50 Books Challenge 2025 Part Two

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the second 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.

The first thread of the year is

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie I'm glad you're enjoying the Slough House series. I love Catherine Standish, I think she's a fantastic character. And I love Lamb and Taverner (and they are both absolutely brilliantly cast in the TV series).

After seeing so many recommendations on here and needing something the complete opposite to Holocaust fiction I snapped up my first Chris Brookmyre - The cracked mirror. Thoroughly enjoyed it, I guessed about 70% of the twist, although not whodunnit.

LA detective Johnny Hawke is investigating a murder that looks like a suicide and in the process ends up in Scotland crossing paths with Penny Coyne who is à Jessica Fletcher type investigating a murder that looks like a suicide. Inevitably nothing is what it seems, there are red herrings and cliffhangers galore. After this would definitely read more of Brookmyer’s work so will look out for it in my
local library.

Good luck with Ofsted @ÚlldemoShúl!

Here are my books so far this year (as I don't seem to have managed to review any of them yet):

1 Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit. A series of feminist essays. This was okay, nothing earth shattering.

2 Summerwater by Sarah Moss. This is set in a holiday park in Scotland on a very wet summer's day. We hear the thoughts and views of several of the visitors staying in the cabins - a retired couple, families, newlyweds etc. I enjoyed this a lot.

3 Girl by Edna O'Brien. This is set in Nigeria and is the story of the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram, told through the eyes of one (fictional) girl called Maryam. Her experience was as awful as you might expect, and I also found it shocking to read about her treatment by members of her own family after her return. This is depressing stuff but well worth a read.

4 Outline by Rachel Cusk. The unnamed narrator is staying in Athens, giving a course in creative writing. She meets up with various people, notably a divorced man who she meets on the plane there, and the characters of these people emerge through the conversations she has with them. Cusk is a great writer and I like this type of book, but I can imagine it's a bit marmite.

@ÚlldemoShúl Good luck, hope it's not too stressful.

Oh and best of luck @ÚlldemoShúl!

All the best @ÚlldemoShúl

Good luck with the inspection @ÚlldemoShúl.

4.A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka. Ever up with the zeitgeist I’ve just finished this 2005 Women’s Prize nominee. Sisters Vera and Nadezhda Mayevskij have been estranged for years, but join forces to free their 84 year old father Nikolai from the clutches of 36 year old Valentina, who appears only interested in him for access to white goods, cars, and a British passport.

Beyond the farcical black comedy, in which the brash and brassy Valentina fights tooth and nail to keep her claws into Nikolai, there’s an interesting family saga looking back at why the Mayevskij’s emigrated to the UK, and how the sisters became estranged.

This was tender and funny in parts, but without wishing to sound too po-faced I did struggle a bit with Valentina’s at times frank Abus of Nikolai always being played for laughs. The backstory was also kept fairly superficial, and I would have liked more of it. The pacing was also a bit frantic.

Thanks all for your well wishes. This truly is the nicest thread on the internet. 😊

I've read 8 books so far this year so well on target for 100 books.

Only one 4⭐️ - the woman on the ledge by Ruth Manchini

And from me too @ÚlldemoShúl 🍀

I don’t really get on with audio and I don’t really like fantasy, but your review inspired me to listen to a sample so now I’ve downloaded Rivers of London.

Well done @RazorstormUnicorn - what an achievement.

Just finished:

The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto Mario Vargas Llosa trans by Edith Grossman

Turns out this is a sequel but in as much as this book made any sense at all, it was fine as a standalone. Set in Lima it tells the story Don Rigoberto and his estranged wife Lucrecia, estranged because a sexual encounter has occurred between her and Rigoberto’s son, Fonchito. We never find out his age, but he goes to school so you feel a bit grubby reading or being interested. Fonchito is a precocious child obsessed with the artist Egon Schielle and his perceived annd/or anctual indecency. DR and Lucrecia are hedonists. The book is told through DR’s fantastical notebooks that he reads and indulges in whilst he and Lucrecia are separated.

All the way through I was questioning what on earth I was doing reading this book, but I kept picking it up, it was compelling and a bit addictive. It’s told in a very disjointed way and you have to read until the end for it to come together.

Its a possible bold but I’m going to reserve judgement until the end of the year.

5 The Bertie Project - Alexander McCall Smith
This is the 11th book in the 44 Scotland series. I was bought this after my son was born as he has a similar name and hadn’t got round to reading it. I enjoyed it but I think I need to at least read the first in the series to understand the characters better. I found moments hard to follow as presumably there is a backstory that helped it make sense to the reader that I wasn’t aware of. Quite funny though and I do like his writing style.

Actually I take that back, according to goodreads I read the first book in the series two years ago. It clearly didn’t have much of a lasting impact!

I found Short History Of Tractors really depressing @StrangewaysHereWeCome

Good luck @ÚlldemoShúl (sorry, my @s aren't working)

22. Here Lyeth. Johanna Frank. This one had some strange use of language at times, the style took a bit of getting used to. The author also randomly uses German words. There was a translation at the end, but I'm not sure that using German served a purpose, other than to remind the reader that the book was set in Germany.

In 1670 (?) Meginhardt is murdered by his father and taken to some kind of afterlife by an angel. They can travel through time.

Meanwhile in 1688 Lexxie finds out that she was stolen as a baby and travels to the village of her birth to find out why.

There were some Witch hunts, hangings, drownings etc. Meginhardt and Lexxie were connected. Lexxies "dad" stole her for good reason. But I'm left unsure about the whole thing.

23. Murder by Letter. Carmen Radtke
    I'll say nothing other than don't bother.

24. The Family Next Door. Charlotte Stevenson
    Psychological thriller. Retired, widowed Viola has a lovely quiet life. Until the new family move in next door, including seriously creepy 8 year old Mirabelle. This was full of twists, I didn't guess what was happening and was all in all a great thriller book. I can't really say much more without giving it away. Mirabelle claimed her mum isn't her mum. Her dad has more red flags than a red flag factory,and her grandfather is just as bad!

I hated it and DNF

Nothing particularly appealed in the Kindle daily deals but I did a quick wishlist check and found the latest Inspector Rebus, Midnight and Blue (#25) for 99p. I still have the previous book TBR. Bizarrely, it's listed as #2 Gifted in the "Financial Retirement Planning! category

Same here, years ago, I found it unreadable.

The front cover looked good though.

5 The answer is no - Fredrik Backman
I don't think I realised this was quite so short when I snapped it up in a 99p deal on the strength of having enjoyed everything I've read by Backman so far.
And indeed it was quite the perfect length for this wry, touching, sad, funny little tale about our ridiculous world. If you've read A man called Ove you will recognise the importance of the apartment block's residential committee and their strict rules and regulations.

That’s funny - sometimes it’s so random

6 The Secret Hours - Mick Herron It’s taken me ages to finish this, partly because it’s a slow type of book, but also due to work being busy and most of my spare time being spent reading all the Trump-related developments - I had forgotten how crazy the news cycle was when he was president the first time round! Think I will have to step away from the news a bit…

Anyway, this was my first book by Herron and I really enjoyed it. It’s got three storylines - a retired spy in the Devon countryside is attacked; a lumbering inquiry into MI5 gets nowhere for two years; and we get flashbacks to 90s Berlin from one of the inquiry witnesses. It’s very slow-burn and the threads don’t come together until almost the end; it felt very le Carré in the level of banal detail and unexciting, unglamorous events (that’s a compliment! 😄). Alongside that was a lot of satire about the workings of Whitehall and recent conservative governments (including barely-disguised references to Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and others) - again, right up my street!

And it gave me tantalising hints of the Slough House series as it’s clear that some of the characters in this book are main characters in that series (albeit cover names or titles are used so it’s not clear to someone like me who has just a bit of passing knowledge). Really looking forward to Slow Horses now!

Typical, isn’t it - I had Midnight and Blue on my wishlist for ages and ages, and in the end gave up just a couple of weeks ago and got it out of the library, as the price wasn’t budging…..sometimes I think they’re watching to see when I take things off my wishlist 🤔

7. The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier

A charming tale of the glassmakers of Venice. Chevalier uses a literary device to skip through history with the same family who live a human lifespan over 600 years. I loved a couple of her other books including Girl With A Pearl Earring, and this was quite lovely, but there's an awful lot of telling rather than showing going on.

6 A little life – Hanya Yanagihara
I have read many doorstop books, but this has surely been the hardest to finish. As I was packing for my summer holiday, I foolishly grabbed this ‘epic novel’ thinking I would finally have the time to devote to it. 5 months later, after having had to put this book down in horror more times than I can count, I have come to the end of 720 pages of this miserable tale.
The Times review on the back cover says something about how it’s rare to get to the end of a book of this length and wish it was longer. I disagree on both counts. It’s not rare for me to finish a lengthy book and long for more, but more importantly, what on earth do they possibly think could have been added to the sheer misery of this storyline??
I haven’t yet decided whether or not to put the title in italics, but I will certainly not be recommending this to anyone I know.