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 yes, she's really inconsistent as a writer I agree. I read one - can't remember the title but it included an art fraud - and it was appalling. I gave up after 50 pages or so. The Karen Pirie ones are good though.

Pity by Andrew McMillan Thanks ÚlldemoShúl for recommending this. It’s a short novel set in Barnsley alternating between the men of 3 generations of a mining family, with hopefully satirical ‘field notes’ from a University study project also in the mix. The field notes do serve to bring the reader round to the ‘we’ve had enough of experts’ case. Simon is the youngest generation, his day job is in a call centre and he performs as a drag queen by night. He is the first generation not to have worked in the mines - his father and uncle did so before they were closed, as did their father. I enjoyed the book, though it was very evident that the writer is of the youngest generation and I’d have preferred the centre of gravity to be the 2 older generations.

Re police procedurals - I'm not going to review them individually but I've just burned through 1-4 of the Maeve Kerrigan books and really enjoying them. Well plotted, good twists and great character development (not really helping with my perception of the Met as being full of misogynists though). I do find them a bit gory and have to skip over some of the descriptions of bodies, and I'm getting quite amused at the number of times Maeve is knocked unconscious, Jackson Brodie style.

I've also read:

The Artist by Lucy Steed. Well summarised by @ÚlldemoShúl below, I liked this but didn't love it quite so much. I loved the concept and the characters but thought it could have been slightly shorter, or perhaps had a bit more going on - I loved it when Peggy Guggenheim turned up but that was just one chapter! I also found the language a bit too 'ripe', eg everything constantly bruising like a peach or bursting open like a fig. But it's overall a good book and I think a worthy addition to the Women's Prize shortlist.

The Favourites by Layne Fargo. Wuthering Heights retold in the world of professional figure skating. Not a lot to say about this, it was fun enough but very light, maybe one to take on a winter holiday!

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra. Really engaging, historical novel set in a film studio during WW2 as Hollywood churned out films to support the war effort. The film studios became a bit of a haven for people from European countries, playing German or Italian roles, all worried about their families in occupied Europe. The strongest storyline followed a group trying to escape fascist Italy just before the war started, which was both a caper and deeply moving.

@MargotMoon I agree with @highlandcoo on Karen Pirie (though be aware that the first KP has her as a fairly minor character; McDermid then developed her into a main character)

"A Place of Execution" is her best standalone novel - about a teenager who goes missing in a remote village, drawing parallels with the Moors murders. The TV adaptation changed the story, though, so don't watch that!

@GrannieMainland I've just reserved one at the library, not sure if it's the first (The Reckoning).

@SheilaFentiman I'll have a look for that one too!

@MargotMoon that's the second, the first is The Burning and I'd say probably worth reading in order as there are plot threads that run throughout. I hope you enjoy!

6
Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter

This is the first of the 'Morse' books, published in 1975. I haven't seen any of Dexter's books mentioned on this forum but then I've only been reading the forum for a year. This was a page turner for me and, despite having watched every single episode of Morse, I had forgotten who the murderer was, so it was a very enjoyable whodunnit.

@GrannieMainland I also enjoyed Mercury Pictures Presents and I thought Marra's other books, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and The Tsar of Love and Techno, were even better.

15 The Man In The High Castle - Philip K Dick

A reread of one of my very favourite pieces of fiction - an intricate, satisfying puzzle of a book (that has little to do with the Amazon series of the same name, plot wise), weaving in themes of history, fiction and truth.

I remember really struggling with this and feeling like I'd somehow missed the point of it on finishing it, although I liked the concept.

I've just finished book #8, Message Deleted (KL Slater). A woman gets a message from her friend asking her to come quickly, but then the message is deleted. She gets to her friend's house and the whole family has gone missing.

I found it irritating at first and nearly DNF - it's set in Nottingham, a town I'm quite familiar with, and it seemed like the author was at pains to constantly remind us of that, by shoehorning road names and local landmarks wherever possible. Although, maybe I wouldn't have noticed or cared if I didn't know the area.

Aside from that, it was full of unlikely situations / behaviour, that had me going "who would do that? Why would you not just go to the police?"

But it did pick up and got my attention enough for me to finish it. Glad I only paid 99p though.

Funny Story by Emily Henry

Daphne is dumped by fiancé Peter just before their wedding, because he’s run off with his childhood best friend Petra (yes really). Daphne moves in with Petra’s jilted fiancé Miles and they pretend to be dating to try and annoy their exes. This was fine except I’ve read a few of Henry’s books now and they all feel very samey. Not sure if I’ll bother with any more.

Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell

I loved this and it’s a bold for me. Ciara decides on a whim to leave her controlling, gaslighting husband but struggles to cope due to a lack of money and no job. There’s lots of pressure for her to return home. I couldn’t put this down - I was really rooting for Ciara to succeed and for her hideous husband to get his comeuppance. It was also a really interesting look at what it might be like living in emergency accommodation for months on end. I think this is one that will stay with me.

27. Unruly - David Mitchell (Audible)

I liked this. It is a brief history of England's kings and queens, written and narrated by David Mitchell. I just love his humour - obviously, he's really funny. I honestly laughed out loud at some of it, even though I was listening to it on my own at work (I have my own room at work)! I also loved the Shakespeare at the very end.

13. Annie Bot, Sierra Greer 4/5
    A feminist page-turner, this novel is a compelling allegory of coercive control in a relationship. Annie is a (very sophisticated) robot, and once she’s in ‘autodidactic’ mode, she can observe and learn from the world around her. Her desire to please her male owner Doug, and her confusion at his unexpected bouts of fury and displeasure, made the book hard to read at times. However, I was mentally cheering Annie along all the way and hoping she would finally find her anger.

14. All Fours, Miranda July 4/5
    Women’s Prize longlist. Initially I found this novel quite off-putting. I thought the narrator was self-indulgent, navel-gazing and not very relatable. I read a bit more about Miranda July and realised that the novel is partly auto-fictional: July, like her heroine, is famous and turns her own life into art, which means in part that she does weird dances around her own home while scantily clad and posts them on Instagram. It’s all very American (and very Californian). As the novel progressed, however, I started to find it more and more interesting. I liked the focus on peri-menopausal women, and the idea that one can forge intimate relationships outside the traditional model of heterosexual monogamy. The narrator’s non-binary child Sam was also a sweet character. So while the novel is not quite a bold for me, I think it’s a worthy selection for the Women’s Prize longlist.

15. Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 5/5
    Women’s Prize longlist. I abandoned Read What You Own and decided to buy a couple of longlist books (once I had realised that they wouldn’t be available at the library for months). This was a good decision, ha! I devoured Dream Count. It’s not a perfect novel (not quite as good, I would say, as Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah), but it has the broad cosmopolitan scope and the intelligence that make me a big fan of Adichie. It’s very much a novel of ideas. The lives of the four female characters she traces are all compelling (three women are wealthy Nigerians; the fourth is an uneducated Guinean immigrant to the U.S., whose story is a riff on the story of the New York hotel worker who was sexually assaulted by the eminent French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn). Broadly speaking, the novel focuses on women in their forties who are somehow perceived as incomplete, in African and/or American culture, because they lack a husband and/or a child. (In this respect, the novel can be set alongside Miranda July’s All Fours, as an exploration of Women Beyond the Child-Bearing Age and how they cope.) In fact, all of these women are living rich and interesting lives, although the parade of male characters who don’t live up to their dreams (the ‘dream count’) is fairly bleak. Incidentally, I liked Adichie’s occasional criticism of the piety of well-meaning, woke Americans: while their hearts may be in the right place, they can be too quick to label other views as unethical, without having taken the nuances of cultural context into account. The political history of Guinea is also a running theme. In short, this is a novel that is sometimes messy but always thought-provoking.

@UpTheLaganInABubble1 Thanks for that review of Unruly - I am in the queue for it in Borrowbox from my library - looking forward to it now

Interesting review of Dream Count @cassandre. I like how you juxtaposed it with All Fours.

I'm having a momentary pause on the WP as need to read book club books but am slowly listening to The Persians, which is fun but not a book I'll be pressing on others.

Also was totally outraged to go to Waterstones on Piccadilly on Saturday and find they had no display for the fiction women's prize, only for the non-fiction. Even more annoying as it was actually International Woman's Day. The staff member I asked suggested I go and look at their Booker display instead if I was interested in literary prizes...

32 A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize. This book is set in Tudor England and about a young girl called Tibb and the people she befriends. It has a very unique voice. This starts out being delightful, but like an overly flavoured dinner, it becomes a bit boring after a while and eventually a wee bit sickening. The second half of this book was stretched out almost beyond my endurance. The characters did not feel in any way like real Tudor era people. Far too whimsical for my tastes- I imagine that it will be popular though- totally depends on how you react to the voice.

My Women’s Prize reads in order of preference so far:
1 The Artist
2 The Safekeep
3 Birding
4 Crooked Seeds
5 A Little Trickerie
6 All Fours

Im learning that voice is really important to me at the moment.
Am listening to Somewhere Else (boring the pants off me so far) and about to start Ministry of Time. This has not been a great Women’s Prize for me so far. Hoping it picks up.

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Very interested in your post @cassandre both those books are high on my TBR

I'm in a lull again, which I hope is temporary. I've got some non-fiction books waiting, but feel like they need more time and brain capacity than I currently have to give. I need to find something though, to stop me just reading about Trump in horror and despair.

The Women's prize stuff holds no appeal to me, I'm afraid. I need something whimsical or a good historical crime book, but fear this may be an impossible ask,

Mrs Granby's Secret or The Bastard of Pinsk by Eleanor Farjeon

This was recommended on here earlier this year. This has a novel within a novel, a childhood diary and various letters and documents as Pamela Lang discovers the secrets of her Great Aunt Addie's Grande Passion. It's comedic (a youthful Addie believes a bastard is a very noble hero of royal blood) but for me the novel with the novel (Aunt Addie was a successful romantic novelist and her entire 177 page first novel is reproduced) was the weakest part and was a bit too long. But I loved the enveloping parts with the practical Pamela and the different viewpoints of the events we discover as the novel proceeds. I didn't love it but I did find it a very interesting and entertaining read.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie for whimsical what about The Thurber Carnival?
Not whimsical exactly, but original and cleverly written, the short story collection Table for Two by Amor Towles. I'm not normally a fan of short stories but I really enjoyed this recently.
As for historical crime. North Water by Ian McGuire is great. Also, Blood and Sugar by Laura Shepherd Robinson, and The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry .. but North Water is the best read imo.

21. My Name is Lucy Barton - Elizabeth Strout

One of Strout's books loosely connected to her fictional small town of Amgash, Illinois - birthplace of Lucy Barton, the writer who narrates this loose collection of reminiscences, stories and half-revealed scraps of childhood events prompted by a stay in hospital and the unexpected appearance of her mother, come to be with her for a while.

I'm sure lots of people have read this so I don’t need to elaborate, but I liked its free-flowing, episodic form (similar to Olive Kitteridge, the only other Strout I’ve read) and feel engaged enough to read the companion book, and probably Oh, William! as well.

@AlmanbyRoadtrip I really enjoyed Squeaky Clean recently. He's such a hapless, hopeless criminal; I loved the dark humour. I'm impatiently waiting for the paperback though.