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 read a lot of non-fiction, @That70sHouse - not exclusively, but I've been keeping to a 50:50 policy for several years now. I’m really keen on history and there are just so many fascinating things I want to learn about. I find it suits me to alternate fiction and non-fiction.

Having said which….my first read of 2025.

1. Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

Annoyingly, I didn’t realise the film version of this book was on TV the other day. I’d have been interested to see how they adapted it, because although this history of the black female 'computers' at the US wartime airbase at Langley (the precursor of what eventually became NASA) started promisingly, it got increasingly bogged down in a lot of detail, facts and figures, and was written in overly-flowery, high-flown style. I did rather lose track of who was who. However, what I took away was a reinforced awareness of the appalling effects of segregation in the US, and the craziness of a situation that saw these formidably-intelligent, massively talented and hard-working women expected to sit at segregated lunch tables and send their children to segregated schools, along with a myriad of other issues of discrimination not faced by their white counterparts (and above all, the white men working alongside them).

Catch 22 is one of my all time favourite books. It was given to me by a friend who didn't get on with it all all. I was serving in the RAF at the time and I could really relate to it. I stayed up all night to finish it.

The best way to approach it is to not try to follow what's going on and just keep going. Imagine the book was dropped on the way to the publisher and the chapters were all put back in the wrong order. As you go on, things that made no sense fall into place. It's wicked funny with a very dark sense of humour.

It's been one hell of a start to the year here. A very dear friend contacted me to say she had been flooded overnight. The water came inside about 3 inches deep. She had no electricity or heating. I went round with emergency supplies and to help. We managed to get her very frail elderly mother out to a friend's house quite early and she came to me once we lost daylight. The electric only went back on for the street at about half past 8. It's affected a large area of town. Battle stations again tomorrow.

@FortunaMajor thank you for the advice! Sorry to hear about your friend.

@inaptonym Yes, I really enjoyed Red Seas. Wasn't sure whether to go straight onto the next one, or read something else in between. I must admit I thought there were only three, but I read somewhere that there could be up to seven, if he carries on!

@That70sHouse I usually have one fiction book on the go at the same time as a few non-fiction. After the kids go to bed is when I read fiction, as I've usually got a longer stretch of time, but I like nerdy nutrition books and I often read a bit in bed with a brew in the mornings.

025 #1
Jenny Colgan, The Christmas Book Hunt - novella
Read 12.11.24 to 01.01.25, reviewed 02.01.25
124 pages

Mirren's beloved great-aunt Violet is dying of cancer, and she asks Mirren for help finding a book from her childhood - not just any copy of A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, but one with hand-drawn plates. Mirren rushes off to visit secondhand and antiquarian books in London and then travels to Wales and Scotland in search of the book. Along the way she meets Theo, a knowledgeable young bookseller, but is he a new friend and possible boyfriend or does he have other motives for chatting up Mirren?

This is a fun story with lots of descriptions of bookshops and a variety of characters who work in them, including travel round the country to visit famous bookselling areas, and this was more interesting than the rom-com part of the story.

It is an Amazon Original, billed as a short story but at just over 120 pages in 32 short chapters, I would describe it as a novella.

3.8

(Amazon Original Stories series, acquired as freebie in November 2024; available through Kindle/audio)

I also really liked Catch 22 - it was on an American Studies course reading list at university - I may have reread it since but that would still have been some time ago! I think when I first picked it up I wasn't sure which war it was set in - though it was "about" WWII it was published in 1961 and the film was made in 1970, so I'm sure the first generations of readers and viewers were very much thinking of the Korean War and the Vietnam War too.

@Terpsichore the film adaptation of Hidden Figures is pretty good. It doesn’t shy away from the segregation and abuse the women received. The three female leads are well depicted and there’s a solid backup of actors like Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons and Kevin Costner, the latter doing his usual turn as Gruff But Sensitive White Establishment Male.
There is a version of the book for children too, which is excellent.

Hello @whereonthestair , I'm just about to start book 2 the hundred year old man who... as well! 😃 I was thinking I was the last person on the planet not to have read it lol

Thanks for your review of Deep Deception @ChannelLightVessel - I'd really like to read that having read Undercover which is a more general account of the scandal.

I read a mix, but my more 'serious' reads tend to be non fiction (though I am broadening my fiction horizons with these threads). I'm much more likely to finish non fiction too, & I find they work very well for me on audio (I listen to lots of books & podcasts when I'm doing repetitive jobs at work)

@That70sHouse I am going to do the same this year and alternate fiction and non-fiction (or try to anyway). Am a big history geek and there is always so much I want to learn about.

@Terpsichore i hadn’t realised Hidden Figures was a book originally, I found the film very engaging and enjoyable whilst not shying away from the discrimination the women suffered. I think I have seen it on Netflix if you have access to it? Or perhaps the catch up service from the channel it was shown on would have it?

@That70sHouse I try to alternate non-fiction and fiction as well. I do find I go through periods when I don’t feel interested in following the thread of a story, whereas I can always keep going with non-fiction. And DD(15) almost exclusively reads non-fiction.

I'd like to join in. I'm not sure if I'll manage it - I wasn't counting last year, but between pregnancy and having a newborn, I may have managed 10-15, mostly on audiobook. I would like to read close to 50 books aloud to my 7 & 9 year olds this year though.

My first goal for the year, is to read at least a chapter a day.

Currently reading:
Physical Book: Jane Eyre
Audiobook: Untangled
Read Aloud: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

I will join the thread and try and stick to it this year... must have read 50 last year but stopped tracking!

1. the year 1000 - Robert Lacey & Danny Danzinger Essentially about what life was like at the turn of the last millennium. Really enjoyed! Very accessible for a period I didn't know much about without feeling too dumbed down

I read 41 books last year, and 60 the year before that so I seem to average 50 and that is my goal. I don't much mind if I hit it or not. Other book goals are to keep up with this thread better, I dropped off several times last year. I also want to get my unread kindle books down, and I have quite a few physical books I am not getting too, as well as audio books to get through. So I'd like this to be a year of tidying up!

I'm on the The Count read along which will we interesting, I hope I remember to keep up!

I finished 2024 with When The Dust Settles which along with everyone else on here I thought was fabulous. A really engrossing non fiction, I've learned so much. I will be encouraging DH to read it.

I'm also part way through quite a few books, so I will either report lots of finishes asap or admit they aren't for me and start the year with a lot of DNF. I can't guess yet how it will go!

I've added The Great Alone to my wishlist, sounds right up my street.

I managed to finish Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban last night but I'm not including it in this years total because I started it on Boxing Day, having finally bought the box sets of HP books and dvd's for Christmas.

All my books for this year are likely to be fiction.
I go through phases with reading - I'm 60 so I've covered a wide range of classics/contemporary/sci-fi/chick-lit/feminism/literary fiction over the last 50 years. Since covid, when I needed escapism, I've been in a fantasy/folklore phase, so much of my TBR pile is adult/YA fantasy or fairy tales.

@inaptonym and @TattiePants Afraid I’ve never got further than about 7 pages of Catch 22 so there will be no limerick unless it’s an unfinished one.

@elkiedee I must have read A Child’s Garden hundreds of times at my grandparents’ house as a child. It’s just lovely.

I got this gorgeous copy of Rebecca for Christmas from DH as my much-loved copy had fallen apart (I did tell him the exact edition I wanted so don't give him too much credit for excellent taste 😝). So I'm starting 2025 with reread number eleventybillion of Rebecca. https://www.foliosociety.com/uk/rebecca.html
then I'm moving on to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie which I got for Xmas 2023 and have yet to open 😳. Or I might read that at the same time

do Audible titles count ?

I'm cheating a bit as my first two reads of 2025 are books I started in 2024, but that's my usual practice so not going to change now!

2 The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel

My "lockdown project" was reading Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Vasari; I read one entry per day (apart from the one about Michelangelo which was 130 pages long!) and posted a short description and a piece by each artist on Twitter. Although women were inevitably few and far between, there were more than I expected. Hessel's book filled out some of the stories of these early women artists, although I would have liked a bit more on them and a bit less on the modern - only 100 of the 455 pages deal with artists working before 1870. That said, I learned a lot about 20th century art movements, seen through a female prism. It was interesting, although not surprising, to see how many of the early 20th century artists were lesbian, bi and trans, and how that influenced their work. And some intriguing crossovers with my other reading - e.g. Autumn by Ali Smith which coalesces around Pauline Boty. I felt there was sometimes too much of an emphasis on identity and not enough on the work, but overall well worth a read and I will dip in and out in future.

Sorry pressed enter too soon. I spend an average of 50 hours a month driving so I get through an awful lot of audible titles commuting.

@StiffyByngsDogBartholomewsChristmasBone that is absolutely beautiful. What a brilliant present.

I immediately searched for the folio society edition of Pride and Prejudice but thankfully it's not quite as fabulous.

That sounds very interesting @Welshwabbit. I've a similar book about composers, might give it a rerun

@highlandcoo i nearly wet myself with glee when I saw it and I knew I had to have it. I don't like paperback books and I always get hardback if I can. Also have a treasured copy of LoTR on bible paper which is apparently worth quite a lot but there's no way I'd part with it.
they also do her four Cornish novels as a box set but it's not nearly as nice.
I concur, I thought the Jane Austen series rather underwhelming. I've got my mums box set that I bought for her as she's past reading them now plus her
copy of Emma that she won at school for "general progress" in the 1950s 🥰

this is a lovely set... https://thejaneaustenshop.co.uk/collections/books/products/jane-austen-the-complete-works-box-set

@StiffyByngsDogBartholomewsChristmasBone it's up to you what you count. I definitely count audibles as I often deliberately get the audible of newer books as it's "free".

Catch 22 was a lockdown read with a small family book club (to check in with each other). It’s one of those books that at the time you are ‘what on earth … what …no but what?’ But it has stayed with me. Apples in cheeks. 🍎