50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Six

70. My Hero Academia Vol 8 by Kohei Horikoshi

In this instalment, it’s the end of the practical exam, where pairs of students have to beat professors. Followed by some set-up for future villainous antics and the start of the summer training camp.

It’s all pretty much in line with previous volumes. Minoru Mineta is getting increasingly annoying with his sex pest traits. I’m hoping he manages to get himself expelled soon, or at least gets much less page time.

90 Pagans – James Alistair Henry. Thank you to @MaterMoribund for the recommendation. I loved this. I do love a story with an alternative setting. I’m very much looking forward to book 2.

Currently reading Lost Lambs by Madeleine Cash but I’m just not feeling it. Its meant to be a funny family story, but not so far it isn’t. Anyone read it and going to convince me to finish it? Otherwise, I’ll DNF.

It was my birthday on Tuesday and strangely enough, I only got one book. DD hasn’t been well, poor lass. So apologetic that she just got me the one book. However, what a book! A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum. Anyone else read it? I’m only 15% in and I am gripped!!

I've been absent for a while, but just caught up.

Going back to My Brilliant Friend, I read this last year after a woman in my bookclub listed it as her favourite book ever and I noticed it was available on Borrowbox, so I went for it. Meh. I was marginally interested at the beginning but got bored trying to remember who everyone was. Far too many people to remember. The same woman recommended Lincoln in the Bardo which I also didn't get on with at all. Lovely lady but we obviously have different tastes.
I do quite like my bookgroup, we largely have similar tastes - literary but nothing too heavy, we laugh about books we all (or mostly) hated - Lincoln in the Bardo I am looking at you. We meet in a pub which is another plus. I share a lot of recommendations I get from this thread with them and they have me down as some kind of incredibly well read person with a book brain like Google. It goes to show how good this thread it for the amount of book info I retain.

@VikingNorthUtsire Verity was my first dip into Colleen Hoover and will probably be my last. Utter drivel. I am still annoyed with myself that I finished it. That is time I will never get back.

@Welshwabbit - I am also getting through the Maeve Kerrigan series, just finished After the Fire which was my favourite so far. I liked the way all the different strands joined up or were red herrings, a bit like Unforgotten on TV, which I also love. Planning to sit in garden with next one this weekend.

Also read :

30. The Names by Florence Knapp A bookclub choice - not something I would have picked up otherwise. It’s the story of Cora and her newborn son and the story opens as she is going to register the birth. Her violent domineering husband is insisting her is to be called Gordon like him and his father, but Cora does not want her baby to grow up like him and wants a different name for him. She has three options - Gordon, to keep the peace, Bear - the name her daughter Maya really wants, and Julian, meaning Sky Father. The story then splits into three different realities, each following the family’s story where the baby is called the different names - Gordon, Bear and Julian. Each one is both tragic and uplifting in very different ways, but all interesting enough to hold my interest until the end. Decent read. I found the Domestic violence and coercive control quite disturbing due to my own history, so trigger warning for anyone with similar experience.

Has anybody hear read Dissection of a Murder by Jo Murray? I'm about a quarter of the way through and wondering whether to keep going.

The plot is somewhat interesting so far, but the writing is so weak. The characterisations are particularly lazy. Every single woman with a speaking role is described by what shade of blonde they are. So far we have icy, platinum, honey, & a mention of recent caramel highlights for the upcoming cooler weather. Everyone is incredibly attractive and, as we're told rather than shown, charismatic. Naturally they're all cheating on each other. Although in fairness the lawyers are all so interchangeable that maybe they genuinely don't notice a switch in bed partner.

Is it worth plowing through? Or is there going to be a last minute 'twist' with no foreshadowing that renders the rest of the book pointless?

So glad you enjoyed Pagans @Tarragon123 ! And Happy Birthday for earlier this week.
I am rattling through books this summer holiday. On to John Of John yesterday and so far, I am loving it. The addition of the Harris weaving history is the cherry on top.

It's on my TBR. I had misgivings when I bought it that this is how it would be...

It's several years since I read My Brilliant Friend but I seem to recall it was a slow burn. I read all four so must have enjoyed them!

I think book clubs do require you to be roughly aligned. We discuss a few options and agree which one we want to read. No-one gets to impose a book unilaterally on the group. It works reasonably well.

Well done on completing Ulysses @VikingNorthUtsire The Odyssey is a much easier read, it moves along quite quickly. I think it would be quite easy to read a chapter a day.

@Tarragon123 I've read Lost Lambs. I found the family more annoying than funny, and the general neglect of the children was ridiculous. The second half does move into more of a kind of spy story, the action ramps up and it all gets pulled together for a rather unconvincing happy ending. But you won't miss out on too much if you dnf.

@MaterMoribund Douglas Stuart created his own tartan which he gifted to Oprah as part of the promo for John of John.

Finished The Eights reviewed up page by Viking. I enjoyed the history a lot and feel quite lucky to have been born when I was. The central "mystery" was pretty obvious though.

Interesting review of Helen of Nowhere @Cherrypi . This one seems to be quite divisive so it's nice to hear something positive. I'm listening to The Vivisectors which I'm very unsure about.

@TimeforaGandT that's kind of how we do it.
Once a year in Dec, we all propose 3-5 books we fancy, so we end up with about 40 books to choose from, then someone does a list, we vote and the top 10 get chosen for the next year, starting in Jan with the most popular (no meeting in Aug and Dec is a meal and Booky Secret santa). It works well.

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.

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.

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

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.

@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!)

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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...

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.

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!

Thanks @GrannieMainland have snapped that up too!