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

@whinsome I read the first DI Ryan Wilkins book and loved it. I must move the rest up on my tbr- I think I have the next 2 on kindle already.

10 In the Beginning by Simon Edge
A satire on the gender wars, this time about Maya Forstater's case. Edge takes the subject of the age of the Earth in place of gender and retells Maya's story through the eyes of Tara who dares to write a paper on Yemen (where she's from) and states that it was formed many thousands of years ago. Cue outcries as the woke brigade tell her she's offending First Nations people who worship a potter goddess from 10,000 years ago. Of course she isn't, but the book describes how her company lets her go and the subsequent battle to prove she's been unfairly sacked and that she's entitled to believe in evolution.

Thanks @Tarragon123. I will look up the Anne Dowd interview! She voiced Aunt Lydia on the The Testaments audiobook, which was great

I thought The Testaments we're fab when I read them a couple of years ago. That and the Handmaid's Tale book have far more insight into Gilead as a whole, although the TV series is one of my favourite ever.

I'm still stuck in some kind of book rut where most things I read are just "ok",a couple were 'good' but nothing brilliant. It's very disheartening.

30. The Little Island Flower Stall. Tilly Tennant.
    Standard 'girl gets her heart broken and runs away' book, but in a change to the usual, in this one she goes to run a flat stall not a cafe. Bella finds out her husband has been having an affair, so she goes to stay with her great Aunt in Jersey and helps run her flower stall. She meets handsome and mysterious Rory who is there to find out who his real parents were. There were some interesting bits about the Nazi occupation and the tunnels that were built there. A bit predictable at times, but an easy read.

31. Wolf-blessed. John O’Donnell.
    Probably wouldn't recommend this. It felt a bit like The Hunger Games at the beginning, but wasn't. There was magic and danger. But that's all I remember.

32. Lunar. Chloe Openshaw
    Fern has recently separated from her husband, and buys a beautiful house called Lunar. When she moves in she finds one of the bedrooms is some kind of shrine to a child, nothing has been moved in forever. She finds out that the son of the family died in a tragic accident 15 years earlier. The Mum died not long after, and the daughter left home and never came back. The villagers won't talk about it, but as Fern gets them to open up she also heals from her long term marriage. The backstory of the dead child was tragic, so many people were hiding secrets and so many people blamed themselves. This was pretty close to a bold actually.

33. The Zone of Interest. Martin Amis
    I think most of you have read this, so o don't need to say what it's about. I'm not sure what I thought though. At times I was so annoyed by it all that I nearly gave up, at other times I thought it was pure genius!
    I found the use of numerals rather than words annoying, for example 1stly, 2ndly. Really irritating! And some words and phrases were in German with no indication as to what they mean, and other phrases that I think most people know and understand were in English. The 'third realm' rather than 'third reich.'
    I also have no idea why the film says its based on the book when they are nothing alike, other than the location.

34. The Red Magus. Natasha Joy Price
    This was another one where the writing let it down. It was all about past life regression and souls existing across timelines. Cassie, in the modern day finds out that her husband is having an affair. In a past life she was stabbed by her brother. So she uses past life regression to try and stop those events happening. I don't believe in any thing like that, although I think the author does. But as a piece of fiction it was an interesting story.

@ShelfObsessed I really enjoyed Nathaniel’s Nutmeg - some of his others are good too, especially the one about Elizabeth - was it called Big Chief or something like that?

Fog and murder sound right up my street, so I’ll check that out too!

@MegBusset Ive read a good book about Captain C, but can’t remember if it was that one. I’ll try to find out!

The fog one seems to be available as an audiobook but not on Kindle, annoyingly.

And the Cook one is very recent, so is not the one I read. Also annoyingly, I have no recollection of the one I read, although vividly remember his botanist and his ending!

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie I was just looking for the fog one too! I can't justify an ACTUAL book purchase at this stage, when I have approximately 12 million unread books (both electronic and physical) and a house move pending.

15. The Hanging Girl by Jussi Adler-Olsen

No 6 in the Department Q series, and probably my least favourite so far. There’s a cold case, a trail of other bodies, a sun worshipping cult, and lots of nonsense. I’m starting to think Carl and Assad have a death wish at this point as they fail yet again to make an arrest without experiencing a near death experience.

The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmyre Thanks noodle and others for recommending this, it’s good fun. Initially it alternates between a Miss Marple-like Scottish amateur detective and an LA noir-style private eye, and then their 2 worlds come together. I enjoyed the humour and the mystery but personally won’t bold it as I’m a strait laced reader who ultimately prefers books to stay in their lane.

The Safekeep - Yael van der Wouden
This was on a few of the round up lists of 2024 book highlights and I think long listed for à prize or two.

In 1960s Netherlands Isabel lives in the family home acquired during the war. Her life is measured, ordered, full of routine and concern about appearances. The introduction of Eva, the girlfriend of Eva’s brother Louis, completely upends everything Isabel understands about the world. Eva is the opposite of Isabel and Isabel sees her as a threat. Things begin to go missing from the family home and the paranoia that Isabel feels creeps through the pages.

The writing was beautiful, really evocative of the place and time and the house was as much a character as the people. The themes touch on memory, family, home and belonging. Really transported me into the novel.

There is a lot of sex in it - I felt it was relevant and done in away that wasn’t gratuitous but not one to listen to an audiobook with your granny around!

22 Bone and Cane - David Belbin

Another from the kindle archives (2011). There’s a second book, but I won’t be bothering.

Sarah Bone is a Labour MP and Nick Cane is the former love of her life. They broke up years ago. Sarah’s star is on the up, as a by election winner just prior to Blair’s first win. Nick, however, is recently out of jail for (what we later find out to be) drug dealing.

After Sarah campaigns successfully against a miscarriage of justice impacting Ed Clarke, convicted of rape and double murder, she and Nick end up crossing paths repeatedly and the spark is still there.

This was pacy enough, fairly implausible, and people in the public eye played faster and looser with the law than even Boris Johnson managed!

ETA I am going to stop grinding through some of the very old backlog and actively pick the next few. The frontlog, if you will 😀

8. How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin

A complicated and implausible murder mystery - there were so many characters and pieces of info, I kept get mightily lost. You can have too many red herrings imo.

The reviews said it was "very funny" - that was clearly a red herring because it wasn't funny at all.

I'm on a total Irish kick so I've been reading #21 We Don't Know Ourselves by Fintan O'Toole - this is a chunky non-fiction that might take me a while to finish.

Fiction-wise, I'm about to start #22 Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan

This was a DNF for me last year. The sales assistant in Waterstones very, very enthusiastically recommended this and another book (Murder in Lake Garda or something like that) to me and really disliked both. I vowed never to take advice in that branch again after that! I did finish the lake garda one at least, but it was not to my taste at all.

@Pickandmixusername Oh dear, I bought that for my DD for Christmas as we are going to Lake Garda in the summer. Was planning for it to be my holiday read!

@ShelfObsessed you might like The Queen of subtleties by Suzannah Dunn

12. The Children’s Bach - Helen Garner

A short book - a novella, really - of 1984 by this always-readable Australian writer, whose non-fiction I really rate. In a Melbourne suburb, Dexter and Athena Fox live a happy enough life in a messy, normal, scruffy house with their two sons, Arthur and Billy, who has an unspecified cognitive disability.

Dexter chances to meet an old friend of his youth, the glamorous Elizabeth, whose much younger sister, 17-year-old Vicki, has come to stay with her. Unsettled by Elizabeth’s modish, unfurnished loft apartment, Vicki gravitates to the Fox household and temporarily moves in. Elizabeth’s reconnection with Dexter also brings her long-term lover, musician and compulsive womaniser Philip, into the circle. Athena is drawn to him and feels the pull of another life, away from family and routine; to Dexter's distress she leaves and heads for Sydney with Philip for a brief affair conducted in sleazy hotels and clubs, but returns home to order and domesticity as the narrative ends.

I read a review of this that described Garner's method as being to cut away almost all the plot until only the impression of a plot is left - that’s very good: you don’t get spoonfed by her writing but have to piece together all these details from fragments as you go. It’s brilliantly well-written, though zero punches are pulled (Billy's disability is handled in a way that might not be seen as acceptable today). Another bold, I think.

I kept going because I wanted to know who did it. The plot was tied up quite satisfactorily but getting there was quite tedious.

Recent reads:
Slough House & Bad Actors by Mick Herron. Which brings me up to date with the series.
I was going to give it a break after Slough House but it ends on such a cliffhanger I had to plough on. However the cliff hanger isn't really addressed in the next book anyway.
I love the inhabitants of Slough House and their interactions. (Although for a punishment billet it's starting to stretch credibility that they see quite so much action.) I'm less enamoured of the political machinations - Peter Judd, Oliver Nash, Anthony Sparrow et al and there was too much of them for my liking in Bad Actors.
That said I will no doubt pick this up again when the 9th book Clown Town is released in September.

#15 A Room With A View - E.M. Forster

Hard to describe tbh! A love story I think. I've only ever read one other E.M. Forster novel and that was many years ago, but the style seems similar to me. Focus on class, love, passion, religion, art and family.

I liked it, but, being absolutely truthful, I didn’t find it enthralling. The main protagonists are a bit naval gazey and upper middle class. Hard for me to relate.

But it is a literary classic and I can see why.

I feel like I've been reading quite slowly this year, I'm not really sure why except maybe RWYO means I'm reading things that I wasn't that enamoured by initially. Anyway this was one I actually did want to read.

Ten. The Empusium - Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. I loved Drive Your Plow so was keen to read another book by Tokarczuk. I don't know if anyone on here had read the Book of Jacob? I decided that looked bit too much of a beast. This is apparently based on Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain which I haven't read and am unlikely to ever do. A young Polish man Mieczyslaw Wojnicz arrives at a tuberculosis clinic in the mountains to treat his lungs. He stays at a nearby guest house with some other patients and the owner who are all rather odd in various ways. Each night the guests meet, drink some trippy liquer and debate philosophy, generally ending up in a slag fest on the inferiority of women. Weird things happen, everything is opaque and hard to understand. For me it was a book to admire rather than love. I found it quite slow moving especially in the middle whether you're just going from one dinner to another, more awful rich food and descriptions of debates. But the last third really steps up. The spooky, natural writing is excellent and the weird descriptions of what happens in the woods are great. A solid 4 for me.

Thanks - I gave up really early on tbh, but probably should have persevered a bit. Not sure I'll go back to it, although I still have the book. Might be one for the charity shop!

@Pickandmixusername it's the background characters in A Room with a View that I enjoyed the most, particularly the other English guests in the Italian hotel.

13. Holy Disorders, Edmund Crispin
Another detection fiction book from the 1940s, although I didn't find it as amusing as Swan Song by the same author. The cathedral organist has been attacked, but why and by whom? Witches, spies, minor clerics - the ingredients were fine but didn't quite come together. Not one of his better books.

14. The Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre, by Tim Hannigan Ah, sweet serendipity. I didn't know this book existed till I saw it by chance in a charity shop, but it turned out to be exactly what I wanted to read. The author has affection for the travel writing genre, but is troubled by criticism that it's embedded in a colonial perspective, an idea rooted in Said's Orientalism. He also wonders about gender and about how much poetic licence is acceptable. He reads academic literature, and undertakes a series of trips to meet travel writers (his meeting with Dervla Murphy was a highlight for me). He looks at the original diaries written by Thesiger and Leigh Fermor and compares them with the versions that were eventually published. He also ponders what it's like when visitors write about your home area. I don't think the book will necessarily have mass appeal, but the author and I have similar preoccupations and I wallowed in it with pleasure.

Bibliomania, I'll look up that travel book as Dervla Murphy was a favourite author here