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.

@MargotMoon I'm not clear on what's changing with Amazon and that video was a bit conspiracy theory heavy with no real information. Can anyone summarise what's happening? Is it just we can't move kindle books to USB or are we no longer going to have access to purchased books?!

@satelliteheart my understanding is that you will no longer be able to save your kindle books to a computer or USB. You will be able to read them from a kindle or the kindle app as normal. Some people think it’s to give Amazon more control of your ebook library, others believe it’s a move to reduce piracy. I may be naive but I think it’s the latter- and I prefer to think authors are being paid for their books so am anti-piracy and see this as a good thing.

@ÚlldemoShúl thank you, that makes sense! Was worried there I'd need to find a way to store all my purchased books on my Kindle instead of just downloading them when I want to read them. I agree, it sounds like an anti-piracy measure which can only be a good thing for authors

Good morning 50 Bookers - from a very very windy Wales - expecting the power to go at any moment, so have made sure the kindle is charged just in case!

I've not been on here since halfway through thread 2, life has been getting in the way and I do spend less time doomscrolling FB and MN these days, which has to be a good thing!

I have been reading a fair amount, so here's my list so far for 2025:

1. The Wrong Sister by Claire Douglas
2. Sycamore Gap by LJ Ross
3. Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
4. The Moon Sister by Lucinda Riley
5. The Trial by Rob Rinder
6. The Murders at Fleat House by Lucinda Riley
7. Manhunt by Colin Sutton
8. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Gamus
9. The Women by Kristen Hannah
10. The Sun Sister by Lucinda Riley

11. Katheryn Howard: The Tainted Queen by Alison Weir

This is the fifth book in Alison Weir's series about the six wives of Henry VIII, each written from the point of view of each queen. It is the first time I have picked up this series in a while, after I read the first four pretty much back to back a few years ago.
I particularly enjoyed the first two, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, mainly because the timeline of the two largely overlapped and was the same story from two opposing points of view.
They are fictionalised obviously, with scenes it is impossible to know if they took place, but they are well written and readable.
I feel this one was a bit stretched out, but in fairness to Alison Weir, Katheryn Howard was only 21 when she was executed and was only married to the King for less than two years, and she had a book to fill. Like the earlier books in the series, there was some overlap with the previous book on Anne of Cleeves. Katheryn was one of her ladies for a short while.
It took me a fair while to read this, mainly because I kept putting it down to read other things (I knew what happened in the end after all!), but a good read overall.

12. The Phoenix Ballroom by Ruth Hogan

This was a bookclub choice, and not something I would choose for myself.
It's the story of Venetia whose husband of 50 years has just died and she buys a ballroom with a church in the basement. She has a live in companion/carer whose mother has just died and the Will won't release any funds to her until a mysterious task has been completed but the solicitor won't tell her what (eyeroll). Venetia's grandson lives with them to add some precocious child charm,.
I realised after finishing it that it is the same author as The Keeper of Lost Things" which I gave four stars a few years ago.
That said, I think I was generous at that time, and found this a bit of a drag, fluffy, predictable and just a bit boring. It was certainly a quick read and she crammed a lot of happy endings for all the characters in the end so it all seemed very rushed.
But pefectly readable if you want a quick fluffy read.

13. Weyward by Emilia Hart
    This is the story of three related woman - Altha on trial for witchcraft in the 1600s, Violet growing up in isolation in a big house and a distant father during WW2 and present day Kate who is trying to escape an abusive relationship. The story alternates between the three timelines and I did feel engaged with each of them.
    I was a fairly easy but engaging read.

14. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

I have to say I really really wanted to like this, but I found it a terrible slog. I did struggle on to the end and then the ambiguous ending made me regret that decision. I was listening on Audible so didn't realise until late on that there was no punctuation either (I am still bitter about the amount of time I spent on Normal People), so fair play to the narrators for doing a decent job there.
It is the story of a fairly wealthy family in Ireland who is beginning to struggle in the recession. It's told from the different viewpoints of the four family members (which I was perfectly fine with) as the family descends into increasing dysfunctionality. The timeline also flips back and forth a lot as well to the parents' own teenage years (also fine for me) but honestly just found it meandered on and on and just got weirder to the point it was just irritating with it's squirrel metaphors and survivalist fever dream sequences.
I remember one line I liked and smiled at- it was something like "Oh my god your life sounds like a soap opera that someone has written in crayon". But honestly I think that was the only one.
Not for me.

I'm very late to the party on this thread (page 17 already!)

Just placemarking to come back to later.

@satelliteheart i believe that none of us actually own our Amazon content, we buy a license to that content. With a physical book, there is small print in it somewhere stating you don’t have the right to copy the whole book or to hire it out.

If you can download and keep a kindle book on your laptop, in theory, you could then sell/pass copies on to anyone whilst retaining your original copy, which would be against digital rights management protocols.

So this possibility is being closed off, and you will need to keep an Amazon account open to continue to access your content through kindle reader or kindle app. But you don’t have to download your content to save it, it’s still all there for you.

@satelliteheart Yes, it's not being able to download to USB. It seems that the conspiracy element is to do with Amazon being able to alter digital content whenever they feel like it, or withdraw books that they don't want people to read. It is a bit Big Brother (with 1984 being one of the books they have withdrawn for a period in the past).

I don't download to USB myself and don't have a huge amount of content on my kindle but I can imagine that some of you on here might have a lot, and may wish to protect it in the event that you decide to stop using Amazon, which a lot of people are doing these days.

@MonOncle

Yes, Tom Lake was a bold for me last year. Meryl Streep doing the audio was perfect

I finished 31. The Ghost Road by Pat Barker this morning.
It's a horrible rainy day here, perfect for reading!

I didn't really enjoy this one, unfortunately. I find war stories very hit or miss as I feel like I've read so many of them. I'd read the first book in this trilogy - Regeneration - and enjoyed it a bit more. I do find Barker's writing of make characters pretty great and believable. These books humanise what's normally discussed as history. It's all about a doctor and patients from a mental institution - all in the military. Poet Wilfred Owen is a character.

I'm starting 32. Night Swimmers by Roisin Maguire next. It's the second or third book I've read that includes 2020's lockdown, so that'll be interesting.

Another 2 books.

28 ) Eye of the Shoal: A Fishwatcher's Guide to Life, the Ocean and Everything by Helen Scales
I loved this.(I also love the author’s very appropriate name) Fish are such fascinating and bizarre creatures and I loved learning more about them. I did feel a little depressed though, reading about how badly we treat them and how we’ve depleted and damaged the oceans but regardless it was a fascinating and enjoyable read. It’s also a very dangerous book because there’s a long list on non fiction books by the same publisher included. I hadn’t heard of most and I’ve added almost every single book to my wish list.

29)American Midnight:Tales of The Dark Selected and Introduced by Laird Hunt.
I’d read 3 of the nine short stories before. The others were fine. A mixed bag like all short stories. None that will really stay with me but it was a quick easy read and these Pushkin Press short stories are nice little books to have on the shelf. I like the cover design and I’m always a sucker for French flaps.

@highlandcoo – funnily enough, I tried Chris Brookmyre out again earlier this year. I definitely read Quite Ugly One Morning in the 90s, possibly when it first came out. But I ended up not finishing. I just couldn’t get into it. I might try Ambrose Parry instead. As for Karen Campbell, I’m currently reading Paper Cup. I hadn’t appreciated that she had originally written police procedurals. Thank you, I’ll check those out. I haven’t read any of Ann Cleeves Shetland books, although I have read the first Vera one and I loved the Peter James books. I’ve never actually made it to Bloody Scotland. One of these years!

@Cherrypi – glad to hear that you enjoyed Elly/Dominica. She mentioned at my talk that she was the baby of the family and that her two older sisters are called Jane and Sheila (I think the oldest is Jane, definitely Sheila) so she doesn’t know why she got the glamourous name lol.

The Secret Hours by Mick Herron

This was a slog. Virtually nothing at all happened for the first half. A few things happened in the second half and it did pick up a bit but it remained pretty hard going. The ending was the best bit of it, both in terms of reaching it and in being the most interesting thing about it.

One thing that really annoyed me was that it was mostly set in Berlin, but there was virtually no sense of place. I didn't get the impression that Herron had even been there, just done a very limited bit of research about street names. Another thing that annoyed me was that even though I was bored out of my skull for most of it, and drifting off at times, I still guessed most of the twists long before they happened.

Not recommended.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie I agree that there wasn’t much sense of place in the Berlin sections, I was disappointed by that. I quite liked the slowness of the book, but it did take me a while to get through and I had to keep making myself go back to it - definitely not a page-turner!

@Tarragon123 That's interesting. She didn't say that at ours so wasn't just delivering a script then.

@Terpsichore Coffee With Hitler sounds like a fascinating if infuriating book. I’ve added that to my wish list so thank you for recommending it.

23 Victim 2117 by Jussi Adler-Olsen

Book 8 in the Dept Q series set in a Danish cold case department. This time the story is centred around one of the team, Assad, as we finally find out about his life before Dept Q. As the team race to thwart a terrorist attack in Berlin Assad comes face to face with a number of people from his past. I found this interesting but some of it was very difficult reading as it dealt with sexual assault.

@DuPainDuVinDuFromage For a book that kept claiming that Berlin was at its heart, it seemed spectacularly...not...

@Tarragon123 That's a shame you didn't enjoy Quite Ugly - it's fairly gross in places but I liked it despite the revolting bits. My favourite of his is One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night. I found the idea of a bunch of people in their thirties, who hadn't all met up since they were teenagers at secondary school together, reuniting to test out a holiday resort on a decommissioned oil rig ( he doesn't always go for realistic scenarios )quite intriguing and really funny in places.

Ambrose Parry is more straightforward historical crime and I thought the Edinburgh setting worked well.

How are you getting on with Paper Cup? It was one of my top reads last year and I'm always recommending it. It was great to read a book featuring a part of Scotland I know very well and Galloway made a change from Edinburgh, Glasgow or the islands where most Scottish books seem to be set.

11 Instructions for a Heatwave - Maggie O’Farrell I know a lot of you have read this (I got the recommendation here after all!), and I’m late to the party as is often the case! I liked this - a gentle family drama with realistic characters who were both endearing and infuriating. It’s set in the 1976 heatwave (mainly in London), and I did get a good sense of the weirdness of the long, hot, dry summer, but the portrayal of the three adult siblings was the best part of the book - they seemed very real, a combination of surface-normal and hidden depths. The three siblings converge on their parents’ house to try to deal with a crisis: their recently-retired dad went out to get the paper one morning and never came back, and their mum understandably calls them in a panic when he hasn’t turned up by the evening. The book plays out over the next few days as secrets come out, but the reason for the dad’s disappearance is the least interesting thing about the book and it’s the family relationships that are the interesting part. Not a bold but a good read.

Went real life shopping today and popped into Waterstones as I was passing. Came out with Transatlantic by Julie Orringer at £3 it was a steal. No idea if it is any good

I've finally finished Republic of Thieves (Scott Lynch, Gentleman Bastards #3) and enjoyed it, although not a bold.

Today I read The Answer is No by Fredrick Backman - it was ok for a short read, but it was a bit ridiculous, I wouldn't particularly recommend it though.

Now I've started Annie Bot which I've been looking forward to.

Remus - sorry, The Secret Hours didn't improve for you.

My latest book is:

11. The Photograph - Penelope Lively

I have enjoyed pretty much all the books I have read by this author, some more than others, and this did not disappoint. The photo of the title is of Kath. Kath is dead but the photo which has recently come to light is raising questions amongst those who knew her: her husband, her sister, her brother-in-law, her niece and the photographer. The chapters are narrated from the standpoints of the different characters mostly in the present day but sometimes dipping back to when Kath was alive. The narrators were very believable and, whilst not an action-packed story, events unfolded, information was revealed and it didn't leave me hanging at the end. Probably a bold.

11 Junk - Melvin Burgess
Gemma and Tar are 14 and have run away from home. They end up in a squat and getting hooked on heroin.
I’m not sure if I enjoyed this or not. I have a feeling it will stay with me a long time. I liked the character development and the ending wasn’t predictable. I’m not a huge fan of every chapter being a different character’s perspective but I can see how it allowed the story to move along.

13 Haunted: Ghost Stories And Their Afterlives by E Jay Gilbert
Disappointing, doubly so because I asked for this as a birthday present last year, thinking it would be better than it was.
It’s a bit of a rambling mess, drifting off into non sequiturs and never seeing a ghost trope through to its logical end. I spook fairly easily in print but there was nothing here to trouble the mind. It’s the literary equivalent of Danny Robins’ irritating, breathy, over earnest Uncanny and I only finished it because it was a gift.

19. All the Rage: Stories from the Frontline of Beauty 1860-1960, by Virginia Nicholson
This was great fun. I'm not particularly interested in fashion, but I still enjoyed this account of how women have tried their hardest to match up to ever-changing beauty standards over the course of a century. She points out that it's not merely frivolous - for many, it was a high-stakes game for attracting male interest as the only real route to economic stability, although there are rebels along the way too. Beauty standards reflect society's view of what women are mean to be, not just look like. She never loses sight of the individuals, and there are lots of enjoyable quotations about what it felt like for the woman in that moment. For anyone looking to dip into some non-fiction, it might be worth giving this a go.

20. The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd
This is a classic of nature writing, an ecstatic account of the beauties of the Cairngorms, by a women who lived in the area her whole life and knew it with great intimacy. I admired it rather than clasped it to my bosom - I find nature writing to be best when taken in short doses. It's all on a very exalted plane. She looks and listens and touches and inhales the scents and for me, this was a reminder to live in your body. I've never been to the Cairngorms, but I'd like to reread this while there.