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

@MyrtleLion I am 2/3 way through this book 🙂 enjoying it but I agree the time skipping is a bit heavy handed!

6 Girl A by Abigail Dean

I saw Dean speak at a crime writing festival last year; she was interesting and this was 99p at the time so I thought I'd give it a try. Lex, or "Girl A" is the oldest girl in a family of children subjected to horrific abuse by their parents. We meet her after her mother has died, and the (now mainly adult) children have to decide what should be done with the house in which they were abused. It's told partly in retrospect, so the story of what happened to the children is revealed as you go along with the modern day plot line.

I was a bit distracted reading it and so probably didn't take everything in as well as I should, but it kept me turning the pages. I really liked Dean's writing style and (possibly due to distraction) didn't guess the central twist. I agree with whoever reviewed her second novel upthread that the narrator's flat style suited this book, but I can also see that it might not work as well in a different setting. I enjoyed the ambiguity of many of the characters and the exploration of how the children had reacted, which I thought was well and sensitively handled in a book that could just have felt exploitative (not of real people, because the "cast" is fictional, but of other, similar crimes).

@RazorstormUnicorn – enjoy your time in the City of Literature! What book shops are you planning on visiting?

@Welshwabbit – I love the Malabar House series. You’ve reminded me to get back into them. Vaseem Khan and Abir Mukherjee (Wyndham and Bannerjee) do a podcast if you are interested. The Red Hot Chilli Writers present Murder Junction.

@ÚlldemoShúl – good luck with the inspection!

Oooh, thanks, @Tarragon123 !

This is a good book to read when you want to curl up on a lazy Sunday afternoon and do not very much at all. So, it’s A A Milne’s one and only foray into detective fiction, The Red House Mystery. Our detective,is Antony Gillingham and his friend, Bill, becomes his sidekick (lots of mentions of him being Watson to Antony’s Sherlock) when Antony decides to visit Bill whilst Bill is staying at The Red House as a guest of Mark Ablett. Antony arrives at Red House just after a murder has taken place and there and then decides to become a Detective. There’s a rogue brother, a disappearing host and a favoured cousin and a murder mystery to unravel. There’s a secret life, a secret passion and a secret passage in the library and a murder mystery to solve. An easy, light read.

Now reading The Wizard of the Kremlin, by Giuliano da Empoli, about 3/4 of the way through. I am not completely getting pulled into the world creation as I keep wanting to google events that are described.

3. Gallows Walk by Giles Ekins This was free on a stuff your kindle day last year and I still don't feel like I got my money's worth! Frankly terrible. The spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, repeated words and punctuation scatter gunned onto the page at complete random utterly distracted from the story, which was also complete rubbish. I very nearly dnf at the disgusting police abuse of a black woman, calling her a monkey and assuming she lacks civilisation and intelligence. Absolutely no excuse of "that sort of thing happened in the 50s" makes the writing in this acceptable. Unfortunately I continued reading and wasted several more hours of my life

If anyone is interested in a synopsis, in 1950s West Garside an attempted bank robbery goes wrong. DI Chris Yarrow and his team investigate. Racism and misogyny abound and offending officers are given token suspensions for brief periods of time before being reinstated with no long term consequences. Apparently we're supposed to root for Yarrow because he very vaguely disapproves of the racism and misogyny although this is only evident in his internal monologue and he never expresses his distaste aloud, despite being the senior officer to the offenders. Apparently this is the first in a trilogy and I wouldn't touch the others with a barge pole

Tracey Chevalier does like a bit of art and craft in her novels. Which I enjoy.

@MyrtleLion have you read A Single Thread? About the "surplus women" left after so many young men were killed in WWI. A group of them get together to embroider kneelers for the cathedral. There's a lot more to it than that though.

I think you'd like it.

No, I haven't but I have reserved it at the library. It sounds right up my street. Thank you!
I love stories about independent women doing their own thing. Between the wars is one of my favourite eras.

19. The House Of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

I have an actual litany of book prize nominees languishing on my Kindle and this was among them, so spurred on by @ÚlldemoShúl's recent review I decided its time had come.

It concerns the writer W. Somerset Maugham and his stay in Malaysia with an old friend Robert and his wife Lesley. Robert warns Lesley not to confide in Maugham lest she become fodder for one of his books. She does anyway.

I'm sorry to say I was disappointed in this. It's very good but not quite a bold for me and that's because it's not a patch on The Gift Of Rain or The Garden Of Evening Mists by the same author I thought. I should say I read both of those a very long time ago, so I might not feel the same way about them now.

I'm a bit disappointed that I'm nearly 20 books in to 2025 and only two bolds. I think the extent to which I read has made me hard to please and I feel like I'm chasing that high of absolutely LOVING what I'm reading. Even my two bolds My Friends by Hisham Matar and Annie Bot by Sierra Greer only got bolded because they were doing something different which I respected.

Oh to just fall in love with a book!

@Welshwabbit @Tarragon123 Another vote for Malabar House series, on book 2 currently!

Dead Mile by Jo Furniss

A locked room murder mystery with a difference. An off duty policewoman is driving home when she gets stuck in gridlock on the motorway. However her time is soon taken up investigating when she realises the man in the car next to her has been stabbed. There’s no way the murderer can have escaped, which means they’re still on the motorway. I really enjoyed this. It held my interest despite being almost constantly set in the same place.

Famous by Blake Crouch

A man who bears a striking resemblance to a Hollywood actor decides to pretend he is the actor when his own life falls apart. How far will he take his deception? A good premise but rubbish execution unfortunately. The main character is not at all likeable, the story is quite short and the ending is unsatisfying.

A Serial Killer’s Guide To Marriage by Asia Mackey

I really enjoyed this. I think anyone who enjoyed Sweetpea would also enjoy this. Hazel and Fox met and bonded over their mutual love of murder, but now they’re married with a child they’re trying to live a normal life. This isn’t enough for Hazel though and when she kills again, will their marriage survive? This is darkly funny, and I raced through it. It’s not quite a bold because the ending was slightly implausible to me but otherwise I thought it was great.

Ink Ribbon Red by Alex Pavesi

Another one with a good premise that didn’t deliver. This tries to be far too clever. It features a group of friends who get together for a weekend and play a game where they have to write stories where one friend murders another. These stories are interspersed with the real events of the weekend, so you’re never quite sure whether what you’re reading is ‘real’ or just one of the stories. This would be fine except I was still none the wiser once I got to the end whether anyone actually got murdered or not. The characters were very thin and they didn’t even seem to like each other at all let alone have all been friends for years.

Oh @EineReiseDurchDieZeit im disappointed you didn’t love The House of Doors as much as I did (but also kind of excited that the others are so much better!) Currently reading a pile of self-absorbed twaddle called Arrangements in Blue but promised a friend I’d read it so will persevere

The House of Doors wasn't a bold for me. The descriptions were beautiful but neither of the stories drew me in.

I couldn't put down A Little Life though and inhaled it over a long weekend. It was unremittingly depressing though and I've found her other books very disappointing.

8. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store - James McBride - much praised book about Jewish and negro families living side by side in a town in Pennsylvania in the 1930s. I was given this and it isn't really something I would have picked up. It was a bit obvious for me, and I got a bit bored.

15 The Glassmaker - Tracy Chevalier

This is a bold for me. I agree with @MyrtleLion that the time slip stuff was a little forced (and very distant from the main story).

But I really liked the main character, Orsola, finding her way from a timid child to an established and confident woman, managing the men in her family with the help of her sisters in law, though good times and plague, into mass production and the separation of the family, A chance encounter with the only female glass maker on Murano in the 1400s leads to Orsola learning how to make glass beads, which are key to her family’s survival at crucial points.

I love glass and visited Murano when I was in Venice many years ago and this makes me want to go back!

Is this non-fiction? Not only does it sound fascinating, but I think it will fit one of the genres on the StoryGraph genre challenge.

@BlueFairyBugsBooks no, not non-fiction although I believe the details about the craft of embroidery, and campanology, are well-researched and accurate. In fact you can still see some examples of the kneelers described in Winchester Cathedral today.

There were almost two million more women than men left alive after WWI and these women would have been expected to become wives and mothers, a future no longer available to them. They subsequently had to find a different way of life, and A Single Thread explores this challenge. It's not just about embroidery, although I did enjoy this aspect of the novel too.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I read The House of Doors only a few months ago and although I think I quite enjoyed it I couldn't tell you anything about it now. Better to read a book by Somerset Maugham rather than one about him imo. The Painted Veil was really good.

Couldn't agree more @nowanearlyNicemum, I found A Little Life to be unremittingly depressing.
I could overlook that (I loved A Fine Balance, another misery fest that it is often compared to) but quite apart from the misery I didn't really feel like the characters were well rounded or their actions believable.

I read A Little Life several years ago and also found it depressing, not least because I thought it was so poorly written that I couldn't understand why it was wildly popular.

I am finally getting round to The Book Thief. I've had this book on the DNF pile since 2019 (as goodreads told me). I am listening to the audiobook. I very nearly gave up on that too!

Here's why it's taken so long:

Everyone raved about it so I read the blurb and thought this looks great. But the blurb doesn't say that Death narrates the book. So his perspective got in the way (and I think he's probably Chekhov's gun, from the reviews that say readers will cry in the end). I expected it to be a straightforward story about Liesl stealing books and if the blurb had indicated that Death was narrating, I would have not been so put off when I started reading.

The audiobook has an unnecessary "soundscape" with an accordion playing intermittently (which I eventually understood, but it's still unnecessary) and every so often Death's voice is put into reverb. I nearly stopped listening but the voice actor is excellent and has such a mellifluous tone that I'm sticking with it and ignoring the gimmicks. I'm about a sixth of the way through, so I'm hopeful that I might finish it.

Just had a lovely time being completely baffled as to why the post I wrote late last night, and could see, now wasn’t showing up on here. Then realised I’d put it on the old thread….

9. Rural Hours - Harriet Baker
A thoughtful and contemplative study of three women writers - Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann - and their experience of living in the country, as all did at various points in their lives (STW probably more committedly than the other two). I enjoyed Baker's analysis of how country life fed into the writing of all three, though I'm not sure how major an influence it really was. A very interesting read, though.

10. The Waiting - Michael Connelly
By way of total contrast, the latest Connelly novel, with relatively little Bosch and mostly Ballard. I’m a sucker for these and it went down very nicely, although I’m not massively keen on the idea of the dull Maddie Bosch being teed up to replace her father once Connelly finally kills him off (as she obviously is, I'm afraid).

Morning All. I wanted to thank the person who recommended Dead Mile by Jo Furniss and the person who alerted me to the latest Rebus being on offer yesterday. Dead Mile is so entertaining.

The Marriage Contract by Brooke Burroughs. Sadly I'm coming to the end of this but it's going to be a bold. I nearly didn't read it as it's not my usual type of book,

I've just reserved A Single Thread at the library so thanks for that recommendation.
I also read A Little Life a few years ago, horribly depressing. I don't mind sad stories and stories of people overcoming adversity but honestly it was 700+ pages of misery heaped on more misery. I don't need that in my life.

This thread moves fast!

I’ve read/listened to a few more books since my last post.

10. West by Carys Davies

This is a very short book and it didn’t go where I expected it to after reading the first dozen pages. I enjoyed it well enough though. In a way I wish that it’d been longer.

11. The Phantom Menace by Terry Brooks
    I used to be a big Star Wars fan and I still have an interest to an extent.(Original and prequels only)
    I got rid of my books a while ago and regretted it so I bought the prequel trilogy on Audiobook.
    I have fond memories of seeing this as a teen in the cinema so this was pure comfort food for me. Jar Jar is still rather grating but I enjoyed this especially the sound effects which gave it the feel of listening to a ‘50’s Sci-Fi radio show. I do wish that they’d included more authentic sounds from the film though.

12. A Furious Sky by Eric Jay Dolin
    This was a history of hurricanes in America. It was interesting though I found the narrator to be a little robotic. The sections on the toll on people more interesting than the debate over which direction a hurricane’s winds rotate in or details of the instruments used to monitor it.
    It does a good job in making you realise just how truly horrific the effects of a hurricane can be and how climate change is making them stronger and more common.

Not a book to read if you are sensitive to child death as there are multiple accounts of children dying horribly. Not in an excessively gratiuitious manner but it’s still disturbing.

13. Attack of The Clones by R.A Salvatore

Again pure comfort food. I couldn’t stop listening to this. It seemed to include more authentic sounds from the film than TPM which I appreciated.

14. The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King.

I bought this on audiobook 5 years ago because the physical book was very difficult to get in the UK and expensive. I wish that I’d bought the physical book because the narrator sounds eerily like an American friend which was very disconcerting.

This was interesting and often horrifying but the Author’s often sarcastic and sardonic tone was somewhat aggravating and I struggled through the last few chapters but I’m glad that I listened and there are several stories that I want to learn more about. It wasn’t as in depth as I’d have liked but the Author makes it clear that it’s an account not a true history of the treatment of Native Americans and First Nations people.

Came back while ago from the library after collecting two books. One of them is Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín. Just opened it there and it's in German ffs 😅

The other one is Tunnel 29. Set in Berlin, but thankfully not in German.