50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Five

Well, it certainly cannibalises Jane Austen.

@RazorstormUnicorn thanks, just checked my Wish List and got Japanese Gothic

Checked my Amazon wishlist today and there seems to be mid-month deals on!

Never Whistle at Night (Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology) - I got this as fairly random insta rec and am hoping it's what I wanted to read when I got and was disappointed by an anthology last year. Can't remember the name. Apparently it's not even on Storygraph!
Solace House by Will MacLean - Can't remember where this one came from but at 99p it's worth a go
The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine - Long listed for the women's prize and to me sounded better/more interesting than a lot of others
City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky - I either like or love his books so always a must buy for me at 99p

I am 70% of the way through East of Eden and wanting to pick it up and read it all the time which surprised me as I found Grapes of Wrath an effort.

@Southeastdweller Interesting question. You could read Quartet in Autumn as showing the practical downsides of singledom - insecure housing in some cases, a slight trepidation about what to do over Christmas and holidays - but the characters themselves aren't especially yearning to be coupled up, at least as I read it.

A few more reads:

73. Brat Ferrar, Josephine Tey
By coincidence, my second book in a row about someone showing up eight years after their death, although books were written nearly seventy years apart. We're in the horsey English squirearchy, when a missing twin shows up just before the twenty-first birthday celebrations to claim the inheritance. Not my favourite Tey book but redolent of an era.

74. In a Summer Season, Elizabeth Taylor
We spend time with a comfortable middle-class woman, her two nearly grown children and her unsuitable second husband. Not a huge amount happens, apart from a flurry at the very end - this is one of those novels where we spend time in people's heads and understand what their life feels like to them. I'm not sure this will stay with me, but there were some enjoyable moments - I liked Aunt Ethel taking tea with her old cellmate from Holloway (they were imprisoned as suffragettes in their youth) and the housekeeper agreeing to play along as the perfect old-fashioned servant. And a lady sorting jumble has a hot flush, puts her cardigan down for a moment and is annoyed to find it marked up for fourpence. For a novel published in 1961, it was franker about sex and menopause than I expected.

75. The Toll-Gate, Georgette Heyer
Unusually for Heyer, the romance largely happens in the background while in the foreground our hero gets caught up in investigating the mystery of the missing gatekeeper. Not her best, but there's still fun to be had.

25 - Hungry Eyes - Dawn O'Porter

O'Porter's memoir is about food, family, friendship, love and loss, and I thought it was pretty good. The writing feels conversational, like you're sitting down for a chat with someone you're gradually getting to know.
While her childhood was marked by loss, there's also a strong sense of being surrounded by people who loved and cared for her. Food runs through every part of the story, becoming a source of comfort, connection and identity. It's also a fascinating (and sometimes horrifying!) reminder of the attitudes towards food, dieting and body image that many of us grew up with in the 80s and 90s.
The recipes sprinkled throughout were a lovely touch. Not every one was for me, but they were all simple and achievable, and I particularly enjoyed the Scottish influences and her wholesome wedding menu.
I did find the repeated depictions of binge drinking and binge eating quite uncomfortable at times, but that's probably the whole point! - and it's what makes the memoir so honest. O'Porter is refreshingly open about the difficult parts of her relationship with food and her body.
The final chapters, where she reflects on the aunt and uncle who raised her and the importance of the food shared around their table, were especially moving.
More than anything, I connected with her belief that feeding people is an act of love and care, and that's probably the main reason I rate the book.
That, and the fact that the title is brilliant ;)

This was an ARC - due out on 18th June I believe.

34 Making It So - Patrick Stewart
Autobiography of the Star Trek star, lovely to hear him read it himself on Audible in his stentorian tones.

35 The Starving Saints - Caitlin Starling
Medieval-esque horror fantasy - the castle of Aymar has been under siege for six months, people are starving, so naturally people start eating people… Not great writing but I loved the concepts - the religion based around saint worship and honey as sacrament, and obligations of fealty encompassing both the human and supernatural realms.

Signed up to a kindle unlimited trial (99p for two months) to read this as would have paid 99p for it otherwise. Which led to…

36 Hellmouth - Giles Kristian
Violent medieval hist fic/horror short - I loved Kristian’s creation of atmosphere and military detail, but ending was a bit daft and very abrupt.

I have a feeling more Kindle Unlimited guilty pleasures involving medieval/fantasy gore may follow. Although I’ve also checked out The Other Bennet Sister, which if the TV series is a faithful adaptation at least, shouldn’t include any cannibalism.

A few more of mine.
37 Three days in June. Anne Tyler Very much Anne Tyler. A small family drama set around a wedding. A good short read, beautiful characters of course but lacking a bit of substance for me and not one of her best in my opinion. She knows what she's good at though and sticks with it.
38 The Astral Library. Kate Quinn Started by hating this book but kind of loved it by the end. The magical library allows the needy to live inside a book of their choosing. Has a rather noisy and annoying protagonist. I didn't much care for her or the super woke cliché of a love interest or indeed the easy dismissal of the constraints on public services but I just loved the idea of living in a book! I read a lot of books that I soon forget, but I think I'll remember this one, it did have charm.
39 My Husband's Wife. Alice Feeney No. Just no. It's a free falling hot mess. We plummet through improbabilities like there's never going to be another opportunity to chuck them in a storyline. I won't be trying this author again.
40 London Falling. Patrick Radden Keefe. Inquiry into the very suspicious death of a London teen and the consequent cover up. Good but depressing read. As everyone else, I wanted more answers. Trust is a dangerous thing. May his memory be a blessing.

39. Deadman's Pool - Kate Rhodes

Ninth in the Isles of Scilly murder series which sees ex Met policeman, Ben Kitto, back in the islands where he grew up and trying to find another murderer. I like the relationships Ben has with colleagues, friends etc from book to book and enjoy the familiarity of the characters and the setting. Failed to spot the murderer (again....).

Ha, very true, @Southeastdweller ! But Quartet in Autumn is a bit of an outlier, as Terpsichore said.

@BestIsWest , that makes sense. I do think her books are rather marmite. When we read Crampton Hodnet for my book group, about half of us loved it and the other half were underwhelmed.

Going back to Pym, it’s not that I don’t detect that it’s meant to be humorous and observant and not that I don’t see the side-eye towards the men, more that it just bores me. I keep persisting because so many people whose views I respect tell me how wonderful she is. We had a C of E canon in the family and I really didn’t like him much and I saw how the women in the family and the village treated him with adoration so it’s not as if that world is totally alien to me either. Not that I need to have experienced a particular world to enjoy a book (Georgian Bath for example). Maybe it will click one day.

Anyway, on to John Lanchester. I don’t like these people either so far.

18 The Architect's Apprentice - Elif Shafak

A small Indian boy runs away from his unhappy home in the company of a baby elephant (a gift for the Ottoman Sultan) and makes a life for himself in Istanbul. Alongside his duties as elephant tamer in the Royal Menagerie he is engaged as an apprentice to the renowned architect Sinan (a real-life character responsible for many of Istanbul's most prestigious 16th Century buildings).

This book took me an absolute age to finish. It is beautifully written and spans decades of Jahan's life involving his unrequited love for a princess, his wholehearted and reciprocated love for his elephant, his love and respect for his Master, an ongoing partnership with a Gypsy family and quite a lot of Ottoman history. As such it didn't feel like one to rush through and I read it in small chunks at quiet times.

• The Outsider - Jane Casey

Published in November 2023, this is a linked book to the Maeve Kerrigan series and follows a case-in-the-life-of undercover cop Rob Langton. 99p on kindle at present.

Rob is tailing a target criminal in his bashed up car and under his Mark Howell identity. Fortunately he saves the guy’s life after a heart attack/car crash, then in a Dickie Roperesque moment, he ends up being taken onto the payroll as a Junior Thug. Mayhem and plots ensue. A good read and I liked Rob.

Book 34 was A Short Stay In Hell by Steven L Peck. As well being a short stay in Hell, it's also a short book, as it's novella, and I read it in one sitting.

It's narrated by Soren, a Mormon from Utah, who dies in his 40s and finds himself allocated to a specific form of Hell, which is a giant library. Before you think 'But that doesn't sound like Hell at all', this particular library happens to contain every single possible book that could ever be written. They don't have to make sense. They could just be the letter 'A' written 100,000 times, so there are billions and billions of books which make zero sense - in fact, whenever one of the inhabitants of Hell even finds a recognisable word by chance, there's a sense of wonderment and celebration. To escape Hell, the damned have to search the library to find the book that happens to contain their own life story.

I really loved this book, although I'm very conscious that it wouldn't be for everyone. It's a bleak existential fable and it's a tiny book with a huge scope. But I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

Book 35, also on a Hell-related theme, is Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin. The film is one of my all-time favourites (although sadly directed by a rapist, so there's that) and I've had a little flurry of reading books in the last week or two that have been adapted into films that became more famous than the books - Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Stepford Wives - which was something that I decided after a discussion in some creative writing classes I've been doing. Only a couple of chapters into Rosemary's Baby so far, but I'm enjoying it a great deal.

Also listening to the audiobook of the fifth and currently last book in the DI Wilkins(es) series by Simon Mason, The Dangerous Stranger. The plot was clearly inspired by the racist riots of 2024, but with everything that's happened in Belfast etc in recent weeks, it feels uncomfortably topical. So that will be book 36.

Yes to everything you said about Pym, @bibliomania ! Great point about how she shows that NOT getting married can be a great thing 😂

I love Barbara Pym. She's great at describing the pleasures of an unrequited crush and how much more enjoyable it can be than being stuck with the person as a husband. Some Tame Gazelle in particular - nobody ends up with the object of their affection (apart from some peripheral characters) and they're all the happier for it. Her characters seem quiet and conventional on the surface, but their lives are still interesting and surprising to them. She's the doyenne of anti-romance - I love Crampton Hodnet for its account of the least enthusiastic elopement ever.

Pym isn’t twee at all! Her books are generally set in genteel circles and often have church-related scenes and characters, but they’re not twee. Her writing is acerbic and observant and funny, and actually subtly subversive, especially about the lives and roles of women at the time she was writing. Excellent Women and A Glass Of Blessings are both brilliant in my opinion.

I am a Barbara Pym fan. I like the observational writing and the humour. Agree with @cassandreon most enjoyable ones (of the ones I have read).

I read Some Tame Gazelle last year - i found it in a very old fashioned Welsh holiday cottage. I had zero expectations. I was a bit bemused by it tbh but it has really stayed with me - she definitely has a bold style. I'm not sure I would read another one.

Im delving into the fog of memory, but I think I quite liked Excellent Women. I enjoyed the period detail and although gentle I thought it was quite evocative of a certain type of loneliness (if I am rembering right). However, Some Tame Gazelle set my teeth on edge to say the least. I know someone who really enjoyed it though, despite being from a world far removed from the one Pym describes. I can remember us discussing it at the time - I was surprised how much she enjoyed it. I think some people just warm to the style more than others.

The French Vendetta Simon Michael
This was book 11 in a series of Legal Thrillers. I've not read any of the others, and dont feel that you need to read them all.
Dual timeline, set in 1940s France and 1970 England/France. In the 1970 timeline, barrister Charles, his wife and child go on holiday to France. They end up staying at a remote farmhouse and end up caught up in a vendetta between those who opposed the Nazis and those who collaborated.
In the 1940s, some Jews are living under false papers. Rumours abound. Someone blabs some resistance secrets to the Nazis.
Thoroughly enjoyable, and a lot of the minor plot points were based on the authors family history.

I’m another one who didn’t get on with Pym when I tried to read one of her books a few years ago - if I remember correctly I was bored and didn’t finish. It’s odd because on paper she sounds right up my street. Perhaps I should give her another try.

Oh gosh, I love Barbara Pym. That said, I didn't warm to her straight away. I came back to her after a delay of some years and then adored her. Maybe this is because I had become a more boring middle-aged person. But I hope not! 😂

It's true that not much happens in terms of plot. Her novels are all about the tongue-in-cheek observation of daily life, and human nature. There is often a single woman protagonist (a spinster if I can use that old-fashioned word) who wryly watches and observes everyone around her. There is also an amazing sense of time and place; you feel like you've stepped into the world of 1930s/40s/50s Britain.

I find her novels very restful when I'm stressed. Her characters worry about trivia, and we as readers can see that it's trivia, but they can't... it reminds me that the everyday stuff I get so anxious about in my own life is not actually that important.

Jane and Prudence isn't my favourite. And @terpsichore is quite right to say that Quarter in Autumn isn't like Pym's other novels. The protagonists are older, and the narrative overall is bleaker.

My favourite Pyms are:
Crampton Hodnet: satire of north Oxford, amazingly well-observed, and Pym wrote it when she was only an undergrad herself, which amazes me. It was published posthumously.

Some Tame Gazelle: Pym's first published novel. As so often with Pym, the male characters are comically self-important and the women see right through them.

Less Than Angels: a satire of academic anthropologists. Pym herself worked for years as an editor at the International African Institute in London, and she draws on her own experiences when writing this novel.

These are my favourites, but they're not necessarily her best; they're just the ones I loved the most. (I like academic satire.) What draws me to Pym I think is that she recognises silly human foibles so well, but doesn't necessarily condemn any of her characters, no matter how blinkered they are. She satirises them but also recognises their humanity.

Sorry for the long post; I'm procrastinating and am spending way too much time online at the moment...

Recent reads

The Ratline by Philippe Sands
Tells the story of Otto Wachter, an Austrian Nazi who was responsible for running a large area of Poland during the Second World War, and the Holocaust, who escaped at the end of the war and died before he could use ‘the Ratline’ to travel to South America. His youngest son, Horst, convinced his father was a ‘good’ Nazi asked Sands to look into the history. The book is well written and deeply researched, and reading about Horst’s blinkers and his awful late mother Charlotte is fascinating. But the book doesn’t really look into the Ratline much at all, which was what had drawn me to it in the first place. It’s an excellent history, just not the one I was looking for.

The Silent Places by Sarah Mellor
This is the second in a series of police procedurals set in 1980s Liverpool. In this one DS Leigh Borrowdale has recently returned from maternity leave and has to work with ex boyfriend and father of her child DI Des Chung in the investigation of the murder of a suspected child murderer. The protagonists are outsiders in this setting which makes for an interesting perspective, but this one wasn’t as good as the first. It took a while to get going properly and the subplot about Leigh’s missing brother was more interesting. That said I’ll give at least a third one a go if and when it’s released.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
I had seen the movie of this before so knew the general storyline, which I thought was just okay- Irish girl emigrates to the US away from family- well trodden roads. Toibin’s writing is lovely and I did feel emotional at one part of the story. However, I don’t think it would have as much acclaim had it been written by a woman (which a gazillion of these stories have been)

The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens
Winner of the 1970 Booker Prize. Norman Zweck is seeing silver fish everywhere. A former lawyer, he’s now an addict with poor mental health and his father, the rabbi, and sister Bella have him sectioned. So starts a story which is at times darkly comic but also very moving of family relationships, social norms, secrets and mental health. I loved the rabbi, and enjoyed this book much more than I expected to.