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

@cloudengel no, you’re right, most people usually do put their titles and authors in bold as they finish each book and leave a review, just so it stands out more easily on the thread.

Then when we come to list our accumulated reads - on each new thread, if we want to (some people don’t bother with this; it’s up to you), but certainly at the very end of the year when we’re all summing up our reads in total - people then put the books they really enjoyed into bold (and the ones they didn’t in italics!).

@LuckyMauveReader its your list, you are welcome to count whatever you wish. I would 100% count it, if it’s separately bound or in a collected works and I read the work then it counts.

@LuckyMauveReader its just been taken off the syllabus at our school. It’s quite nice to explore new texts

On my list right now:

The elements series by John Boyne(4 books, water, earth, fire, air)

The hearts invisible furies - John Boyne

The ministry of time - Kaliana Bradley

All the colours of the dark - Chris Whittaker(just finished, it's amazing)

Hello beautiful- Ann Napolitano

Thanks @Southeastdweller

I loved Larkin's two novels when I was at uni a million years ago, th9ugh not sure what I'd make of them now.

I've read about 40 pages of Slow Horses today. (Whispers - I'm not very taken with it, as yet. Does it get better?)

@AgualusasLover I wasn't sure. I would have just kept a separate list with all shorts on though. This is much better as I don't need to faff. 😃 Thank you

@MrsALambert Yes of course. That is what I'm finding doing this challenge. I'm reading books I've either disregarded for silly reasons or due to being a genre I wasn't interested in.

There are a few suggestions I've picked up and will be making my way through them too. I have a pile of 6 books TBR including 2 more sort reads. One of those is a genre I definitely wouldn't have come close to reading so I'm remaining hopeful.

Today's Kindle deals are quite interesting: they include

The Princesses of Hesse by Frances Welch, about Queen Victoria's granddaughters
My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss (read last year via Netgalley)
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (already had this)

and about 15 books by Rachel Cusk including fiction, memoirs and an essay collection at 99p/£1.19 - (bought 6, as I have the others on Kindle already)

5. Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

Shortlisted for the Booker 2023
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize 2024

I nearly stopped reading after the first chapter, but kept going. It's a coming of age novel about a girl whose mother has died, and whose father then puts her through a brutal regime playing squash.

I didn't know what to make of it. It's a good read and I suppose it's about grief, but I'm autistic and probably missed a lot of its meaning.

Remus I found Slow Horses dull and DNF it last year. I know most people love the series though!

Glad it’s not just me! Dull; so many characters that I can’t remember who’s who and don’t really care anyway; things that are supposed to be funny and aren’t; half of the sentences don’t even make sense.

The Zone of interest -Martin Amis

Think there has been a few of us who have read this recently. I’m finding it really hard to gather my thoughts about it and I think unsettling is the word that sums the book up. The phrase the banality of evil was in my head whenever I picked it up.

I wanted to read it as the film of the same name was the best thing I saw at the cinema last year but the book was just so different it wasn’t quite what I thought it was. I am thinking about it days after finishing so it has stuck with me in ways that other books often don’t.

I didn't love Slow Horses either and agree about getting confused between the characters. That makes a book very difficult to follow. I had the same issue with A Place of Greater Safety, which as a Wolf Hall fan I had expected to be right up my street. Couldn't get the three main characters fixed in my head at all so DNF.

The TV series has been so much better. I am really enjoying it, and willing to have a bash at the second book now I have the characters straight in my head. If that doesnt work, I'll stick to the TV show from now on.

Hoping I don’t upset anyone (particularly as you seemed to empathise!) but I was not a fan. Columbine is one of my obsessive rabbitholes that has never ended. I’m surprised it took me so long to read this. Honestly though, I kind of wish I hadn’t.

It’s full of excuses as to why her son committed his atrocities and examples of what a perfect family they all were. She barely humanises the victims. Then there is the constant undertone that her perfect son was coerced into it by Eric Harris. It drove me mad!

Nice to find someone who is interested in the topic though! I feel as though people look at me askance when I mention it in real life 😂

@Terpsichore Oh gotcha! Covered my eyes to scroll past your review but looking forward to it.

@SheilaFentiman MMA is my favourite Wimsey by miles (book and persona lol)

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie Guess you've have enough advice to decide but I was going to say Slough House isn't the fluff you might expect and you do have to concentrate just to engage on the most basic level - so if you're not enjoying the experience, there's really no point. Obviously as with any long-running series (with this high a body count) some books and characters are better than others but his style is well established from the off (had published several novels before this, and more poetry before that).
Also, for ropier reasoning of I think you're likelier to hate a popular thing than not! 😁Which is fair play - I haven't seen the adaptation that really everyone does seem to love, and the more it's praised the less I want to.

8 . Man in the Queue - Josephine Tey

I have this book on audible as I wanted to read Daughter of Time for the Plantaganet connection and the complete collection of Inspector Alan Grant books was the same price as the individual book. So I thought I'd start at the beginning of the collection. This book was almost a DNF the author is a bit try-hard with language. I've never seen (heard) the word sardonically used so many times! Add to that the first half is confusing with a pretty unlikable group of protagonists including the stage starlet Ray Markable. Anyway I was listening to it as I was doing chores/ driving and in the end it turned out, despite the faults, to be quite an interesting plot twist. I'm not sure how Inspector Alan Grant will get involved in an investigation involving the Plantaganets but I've got a few more books in the collection before I can see how that pans out.

@inaptonym I’m genuinely not trying to be all, ‘Oh, I’m not a sheep’ about it. I wanted to like it and am giving it a good chance, but it’s not working for me so far. I’ll try again later.

The Daughter of Time is really quite a different book, in a good way.

I do like Grant (Dalgleish, from P D James, carries his echo) but he isn’t immediately endearing, for sure.

Oh no, I wasn't accusing you of kneejerk hipsterism - I actually know a lot of people who don't get on with the books and can see why. But if you just don't like his writing style, that doesn't really change. (As a fan of the books I wish he'd drop the animal POV bookends already.)

Thanks @elkiedee i bought the Sarah Moss

@inaptonym I extra-love MMA because I read that DLS dashed it off whilst she was writing The Nine Tailors, which was taking her a long time to research and produce - and it’s still blinking brilliant 😀

Recent nonfic:
Sara Lodge - The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective
Fairly self-explanatory title, fairly well executed. Lodge is interested in how the VFD was produced through the ‘creative cross-fertilisation’ of real life and fiction, and combines readings of literary narratives with court records and newspapers (ads and letters as well as journalism) as well as hybrid texts. Once past the unpromisingly Carrie Bradshaw-ish intro (As I sat in the BL reading room I couldn’t help but wonder…) I really enjoyed the early chapters’ balance of history and criticism, in particular Lodge’s own archival detective work and popular drama esp. in East End and regional theatres (1860s-80s).

Unfortunately, having run out of fresh historical discoveries, later chapters tended to conventional literary survey of the potted-author-bio-and-plot-summaries type in support of her uncontroversial but fairly basic theses. Hardly ‘mysterious’: many novels were familiar to me (and likely others choosing to read a book with this title for fun) while also, based on some online reviews, boring the general cover-to-cover reader of narrative nonfic interested in social history or true crime.

The writing was generally smooth and light, only occasionally lapsing into trite academese (the VFD was ‘a performative space…for querying and queering’) or the opposite, try-hard relatability (Vic newspaper letter pages = social media! Vic women working around other obligations = zero hours contracts!) Sometimes very fun too (the chapter on PIs was called ‘Sex and the Female Dick’) and lots of fabulous pictures. Overall, more one for non-specialist Viclit fans - as one, I did come away with a healthy TBR, mostly secondary texts.

Lucy Easthope - When the Dust Settles
50Bookers top nonfiction read of last year. The hype is real: I found this an eye-opening, moving, highly readable page-turner, with unexpected flashes of humour. Inevitably full of distressing and haunting details, though their matter-of-fact presentation never felt gratuitous. I actually would have welcomed even more nerdy fascinating specifics about her work though the balance and interweaving of personal, professional and political was clearly intended and deftly done. For personal life-experience reasons I found the tracing of a ND woman's unconventional path (sorry, but needs must) inspirational.

OTOH, for personal life-experience reasons, a few howlers involving Asian people and places did made me wince and cast the ‘intrepid (British) expert flown in everywhere’ thing in a different light. A slightly ambivalent messy response feels appropriate anyway, to a book which fully commits to complexity and the refusal of easy answers, and which I will also bold.

Into double digits now with #10 The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

I read The Sentence last year and immediately wanted to read more of her books.

I LOVED Before My Actual Heart Breaks by Tish Delaney, by the way. I think it's set almost exactly where I grew up in rural Northern Ireland, during the 70s-90s. It's definitely a heart over head read for me. I'd be interested to hear what others with less emotional connection thought of it, if anyone's read it?

@SheilaFentiman that does make me love it more 😁I've read T9T at least 3 times and still have no understanding of (or interest in) the plot specifics. More used to defending my MMA love against marauding Gaudy Nighters though!

I DNFd the audiobook of Slow Horses but that was 2022 when I was unwell for months and not on the thread

I broke my buying ban to get the compendium to give it another try in print, it doesn't count because I already owned it in another format

@@TheGodOfSmallPotatoes and @Zireael There is a chapter in Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree about Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine killers, I don't know if you've read it. The whole book is a fascinating and compassionate study of families and parents of exceptional children - for example coping with disability, children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape or who become criminals - and how we understand human difference. It is a brilliant if rather weighty book first published in 2012 (when I read it) so I'm not sure if some of the ideas might now be considered rather dated, for example the chapter on Transgender.

I was at my parents house yesterday and my mum has a complete collection of Agatha Christie published in the 60s. I realised it would make more sense to borrow hers than to keep buying the books in the read christie challenge so I went through and picked out all of this year's challenge books. They're hardback with 3 stories in each so pretty hefty books. They're so old that And Then There Were None still has the original title and wording using the N word. I mentioned it to my mum and she said that's one of the reasons she still has the books despite not having read any of them for decades as she thinks she probably can't pass on that title (to a charity shop etc) and she doesn't want to break up the collection by taking 3 stories out of it