50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Six

44 The Spy in the Archive - Gordon Corera Non-fiction account of the life of Vasili Mitrokhin, KGB officer who ended up running the KGB’s archives (and copying much of them, then smuggling the copies out to the West just after the fall of the Soviet Union). Interesting story, though unfortunately the book doesn’t do justice to it - really not very well-written at all, and I found it plodding and dull. A pity because I enjoyed Corera in his podcast The Rest is Classified (although I stopped listening because his co-host is just too annoying - definitely won’t be reading any of his books!).

@AliasGrapeA lot of A Song for Summer is recycled into Eva Ibbotson’s children’s book The Dragonfly Pool. It’s one of her older children’s trilogy with Journey to the River Sea & The Star of Kazan. Dragonfly Pool was the last of the three that I read to my DC & we all enjoyed it immensely (somewhat guiltily in my case as I expect it could be deemed politically incorrect but it is very funny).

@TattiePantsMother Mary has just arrived on BorrowBox (I’ve had it reserved for months) & I am really enjoying it. I was feeling a bit jaded with prize lists, but this one so far is great & not a book that I would have read without the list.

I really liked When the Cranes Fly South @DesdamonasHandkerchief

I've just started listening to The Vivisectors and think it's going to be a pretty marmite one.

If you do buy a Kindle book at a more expensive price the day before it turns up on a deal, or even up to 14 days before, you can return it, and buy it again at the cheaper price. It says it might take a couple of days for your money to come through. The options don't say "because the price on Amazon just dropped" but I choose "found a better price elsewhere" - I'm sure I'm not the only one in these circumstances and I do think that Amazon has an annoying habit of putting rogue deals in - sometimes something is listed with loads of 99p deals or even as a deal of the day, and it's £4 or £5, and I wonder if they think someone will be click crazy, or looking when a bit tired or drunk. I don't drink but I admit to looking when I'm not entirely wide awake, and sometimes if I'm there's a few offers I'm more tempted to add something which I'm not actually sure I want to read - that's what I mean by going a bit click crazy!

36 A Song for Summer - Eva Ibbotson

I think it was a 50 booker who put me onto Ibbotson’s Journey to the River Sea which I read last year and enjoyed, looking forward to reading it with DD when she’s a bit older. That led me to this, it was available on kindle unlimited and was quite a charming historical (WW2) romance. The introduction tells me she described her historical romances as being “definitely for old ladies and people with flu” and whilst I’m not currently either, I did enjoy this!

I resisted reading The Wedding People but it came up in deals so I bought it to read on holiday. A lot of it stretches credibility but I liked it much more than I thought I would. It's less silly than its publicity suggests. Good sunbed read.

Thanks for the heads up @TattiePants also
boight!

Just bought Mother Mary Comes to Me in today’s deals which has been reviewed positively on here. Nearly bought it at full price yesterday so glad I held off.

Some great recommendations today.
I’ve placed a hold with Borrow Box for the Mark Hadden biography, and there’s a month wait on Libby for When The Cranes Fly South but if that’s only 99p atm I may just buy it on Kindle so there’s no pressure to read within a certain time frame. (And that is how I end up with dozens of unread kindle books!)
John of John not available anywhere foc so may splash out the £2 for that as it seems to be getting universally good reviews.

Excellent review of The Portrait of a Lady @StrangewaysHereWeCome I've a soft spot for this book.

32.The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. Isabel Archer is invited by her aunt Lydia Touchett to travel from her home in Albany, New York, to stay at the Touchetts’ London estate. Bright and charming, she attracts a good deal of interest from a number of eligible gentlemen, including two marriage proposals, but she prefers to stay independent and wait for a more spiritual and emotional connection. On the death of her uncle she receives a vast inheritance, allowing her to marry for love, which turns out to be less of a blessing than a curse.

I rather enjoyed this. James really gets into the bones of Archer as a character. She’s charming and witty, but also sensitive, stubborn and independent. The disintegration of Isabel’s marriage felt painfully credible. There are big clues to the reader from the outset that Isabel’s marriage is doomed, but Isabel's own gradual realisation of the truth is sad and grimly fascinating. The Touchetts’ travels around the grand cities and countryside of Europe are also wonderfully evocative.

51 . The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

What it says on the tin. A Poirot investigation

I know this has been loved on the thread but it didn’t do anything for me at all. I tried it both in print and audio and struggled with it in both formats. I know that in many ways it’s “a first of its kind” but I found it rather dull and slow paced and I solved it easily by asking myself a simple question.

Not a patch on And Then There Were None which is the only other Christie I’ve read.

@MonOncle Lonesome Dove is such a great book

I’m another one that has fallen off the thread, my reading has been really slow recently due to the World Cup and general summer business (and a little bit of phone addiction which I need to curb).

But here are two recent reads:

Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino

A girl grows up believing she is an alien, placed on earth to observe life here and communicate her findings to her home planet. She does this initially via her dreams and then a fax machine her mother finds. Her observations are funny and philosophical and by the time she reaches adulthood she has a substantial collection of correspondence. Eventually, after some gentle prodding from a friend who works in publishing, her observations are shared with the world.

I really loved this, thought it was tenderly written with love for the characters. I have a tiny gripe about a secondary character passing swiftly after a cancer diagnosis but I am probably just being triggered!

Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico

Oh this was fairly excruciating to read! As an ex-pat elder millennial I recognised, both in myself and my peers, a lot of the ambitions, anxieties and life choices of the characters in Perfection as they navigate their twenties and thirties in trendy Berlin. Brilliant satire, possibly a bold.

I’ve started Lonesome Dove which I’ve been meaning to read for a while now, somehow drought conditions seem ideal timing.

One Pair of Feet - Monica Dickens
As recommended on here.

58. Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami (trans. Jay Rubin)

Toru Watanabe remembers a point in his younger life when, as a university student, he was obsessed by the beautiful but fragile Naoko. They're bound together by the past suicide of her boyfriend/Toru's friend, but their relationship never develops into a full-blown romance. With Naoko far away, battling with her mental health in a long-term residential facility in the countryside, and Toru studying in Tokyo, he meets a fellow-student, the effervescent Midori, who in film parlance would be classed as a manic pixie dream-girl. He’s unable to progress in either relationship, gripped by indecision and feeling bound to Naoko although she’s too ill to commit to him. Her eventual suicide leaves him on the threshold of a new stage of life, but we don’t know what it is, as Murakami chooses to end his narrative here.

This was a book club read and my first Murakami - essentially it’s a novel of adolescence, growing up, grief and depression. Everyone is struggling with loss of some sort. Toru is a lonely, alienated figure with virtually no friends, and even the sex, graphically described, seems distant and perfunctory. The Japanese setting worked for me (I'm fascinated by Japan) but in terms of the plot and characters, I'm not entirely sure this one was for me.

I am with you @cassandre and @elkiedee in often hoping that library reservations take their time! I am in a pickle with my BorrowBox reservations at the moment. Three that were originally well-spaced all arrived at once, and one of them is 26hrs long. I am having to listen during time I'd rather be reading my physical book in order to make it through!

On the plus side when I first reserved John of John it was showing as available in early 2027, but has now crept forward to October.

I do that! At the start of Deal Month I add the 99p ones to wish list and then decide through the month.

With Five, it was reviewed in my local bookshop’s newsletter and sounded great, so I bought it on kindle (I do buy fancy hardbacks from them so they get something from the deal 😀)

Yes, agree!

@elkiedee Pierre getting a job because of “who he knew” was more plausible than Nadia getting one without any practical background.

Younis worked with and not for the UN. I’m sure she encountered some people with some of these characteristics, but to have a team-load of them with limited redeeming features didn’t ring true, to me.

I agree. She complicated it far too much with everyone's backstories being raised to absurd levels of complications. Then having the Iman they brought in being a hippie charlatan was really too OTT. It would have been a far better story had she hinted at how people joined not necessarily for altruistic reasons but because they were broken or greedy in some way and focused on the problems with the deradicalisation programme and the Shaminia Begum woman.

Oh @SheilaFentimanI have Five either on my Kindle or I put it on my Kindle wish list (even though it was 99p - I’m trying to give myself cooling off periods).

Maddaddam Margaret Atwood. I'm glad I read this trilogy, but this one wasn't really for me. It was a bit rapey and patronising. And it was all wrapped up too nicely by the end. I preferred book two.
50 Atomic Habits. Well, I'm not sure there was much to see here. Maybe I have read too many self improvement books or am already perfect or something but I don't think I encountered anything new. As the title implies it is about developing habits that will help you achieve your life goals.
51 Zen in the Garden. Miki Sacamoto. This was almost a DNF. I listened to it as an audio book and the narration really put me off. It's a biography of Miki and her garden but the narrator was a man, which seemed inauthentic plus the plant names were often incorrectly and inconsistently pronounced. It lacked the detail to make it a gardening book but also the soul to be about the Zen experience. It was pleasant but didn't hold my interest at all.

I really liked Fundamentally - I didn't think everything in the story was entirely realistic but lots of international roles go to people because of who they are rather than what they know. Britain has a long history of doing that - it may have changed form since the middle and upper class British "remittance men" sent off to do something in the Empire, with the US and other countries joining in the jostling for influence. And the author may well have based some of those "caricatures" on people she met in real life.

Yeah @SheilaFentiman I just don’t understand the love for Fundamentally I thought it was very poor.