50 Books Challenge 2025 Part One

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the first thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2025, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

If possible, please can you embolden your titles and maybe authors as well of books you've read or going to read? It makes it much easier to keep track, especially when the threads move quickly at this time of the year.

Who's in for this year?

Ahh thank you @Waawo ⭐️

Wow, I'm so jealous!

No library reservation charges here either in and around the Glasgow area. I reserve way too many books on a whim and would have spent a fortune if there were charges for this! They also scrapped the overdue fees here following lockdown.

Thank you@Southeastdweller for the thread and @EineReiseDurchDieZeit for the signpost.

I missed the limericks but here's my first read for 2025

There once was a house on the moor,
Where spirits would wail and implore.
Through passion and spite,
They’d argue all night,
Then haunt when their bodies were poor!

@Tarragon123 I hope you enjoy it when you get to it. The writing isn't the best, but it's an interesting read all the same.

We don't pay to reserve books at the library here either, and no late fees. Which is great, but makes it all too easy to not rush to return a book. Even when you can see someone is waiting for it.

I use the libraries in three London boroughs, the one where I used to live and two neighbouring ones, one where I used to work and where DP now works, and another where I used to work, and where I stayed when I first moved to London. In addition, I used to borrow books from Westminster when I worked in central London.

All now have free reservations and one also doesn't charge fines and has recently increased borrowing limits. I'm about to get ready to go out to one a bit further away to collect reservations and borrow some books I can't renew, if I get it together soon I might get to look in the nearby charity shops too.

Yes. You're right! She was Dutch. I posted what I could remember from initially reading about her 2 years ago. Apologies.

I agree that it was easy to miss the stone, but I think that's almost the point. We walked round the square twice to find it.

£1.20 for library reservations here so I’m very jealous of those who get them free! I tend to keep my reservations for brand new books coming out that I want to read, where the reservation is still much cheaper than buying the book.

£1.50 reservation charge for adults in this county. Feels like there should be a national policy on this and a national ebook/audiobook service.

1. The safekeep by Yael Van Der Wooden

Set in a rural Dutch province in the early 60s, two siblings meet their brother's new girlfriend and she temporarily moves into the family home with the sister. The sister really dislikes her initially...

I really enjoyed this one. It didn't go where I expected to twice! It's nice to be surprised.

No need to apologise and thank you for sparking such a great convo here! I didn't at all intend to criticise the size - just was struck seeing it in isolation having perviously only encountered groups of them in Germany. Ofc that also keeps the costs reasonable/accessible and enables them to be laid individually by hand ❤

I was surprised at how small it was too. Even though I'd read that they were 10cms by 10cms. I think it's easy to forget how small that actually is.

I'll admit I hadn't heard of them when i was in Germany in the 90s, and don't remember seeing any. Mind you, the largest big city too where we were was Munich which didn't have any at the time and it's entirely possible there weren't any in the smaller towns at the time.

@BlueFairyBugsBooks thanks for the links. I do have a strong personal connection to the Holocaust. Not sure how I feel about the stumbling stones. As there are fewer and fewer who bore live witness, anything which helps to remember is probably good. But 100,000 is a drop in the ocean in the context of 6 million. According to the link posted, in the town in which my grandmother grew up, there are 4 stones. But over 7500 Jews - the entire community including my grandmother’s close family - were shot in a forest near the town in a single weekend.

I have read with interest the discussion on “stumbling stones”. I have never heard of them before

Glad to see The Darkland Tales being discussed again this year. I started with Rizzio and Hex and loved them both. Columba’s Bones and Nothing Left to Fear from Hell were less entertaining I think. Queen Macbeth was really enjoyable. Denise Mina and Val McDermid are both old favourites of mine when my reading was largely crime writing. McDermid is particularly dark and quite gruesome. I do smile now seeing her singing in the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers. My MIL used to say of her “she’s a lovely lass but she writes some terrible things”

I have downloaded Wool having been interested in it from the group for some time. I will finish Odyssey and get stuck into that as I think I am in a terrible rut of historical fiction - unless it’s Greek or witches it doesn’t seem to be happening

I'm sorry for your families losses. I agree 100,000 is such a tiny percentage of those lost. But I don't know what the solution is.

Thanks boiledegg - I felt mean quibbling because the constant checking is part of the mental state she is describing, but it felt laid on too thick by Moss the thinker as much as Moss the subject.

We dont have charges, either for reservations or for overdue books. Its a great system!

No reservation charges or late fines here either and you can borrow upto twelve items.

I feel like my county's library network is ripping me off now! 🤣

So if you reserve a book from another library in your county, there's no charge for it being transported over from up to an hour away? You are all living the life!

Good stuff @bettbburg 😀

To be fair, my library network is only for the town, not the whole county. We do have 6 or 7 branches though. But no, no fees.

I'm not a huge fan of the system to reserve books though. By the time the book is actually available/has arrived at the branch I want im either not here to collect it (has to be within a week) or I don't have time to read it for whatever reason.

Edited to add: we can apparently borrow up to 30 items at a time

@AprilLady – I’m so sorry. For those of us with no connections, it appears to be a good idea. But 4 stones for a population of 7,500 is nothing. And 7,500 was only in one weekend. I suppose the difficulty is that it is done by individuals trying to find out details on other individuals. Perhaps a more official scheme would be more appropriate?

@Passmethecrisps – I love Denise Mina too. While I loved Hex by Jenni Fagan, I didn’t enjoy the next book of hers that I read, Luckenbooth at all. I do want to read Columba’s Bones but not to bothered about the Bonnie Prince Charlie one. I feel he has been written about quite a lot all ready. And I don’t know the authors.

@RunSlowTalkFast – I live in a very small county and I work in different areas, so its easy for me to click reserve or get it sent to my local library if I’m not going to be the locality. Do we have anyone from Orkney, Shetlands, Western Isles, Argyll and Bute or Highland Council area? Would be interesting to see if they have the same system. It could easy take a couple of weeks to get from one island to another or the mainland.

Ebooks are free to borrow from my library (I think that’s universally the case?) but physical books are 90p. What slightly disgruntles me is that if you lose the will to wait, as I did recently having been way, way down a reservation list that wasn’t moving for months, and cancel the already-paid-for hold, it doesn’t get applied to your account for a future reservation, you just lose it. But I suppose the charge is just for the reservation, not the actual borrowing, whether you complete it or not (this was for Death at the Sign of the Rook - and what should I see when I walked into the library to get something else but a pile of copies of that very book available to borrow, which apparently about 45 people were patiently waiting for!).

I hadn't heard of Stumbling Stones either so thanks for telling us about it @BlueFairyBugsBooks . Awful to hear your Grandmother's story @AprilLady

@inaptonym I used to love the Nordic bakery too, and round the corner there was an amazing hot chocolate shop Said Dal 1923, also no l now closed.

For any Booker fans on here, the Waterstones in Piccadilly is doing a retrospective with all the Booker prize winners and shortlists since it started in 1969 (pic below). I popped in today and picked up Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala that won in 1975 and The Vegetarian by Han Kang that won the International one in 2016. I was surprised at how many of the older books are favourites on here - quite a few Penelope Lively, Barbara Pym and Penelope Fitzgerald as well as Mrs Paltrey at the Claremont.

1. Private Rites - Julia Armfield. This is marketed as a dystopian retelling of King Lear, but as far as I remember Lear ( which I don't know particularly well but have seen), it's quite loose - an autocratic father with 3 daughters but I think that's it. It's set in the near future when climate change has really taken hold. It rains constantly, houses are flooding and people are building higher and higher to survive. Daily life is kind of functioning but everything is scarce and difficult. It's about 3 sisters - Isla, Irene and Agnes- who's father, a brilliant architect, has just died. He was also a tyrant and their mothers were largely absent. I thought the world was brilliantly drawn, the slow creep of climate change until everything is fucked feels very realistic, and it was quite depressing to read this alongside the reviews of the year talking about how climate policy has basically been pushed down the agenda everywhere. But the plot and the characters didn't really draw me in.

@CornishLizard great review. I very much enjoyed My Good Bright Wolf by you are right that the level of privilege checking was so extreme as to be quite distracting.

We don't have library reservation fees, but I'm permanently getting stung for lateness fines. At 20p per book per day you don't have to forget for long to be handing over fortunes if you borrow a few at a time.

1.Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival by Daniel Finkelstein. An account of Finkelstein's parents and grandparents experiences during the second world war. His mother's family were German Jews who moved to the Netherlands after the rise of Nazism. His father's family were from Lvov, in Poland and faced the consequences of it being annexed by Russian forces.

This was excellent. Finkelstein writes in a way that creates drama and tension as totalitarianism takes hold across Europe. It's bleak - at one point Finkelstein listed the fates of the inhabitants of the very average street where his mother was living in Amsterdam, and the vast majority of the residents were murdered. His father's family's story of internal exile in Siberia, forced labour in Kazakhstan, and the Katyn massive covered ground that was less familiar to me, and equally absorbing.

Despite the bleakness of the scale of murder and hardship, family life is detailed beautifully and with warmth, alongside the ceaseless efforts made by Finkelstein's grandparents to save their children from the harshest of fates.

Up next is Hotel du Lac.