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?

I'm with you! Anyone who doesn't find the pirate film scene fucking hilarious clearly doesn't have a share my sense of humour.
Many of my other loves get dissed on here, usually as 'boring' - that word from certain posters just makes me sit up now 😁

I’m retired so no commute, can’t go to bed much earlier as I’m the only one who takes ddog out for last wee at 23;00. I read from about 23:30 to 01:00 or 01:30. Probably need to spend less time on mumsnet.

@Passmethecrisps The White Spider is excellent. I've read it a couple of times.

Henry Crawford is definitely a much more interesting and attractive character than Edmund. I can never understand why on earth the vivacious Mary is at all interested in Edmund.

I do think a bit of a fling with Henry whirling her around dance floors and possibly having a non-pregnancy inducing shag would have done Fanny a world of good. I suspect he would soon get bored of her and look elsewhere for his fun though.

I absolutely love The Pursuit of Love!

On Kindle books, sometimes if you look at a book on Amazon it's not clear that you've bought it and I've discovered that a few times I've bought the Kindle book more than once - I often check my orders.

When taking books off a Kindle, you can "remove" them rather than permanently delete them. I have accidentally permanently deleted at least two, one of which I wanted to reread as it's first in series - it's a book that regularly appeared in Kindle daily deals until I started waiting for it to come up again and it took years! I borrowed it from the library in the end and after that it did come up again. And I still haven't read #2, never mind the next 7 or so books in the series (Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch).

But if it shows in your orders, click on it and look at the receipt, and you can check that you didn't return for a refund etc. Then try searching under Manage your Content - try author as well as title etc. If that doesn't work, I can't think of anything else to do.

Just checking in so I don't have a whole thread to catch up on next time I finish a book!

I deliberately didn't read Hamnet as everyone in the world read it at some point the year it was released and I don't like being told what to do. I have read The Marriage Portrait and didn't really realise it was by the same person, and it was fine but not my favourite so no rush to read her others.

I love Pratchett and it was a thing in my family where my Dad would buy my brother the latest book each Christmas and borrow it immediately it was finished so he could read it. Good times.

On Jane Austen, as several others have said, Mansfield Park was one of my A level texts, and I didn't like it as much as some of her other books. I think that Pride and Prejudice and Emma are the most fun (Emma Woodhouse can be annoying but entertaining) but also really like Northanger Abbey - Catherine Morland is the Jane Austen heroine who really enjoyed reading for pleasure - sensational Gothic fiction - the predecessor of horror/crime/domestic noir perhaps - and then she gets a lot of stuff mixed up in real life.

I probably need to try rereading Persuasion because I don't think I have reread it since I was really young, don't know why. I don't often think films really improved on books but I do think that about Sense and Sensibility - the film with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, even if ET was probably over twice the age of Elinor in the book (apart from Persuasion, most of JA's heroines are still in their teens).

My memory is that I really enjoyed The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate when I last read them but they're surely due a reread (along with hundreds, or thousands, of other books that I read in my teens, or even my forties - think I read some of NM's books as an adult but even so it's probably more than 20 years!).

It didnt not work for me. I read a whole lot more than I did since my divorce.

Love the fact that Mansfield Park has a sodomy joke. Dear Jane was not a lady.

4. 4. The Dark Wives, Ann Cleeves
The latest Vera book. It was fine but a bit paint-by-numbers crime fiction.

I deliberately didn't read Hamnet as everyone in the world read it at some point the year it was released and I don't like being told what to do.

@RazorstormUnicorn Ha, you are me 😅

Do you have time to read during the day if you're retired @caramac04 ? I tend to have a print book, Kindle book and audible on the go at the same time and read each at different points. Kindle is definitely in bed when DH is sleeping.

That BBC list is interesting @Arran2024

I've read 9 of them but I do read lots of literary fiction in the year it comes out. There are quite a few on there that I haven't heard of, which I find a bit surprising.

I'm enjoying this thread. Lots of favourites being discussed. This thread has been so great for discovering good books over the years I lurked. I loved Letters between Six Sisters but didn't especially enjoy Nancy Mitford's fiction.

1 Wild Air by James MacDonald Lockhart

I enjoyed this non fiction about travels around the UK listening to birdsong. Each chapter was devoted to a different bird from lapwings to nightingales to divers. The author spends time in various places and observes and listens. Some chapters were more interesting than others- I just find ravens generally more interesting than dippers....but this was gentle and an easy read.

Now reading The Dead of Winter by Stuart Macbride. I don’t normally go in for the police procedural (if this can be described as such) but I just fancied something very wintery... and this had loads of snow on the cover! I’m halfway through Wool by Hugh Howey and I’m real enjoying it but it is on spotify and I have run out of my free hours for the month and I refuse to pay extra so will have to put it on pause until next month and learn my lesson and only choose books less than 15hrs on spotify in the future.

@RazorstormUnicorn I’m the same - I sometimes take against books just because they’re popular 😄 I read Hamnet because my lovely neighbour pressed it on me, as I was a handy English-speaking person (in a town of French people) - probably wouldn’t have thought of reading it otherwise!

@ÚlldemoShúl thanks, maybe I've accidentally done a perm delete on those. I'll contact Amazon to see.

I didn’t read The Bee Sting for ages because it seemed too popular

I actually DNF Mansfield Park because I hadn’t banked on liking Henry Crawford and thoroughly disliking Edmund! I know how it ends because I’ve seen various adaptations, but apparently they tend to make Edmund more palatable - I couldn’t stand him in the book.

I think I don't read popular books when I'm being a bit snobby about them. Like Matt Haig books that I generally think are pretty obvious and are pressed on me by people who don't read much.

I read The Pursuit of Love a couple of years again and didn't really get what the fuss was about but maybe I need to try the letters.

1. Rodham - Curtis Sittenfeld. I quite liked this reimagining of what Hilary Clinton's life would have been like if she didn't marry Bill. The first part stays quite close to the truth ( although with a lot of sex!) but at a certain time, their relationship ends due to her concerns about his infidelity and their paths diverge. I did have to Google a bit to check what was based on reality and what wasn't, I was at Uni during the Clinton presidency but not paying much attention to politics then. Still an interesting read and it made me warm to Hilary as brings out the misogyny she battled.

1. Human Acts - Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith. A powerful account of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea where the authoritarian government killed a still unconfirmed number ( anything up to 6,000) of students and protestors. The book is narrated by different voices over 40 years including a schoolboy who is searching for his friend's body, a ghost, a tortured prisoner and a mother. Its incredibly descriptive and difficult to read, massive trigger warnings for death, torture and brutality. But it casts a light on something I knew nothing about and it's particularly poignant in light of recent events. I think this may be a bold for me.

5. Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

I’m writing this review from the corner of the room where I am huddled, rocking back and forth, in wide-eyed terror. This book, about how a nuclear exchange might pan out, scared the absolute bejesus out of me. It was good, very good, I appreciated the work the author had done to fill in the gaps as there is so much classified and redacted information we don’t know about this area. And the minute by minute account really helped to ramp up the tension, while emphasising just how little time there would be for escape, or for those in charge to make such immense decisions. This is easily the most terrifying book I have ever read, by a country mile, and I totally concur with the words of Nikita Krushev “The survivors will envy the dead.” Definite bold.

Interview with the Vampire - Anne Rice

I think I first tried to read this in the late 90's as a teen after watching the film adaptation. The film as it turns out was a mostly faithful adaptation of the book which was a pleasant surprise. I won't summarise the plot, and I'm sure most people will be familiar with the jist of the story.

I found the story to have moments of excitement and fast pace, and other parts to be slow and dull, much like the narrator's 200 year existence (perhaps that was the point). Overall I found the character development quite poor, until the last 40-pages or so, but again, this is the essence of what it is to be a vampire - to remain static as the world changes. I did like that Rice included a plausible explanation for why the world is not over-run with the undead; most vampires get so depressed with eternal life they destroy themselves.

Fairly morose on the whole, but fitting.

Still going at a strong pace

9. My Friends by Hisham Matar

Khaled lives in London having become exiled from his homeland in Libya. Away from home, he clings to his friends Hosam and Mustafa for moral support and the novel revolves around his encounters with them against the political backdrop of Libya from the 80s right up to the Arab Spring.

This got bumped up my TBR because it came in highly praised on the 2024 round up thread.

It's a good, solid novel of the contemporary literary sort I like. The only criticism I do have is that Khaled's life outside of these friendships is very thinly drawn.

I did find I struggled with the beginning but I did race through it once I was into it. It's a page turner for sure, and though I felt the end could have been better, it's probably my first bold of the year.

@MamaNewtNewt it was absolutely terrifying. It wasn't as if the source material needed much to scare the living daylights out of me, but the way she constructed the narrative made it absolutely horrifying. I couldn't sleep after finishing it.

@PepeLePew Yes! I think I might have a bit of trouble sleeping tonight. I mean the nuclear bombs were terrifying enough, but the EMP sounded even worse!

3. Rivals & 4. The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous by Jilly Cooper

More entertaining Rutshire rutting. Lysander - the eponymous Man who Made - is a much better Jilly hero, having RCB's looks and sporting talent but minus the animal cruelty & general unpleasantness. (Mind you, I'm not sure I'd rate him as a long term prospect for anyone who didn't want to be terminally broke while doing all the washing up & cleaning.)
I think I'm going to stop there - the "dated and problematic portrayals of race, homosexuality, gender roles and sexual consent" (thanks Wikipedia) are getting a bit much for novels written well into the 1990s.

5. Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

Multi prize winning SFF novella. Kevin is born in the midst of the Rodney King riots, the Riot Baby of the title. His big sister Ella has a 'Thing' - psychic powers that let her read minds, see the past & future, and increasingly as she gets older, affect the real world. The pair grow up in New York, surrounded by violence, gangs & police harassment, & Kevin gets drawn into gang life, ending up in prison on Rikers Island, while Ella retreats from city life, escaping into her mental abilities.
Although this is short, I thought it was very powerful, definitely a bold. It moves back & forwards through Kevin & Ella's lives, showing the impact of the violence surrounding them & the wider community, and of the mass incarceration of young black men. While it's definitely a political work, it's not heavy handed at all, & the two protagonists feel very real & rounded characters.