50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Five

Yes, as I read on i could see there was a lot that was distinctively Japanese about it - and also, it started out as a play, and I can see it working much better in that format.

@Terpsichore I quite liked it. But I think Japanese cosy is very fable like. The repetitiveness is a feature not a bug! But definitely an acquired taste as I realised at my book club where I was the only one who liked Water Moon.

No problem, I quite understand.

If you decide to go searching it’s in the BFI Modern Classics series, published in 2002. 😊

I enjoyed your review @Terpsichore 😄

@Terpsichore I agree with your review. Lots of people love it though!

That’s extremely kind of you @RomanMum but I’m strictly incognito on here. Not because of other members but because MN is leaky like a sieve and so I don’t put any details anywhere, not even a number for WhatsApp via PM. Thank you anyway

43. Before the Coffee Gets Cold - Toshizaku Kawaguchi

I love Japan, have been there several times and indeed have visited many Japanese coffee-shops, but I can safely say I'd never have read this if it hadn’t been required as a book-club choice.

At the Funiculi Funicula coffee shop in Tokyo (huh?) it’s well known that customers can go back in time if they follow certain Rules. These Rules are precise, onerous, and repeated so many, many times during the course of the book that you'll want to scream when you sense them approaching yet again. Not least is the requirement for time-travellers to drink their coffee before it gets cold, or they'll be stuck in the past. A number of stereotypes whose clothing and eye shape are described in lieu of character then proceed to undergo the process so they can achieve…..erm, not very much? A bit of mild personal development, maybe, but as one of the Rules is that precisely nothing in the present can be altered by going back in the past, this all seems a bit academic.

It's so clunkily written - or maybe badly translated - that I was astonished to learn that three further helpings of this mawkish stuff have been published, and millions of copies have been sold.

Now, how to say all this really politely at the book club……🤔 😱

If you PM/DM me I can send you my copy!

As someone who has seen The Usual Suspects many times and even plotted out the various strands of the story in a notebook to try and work it all out, that sounds great @RomanMum

I’ve read 18/100 on the new list (which I do prefer to the earlier one) which just tells me I’m not the sort of person who reads list-worthy books 😊. Two heist-themed books from my slowly-reducing RWYO pile:

27. Spitting Gold – Carmella Lowkis

Paris 1866: Sylvie Devereux is reconnected with her estranged sister Charlotte to plan one final con to finance their ill father’s medical treatment. Their past crimes were based around conning wealthy families as fraudulent spirit mediums – and they will need to deploy every trick to terrify their latest marks into handing over the family treasure. Until they start experiencing paranormal horrors themselves…

This had it all – history, gothic settings, suspense, plot twists and sapphic romance to boot. I preferred Laura Shepherd-Robinson's The Art of a Lie in terms of the plot development, but I can see how this has been compared to the work of Sarah Waters. It was a solid debut novel, but for me nothing exceptional.

28. The Usual Suspects – Ernest Larsen

A short book, more an overlong essay, studying the making of and themes behind the 1990s thriller/heist movie. It was moderately interesting - film studies or film-making students would probably appreciate it more as there was a lot of perceptive stuff to say about the film.

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford
I hadn’t read this before because the author’s name made me think he might be a bit of a patronising arse. By the end of the book the jury was still out on that, but I did largely enjoy it.
Iris is a secretary on the London stock exchange during WW2. She’s a bit of a fast cat and one evening in a club poaches a young radio engineer, Geoff, from under the nose of society girl Lalage Cunningham. Lalage/Lall has a Cunning Plan to let that nice Mr Hitler win, involving an ancient Order and some Angels.
Liked: the Angels, the construction of the path to Nonesuch, the wartime stock exchange minutiae, the humour, the passages of beautiful writing on faith, hope and loss.
Hated: he can’t write women and he especially can’t write women’s sexuality - the Ick was real, people <shudder>. I particularly disliked how he tied in Iris’s lifestyle with the ending (vague to avoid spoilers).
It did keep me reading, with quite a lot of eyerolling at the self satisfied Male Writer Shows How He Writes Female Character signalling. The plot was great, a jolly terrific adventure, chaps! Deeply irritating cliffhanger ending To Be Continued but if I have to spend the sequel cringing at Iris frotting her way back to her true destiny then it’s going to be a DNF.

think the first volume of the trilogy was also a read on the Rather Dated book threads? Which I always think of joining but haven’t managed to yet. There’s not enough time to read all the books I wish I could read!

It was. Would be great to have you aboard @cassandre but I totally understand (and sympathise) with the too-many-books problem!

I chose to write a Comparative Literature dissertation as part of my degree in my final year. Because there were only 2 staff in a little corner of the French department, there was only one subject available - the short story. I think the reading list included Katherine Mansfield, whereas the other lecturer in the 2nd year had taught a course on The Novel of Adolescence and Self Development - and the books were old and white but there were lots of women.

I did draw on quite a few African-American writers though I didn't come across so many outside the UK/US and France at that time. Many of the stories I worte about came from Angela Carter's anthology Wayward Girls and Wicked Women. One author has become the 2nd most famous painter in Mexico now - after Frida Kahlo (1st) but probably before Kahlo's husband Diego Rivera - and I think Kahlo is well known outside Mexico whereas I'm not sure her husband is.

37 on that list for me - quite a few of them are more ones I know I’ve read (in my late teens/ 20s probably) and can’t remember a thing about though.

Finished my number 23 of the year Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
This was a RWYO, had been hanging around unfinished as when I started it previously I just found it irritating and not as good at what it was trying to do as say Wodehouse for example. This time I rather enjoyed it, goes to show how much your mood at time of reading influences your experience of the book.

@AgualusasL0ver It’s a man having a midlife crisis against the backdrop of memories of Salazar’s Portugal and the Carnation Revolution. For those interested in the latter, in the world of fiction Perreira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi is vastly superior (and would make my top 20 never mind top 100).

I thought that Pereirra Maintains was excellent too. I gave my dad a copy - he was scarily highbrow - and it was a hit. He had learned several languages including Chinese, so I could only give him books in translation if he had never learned the original language. Although this may have been translated from Italian not Portuguese, I don't think he spoke/read either. he now has dementia but listens to audiobooks all the time on headphones, and I'm sure he's listening to old classics not any old rubbish.

You can still get through AQA A level English Lit without doing a single text by a non white male, unbelievably. Apart from the odd poem.

@AgualusasL0ver I think your view is entirely understandable, and doesn’t mean you’re not a feminist! To boast about rescuing women writers from obscurity has become a bit of a cliché. What interesting things does the 'rescuer' have to say about said women writers, would be my question.

That said, things have dramatically changed over the course of my own lifetime when it comes to including women writers and BAME writers in the literary canon. When I studied French literature at university in the 1980s, there was an introductory literary anthology used called Poèmes, Pièces, Prose. I found it in a secondhand bookshop a few years ago, and bought it out of nostalgia. I was amazed to see that there was not a single French/Francophone woman writer or non-white writer featured in the entire anthology! This was a 700+ page anthology published by Oxford University Press in 1973. What amazes me almost equally is that when I was an undergrad, dutifully studying this anthology, I never noticed the fact that ALL the many authors included were white men. It just seemed normal to me.

So in that sense, things have very much changed for the better. Needless to say, there were many, many amazing French women writers and Francophone post-colonial writers who could have been included in that anthology. The editors just didn’t see fit to include them. Extraordinary.

On a related topic, there’s a new antiquarian/secondhand bookshop that has just opened in my city. The people who run it seem lovely. But I did notice walking round that the (carefully curated) selection of books was all very much the Great Western Canon. Almost no books by women or writers of colour at all. I felt that the bookshop was designed to appeal to US tourists, who think of England as the land of Shakespeare and Dickens and the Inklings, and aren’t really interested in the full range of Anglophone literature. I felt like the bookshop badly needed some Virago Classics, like Stella Gibbons or Elizabeth Taylor. Or Edna O’Brien!

On the subject of O’Brien, I read her Country Girls trilogy last year and thought it was great, although a little bleak. I think the first volume of the trilogy was also a read on the Rather Dated book threads? Which I always think of joining but haven’t managed to yet. There’s not enough time to read all the books I wish I could read!

I have read 49 or 50 on the Guardian list as have only read 2 of the Neoplitan novels. Two more I am currently reading.

@AgualusasL0ver I didn’t love The Last Train to Lisbon. I had to switch to audio to finish it. Shame as I liked the opening.

Just to say I didn’t mean to denigrate Mary Beard; I may not see eye to eye with her on every issue, but I think she’s great. It’s interesting that she’s the chair of this year’s Booker. She’s very much a historian rather than a literary critic, but I’m sure she’ll do a good job.

Anyway, the world would be a worse place if we only read books by writers whose views we agreed with on all points. Sometimes reading is primarily for comfort, but I also see reading as about expanding your horizons and looking at the world through someone else’s perspective.

There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to read someone’s books either though. I’ve decided not to read any more Lionel Shriver as I find her anti-immigration views so reprehensible. That said I didn’t like her writing much anyway, so that wasn’t a difficult decision!

Then there are writers who seem to be really good people in real life, but whose books just don’t speak to me. Matt Haig for instance. And Yael van der Wouden who wrote The Safekeep. I’m sure there are others.

The world of books, like the world of people, is a rich and multicoloured tapestry 😁

I have just finished Lucy Steeds' The Artist. This really is beautifully written and evocative. I liked reading a book set just after WWI rather than in it. Themes such as control, possession and trauma are well explored. Her creation of Tartuffe is so convincing I did check if he was real.

Quite a slow read but sometimes that is a good thing as I have raced through a lot of very average , plot driven stuff recently. I look forward to more form Steeds.

I'm assuming some people named the whole series and some individual books form within a series so they probably then counted that as one 'book'.

I read the Country Girls when I was about 15 (early 1970s). I've got rid of 95% of my paper books but I still have Edna O'Brien. I might buy one or two on kindle to re-read because I can't read the print or hold the book very easily now.

I've read about 25 on that list and have several on my tbr. For some reason I've never got round to reading Madam Bovary but have a copy.

What’s interesting to me is I have read 32 on that list, and 35 on the critics list, really not a lot in it. They don’t seem greatly different to me, the readers one is broader and less euro centric.

Readers, I have FINALLY finished a book:

Last Train to Lisbon Pascal Mercier, trans by Barbara Harshav from German

The first 40% I was still slumping and the least 60% I read over the last two days. This is a slow book about a man in his late 50s who teaches Greek and Latin in Bern. A chance meeting with a Portuguese woman about to throw herself off a bridge and stumbling across a rare Portuguese book sends him on a journey to Lisbon where he tracks down the family and friends of the writer. The ‘writer’ thinks himself a philosopher and there are long sprawling italicised passages from his ‘book’. The protagonist clearly values and aspires to him.

It’s a man having a midlife crisis against the backdrop of memories of Salazar’s Portugal and the Carnation Revolution. For those interested in the latter, in the world of fiction Perreira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi is vastly superior (and would make my top 20 never mind top 100). I’d read more by Mercier if it appeared in the deals but wouldn’t seek him out.

45 for me and 10 DNFs. I’m counting LOTR as finished even though I had to give it back to the person I’d borrowed it off with one chapter to go and I’ve never gone back to read it. I reckon if I made it that far I can count it.

I'd say I've read around thirty books from that list.

I'm counting Les Mis (in progress!) and also Ulysses although I listened to Ulysses as an audio book and most of it went over my head.
Also, I never got round to reading the last of the Elena Ferrante quartet.