50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Five

Finished my number 26 - Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh this and Decline and Fall had been languishing on my kindle for years, I just couldn’t get into them at all I kept getting bored and giving up. Listened to Decline on audible in the end and found myself enjoying it so did the same with this one. Brilliant narration for both, and helped me find a way ‘in’ to the text which on the page was doing nothing for me for some reason.

I do tend to fall asleep to audio books if I listen in bed - I put it on 15 min timer then extend it if I’m still awake, occasionally have to do a bit of back and forth the next time but generally this works ok. I really like them for driving, ironing and when I’m having a spell of insomnia too.

Another one who falls asleep to audiobooks, so I tend to only listen to “re-reads” where I already know the plot 😀

No, only Book One had been written when i read it and by the time Two and Three came out it had been so long I'd forgotten quite a lot so I didn't go back.

I liked Babel and am looking forward to her new one.

I can't listen to audio books, my brain doesn't process them at all. Which is why I only use them to fall asleep to, and therefore don't count them in my reading list.

Perilous Journey To Freedom Marion Kummerow
Book 3 in the Escaping The Reich series. This one sees an escape over the Alps from Austria to Switzerland. It was really tense, metaphorical edge of the seat stuff, and whilst the characters are fictional, people really did risk their lives escaping this way. It's not full of successes which adds to the realism of the subject. This is a really good series where the full extent of the horror of the Nazi regime is just in the background, in a menacing slightly sinister, but not overly in your face of you see what I mean.

I was surprised that I enjoyed this one so much when I read it, but a lot of her early experiences resonated with me.

Solidarity - I do the falling asleep thing with an audiobook all the time. I am trying to listen when travelling or doing chores, but I’m not always successful.

Sorry you’re having a weird reading year, Eine. It’s so frustrating when you hit one of those patches; I was in it myself a few months ago. Fingers crossed, I seem to be plugging on again now and have got to….

48. Craftland - James Fox

I think it was possibly @RomanMum who reviewed this positively upthread - I caught it being read on R4 and it duly went on the wishlist. Fox travels the country in search of the country's dying crafts and trades (he gets a telling-off from some professionals for describing them as craftsmen) that were once ubiquitous. Examples include dry-stone walling, knife- and scissor-making, bodging (ie chair-making), tanning, watch-making and letter-carving. I enjoyed reading about all this, although it’s quite dispiriting to think about a country which once teemed with all these skills as ordinary, everyday realities. Now most are virtually extinct - the words 'he is the last person now carrying on this tradition' crop up regularly throughout the book - and while I accept that, for example, not many people need hand-made cartwheels any more, it seems quietly heartbreaking to me that we’ve almost entirely lost touch with our connection to our own past history in which such things were vitally important.

Comfort Eating - Grace Dent

I love Grace’s restaurant reviews and work on masterchef. This was fine but slight - a quick read (and the exact opposite of Ultra Processed People, except on the subject of Proper Butter 😀)

Really unproductive at the moment, fell asleep with an audiobook on again and not sure where I got up to. Can’t read an actual book to save my life - this is a very weird year for me compared to previous years my numbers are SO low - I know it’s not about the numbers but I’m not reading at all and I don’t know why

@Stowickthevast I have Babel on my list! I think I may need something a bit lighter after finishing the Poppy Wars before I go on to it. I have always wanted to read a Room of One’s Own. I tried to read Mrs Dalloway once but couldn’t get through it because of the writing style - think that’s more a reflection of me than VW though!

Grannie glad to hear baby is ok

I thought Notes on an Execution was excellent - not an easy read but managed to hold various different truths - telling the stories of the victims alongside the horrors of the murderer’s early life and the barbarity of the death penalty.

I’m glad you are feeling better @Tarragon123

I’ve also been in hospital with my baby, all fine now luckily. I read Heated Rivalry when I was there and think that, like Off Campus, they must have made a much smarter and more interesting TV series compared to the book. It was perfectly fine as romances go, but it’s hard to see why it got picked for filming over all the others out there…

Welcome @VanGoSunflowers I haven't read The Poppy Wars but I think Babel is quite popular and has similar themes. I didn't love it but I know plenty of people did.

60. A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf. I've never read this before so did it for Ben Reads June challenge. It's Woolf's essay about women and fiction written in 1928. I really liked it and found it both exhilarating in how far women's rights have come in the last 100 years but also slightly depressing in the still existing inequalities. It probably still helps to have an inherited income and room of one's own in order to be a writer!

61. Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way - Elaine Feeney. This is a book about Claire who goes a bit deranged with grief after her mother dies, breaks up with her boyfriend and moves to the family home in Ireland. It has an odd structure where the main part is written in the first person from Claire's Pov but then we get flashbacks to 100 years before when the family are living in poverty. We also get an extended flashback to Claire's childhood, and then it switches back to modern day but in a third person perspective. It's a bit distracting, although I guess it's showing the inherited trauma through the generations. There are some side characters who seem a bit irrelevant and the ex boyfriend who comes to Ireland has basically no character. There's also an odd bit where Claire gets obsessed with trad wives which doesn't really contribute much to the plot. I gave this 3* but now writing this review, feel like I was too generous!

A Million Miracles Roberta Kagan
This is the final book in the series, 'A Million Miracles', and whilst the first 2 were ok, I dont recommend this one. I looked back at my reviews for books 1 and 2 and said that you have to suspend belief a little, well with this one its just totally implausible.

Over the 3 books, Pitor Barr along with his wife Mila and son, is imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. Pitor and Jakup, the toddler son, both look very aryan, and Jakup is stolen by a guard to be sent and raised as a German. Mila is killed. Pitor escapes, murders a Nazi officer who he conveniently looks like and goes off to find Jakup. In the final book Pitor manages to find Jakup, who is being looked after by a woman he slept with previously, kill the guard who adopted him and then walk into Auschwitz with the dead Nazi over his shoulder and bury his body in a pile of other dead bodies. The timeline was also a bit wonky!

Welcome @VanGoSunflowers

Point Blank. Tana Collins
This is the first book in a new crime series, but I think it might be a spin off from the author's previous series.
Set in Scotland and primarily about a man who gets shot on his doorstep at point blank range for no reason. It turns out that a previous case saw the woman who used to own that house murdered and her husband imprisoned for the crime. Ballistics show that the same gun was used in both crimes.

This was really good, the author managed to give enough backstory to all of the characters without it feeling like we're being spoon fed. The repeated mentions of real historical cases, such as the murder of Jill Dando, felt a little OTT at times, almost like the author was trying to prove that she knew her crime history. But overall it was a good, solid read.

Lisa Doyle Is Absolutely Fine. Mo Fanning
In a drunken moment of madness after her bestfriend announces her upcoming wedding, Lisa announces her own engagement over Instagram. Only Lisa isn't engaged. She doesn't even have a boyfriend. So she hires her gay flatmate who is a failing actor to play the role. This was mad, funny (and at times there were stupid errors that may have been because I read an ARC and they've been corrected in the final version). Whilst I've never been mad enough to invent a boyfriend, as the one who is always single at weddings and parties, I can kind of understand why she does. Good lighthearted fun.

Ooh, treat yourself to the Georgette Heyer, @BeaAndBen I'm living in her world this year.

Thank you for the warm welcome all! The longest wall in my living room is all book shelf and there are far more on there that I haven’t read than I have. I like to think of it as future potential 😂

@BeaAndBen have you moved on to books 2 and 3 after the Poppy War?

I enjoyed The Poppy War too, Sunflower.

Today I finished book 32 of the year - Oathbringer, book 3 of the Stormlight Archive and a whopping 1239 pages. I have to read these balanced on a cushion because they are too heavy to hold up for long!

I think I'll treat myself to a light Georgette Heyer before embarking on book 4

Welcome @VanGoSunflowers

Hi @VanGoSunflowers of course you can join in, and if there are any lurkers who're thinking about joining, please do! It's never too late and you don't have to read 50. Nobody cares - we're here for the book talk, not the numbers.

Maybe I need to give Tomorrow x 3 another go. I couldn't get into it when it I started it last year and abandoned it very quickly.

Welcome @VanGoSunflowersI am a fan of a DNF myself if a book isn’t grabbing me in the first 20% or so

Please may I join?
I don’t think I can hit 50 this year though. I fell in to a bit of a reading slump at the start of the year when I tried to read Brimstone by Callie heart after really enjoying the first book Quicksilver. Brimstone is just awful, I was trying to push through but couldn’t finish it. So looked for recommendations of books that are similar to my last favourite read which was Alchemised by SenLinYu and settled on The Poppy War by RF Kuang. I have just finished it and have the sequel lined up ready to go. I enjoyed it so much. Genuinely think it was a great read, although very dark and gritty. Moral of the story for me is to not push through if I’m not enjoying a book!

38 Watermarks edited by Tanya Shadrick
This is a slim collection of writing about swimming outdoors, divided into sections for the sea; rivers; lakes, ponds and pools and lidos. It’s a mix of very short prose pieces (not really stories in the main, although some of them are) and poetry. There’s some beautiful writing, some of which really captures the joy and slight trepidation of swimming under the sky. Recommended for water lovers!

39 Cruel Acts by Jane Casey
I think this is my favourite Maeve Kerrigan so far, but I’ve thought that about a few of them, so that may just be driven by recency. I thought this one was great, though. A really good mystery, tension between Maeve and the emerging new female detective and the usual touch of personal devastation thrown in. Plus obviously continued endangerment of Maeve's life. My favourite thing about these books is the central core characters and I can’t say too much about this because spoilers, but Casey writes human emotions so well. My heart twisted several times in this book, and not because of the murder plotline.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin

Sam and Sadie meet in the children's hospital, aged 12 and 11, when he is recovering from a car accident and she is visiting her sister. They bond hard over gaming, fall out, but reconnect in Boston when they are both students.

I loved this. IIRC it was a bit Marmite on here, but I really liked the way the relationships were drawn and the strong sense of character.