50 Books Challenge 2025 Part Three

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the third 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 here and the second thread here.

Sorry to hear about your / your Dh's health issues @TattiePants and @PepeLePew I hope everything turns out out ok for you both.

Thinking of you both @PepeLePew and @TattiePants , and anyone else going through difficult times.

I’m looking forward to a re-read of the House on the Strand soon, having bought it at 99p (I make myself read oldest first on Kindle, so it’s a while off yet!). Currently finding a Rory Stewart book quite slow-going…

Best wishes to Pepe and Tattie 💐. Do hope the news is good and the waiting helped by book distraction.

I also enjoyed The House on the Strand. I have The Scapegoat and The Kings General on my Kindle TBR pile but planning to save for a holiday in Cornwall later this year. * *I love DdM and even better I have a cousin called Rachel.

I went yesterday. I may have cried. A lot. It was utterly splendid.

On my way now - can’t wait!

Oh dear @EineReiseDurchDieZeit and @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie ! Maybe I didn't describe it very well... there was, to be fair, a lot of semen, though I didn't put that in my review.

I'm seeing Ballet Shoes at the weekend!

Jealous of everyone seeing Ballet Shoes @GrannieMainland yes that's what J remember @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie an objection to excess semen !!

Nice image in my head there!

Having watched the TV series and been recommended the book by a couple of you, I read Say Nothing. The book is most absorbing and, of course, in every way superior to the Disney+ adaptation (good TV though that is). It really does explore the mess that was, and really still is, Northern Ireland. I found the bits about British government involvement and even perhaps collusion the most intriguing. Fascinating, troubling stuff.

Sending hugs and 💐 to @PepeLePew and @TattiePants .

Really?!!!! How do I not remember?!

Found my review.

DNF The New Life
There’s only so many erections and ejaculations a girl can cope with in 15 pages, and this was too many.

Interestingly after a year on the waitlist I just got my ADHD diagnosis appointment through for next month. I will need to prepare properly as I am nervous I am not ADHD enough to get the tick. But I am not sure what it will change. My GP sorted the referral before I had the chance to think about it! In the meantime time I have been assuming I have it, which mostly means being nicer to myself when I forget a plan, lose my keys, double myself etc.

Much love to those waiting on health news. I wish you reading are able to escape into!

DS had his ADHD referral through in under a year too. When I have time I’ll go back to the GP. DM is in hospital after a fall atm and there’s too much going on there for me to think about much else. I do recognise what was said up thread about structure around a working life. I was super organised and thorough in my job, overly so and I am totally incapable of being late for anything. Overcompensating.

Not sure if I’m doing this right as not joined this kind of thread before

1. The Bear and the Nightingale – Katherine Arden
2. The Girl in the Tower – Katherine Arden
3. The Winter of the Witch – Katherine Arden
4. Dance of Thieves – Mary E Pearson
5. Vow of Thieves – Mary E Pearson
6. The Vagabound Clown – Edward Marston
7. The Cinnamon Bun Book Store – Laurie Gilmore – did not enjoy this at all

1. The Wind in the Willows – have promised myself a re-read as love this book
2. Written on the Dark – Guy Gavriel Kay

10. The Harp of Kings – Juliet Marillier
11. The City in Glass – Nghi Vo

Edited as I don't know what went wrong with my numbering

Thank you for the new thread @Southeastdweller. I couldn’t find it and had 12 pages to catch up on lol.

@ÚlldemoShúl
– there is an older group of reader on BookTok. You just need to search them out 😊
@PepeLePew @TattiePants love to you both

24 Queenie – Candice Carty-Williams RWYO challenge. Bought this at a bookshop because it had a ‘long listed for the WPF 2020’ sticker on it. Queenie is a young, black women living in London. She and her boyfriend are on a break and she has a series of awful men. This was a hard read in parts, but very rewarding.

25 The Secret of Flowers – Sally Page 99p Kindle special. Bought because I enjoyed a previous book by the author. Her daughter is also an author, but I haven’t come across her. SP was a florist prior to becoming an author, so there are lots of detail about flowers. The story is two stories, contemporary Emma, a young widow who is struggling and Violet, a young Irish woman who’s family moves to Argentina. Emma becomes fascinated with the Titanic and the mystery of who did the flowers. Themes of friendship, family, I enjoyed it. Recommended.

I went to a book event last night with the lovely Elly Griffiths. @Cherrypi EG made that very point about so many books being set in 2019 because authors are avoiding writing about the pandemic. I’ll definitely be getting Frozen People out of the library.

I’ve also managed to not buy any books. That’s 50 days now, hurrah! I’m down to 24 unread on my Kindle.

Don't worry about it @Purplebunnie but basically:

Reviewing a book?

Bold the title

Making a list ?

Just bold the titles you really loved

Welcome to the thread!

Thank you.

@Purplebunnie and the numbering messes with EVERYONE. It's not you, it's MN

43. Finding Home in Hartfell. Suzanne Snow
    Pippa is asked by her aging rockstar father to go and 'sort out' a house that he owns in the Yorkshire countryside. What he doesn't bother to tell her is that there's a sitting tenant, and a lot of history with the village. Pippa and Gil (the tenant) were both pretty unlikeable tbh, and the romance thoroughly predictable. But, this was a nice cosy "you know what you're getting" book.

44. End of a Century. Paul Carnahan
    A bold for me. This is a slightly odd story about a suit. Set in the 90s, Des likes to buy, and wear, vintage clothing. He buys a suit from a shop in Glasgow which was hand-made in London in 1966. He finds a love letter in the pocket, and in order to impress a woman he likes ends up going to London to find out where the suit was made, who for and why.
    
    I know. It sounds bonkers. But it was brilliant, and it made me cry. Finding something like that, and tracing the history is exactly the kind of crazy thing I'd do, although I'd just search online!

45. Witness to the Revolution. Kiersten Marcil
    This is book 1 in a series. Savannah is a 21st century single Mum, living in America, when she's suddenly somehow transported to 1778 and the edges of a battlefield. The American Revolution isn't something I know much about, but the history in this book did match to what I know. Most of the book was fairly slow with Savvy living with the army and getting used to being a woman in the eighteenth century (or 'the eighteenth' as it was referred to in the book which I found incredibly annoying). Despite being fairly slow, it was still an enjoyable read.
    However, it really picked up in the last 25% or so, when some kind of weird magic, and possible witches were introduced. This is the kind of book where I'm not sure what I think right now. I need to read book 2 to work out if it was just too slow, or if it was just the world building that made book 1 seem that way.

💐@TattiePants and best wishes for DH's treatment and recovery.
You're one Maeve ahead of me at least. Only took a punt on the first two at 99p, now in a long library queue for the third...

hello @Purplebunnie ! The Wind in the Willows is one of my favourite books ever and it's great to see another fantasy reader here! I also have the new GGK on preorder, hoping for a return to Arbonne.

@Tarragon123 well done on the no-buy! Will wait for your review of The Frozen People to decide whether I want to read it - even though I still have Ruth G. to try.

I also DNFed The New Life for being too wanky, literally. Actually it's been THE 'book read by people who don't normally read novels' in my RL friendship group last year so I'm glad it's out there (so to speak) and loved your review @GrannieMainland

💐for @PepeLePew and @TattiePants

I don't think I've brought my list over, sorry it's 12 pages into the thread 😬

1 Winter Swimming - Dr Susanna Søberg
2 The Story of Art Without Men – Katy Hessel
3 Mr Loverman – Bernadine Evaristo
4 We Solve Murders – Richard Osman
5 City of Destruction – Vaseem Khan
6 Girl A – Abigail Dean
7 The Slap – Christos Tsiolkas
8 Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World – Mark Aldridge
9 Black Butterflies – Priscilla Morris

And my latest read:

10 Portrait of a Marriage – Nigel Nicolson

This is a thoroughly strange but thoroughly absorbing book. Nigel Nicolson was the younger son of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson and this is his account of his parents' marriage. But it is told in five parts; two are autobiographical, written by Vita about her early life and her affair with Violet Keppel/Trefusis, and the remaining three are Nigel's attempts to make sense of it all. Vita's account of her childhood is absorbing and (in parts) endearing; her telling of the affair, by contrast, is a breathless whirlwind of passion that feels Wuthering Heights-esque in its overwrought emotion. It all works strangely well with Nigel Nicolson's impressively calm attempts to draw everything together. His fondness particularly of his father is apparent in his writing. Whether the marriage worked quite as well as he said, who knows, but it is an intriguing explanation of a different way to live. A bonus is the larger-than-life character of Vita's mother, Lady Sackville, in relation to whom I swung between bemused admiration and agreeing with Virginia Woolf's assessment (after Lady Sackville told Nigel's older brother the entire story of his respective parents' infidelities randomly on one occasion when he visited her, aged 18) that: "The old woman ought to be shot"

@inaptonym I'm also hoping for a return to Arbonne. I can't wait for it to come out

I'm tempted to re-read Rebecca as well. The booktuber Roro Reads has just done a review on it which I watched earlier, he thought it was an excellent book. I might watch the Laurence Olivier/Joan Fontaine adaptation this weekend too.

I read it donkey's years ago @InTheCludgie but really enjoyed the reread.

I watch RoRo Reads as well! Read Rebecca when I was a teenager so it would be interesting to see how I took to it now. Alas, the state of my TBR has no room for that sort of endeavour