50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Eight

That’s probably why @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie it’s an old one

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie- MG Leonard has a whole series of children’s detective books set on trains including 2 set in the snow! (Danger at Dead Man’s Pass and The Arctic Railway Assasin). I didn’t manage to get through any but DS2 used to be very fond of them. I can’t think of many adult novels set on trains (other than the train journeys in Shute’s The Pied Piper & Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds which are only short episodes in the story; and Richard Trevithick appearing in the later Poldark novels), which feels like I must be missing something given how much people love trains.

@ÚlldemoShúl- I enjoyed The Familiars (& agree that Fleetwood is quite a name). I have also been more aware of the history of witch trials after reading it (& have a history book to read on them), which is what a good historical novel should do (make you more interested in the actual history).

100 . Nucleus by Rory Clements - spy/detective story about Nazis infiltrating an atomic research lab in pre-War Cambridge. This is the second in the series and was readable, but not as good as its predecessor. Very pleased to make 100 though! Next challenge is to finish the 52 book challenge for the first time!

101 . Nemesis by Rory Clements - more WWII spying as the main character runs into an ex-student on a trip to France. Is this a coincidence or something more sinister. This wasn’t as good as its predecessors and featured an annoying marriage subplot, where a character’s attitudes feel too modern for the time the novel is set (she does get told off by her charlady & quite rightly so). This did however satisfy the nemesis prompt for the 52 book challenge 😊

Read and liked it @Owlbookend

@Benvenuto Thanks, I'll have a look but ideally I want something that will last me longer than children's books.

Trains are not obligatory btw.

Not read Poldark and know nothing about it - do I want to?

Snowblind by Ragnar Jónasson?

I have it waiting for me on my Kindle, but not read it yet.

Sorry, I know I'm a fussy pain in the arse, but I read the sample of this previously and it didn't work for me.

Thanks for all the kind messages about dh, who is currently sleeping as he gets tired so easily. He was rushed to one of the specialist stroke units and operated on within an hour of me calling 999, so his treatment was amazing. But it's been very stressful.

Re the train journey, what about Tokyo Express, a classic Japanese murder mystery?

Banshee: Mythological Irish Women Retold by Aibhe Malone
Some excellent stories in here, from writers I have heard of and some I have not. All based on Irish myths as told to the author and generations of children before her, handily summarised at the beginning without too much detail. Contemporary settings.

I took against The Familiars for ignoring the actual history of the Shuttleworths and Gawthorpe Hall, clumsily attaching it to the Pendle Witches and being a swirly-covered pile of absolute bollocks; one of the worst examples of Making Shit Up About Real People I’ve ever come across. Opinions may differ, of course

I loved Grief Is The Thing With Feathers ÚlldemoShúl. Being there until you don’t need it anymore. Went back to it after a close bereavement.

That's an incredible response by the NHS.

Thanks - I'll check this one out now.

I laughed at this! It is indeed a swirly covered pile of bollocks but entertaining page turning bollocks nevertheless which I thoroughly enjoyed in my daily commute. One of those places where it’s better if you don’t know anything about the history by the sounds of it 😁

I think that was the problem! Gawthorpe is one of our local (ish) NT properties with so much history to explore and the poor Pendle witches dragged out of their graves time and time again by lazy authors. Only two pieces of literature about the latter will ever be acceptable to me. The Malkin Child by Livi Michael and The Lancashire Witches poem by Carol Ann Duffy, inscribed on waymarkers from Barrowford to Lancaster (the route of the condemned).
Pendle, the literary hill I will die on

Goodness @Arran2024 - best wishes to your Dh. Hoping he is having decent follow up (I work for a community stroke team).

This is a very long time ago but just wanted to say to @elkiedee that I read what you wrote about your sister’s friend and it is so horrifying, it must have been such a seismic shock to so many. Hoping the thread you describe resolved somehow, I don’t remember that one.

38 The Private World of Georgette Heyer by Jane Aiken Hodge
Simultaneously on a long holiday (yay) and with a nasty cold (boo) this was ideal. Can’t help feeling that GH and I would not have got on in person, as she generally despised readers of her books, but very interesting nonetheless. Frustrating that she was so bad with the money she made, though this was perhaps relative (she always stayed at Cipriani’s when in Venice etc, doesn’t really sound like poverty). DP was a bit shocked when I screamed out loud on finding he is friends with GH’s grandson - he had a vague idea that there was an author in his friend’s family but no more than that.

Best wishes to you and your DH @Arran2024 💐

I'm nearly finished Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout.

I didn't love it. There were too many anecdotes spread too thinly over the course of the book. I didn't like the encounters between Olive and Lucy (I thought they were dull) and Lucy's constant interjections of 'Oh Bob!' got on my nerves.

There's a crime bookshop in Cambridge @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie-Bodies in the bookshop. Went there today. They have a whole room just of Agatha Christie's books.

A couple more from me:

61 The Butler - Clare Mackintosh

Not a typical Mackintosh - more of a homage to the traditional detective story set in a big house with staff and dysfunctional family/guests who all have a motive. Here, our butler is from an agency and working in a villa in the south of France and has a houseful of guests who have money and personal issues as well as secrets so it's no surprise when a body's found in the pool. The local police put it down to a robbery gone wrong but the butler knows better and investigates. Good fun!

62 Forever, Interrupted - Taylor Jenkins Reid

Elsie and Ben have a whirlwind romance and marry within 6 months. 9 days later Ben is dead and Elsie meets her mother-in-law, Susan, for the first time. The book tracks Elsie's grief journey and her relationship with Susan interspersed with the story of their relationship. Apparently TJR's first book, not her best/my favourite but an easy read.

Ooh now we're talking.

Sorry everyone to hijack the thread.

He had a thromboctomy, which was so successful, he was talking, walking, eating, cutting up food so quickly so he was discharged three days later with no rehabilitation plan - we have been left just seeing the GP. He does have a speech and language therapist coming on Weds, that's a month after the stroke, but i suspect he will be signed off. His follow up with the stroke consultant is in April. The main problem is the tiredness.

Thanks @PermanentTemporary

It's a thread from the last few days - most people continued to behave very well and the poll went down from 26% to 16% unreasonable - probably from people who didn't bother reading hundreds of posts saying the same thing before they voted. A few people just said no don't leave your kids, but most of the responses were to get help - it included things like being woken up by her partner having sex with her when she was asleep at night, that's one of the things that reminded me so much of Cara in Nesting and her story, not to mention the whole Rob saga and others in the Archers, the Gisele Pelicot story and more recent similar stories in the news. Lots of gaslighting and coercive control. The thread seems to have gone quiet now. Will be interested to see if this turns out to be "research", well intentioned or otherwise, and/or whether OP comes back to make further revelations and/or seeks help.

@Arran2024- thanks for the update. Very pleased to hear that your DH was doing so well.

@MaterMoribund- I had no idea that Gawthorpe Hall & its inhabitants are real & I can see why you disapprove. That is a real problem with historical novels when they are about actual people as the writing does need to be both respectful & of good quality (both in research & in the actual). I do want to visit Gawthorpe Hall now though.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie- there are about a dozen Poldark books & I remember the later ones being hefty tomes to lug back from the library so they might be worth a look as they would keep you going for a few days some time. The books get overshadowed by the TV series. I read them as a teen as they were in the library (I was always running out of authors) & I was probably too young for them. They are set in Cornwall and begin at the time of the American Revolution, and as a teen I liked the combination of Jane Austen style balls plus duels & fights, smuggling & lots of misery due to unrequited love. I’ve recently reread the 1st one as it was in the deals earlier this month & enjoyed it - what I didn’t notice so much when younger was how it deals with industrialisation (there’s a struggle between the main character as a benevolent landlord & employer and others who are much more exploitative and this is why early locomotives feature later in the series) and just how badly most of the aristocrats behave. It’s also good on working class life.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie
Poldark is a family saga series of about 12 books by Winston Graham set in Cornwall in the 18th and early 19th century, starting a bit earlier than Jane Austen's Dorset and Hampshire, Hertfordshire or Derbyshire. So journeys by stagecoach or on horseback as this is before the railway. It's been adapted twice, and there are several series of the new adaptation, still available I think through streaming services. I think I've watched the 1st series and perhaps part or all of the second - not sure how many books are done together in each series.

Have you read @Benvenuto's review of Ross Poldark? - worth a sample or returning if you don't like it after a chapter or two, I think. In other words, you might actually like it, I think.

ETA Cross post with @Benvenuto's response. I didn't read or watch Poldark as a 70s kid or 80s teenager, just as a middle aged woman getting into streaming a few years late, when old record, CD and DVD players are all broken or don't seem to be possible to configure with the Virgin Media boxes. I don't have a spare wall in the room/house for a huge VM or Sky Glass screen, for obvious reasons, and Sky Glass doesn't seem to be tailored to the needs of book addicts.

@Arran2024 that all sounds very encouraging, but must have been terrifying at the time.

In one of those weird bookish coincidences that aren't actually that rare when you're reading more than one book at a time I'm currently reading 2 books where one of the protagonists is called Maren, having never ever heard that name before.

Quite a lovely name actually, it means 'of the sea'.

Oh and the books are Glittering a turd by Kris Hallenga (Maren is her twin sister) and The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.

@Arran2024 I know the NHS is a bit of a disaster at present but in an emergency, there's nothing like it. How frightening for you both, I would imagine you BOTH need a lot of rest.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie I'm sure you've already read it but just in case, how about Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow? I have it on my re-read list because I first read it when I was a student who read everything at 90mph and I'm sure there's more to get out of it.

@Arran2024 sending warmest wishes to you and your DH; what a scary thing to experience. I hope he continues to recover well!

💐too to @elkiedee ; the Annabel Rook story is utterly dreadful.

I'm very behind with reviews, so thought I'd just review the most recent books I've read (and catch up on the backlog later).

60. John of John, Douglas Stuart 5/5

Booker Prize shortlist. I loved this. A young gay man leaves Edinburgh (where he has had trouble earning a living after finishing uni) and goes back to live with his father and grandmother on a remote Scottish island. The father is a dour Presbyterian and an abusive parent. This doesn’t sound prepossessing, but the characters and the family relations are brilliantly depicted, and I found myself sympathising with them all despite myself (even at certain points with the abusive father, which is saying something). The sense of place is very convincing, and so are the intricate descriptions of weaving and of colours (Stuart used to work in textiles and uses his specialist knowledge to good effect). The ending I thought was a tour de force. If I have any criticism, it’s that the mother figure is perhaps less well-developed than the rest, though she is portrayed sympathetically… as in Shuggie Bain we see a mother who has let her son down badly. There is a satisfyingly complex grandmother character, however, who stands in as surrogate mother. Another interesting feature of the book is that many of the conversations are said to be in Gaelic; italicised English is used to indicate Gaelic speech.

Next, three novels which were all impressive in some ways, but which annoyed me enormously in others:

61. May We Feed the King, Rebecca Perry 3/5

Booker Prize shortlist. An original concept, but ultimately I found this novel disappointing. The main protagonist is a museum curator (a woman apparently, as one of the short chapter titles uses ‘she’) who collaborates with an archivist (of indeterminate gender) to create an exhibition inside a palace (apparently medieval). Perhaps because I’m someone who works on pre-modern literature, the vagueness of the historical references drove me crazy, and the world-building wasn’t convincing to me. I was also irked by a few minor things, such the emphasis on the archivist’s white gloves (archivists don’t wear gloves nowadays; they can actually damage manuscripts more than careful clean hands can). And while there is a lot that we will never know about the past, I’m sceptical that beautiful exhibitions of artificial fruit can get us much closer to it. There are a lot of ‘real’ documents and artifacts that survive from the past, and we can anchor our analysis in those. I wonder what Mary Beard as a historian made of this novel.

@bibliomania you compared this novel to Piranesi, and that intrigued me, because I adored Piranesi. I can see the similarities, so I’m not sure why I loved the one novel and was left cold by the other. Maybe because Piranesi is more unashamedly about an imagined world, whereas May We Feed the King seems to be claiming to be about an actual historical one? I don’t know, will think about this some more.

62. The Palm House, Gwendoline Riley 3/5
    I wasn’t a fan of the previous Riley novel I read (First Love), and I liked this one somewhat better, but I’m afraid Riley’s writing style isn’t for me. She’s obviously a gifted writer, but her characters don’t draw me in. The narrative feels a bit clinical (even when it’s describing depression and cruelty). Maybe I’m a bit of a sop as I want to read about people who exhibit more warmth and emotion.

63. Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke 3/5
    This novel started out so well as a satire on tradwives! But the crazy twists of plot were too much for me. I think the concept of this novel is brilliant, but it’s trying to explore too many different questions at once, and as a result everything feels a little crude and superficial (American women and the failures of feminism, MAGA, nostalgia for a simpler past, the paradox of the tradwife influencer who is theoretically anti-technology but in fact relies heavily on it, the exploitation of children by parents, and more!). The novel offers plenty to think about. But Burke is clearly someone approaching religion from the outside, and her characters didn’t feel convincing to me. This failure to imagine people trying unsuccessfully to live out their religious faith was all the more striking because I’d just read John of John, which imagines that phenomenon so well.

Thanks @cassandre for your reviews, sorry you didn't like most of them more, and I wish you a string of books that are at very least a 4/5. I have at least 3 of the Booker listed titles TBR.

I've only started @Yesteryear - library hardback, overdue - but have borrowed a library ebook copy that finally came up and will go back on 6 November. And However, I'm nervous about being stuck mid novel for weeks/months even so and am hoping it comes up as a deal sometime soon. I've also borrowed some other books as library ebooks until at least November but ditto! It seems I'm not yet on the library naughty step (block on new loans until I return books), but probably will be again soon.

@Arran2024 wishing you and DP well. Scary.

I enjoyed the Poldark books, I think I read the first 2-3 but I am not good with reading a series because there is so much to read and after 2-3 I feel satisfied with 18th century Cornwall and all its goings on. I did enjoy the series though. A lot. I don't find Aiden Turner particularly attractive but give him a scowl and a tricorn hat and it turns out he is my sort of sex god.

@ÚlldemoShúl I don't find Stacey Halls very memorable but I enjoy her stuff when I am in it. Easy to read and good books for when I am slumping a bit, enough plot, character and whatnot to get me going again. Luckily, my historical expertise is so niche no one writes widely available novels about it.

I've been at the Wimbledon Book Fest today (and tomorrow). I nearly fully committed to next weekend as well, but the cost got a bit prohibitive. They've got two Turkish writers on the bill tomorrow, Defne Suman (I reviewed Summer Heat a while ago) and Burhan Sonmez (his book Istanbul Istanbul has been on my shelf forever). It is wonderful to see more Turkish writers other than Elif Shafak who is at every festival (and in fact appearing TWICE at Wimbledon). I do love her and her writing but I am seeing her for free at another event in a few weeks so skipped this one.

My work book club read Yesteryear recently but I didn't have time, or really the inclination and nothing they said in the gathering made me think I will bother. We are reading The Correspondent now which I am really enjoying.

Do people count dramatised audio books? I do count audiobooks, not that it is about the numbers per se. I just listened to this on audible.

Dracula adapted by Robin Ahern for Audible

This has a full star cast, Jonathan Bailey, Ella Purnell, Aimee Lou Wood, Louis Partridge, Johnny Flynn and others. I was going to re-read for a book club I am joining next week and a trip to Whitby I am planning next year, but this literally popped up as just released as I was deciding whether to read it or listen. I LOVED it. I thought it was superbly done and the epistolary writing lends itself so well to adaptation. Van Helsing was played by Maggie Gyllenhal who was a bit annoying. I think it was because she was the only American in an otherwise British cast - no problem with american accents, it just felt out of place here. Not sure why I care since Van Helsing is Dutch.

Anyway, it was very atmospheric, the cast were really very good and I would highly recommend.