50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Six

@VikingNorthUtsire great review and why I have a history of failed book groups.

I love the idea of a book group, like minded people, new friends, lots of book chat. Unfortunately they all feel like I'm at school being made to read something I hate and I very seldom found a book to love. One notable exception was Life After Life.

Good lord. You are certainly suffering for somebody else’s ‘art’ in this group. I’m impressed/astonished that you’re prepared to go back for more! But I hope you do, so we can read more of these excellent reviews.

Haha, I will probably be much less forthright with them than I was here! We're quite a new group and I am not ready to be the resident Grinch quite yet.

@VikingNorthUtsire I enjoyed your review far more than I suspect I would enjoy the book. I was forced to watch the film of The Housemaid and that is hours of my life I will not get back. I hope your book group appreciates your sacrifice.

46 Verity, Colleen Hoover

(rant, also slightly spoiler-ish, consider yourselves warned)

Bloody book group! First of all they made me read The Housemaid, in which a vulnerable and emotionally damaged young woman escapes money problems and homelessness by taking a live-in job with a wealthy married couple, consisting of a super hot guy and a scary psychotic wife. Now, only months later, they have asked me to read this one, a book in which a vulnerable and emotionally damaged young woman escapes money problems and homelessness by taking a temporarily live-in job with a wealthy married couple, consisting of a super hot guy and a wife who is brain damaged and unable to walk.

OR IS SHE.

Our protagonist, Lowan, starts to suspect that Verity may not be as helpless as she seems. Also that she may have murdered either one or two of her children. She finds Verity's diary which promises to tell her the truth. But because apparently Hoover is awful at pacing and also at writing plots that have any relation to anything that a real human person might do, instead of either leaving her employers' house or reading the diary in one sitting, Lowan inexplicably reads one chapter at a time, because she's so busy mooning lustfully over Verity's husband, a man with a black hole of nothingness where charisma and personality should be.

Also, not only is the protagonist called Lowan, but Verity's children are called Chastin, Harper and Crew. CREW.

The only good thing I can say is that it made me feel more positive about The Housemaid, because Freida McFadden does at least introduce a couple of plot twists, and manages to subvert some of the clunking great cliches of this Jane-Eyre-but-make-it-Booktok genre. Hoover attempts a twist but it manages to be both entirely predictable and execrably executed, so that the last chapter of the book is even worse than the tosh that preceded it.

I have never read a Colleen Hoover before. I am pretty sure I never will again.

What's the opposite of a bold? That.

I was also bored by My Brilliant Friend and had no desire to read more of them. So many people love it though, feel I'm missing something.

I did recommend The Feather Thief recently Terpsichore - glad you enjoyed it.

The Island book sounds (and looks) great Agualusa - I’ve read a couple of their fiction books and they are so beautifully done.

I found it hard going at the start, but eventually grew to like it. I never read the fourth book, because it hadn't been published when I got to the end of book three. I'm not sure I'd go back to it now (re My Brilliant Friend).

59. The Feather Thief - Kirk Wallace Johnson

Recommended on here (sorry, I can’t remember who mentioned it - I want to say @CornishLizard but that may be wrong). Jaw-dropping account of the theft of hundreds of historic (and dizzyingly valuable) specimens of rare birds from the Natural History Museum at Tring by American Edwin Rist, whose obsession with obtaining feathers for his hobby of fly-tying led him to break in by night and stuff a suitcase with almost 300 birds before escaping undetected. He was subsequently caught after making substantial amounts of money in sales from his haul, but faced only a suspended sentence after successfully putting forward a very convenient defence of Asperger's syndrome.

The author became involved in the case after Rist's trial and tried his best to track down the birds that were never recovered (174 were retrieved intact, but many without their vital identifying labels). He failed, but he did manage to interview Rist, and his scepticism about the Asperger's defence is evident (I'd share that scepticism, tbh).
Fascinating for me as it's a story that happened virtually on my doorstep, but I'd recommend it to anyone - a bizarre but gripping insight into a hidden (and very strange) world.

Here is a picture of the island book, because I think it’s stunning and love it.

I also DNF'd My Brilliant Friend despite everything about it being my sort of thing. I do think it was wrong place and wrong time. It took me three attempts over a number of years to read Captain Corelli's Mandolin but once I did I never looked back and I still be LdB's books in hardback.

Northanger Abbey Jane Austen
I don't re-read much but do seem to have a habit of re-reading an Austen each year. There is a touring outdoor production at the moment so I was refreshing my memory in time to see this at the weekend. (The play was average, but a fun day out). This is one of Austen's first novels, but published posthumously and tells the story of young Catherine Morland, her first season in Bath and is a satire based around the fashion for gothic literature at the time. I am keen (as I was the first time I read this) to read all the books referenced but have not go to them. This ranks as no.5 out of the 6 main books by Austen for me, not because I didn't enjoy it but because I just think that Persuasion, P&P and Emma are much stronger narratives with more wit and charm.

Over the Water: Essays on Islands various (no editor)
This is part of a series published by Daunt Books. This one is a set of essays from various writers about islands. Others in the series focus on the garden, rivers, the kitchen, cycling. I continue to be somewhat obsessed with island based literature and non-fiction as I humbly write about 20 words a month about an island that in my head will one day be a coherent story.

This is my first bold of the year I think. It is almost a 5 star, but I knock off 0.5 because some of the essays are a bit metaphorical and stretch the island connection. Overall though, I read this in 24 hours and just did not want it to end.

@ÚlldemoShúl I’m on Chapter 5 and not sure if I’ll finish!

The Husband’s Secret - Liane Moriarty

Charity shop purchase, quick read, typical Liane Moriarty (though less farfetched than some).

Cecilia’s husband is travelling when she finds an “open in the event of my death” letter in their loft. Will she resist opening it? (Spoiler: not for long!) Her story intertwines with that of Rachael, school secretary at her kids’ school and Tess, who grew up in the area and has recently moved back with her son Liam.

Ideal book for unwinding after a stressy day!

66. Make Change That Lasts by Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Self help book about trying to reduce reliance on unhelpful habits. Some useful tips, although a lot of it is stuff I’ve read before in similar books. It’s nicely packaged though. Lots of nice pictures of the author looking contemplative and inspiring.

67. Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries by Kate Mosse

Subtitled How Women (Also) Built The World.

I wanted to like this more than I did. Mosse is aiming to highlight the names of many women who deserve to be better known in many different fields. It’s a noble ambition.

Unfortunately, the sheer scale of the task means that most of the women mentioned (with the exception of Mosse’s great-grandmother) get very little space on the page, and it often feels more like looking at lists of names.
I guess the book would be many times longer if each woman got a decent amount of space, so it’s understandable, but also often frustrating. I wanted more details, more information about the lives of these women, and most of the time, I didn’t get it.

It’s also one where I kept taking breaks because I found the volume of names in each chapter a bit overwhelming.

Ooh that does sound up my street @GrannieMainland!

I enjoyed the Neapolitan Quartet though I was a bit baffled by all the discourse at the time it got big about it being reflective of real female friendships - not like any of mine, thankfully!

@AliasGrape I think A Song for Summer is my favourite of her books, especially the love interest whose signature move is throwing Nazis out of windows.

I’ve just finished Dolly All The Time by Annabel Monaghan which is a charming summer romance for those who like that kind of thing. A lovely New England beach town setting, a great community and cast of supporting characters, and a properly grown up heroine who can change a car tire, grout tiles and sew curtains. It has some fun Pretty Woman references too, a film I still love despite its many, many problems.

Double DNF
Helen of Nowhere Act 1- thoroughly unpleasant academic makes excuses for being a prick. Act 2 realtor monologues. I just can’t be bothered. If it wins the Booker I’ll go back to it.

And speaking of pricks. I just can’t do Hemingway- or I can’t do him right now. I read the first chapter of For Whom the Bell Tolls and just thought no. Sorry Tabby and Dominic.

I loved them too, but for me it was kind of like olives or gin - I started out not enjoying them at all and I can’t say exactly at what point I got into them, but was obsessed by the end and would happily read 4 more.

It was a DNF for me. I tried a few times but never got into it.

Looks like I’m in good company!!

Same here!

I loved the Brilliant Friend Neapolitan Quartet but would agree the second and third novels were the strongest, and for me the final book did run out of steam.
I’d also watched the Sky series before coming to the books which I think really helped with keeping the huge cast straight in my head and meant I knew the trajectory the story was taking and was invested in the characters - one of the few times watching first then reading was the right call.

Me too. I’m a serial giver upper. No patience.

I was certain I'd already reviewed numbers 45 and 46 below, but can't find them on the thread so have done (possibly) again.

45 Conundrum by Jan Morris
Morris’s memoir of her life and, principally, her transition from male to female. I’ve not read any of her travel writing and feel I really ought to. I read this for a book club and it was a fascinating insight into Morris’s thought processes, albeit heavily shaped by the timing of her transition and of its writing (1970s). I was intrigued by Morris’s conception of femininity, which was extremely stereotypical. I also felt that some of her suggestions about differences between men and women – e.g. the idea that men care about climbing Mt Everest because it’s there, whereas women would not engage in such a pointless pursuit – are much more indicative of differences between individual people, rather than between men and women generally (there have, of course, been several women who have climbed Everest!). This now feels like a period piece; things have changed so much for trans people in the last 50 years.

46 Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann
I wanted to read this after reading Rural Hours, Harriet Baker’s book about the time Lehmann, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf spent living in the countryside and how it shaped their writing. The protagonist, Judith, grows up before WWI, living next door to a group of children who are all in the care of their grandmother. Some are siblings; some cousins, but she is fascinated by all of them. The book tells the story of her childhood interactions with them, then her adolescent passion for some of them, then her university career (where she becomes obsessed with a female fellow student). There are losses along the way. It’s written like a kind of fever dream, which I thoroughly enjoyed although other readers may find it wearing. And the descriptions of the countryside are glowing. I was quite sad to leave the characters when it ended. One moan about my Kindle version – for some reason, the name of one character (Mariella/Marietta) kept changing in the text. I’m still not sure which it was meant to be!

47 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
I feel like the last on the thread to read this Women’s Prize winner. We discover the life and secrets of Sybil, a woman in her 70s, through her correspondence with friends, family members and famous authors. I really liked this. Sybil is a great character and I thought the revelations were cleverly done.

I gave up on My Brilliant Friend for being really fucking boring. Each to their own, but I really don’t get the love for it.