50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Six

I love my book club. We just celebrated our 10th anniversary. 3 of us started it when our kids were leaving nursery, and we each invited one other person to join. We've had various iterations over the years but we've had a solid 8 for the past 5 years who all truly love reading. We take it in turns to chose a book and generally read literary fiction, but have done non fiction too, and one play and one graphic novel. It's definitely been one of my favourite things about the last decade. We do make sure we discuss the book properly, but then do tend to chat about children, menopause, TV and various other things!

Great review @RazorstormUnicorn! I last read it 10 years ago - maybe time for a re read.

74. Hekate by Nikita Gill - read this for my in person book club. Mine is a Chapter 25 club and the books are chosen by head office based on the genre group members have voted for. This has led to quite a varied selection but though I read widely across genres, many of them have not been very impressive. This one is a verse novel about the Greek goddess. I believe it is for YA audiences and it really shows. The poetry has some lovely parts but is mostly pedestrian. The themes - women's identities, how power corrupts - are very clearly stated, leaving nothing for the reader to do. There is no thinking or reflecting required and I find I need at least a little of that from my reading matter. Overall, underwhelming.

Yay another for the MBF fan club!
I found all the books and audio books easily available on BorrowBox and Libby if you have access to those.

I left my last book club when the choice was to read a Caitlin Moran - we were supposed to be able to blackball a book if we wanted to, but no one listened to me! This was the last straw for me - the books were becoming increasingly not my thing and one woman was dominating everything and everyone else seemed entirely in her thrall. I don't miss it tbh - too much talk of schools and not enough of the books.

Excellent, thanks @GrannieMainland

I didn’t love the Mary Kelly although I think I’m in a minority of one. I dug my review out and whilst I recognised the quality of the writing and especially the use of landscape, my ultimate thought was, “It made me feel a bit grubby”. Grim and bleak as fuck. Maybe it didn’t help that I read it in a post surgery, drug-induced haze.

Born To Run by Christopher McDougall

A re-read as I am having a midlife crisis and started trail running.

I am not sure the science stacks up, the barefoot or barely there trainers seem to have been a fad or remained niche, as in all the shops my only option were for very cushioned trainers.

I am not all bothered by if the theory that we were born to run is right or not, this remains one of the most inspiring books I have ever read, and I will be thinking about it as I lace up my trainers in a bit. The misfits who wander into the copper canyons to race the Tarahumara warm my heart, the unforgiving terrain sounds beautiful and I want in on the adventure!

And of course I smiled all the way through knowing that at least @Tarahumara must love this book as much as me!

Thank you @GrannieMainlandwill be a perfect holiday read for me so going to download it now. I also have The Forbidden Notebook with me after all the Alba de Cespedes love from @cassandre and others

Thanks @GrannieMainland have snapped that up too!

Jane Casey’s new book which is a standalone thriller is 99p today - I snapped it up when the baby was awake in the early hours!

So far, I am definitely in my book group for the human connection rather than the books! I don't mind reading some crappy books if it means making or maintaining friendships - this thread can be an outlet for my true feelings about the books, and we live in hope of some better choices to come.

Interesting conversation about The Eights Vs Gaudy Night. I haven't read the latter although it is on my tbr (99% sure I have a charity shop copy on my shelf). I'd understood (almost certainly from discussion here) that the Lord Peter - Harriet romance was a slow burn which finally comes to a head in this book, so I had resolved to read the whole thing in order from Strong Poison onwards. Unfortunately I didn't especially love that one so the project faltered. I think I might skip to Gaudy Night just for the compare and contrast with Eights. I do love a slow burn though (sigh)

@HagCymraeg interestingly, I LOVED Lincoln in the Bardo, erection guy and all! I found it very strange, completely original and surprisingly moving. So I am half pro and half anti your book group friend's recommendations.

Thank you @cassandre for the reminder of the Mary Kelly. I remember @Terpsichore 's fantastic review. I think it's got a bit buried in my ever-expanding wish list.

32 - My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
The multitudinous cast and my shocking brain fog made me fear I would never get my head round who was doing what to whom BUT all of a sudden it clicked and then I raced through it, soaking up the dusty, noisy, grotty parts of 1950s Naples. Now I need to get my hands on the next instalment...

DP not DO - I don’t know who DO is or what he bought

Nice to see you again @HagCymraeg

I have been to the excellent Topping and Company in Bath today. I bought Hop, Step and Jump by Winifred Watson who wrote Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day although I understand this is very different. DO bought a signed copy of John of John so we were both very pleased.

Thanks everyone for the congrats- I knew you lot would understand the high of finishing it 🎉

37. The Spy and the Traitor by Ben MacIntyre

Much reviewed on here, it has been sitting on my book shelf for ages (actually my husband's book).

it is about the KGB colonel, Gordievsky, who spied for M16 in the 80s. I found the latter sections when he is back in Russia thrilling and sped through them but I also found a lot of the early stuff pretty tedious, which is why I haven't given it a bold. I also felt like I was being sold a line about how he spied for such highly ethical reasons whereas other spies were just in it for the money or attention - some of it sounded like M16 propaganda to me. But the last few chapters were worth it.

Finished Catherine Chidgey's The Book of Guilt, the more quality read of my sunbed selections, must say. It is very good, similar in tone to Pet but the premise is alternative history (re the culmination of WW2 and I quite liked the idea that Nazis may not be the only baddies)) and dystopia : it's not original: smatterings of The Chrysalids and , dare I say it NLMG (sorry!) but more plot driven than NLMG (hoorah!) with a sympathetic , tortured narrator. It's clever - a bit longer than it needs to be but ultimately an unsettling and thought provoking novel. Chidgey captures a naive childlike voice very well.

I read somewhere (probably on here) about a book club where they just agree a theme and then everyone chooses their own book on that theme (which could be fiction or non fiction), so nobody is forced to read something they don’t like the sound of and there’s the opportunity to find out from others about books you might like. I thought that sounded a great idea and I wouldn’t mind going to a book club like that.

@HagCymraeg - sounds like you’re way more organised than my group! We choose the next book to read each time we meet.

@Terpsichore she’s a wonderful writer. Not a word wasted. It’s a real shame there aren’t more of her novels in print.

My uni library has some of her out of print titles but they’re non circulating, which means I’d have to sit and read them in an actual library! I may well do this; it just feels weirdly wrong to me to sit in the uni library and read for pleasure not research. (I’d probably feel less guilty if I were making faster progress with the actual supposed research!)

Delighted you liked Due to a Death, @cassandre! I’m guilty of boring on about Mary Kelly so I’ll just say that when I read it (as a totally random charity shop buy) I can barely remember ever feeling more immersively plunged into a novel from the first couple of sentences.

Correction: the Levy novel is about Stein not by Stein! Argh

43. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein 4/5
    The first work I’ve ever read by Stein (and apparently her most accessible). I’m a Deborah Levy fan, and Levy’s newest novel is by Stein, so I thought I would read Stein first in order to form my own impressions. This was a very striking read; Stein is frustrating and intriguing in equal measure. She wrote this memoir (about her years in Paris from roughly 1907-1932) in the voice of her lover Toklas, which enables the narrator Toklas to proclaim what a genius Stein is. It’s a work of self-promotion, but there’s also plenty of irony and humour running through it (the fact that the self-promotion is not disguised whatsoever somehow makes it more palatable). Commas and capital letters are in short supply; this is a deliberate stylistic choice on Stein’s part. There were many names I recognised (mostly of famous Cubist artists), and many names I didn’t, but I mostly let it all wash over me. Stein entertained the artists in her salon (like a kind of honorary man), and Toklas cooked for everyone and entertained their wives. I found the memoir more gripping when it moved into the war years; perhaps because Stein and Toklas were driving ambulances round to help the wounded, and the narrative seemed less self-indulgent. I’m not sure I like Stein exactly, but I admire the boldness and originality of her voice. I now want to read Hemingway’s A Movable Feast, which apparently describes the same period as Stein’s memoir (he was part of her circle).

44. My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Deborah Levy 4/5
    This is presented as a novel, but it’s in the first person and reads very much like Levy’s trilogy of ‘living autobiography’, which I adored. This is a short, witty, very readable novel and I loved it. The unnamed narrator is in Paris, hanging out with two other quirky women whom she has met there, and working on an essay about Stein that seems unlikely ever to be finished (though clearly the novel itself is the finished ‘essay’!). I’m tempted to give the book five stars, but it’s perhaps a little slight; it’s less about plot than about a sequence of stimulating ideas (though that in itself is very Stein-like). The parallels between Stein and Levy herself are evident: both are bold, independent women writers with a sensuous, playful streak, who write about themselves and who emerge as larger-than-life figures. I think Levy has done a great thing by reminding our generation of Stein and of what an interesting thinker and character she was.

45. Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers 5/5
    A reread after many years for my work book group. It was a denser read than I remembered (though all of Sayers’ detective novels are dense). It remains my favourite of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels. It’s quite a hybrid book: a mystery, a love story and a university novel. Sayers shows off her scholarly credentials, with plenty of (untranslated!) Latin quotations, and epigraphs to each chapter that consist of arcane 17th century English poetry. I have a soft spot for this kind of retro erudition (though I’m a bit embarrassed to say so). The great strength of the novel I would say is its vivid evocation of what life was like in an Oxford women’s college in the 1930s. The women tutors are stern, committed to their vocation, yet also quite catty and fallible. Most of them are unmarried, and a big theme of the novel is whether women academics can have both a family life and a career (the implied answer unfortunately seems to be no). Sayers herself had only one child, an illegitimate son, who was raised by foster parents and who didn’t discover the biological identity of his mother till after her death… so clearly the tension between scholarship and maternity played a role in Sayers’ own life. Much as I love this novel (which has been called the first feminist detective novel) I was struck this time by how conservative it was in terms of class. The ‘scouts’ or domestic staff are locked into college at night (unlike the women dons, who have more freedom). And Peter Wimsey himself is a kind of madly idealised figure (Wimsey = whimsy?) who is rich, good-looking, witty, clever and the aristocrat par excellence. A thought-provoking read and one I would go back to yet again in the future.

46. Due to a Death, Mary Kelly 5/5
    I bought this earlier in the year on @Terpsichore's recommendation. I’ve read one Kelly novel already, The Spoilt Kill, which features the same private detective (Hedley Nicholson). However, while The Spoilt Kill is narrated by Nicholson himself, Due to a Death is narrated by a young woman who lives in the small village where Nicholson has decided to stay for awhile. I was blown away by this novel; it’s very bleak, but extremely well-written. Three village couples, all rather unhappily married, interact with one another, and the tensions and fractures are gradually laid bare. Great characterisation, and a feminist subplot involving unwed pregnancy and abortion.

Belated thanks @Terpsichore for the tip about the Observer article with Mark Haddon. He does sound like he's still having a tough time of it. Very sad but at least he's still writing in whatever way he can.

Adding my voice to the general congrats to @ÚlldemoShúl for having finished Ulysses! The idea of reading it alongside a handbook seems like an excellent idea to me.

I'm a fan of Ferrante, but at the start I found the series hard going. The characters were quite unsympathetic. I liked it better once the narrator went to university and feminist ideas came more explicitly to the fore. I do think Ferrante is a marmite author. An Italian friend of mine read the books in Italian and disliked them, because they're set in Naples and Ferrante didn't use authentic Neapolitan Italian dialect apparently! I've now recommended Alba de Cespedes to this friend and am holding my breath a bit to see if her review is positive or not!

The discussion of The Eights is interesting. Joanna Miller actually came to our book group to talk about the book when we read it, and she seemed lovely. The book itself left me unsatisfied though. It felt too much as though Miller had transposed the language and setting of contemporary Oxford into the past; the students sounded more like modern-day undergraduates than 1920s ones. It's very hard to write a plausible historical novel.

I recently reread Dorothy Sayers' Oxford novel Gaudy Night (I'll put the review below) and there was so much in that novel that seemed alien to the present day. For example, the tutors and undergraduates spend a lot of time socialising together: they punt on the river together, go to the same parties and so on. One member of my book group studied at Oxford long ago, and she said that was absolutely the case at the time: since all of the tutors and students were living together in college, they did socialise together. She said that on Monday morning though, you would come to your tutorial and the formal relationship would be restored. It would be decidedly odd I think for students and tutors to socialise together today, but that's largely because tutors have a firm demarcation between home life and social life: a demarcation that didn't exist in the same way in the 1930s when Sayers was writing. It's details like this that bring the past alive for me. Miller did a lot of research for The Eights, but I would say that the past as she depicts it doesn't feel 'other' enough.