first two books, she assists the camp healer, Machaon, as his slave. Following the victory and the capture of Priam's daughter Cassandra, Ritsa becomes her slave and witnesses her madness, before Cassandra recovers and is married to Agamemnon, setting in train the events that culminate in Clytemnestra's revenge for the sacrifice of her daughter, Iphigenia. I read this whilst on holiday in Greece and finished it the day we visited ancient Mycenae, which lent it extra resonance. I walked under the Lion Gate which features heavily in the book, and it was pretty amazing to think that it's still standing, 3300 years later. Anyway, as a result of all this it's hard critically to appraise the book, but the pervading sense of menace and foreboding was brilliantly done, and I was swept up in the story. Ritsa's complex relationship with Cassandra is also well done, although the switches between Ritsa's perspective and Clytemnestra's are a bit jarring, and I think Clytemnestra has been done better elsewhere. I thoroughly recommend reading these books in Greece!

27 The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

This was Tan Twan Eng's first novel; I loved his second and third but have only just got round to reading it. I read the whole thing in a day (enabled by my flight home). Objectively, I can see its flaws; it's too long, there's a bit too much explaining; the central relationship is murky and the female characters are few and far between. But as with his other novels, it completely captured me. Philip Hutton, the 16 year old, half-Chinese son of a wealthy English business owner living in Penang, meets Hayato Endo, a Japanese civil servant who rents an island from Hutton's father. Hutton finds a teacher, friend and something more in Endo, learning the art of aikido. Philip reveals Penang's secrets to Endo, as the shadow of WWII stretches across their lives. The second part of the book deals with the Japanese occupation of Malaya and the complicated roles Philip, Endo and the large cast of characters play in it. There is so much going on here; Philip's Chinese ancestry, triad gangs; love, loss, brutality. It's a tough, sad read, but despite its length and density I found it utterly engrossing.

@AliasGrape @MonOncle not just me then! You’re right about the cliff hangers and ‘Consumed’ is a good word. I’m completely caught up in the Neapolitan world.
I heartily recommend the TV series and having read the books Lenù’s passivity will make better sense to you.
So much of what we know of her is her internal thoughts and obviously that isn’t all communicated via the screen - despite the occasional voiceover. At times I wanted to shake her watching the series.

Because of the time span the book covers, three actors play each role. The first change over is almost imperceptible, the second (for the final series) is not and it took some getting used too, (the actress who plays Lenù in series 4 is married to the Director/showrunner which I think explains why she got cast despite being very different to the previous actress in the role) but - avoiding spoilers - it does have that one scene that made me gasp out loud and re-examine everything that had gone before.
Getting stuck into A Tale Of Two Cities now, but looking forward to getting back to Naples!

I enjoyed PHM the film but not as much as the book

I have @MonOncle. I thought it could have been shorter, there was a bit of a lull in the middle but otherwise enjoyable. Nice knitwear.

@DesdamonasHandkerchief I lost 6 weeks to the Neapolitan quartet a couple of years ago, I couldn’t stop. Ferrante can write a cliffhanger that I can’t resist!

I’ve just finished Trust, by Hernan Diaz. This is a clever puzzle of a book, with four manuscripts focused on the story of a financier and his wife in 1920s New York. I had already read a review on Goodreads thst implored people to ‘stick with it’, otherwise I may have DNF’d it during the second section which was really quite boring, but became important as the story progressed and revealed itself. I think this may be a bold as I can’t stop thinking about it.

We might go and see Project Hail Mary today, has anyone seen it?

@Stowickthevast I’m old enough to know nearly everyone mentioned!

@BestIsWest I'm considering DNFing Burton & Liz. I'm about 30% through but keep getting distracted as I don't know who anyone is so start googling them. They do both sound awful but fascinating too. I think maybe I need to watch some of their films and then decide whether or not to continue. The only one I can remember is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf which I did for A level.

35. The Bombay Prince by Sujata Massey. Third in the series of Perveen Mistry historical mystery novels set in 1920s India. The characters and social history were great as always. I have learned so much about Parsi culture and how they were seen in pre-Independence India. The mystery in this one was less good than the previous ones and I felt the murderer's motivation wasn't very clear. I will continue reading this series when I can but Libby does not have the next book yet.

I am moving onto Villette by Charlotte Bronte, which I am reading for the Marathon books prompt of the Goodreads Spring challenge. I have so many books on my TBR, I find challenges a good way to pick one to read next.

Reading The Correspondent made me join a snail mail pen friends club and also made me want to read Lonesome Dove and Joan Didion. I have The Year of Magical Thinking out on Libby and am gilding up my mental loins for it!

When I read The Correspondent recently I had to skip the Lonesome Dove letter as I was worried about spoilers!

Enjoying the Lonesome Dove discussion, I’m another one who added it to my list after its appearance in The Correspondent. Definitely* *more inclined to read it now.

@DesdamonasHandkerchief you've reminded me of how consumed I was by those books! I didn’t really get it with the first one, but something kept me reading and I became obsessed. I remember nothing quite measuring up for a while afterwards. I haven’t watch the tv series but have been meaning to give it a go.

Finished 17. The Carer - Deborah Moggach
Robert and Phoebe, hire a carer for their ailing elderly father James. The first part of the novel deals with the tension and complexities of this arrangement - they’re relieved when Mandy arrives and takes such good care of their dad, something they don’t particularly want to do themselves. They need her, their ‘saviour from Solihull’, but clearly look down on her, are scathing (to and between themselves) about her appearance, political opinions and the life her father seems to be enjoying with her now - Lidl trips, village gossip and horror of horrors reading the Daily Mail. When Mandy begins to act more and more suspiciously, they’re torn as much as they disdain her they’re scared to fact the upheaval and impact on their life that sacking her, and having to take over care for their father, would bring.

We get twists and turns along the way, family secrets revealed and relationships redefined.

I preferred the first half, the later part took the book in a different direction and honestly stretched my credulity a bit, but overall this was an enjoyable read.

Just dropping in to say I am being held prisoner in Rome with Burton and Liz. I veer between thinking ‘Why am I reading about these awful people?’ and not being able to stop.
Send help.

Chat GPT said : You’ve got a very distinctive mix of tastes—literary but readable, emotionally intense, often sweeping in scope, with a thread of identity, obsession, or displacement running through everything

19. The Doctor Will See You Now by Amir Khan

Memoir written by a GP working in a busy GP practice.

As usual with this sort of book, there’s a mixture of funny anecdotes and sad anecdotes along with some musing over the state of the NHS. Dr Khan comes across as a very likeable GP in this book.

Yes, I am learning to be very specific about what I like/d and dislike/d in books I've read. It has before recommended something I don't like and I don't hold back.