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?

Thanks for all the Shardlake encouragement. I've ordered #2 from the library, so we'll see if I can manage all 580 pages of it 😂

I agree with the comment that Hamnet was a waste of a good premise, but it did prompt me to take my first ever visit to Stratford on Avon and to spend several hours in the birthplace house, which had been brought alive by Maggie O Farrell in the book..it was one of my absolute highlights of 2024 and I hope a lifelong memory.

I’ve finished two more books.

8. The Snow Geese by William Fiennes

This was a lovely nature book about a British man who decides to fly to America to follow snow geese on their migration. Well written and he describes people just as astutely and almost as eloquently as he does the geese.

9. American Sirens by Kevin Hazzard

This was the story of the black men who became America’s first paramedic team in Pittsburgh.

This is a likely contender for my top ten of the year. It was fascinating if often frustrating due to the treatment of the Freedom House team and about so much more than the crew’s story, though that alone would have been more than worth my time but it also covers the history of emergency medicine including CPR, race relations, prejudice, inequality and policing in America.

I listened to it on audiobook as my monthly choice with Amazon Music but I liked it so much that I’m going to buy a Kindle or physical copy too.

I’m just about to start Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water by Vicki Valosik.

I love Pratchett especially Witches and Guards. Sam Vimes is played by Jason Isaacs in my imagination, which helps, and I’m going to be Nanny Ogg when I grow up.

I can take a bit of mountain and sea peril - Into Thin Air is my favourite thing I’ve ever listened to on audio, and The Terror was a semi-guilty pleasure I absolutely loved. (Just can’t really be doing with children in peril since I had DD.)

Sam Vimes is played by Jason Isaacs in my imagination

Ohhhhhh, yes!

I had a friend at school, a boy friend,( but never a boyfriend ) who recommended The Colour Of Magic “but that’s just so you’re in from the beginning, stick with the books and they get better”. He was so right and a love affair of many decades started then….not with him, but with Terry Pratchett’s characters. Until the last couple of books, which I just can’t read because, well, because.

It’s just a holiday with very little/no chance to read - sorry if I made it sound more exciting than it is 😂. I do have a book with me, but have barely touched it!

1 An Island Wedding - Jenny Colgan
I have just blubbed through the final 30 minutes of reading this. A reflection of some real life happenings as well as some lovely Colgan characters for whom you genuinely want the best. This was supposed to be my happy, feel-good read!!

Voyage for Mad Men by Peter Nichols
Non-fiction about the Golden Globe boat race of 1968 and all of its accompanying peril and disaster. I’d previously read, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst so knew that it was going to end badly for at least one of the competitors.

I enjoyed this, although there was rather more stuff about mending various bits of boats than I was able to understand.

I loved We are all Completely Besides Ourselves too @FortunaMajor. You need a new book club!

I started Human Acts by Han Kang yesterday. It's incredibly bleak.

I LOVE Maggie O's earlier books, and have reread them several times, but struggled to get into Hamnet, I did enjoy it in the end though.

I've started The Marriage Portrait a few times and given up. I might try again this year.

Got a kindle for Christmas but still love a paperback book too. Definitely read more with a kindle than I normally would as its much easier with a toddler. Putting her down for naps I can hold on to my kindle and turn the pages etc.
Books I've read so far this year

1. The things we never got over- Lucy Score - actually quite liked the story line but a bit unsure about the next books in the series following a similar path.
2. The third gilmore girl- Kelly Bishop- as a big fan of gilmore girls fan I was really interested in reading this. Such an interesting memoir and I would highly recommend reading the physical copy will listening to the audiobook for this one.
3. Started re-reading the Harry Potter series as it's quite a comfort read especially in this January weather. Dipping in and out of the books and have so far read up to the prisoner of azkaban as always these will be a firm favourite for me.
4. Remarkably bright creatures- Shelby Van Pelt- This will be my next read the reviews look very promising

I read Human Acts last week. Bleak is the word. Have you read anything else by Han Kang?

2 Years That Changed History: 1215 - Dorsey Armstrong

Great Courses series on the momentous year that saw the signing of the Magna Carta, the Fourth Lateran Council and Genghis Khan’s capture of Beijing, explained in the context of social trends and broader world events. Dorsey Armstrong is an engaging teacher and I’m working my way through all her Great Courses output.

3 The Darcy Myth: Jane Austen, Literary Heartthrobs, and the Monsters They Taught Us to Love - Rachel Feder

Hmm. Feder’s main point here is a good one: women have been sold a beauty-and-the-beast plot line where if you love someone enough, despite them bringing enough red flags to put up bunting, they will turn into your prince - leading us into failed relationships, heartbreak and potential danger. If someone acts like an emotionally unavailable arsehole, it’s probably because they are one. Not because they have a traumatic past that can be cured by the patient endurance of a good woman.

But it’s like an editor told her to try to make this stick to the character of Darcy so the book could be sold to Janeites - and while Darcy does sort-of fit the paradigm (he’s rude at first and snobbish about Lizzy’s family), he’s not an archetypal example. Lizzy doesn’t wear herself out trying to love him into changing his ways - she rejects him at first and he shows himself to be a good’un on his own initiative, by saving Lydia from potential disgrace by paying Wickham off so that he will marry her.

(Feder is right to point out that this action isn’t entirely unproblematic though, as by paying Wickham he is enabling a rake and seducer, and serving himself by preventing any scandal around Lizzy’s family which could sully his own reputation by association.)

It’s also marred by a daft I’m-so-cool-and-down-with-the-kids narrative tone - I get that it’s meant to be light-hearted, but I bet her actual students (at the University of Denver) find it excruciating. She says she was 6 when the Disney Beauty and the Beast came out, so she’s roughly my age - we geriatric millennials should have a bit more dignity!

I think Remus should stay away from this one for sure.

@IKnowAPlace I haven't. I've got The Vegetarian on my TBR pile but will definitely need a break from Han Kang after this!

Did you review Human Acts on here? I'm about half way through. It feels important though distressing.

The disappearance of Stephanie Mailer - Joel Dicker

This is a dual timeline book with the first focusing on the investigation into a quadruple murder in 1994 and then the second timeline beginning with the upcoming retirement of the detective in timeline one who rebuffs an approach from Stephanie to ask him to re investigate the 1994 murders and who then disappears. As you would expect there’s a long list of characters who may or may not have been involved, twist turns and deflections and a fairly satisfying, if a bit implausible, resolution to it all.

It’s long - nearly 600 pages and it definitely could have done with losing about 100 pages and a few storylines that didn’t really bring anything to the central plot but was background. The dialogue seemed clunky sometimes not sure if that is the writing generally or the translation. The author is trying to be clever with structure and timelines - he loves a flash back! This works in some sections more than others. So a bit convoluted but it passed the time as a not to demanding bed time read.

I've added Into Thin Air onto my TBR, where it can wait patiently with TTOD and Erebus. I have some of the 50 bookers as 'friends' on my Goodreads (although can't remember who is who) and it gets 4-5 stars from all but one.

I just don't get the love for the Mitfords; I have read Love in a Cold Climate twice, twenty years apart, and was unimpressed both times. I listened to The Blessing on CD from the library (£1 hire charge for three weeks years ago) and was equally nonplussed. Then a few years ago I read Wait for Me! 'Debo's' autobiography, and it left minimal impression on me.

I tried to get into Discworld as a young teenagers, and it went completely over my head at the time. I quite like the Death books, and I might give the nightwatch series another go as I remember liking Guards! Guards!

I hated We are all completely... but I did enjoy Booth.

@LadybirdDaphne Thanks for the warning. I’ll stay well away. The idea of the book sounds interesting, but the Austen link is tenuous at best, as you say.

My name was Janeite on here years ago, incidentally.

Re Darcy paying off Wickham - I don’t think it was self interested, because he didn’t know how much Elizabeth’s opinions had changed. He was doing it to save the embarrassment of the woman he now loved, but he didn’t expect her to ever know that it was him.

1. Mansfield Park: Jane Austen.

When Fanny Price is ten years old, she is taken from her parent's house in Portsmouth to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle at Mansfield Park. Her two girl cousins and awful Aunt Norris remind her daily how grateful she should be for this change of circumstance. Fanny is like Cinderella; useful as a companion for the indolent Lady Bertram but not a person in her own right. Fortunately Edmund, the younger brother, is kind to her and she looks up to him. Her admiration turns into a deep, abiding love over time.

Fanny's world consists of her new family at Mansfield Park, the Grants in the parsonage and their relations the Crawfords, Mary and Henry, who have come down from London to live with them. While Uncle Thomas is away in Antigua overseeing his sugar plantations, the young people are left to their own devices and they come up with the idea of putting on a play. Fanny is entreated to take on a small role but she is reluctant as she doesn't want to act. Neither is Edmund and this sets them apart from the rest and highlights the difference in values between them and the others, between liveliness and moral propriety. Fanny, although quiet, is a keen observer of people and has the measure of everyone which proves to be right in the end.

I enjoyed reading Austen again, but I didn't find this one particularly enjoyable.

I found it rather long, particularly the first half. I think there was too much time devoted to the play. It was hard to understand Fanny's and Edmund's position until I read the introduction and learned why this was such an issue for them. The play itself wasn't discussed much either and I realised what it was much later on in a footnote and understood better then. Austen's position against disorder and impropriety where good principles, even temper and duty should prevail, made this a worthy book and a little heavy going.

While I had huge sympathy for Fanny, she is a really quiet character and only becomes animated half way through the book when Mr. Crawford proposes to her and she takes a stance against it and him and rightly so. I enjoyed this section and the part where she stays in Portsmouth. She finds out that she has nothing in common with her own family any more and she feels displaced. Mansfield Park, with all its faults, is where she belongs.

Overall, I liked it. I didn't love it. I'll read another Austen at some stage.

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh I am glad you’ve covered the detail. I’m trying to reread all the Austen’s this year for her 250th birthday and deliberately started with MP and I am trying to read it with a more sympathetic and understanding eye to Fanny. I’ve always strongly believed Henry would be a better match, but largely that’s because I would prefer Henry over Edmund, and o also would quite like to be animated Miss Crawford when I grow up (but then not marry Henry, obviously). I’m 50% through.

Thanks @AgualusasLover

I think Edmund comes across as solid, reliable, but dull and a rather pompous ass, particularly in this dealings with Mary Crawford. He's not very likeable, apart from being kind to Fanny. That's his redeeming feature.

I thought Fanny was very judgemental about Mary Crawford (Austen's position of course). This is probably what saved Fanny from being very saintly. I found it hard to understand what was so objectionable about her. I appreciated her liveliness (oh no! her lively mind!) and her independent spirit. Too modern maybe?

Henry Crawford is a fickle creature. Maybe Fanny's influence could have worked on him. My guess is that he would have wandered away from her at some point and she might have had to put up with it.

I preferred the second part of the book to the first because...it was livelier.

I first read Mansfield Park for A level and really didn’t like it - I thought it was very boring with nothing happening until right at the end (I was a bit against it from the start though because the teacher told us it had been a choice between MP and Wuthering Heights and I really wanted to do WH, having already read that and loved it!). I reread MP as an adult and enjoyed it much more then.

Book 3 finished last night

3 Walk The Blue Fields - Clare Keegan

This is a collection of short stories so I whizzed through it. Every story is as tightly written as Foster or Small Things Like These and absolutely beautiful. Stand outs from the collection are The Foresters Daughter and the titular Walk The Blue Fields. Almost all stories are set in rural Ireland and have an undercurrent of sadness, melancholy and things left unsaid. This was a short but affecting read with each story leaving me heaving a great sigh and staring into the middle distance when it ended. A bold for sure

@Passmethecrisps Inappropriately 😁at heaving a great sigh and staring into the middle distance response to Keegan though I do the same

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh Loved seeing MP through your fresh eyes - my least favourite book by my very favourite novelist though I'm due a reread this year to check emotional maturity levels (tracks inclination to shake Fanny / smother Edmund / run away with Mary or so I've heard...)

In thread synchronicity, has anyone else here read The Jane Austen Book Club? It was KJF's first mainstream hit before WAACBO and Booth, and not what you might expect from the very pastel swirly font covers it tends to get. I struggle with modern romance/chick lit conventions but tried it because I was already a fan of her SF and ended up really enjoying it.
(Film was badly done, esp Emily Blunt's character.)

I have to admit I haven't read any of these https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240605-andrew-ohagan-to-scarlett-thomas-12-of-the-best-books-of-2024-so-far

Weirdly I did go through a short phase of mountain peril about 20 years ago while on an expedition and reading material was limited. That makes me sound terribly adventurous but I am not.

I read The White Spider by Heinrich Harrer which is essentially a compilation of all the attempts to summit the north face of the Eiger. This was compulsive reading with some tragic stories. I started using terms like bivouac in day to day conversation and made myself appear awfully adventurous. I also read Touching the Void which the actual
mountain climbers I know refuse to read. I don’t recall whether I have read Into Thin Air but I read at least three mountain peril books in that period so I think it may have been this one as the timeframe is correct.