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.

Oh Now I know who she is ! Perfect, thanks Remus

Exciting bookish day with the Women's Prize long list. I don't know how I feel about this one. Last year, I instantly knew there were several I wanted to read, this year I don't have the same feeling. The Safe Keep is already on my wishlist and I'm a bit swept up in the hype over Nesting but otherwise, I'm not jumping to read anything else. I usually aim to read the shortlist as long as there's nothing too twee on there (looking at you, Restless Dolly Maunder.) I've read other books by Strout and Adichie, so I might get to them at some stage. I need to look at what I've actually read in the Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton Worlds before reading any more! Keen to hear reviews of Dream Count.

I read 38. Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa today - it's very short. A bit like a Japanese Claire Keegan - it's much weirder, but it explores what it means to be an adult woman with a serious disability in Japan. I enjoyed it. It's on the international Booker long list - I'm not sure it'd make a shortlist.

I'm about to start 39. The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes - I've not read anything Irish for at least a week!

I finished
27 A Very Private School by Charles Spencer
The idea of sending a 7 or 8 year old child away to school is shocking to me and Spencer’s tragic tale of his schooling goes to prove that gut feeling right- not just in the abuse but also the emotional damage it did to those young boys. A difficult read.

28 Lost and Never Found- Simon Mason
The third DI Ryan Wilkins novel. When celebrity Zara Hawthorne crashes her car and goes missing the two DI Wilkins are put on the case, but Ray is conflicted having been offered a plum PR post. This one wasn’t quite as good as its predecessors but still a good fun fast-paced mystery. Love the odd couple vibe in this work partnership.

Still reading my long reads- two Iliad translations, War and Peace, and Middlemarch (great to see the love upthread). Will now try to squeeze some Women’s Prize nominees in between.

Just bought Nesting, thanks for the recommendation. I've only read All Fours so far, which I hated, but will definitely be reading Dream Count and Tell me Everything.

I read Middlemarch as a student and loved it then, I should really reread.

I have never read Middlemarch, despite wanting to, I’m sort of waiting for the right place, right time. I don’t know why, but I imagine reading it in spring/summer for some reason. I’ve put Tristan Shandy on my big classics list this year.

Middlemarch is an extraordinary book; I need to read it again.

@Stowickthevast I think The Trees would make a great book club discussion. There's certainly a lot to talk about! The satire seemed more effective to me than it did in James. Partly because James was set in the 19th c., but the characters mostly talked the way people talk now, and that felt clumsy and anachronistic to me.

Of the Women's Prize shortlist, I've only read Strout (which I loved, but I'm a huge fan of Strout) and Safekeep (which I found underwhelming). Coincidentally, I had just collected All Fours from the library, so I will read that next. I also got Ministry of Time from the library today, just because it was the only longlist book actually available on the shelf to be checked out (maybe that's a bad sign, ha!). I'm not so keen to read it now after the mixed reviews above!

I'm excited about Dream Count because I've never read a novel by Adichie that wasn't worth reading.

I'm looking out for @fortunamajor because I think of her as the Women's Prize for Fiction queen 😀She's been reviewing the longlist for years. But I don't know if you're doing it this year, Fortuna? Especially with the ridiculous 4-week gap between longlist and shortlist.

29 Death in the East – Abir Mukherjee (Wyndham and Banerjee 4) Library. For the first time in this series, we go back in time to 1905 East London when Wyndham first joins the police. Does he see a dead man in India in 1922 connected to a 1905 case or is it the opium addiction? Interesting juxtaposition between the racism experienced by the immigrant Jews in East London in 1905 and the racism shown to the Indians, like Banerjee in their own country, by the expat community. Mukherjee didn’t just pluck 1905 out of the air. It’s the year that the UK brought in the first legislation to curb immigration, in response to the Jewish pogroms in Russia.

30 Holy Fools – Joanne Harris. Kindle. I do enjoy Joane Harris. This one was very different, but no less enjoyable. Set mostly in France in 1610, with religious tension after the assassination of King Henry IV, it tells the tale of a nun who is a single mother and how she ended up there with her daughter. Enjoyable.

I'm one of the rare people on here who found Ministry of Time fun, @cassandre . I didn't think it was great literature, but an interesting twist on time travel with some interesting characters, decent jokes and a touching love story.

Thanks @bibliomania, I could do with a fun light read!

It does get a bit gloomier and high stakes towards the end, @cassandre , but I can't remember the ins and outs. It's the scenes of characters adjusting to a different time that I enjoyed, in particular a minor character who adapted with enthusiasm and one who didn't.

@AgualusasLover Tristam Shandy works well when read in short daily instalments, as it's broken up into very short chapters. Some are completely incomprehensible (I seem to remember one largely in Latin) but then one will catch you by surprise and make you laugh.

Big Sky - Kate Atkinson

Number 5 in the Jackson Brodie series and probably my least favourite so far.
This was a bit messy. As always, there are some great pen portraits of individuals - I particularly liked Crystal and Harry - but there were so many interchangeable blokes named Steve/Dave/Vince/Keith/Brian/Kevin that I kept getting confused and there were too many filler characters (The whole Gary/Kirsty/Tatiana bit could have been dropped).

I might read Death At The Sign of The Rook again just for completion.

I really enjoyed the earlier books in the Jackson Brodie series and especially loved When Will There Be Good News but can't remember much at all about Big Sky.
I might have to flick through it before reading Death at the Sign of the Rook which I'm hoping will be a return to form.

23. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (Hardback Book)

Wonderful book, but a bit depressing. Still loved it

24. The Court of Henry VIII (Audible)

Enjoyed this very much. Non-fiction history book about what the title implies

Thank you to whoever mentioned thee 50 classics for 49p. What a bargain. Sadly my kindle can't seem to cope with the size of the file and crashes whenever I try and open it.

#8. Small Bomb at Dimperley, Lissa Evans
So exciting to have a new Lissa Evans to read, didn't love it quite as much as her others, felt a little more lightweight with possibly less depth to the characters, but still a bold.

Middlemarch may be my favourite novel of all time - read for the first time the summer before going up to uni and reread every few years since: it never disappoints and always feels surprisingly relevant to whatever's going on in my life at the time. (Actually how I imagine religious people feel about their scripture 😅) Not an Eliot fan otherwise - well actually I really like around 1/2 each of DD, FH and Romola - but everything else, ugh. But Mm is just so satisfying, properly plotty and full of emotionally involving people and chewy moral quandaries, as well as all the big ideas.

To adapt @bibliomania we marry ARE imaginary people - the real person can be very different from the fantasy version we've created. I so love the famous image of the ego as a lit candle creating, from random scratches, the flattering optical illusion of concentric circles around a little sun 😍 Can't click @highlandcoo 's link but hope it's Rufus Sewell being smouldery. Though I maintain that the 90s adaptation did Lydgate dirty - he's supposed to be Ladislaw-hot, just in glasses. The male version of that common Jane Bennet/Harriet Smith casting issue!

PS to classics fans, out of copyright ebooks are free on Project Gutenberg.
Or for a smaller selection / more modern site: Standard ebooks With generally better formatting than in Amazon cheapies IME.

@BlueFairyBugsBooks I never thought about the file size, I haven't tried opening it yet! My kindle is a fancy new one though, so hopefully should be ok. Maybe you need a new one too? It's the obvious choice, really. (Might somewhat negate the bargain, but that's not the point!)

Happy belated WPFF day to those who celebrate!
I'm another who preordered Dream Count, so pleased to see it there. I'll also be reading Amma as it was coincidentally chosen by my ESEA women bookgroup last month. The two I've already read were:
The Safekeep - I found this too blandly written for the Booker but don’t mind it as much in a WP context. (Though for F/F histfic I would have preferred Saltblood in its place -* *my only criticism of that one was that it felt too polished, too conventionally well-written to suit its adventurous subjects. TBF I am very into pirate lore 😅readers unfamiliar with the history might get more out of it.)

and The Ministry of Time - many flaws but even more fun. I think this was one of our BBBs last year but I'm with @bibliomania Agree it's not litfic but nor is it commercial fic, despite messing with multiple genres (historical, romance, SF, political thriller). Instead I think it's openly and gleefully fanfic, so come at it through that lens @cassandre I bet you'll find things to enjoy - before it all falls apart anyway 😁 The autofictional element has been controversial but I thought it provided some much needed grounding for the fluff, and as a fellow mixed Asian woman I found some of the race/postcolonial commentary surprisingly astute and subtle - some really clumsy too, but overall light years beyond R. Kuang.

DNFed A Little Trickerie last year - I found the voice inconsistent and grating, and read a few (otherwise positive) reviews warning that it was anachronistic in that 'give the good guys 2020s enlightened views on race/gender/sexuality' way which really irritates me.

Agree with others that it’s a surprisingly orthodox list. I've just collected (preexisting) library holds for The Artist and Fundamentally and could borrow all the other longlistees too, although with waiting times way past the prize announcement date. Probably a good thing as my other holds are taken up by the Intl. Booker, which is the only prize I was supposed to be following this year 👀

Hopefully following along 50B reviews will save me from too much WP FOMO. I also hope @fortunamajor checks in - you did try to save me from Pointless Dolly Meander last year.

The only Eliot I have read was Adam Bede but I have a penchant for the tragic and a minor obsession with the crime that is committed. Trying to not be spoilery.

Talking of our theatre discussion, I took a decadent day of annual leave and indulged my Chekhov love to The Seagull at Barbican, so thinking now is the time to finish the set of short stories I have been half way through for approx 2.5 years.

40. Firebrand by Elizabeth Fremantle

Tells the story of Sixth Wife, Catherine Parr, from the death of her second husband Lord Latymer through her marriages to the King and to Thomas Seymour.

It was good, and I don't know what it was about it but it took me much longer than my usual pace

It repeats the idea I've read elsewhere that Thomas Seymour bedded the Virgin Queen when she was a teenager and I'm really not sure that rumour is true.

The fate of Mary Seymour is not guessed at, just that she will be taken in by a family of the same rank.

This was 99p when I bought it and worth it at that price, but not a massive stand out to be honest.

33 Henry VIII: The Heart and the Crown - Alison Weir

Like @EineReiseDurchDieZeit I ended my day with Katherine Parr 😀

Weir writes both fiction and non fiction; this is the former. It follows on from her Six Queens series (and she thanks her editor for reading 3000 pages of those books to check for inconsistencies)

I read this on kindle but suspect it is a doorstop in paperback.

This is That Bastard Henry’s life as fiction, from childhood to kingship to husband of 6. It’s a pretty sympathetic portrait of Henry as a man deeply affected by the loss of his mother when he was young. Some clunky insertions of real history (eg the full text of a documented speech)

I think there are better books out there - I do know an awful lot about the period though.

As I have said here before, Weir’s history is stronger than her fiction and I won’t be buying any more of her fiction for a bit.

Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro) is on Kindle Daily Deals today for £1.19. I've read it twice, I really like it. I'm rubbish at reviews so I'll leave it to you guys. Hard to believe that this and the Bloody Boring Butler came out of the same brain.

Are we going to need more fights about it? It’s been a while!

I think we might!