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.

Just finished two stunning bolds - a good pairing with shared themes of women’s experience in wartime:

15 To Calais, In Ordinary Time - James Meek
I think this split opinion on here, but I loved this tale of a band of archers heading for Calais in 1348 as the plague heads the other way towards them. As the world turns upside down around them, ploughman Will and gentlewoman Bernadine take the opportunity to escape the confines of narrow village life and the marriages they’re expected to enter, and explore a wider meaning of the forms love might take.

I’m a big fan of the micro-genre ‘people go on a journey in a world alien to our own as expressed through invented language’ (oh hi Riddley Walker). Here, there are 3 narrative voices, representing the 3 estates of the medieval world - those who fight (Berna’s Frenchified English), those who pray (the proctor Thomas’ ‘Latin’, rendered as a highly mannered voice littered with Latinisms) and this who work (Will’s English, a sort of Middle English where the main feature seems to be you can put as many negatives as you like in a sentence and it’ll still be a negative). All this takes a bit of getting into, but it repays the effort and by the end I was absolutely devouring it.

There was more cross-dressing and sex than I was expecting, and a spirit of play through the whole thing, with intriguing doublings across the main cast of characters. Will and Berna have both run away from village life to explore a wider world; Thomas and Welsh bardic archer Madoc both make stories from the tales of the archers’ lives. The contrast with the captured and imprisoned Frenchwoman Cess, who the archers carry about with them in a cart, is deeply poignant - she hasn’t run away, she’s been violently wrenched into a brutal life of sexual servitude. By the time the plague hits, you really care who lives and dies.

The second book was:

16 The Power of Women - Denis Mukwege
Thank you so much to whoever recommended this. I was aware of Nobel-prize winner Dr Mukwege’s work treating victims of sexual violence in war-torn Congo, but hadn’t realised he’d written this - a mixture of autobiography and manifesto towards improving women’s lives across the world. His gruelling accounts of women forced into sexual slavery by armed militias gave a brutal reality to the story of Cess in To Calais which I might not otherwise have felt. Dr Mukwege is a truly inspirational figure, whose determination to bring the plight of women in the Congo to the attention of the wider world has earned him the enmity of the Congolese government and/or othered armed groups - to the extent that he can now only remain in the country to do his work in the Panzi hospital under the protection of UN peacekeepers.

@LadybirdDaphne To Calais sounds my sort of thing. I have been restrained and merely added it to my Wish List for now, as my TBR pile is quite large.

@highlandcoo no spoilers, but a scene in Paperboy had me hooting with horrified laughter last night.

Thanks @highlandcoo I’ll check some of those out. Not sure if I dare admit that I didn’t like North Water even though the setting is very much my thing.

I started The Ferryman by Justin Cronin last night. I’m enjoying it so far, but dd says it ends up rubbish- we’ll see!

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie its been a while since I read it but I think I remember The Corner Shop - Elizabeth Cadell as being a bit whimsical in a Mary Stewart sort of way.

I agree with your DD Remus - The Ferryman has a good build up but didn’t live up to its promise for me.

@Stowickthevast I had a similar experience last week when I went into Blackwells (now owned by Waterstones) and much to my disappointment, found no display for the women's fiction prize! They must do better! Maybe there is a display in the actual Waterstones shop (there is a Waterstones branch here as well). I must investigate.

@ÚlldemoShúl thanks for listing your Women's Prize reads so far. I take it you hated All Fours! I can entirely understand people hating it, ha. I have A Little Trickerie out from the library, but it doesn't sound like it's going to be my kind of book at all. I'm fussy about historical fiction and don't like it when the setting is moved to a different era but the characters all seem to have the voice and mindset of today (this reminds me of The Maiden from last year's Women's Prize longlist!). @LadybirdDaphne To Calais, In Ordinary Time sounds intriguing and at least it apparently lacks that flaw.

I'm a bit disappointed that my only two strong bolds from the WP longlist so far are the big hitters: Strout and Adichie. They have both already won loads of prizes so I would rather back an author less well-known. Maybe my own tastes are too conservative; I don't know. But I still have most of the longlist left to go, so I remain hopeful.

@cassandre I reviewed it at the end of last year I think. I found the Californianess a bit too much. I was waiting for Gwyneth Paltrow to appear. I think it is probably a marmite book. I was interested to read another perspective on your review. I’m saving the Adichie and Nesting until near the end as I think they will be highlights for me! I have to catch up Oh William and Lucy by the Sea before I reach the last Strout so I don’t think I’ll make it before the short list- it’s far too small a gap this year.

@LadybirdDaphne we did To Calais for book club a few years back and it is definitely a book that has stuck with me.

I'm rereading Olive Kitteridge to prepare for the Strout. I think I'm up to date with the Lucy books but not sure whether to read the Burgess Boys and Olive Again. Though I think for the Women's Prize, the newest should work as a stand alone.

26. The Trees - Percival Everett. This was shortlisted for the Booker a couple of years ago I think, but I didn't read it then as it didn't appeal. It starts with a white family in Money, Mississippi, a member of which is murdered. He is found next to an unknown dead Black man. The murder is related to a lynching of Emmett Till in the 1960s. A couple of Black cops from the centre of Mississippi turn up to investigate the murder. Is hard to describe this book as it seems like it's a murder but ends up being something completely different. It's funny but also really packs a punch, looking at the history of lynching in America. I think it's a bold for me, and I think I liked it better than James, which was a bit more predictable.

@ÚlldemoShúl 😂at Gwyneth Paltrow! you're right, I suspect she and Miranda July could have a fair bit in common. Conscious uncoupling and all that...

Just checking in to say I haven't finished anything in ages. I've gone down a rabbit hole of being horrified by USA headlines and unable to look away apart from to keep up with The Count Of Monte Cristo.

However I need to pull myself out of this fog and also after some busy weekends have some time at home so might actually be able to do some reading.

And to facilitate this I got a lovely pile of books for my birthday!

An Alexander McCall Smith (can't remember which one) and a book about a man who befriends a penguin from the in laws.
Consumed by Aja Barber deliberately purchased for me second hand by my SIL.
A wonderful hardback book on UK National Parks to supplement my love of the USA ones.
I felt the love!

Happy Birthday @RazorstormUnicorn. I saw a trailer in the cinema for what must be the penguin book - with Steve Coogan, looked fun.

Happy Birthday @RazorstormUnicorn ! The penguin book is doing the rounds of our work book swap at the moment - I haven't read it yet but feedback from colleagues is positive.

Happy birthday @RazorstormUnicorn 💐

Happy birthday @RazorstormUnicorn !

Happy Birthday @RazorstormUnicorn 🎈 and Happy Reading!

Echoing the birthday greetings, @RazorstormUnicorn ! congrats on the excellent book gifts.

Btw @Stowickthevast thanks for your review of The Trees, which I agree with entirely. The novel takes some weird turns in terms of genre, but for me, it worked. And there were lots of comical moments. I keep thinking about the scene in the diner where the waitress asks, 'Do you like chili?' And the cops says yes, and the waitress says deadpan, 'OK, don't order the chili.' 😂

It's one of those novels where all the white characters to a person (I think) turn out to be villains, but in a satirical novel by a Black American writer, I can deal with that.

Oh Happy Reading!

I have now joined in the group who has read Glorious Exploits. I concur with the prevailing view that this is a very good book - I did feel like I don't know enough about ancient history to fully 'get it' and I'm sure classical scholars pick up on loads. But the characterisation of the leads is vivid (others rather more thinly drawn I feel) and the inexorable movement to the (dreadful) climax is well done. After that, the ending felt rushed . I did get the deus ex machina bit though!

Happy Birthday @RazorstormUnicorn !!

I saw a very early preview of The Penguin Lessons at the cinema. It was utterly fantastic. I haven't read the book though.

#9 We solve murders, Richard Osman
Really enjoyed the first novel in his new series. It's a bold.

Thanks @BestIsWest I’ll get the sample.

@LadybirdDaphne Well, I’m into it now so unless it really annoys me, I’ll see it to the end!

Happy birthday @RazorstormUnicorn and solidarity re the Trumpian fog.

36 Bleeding Heart Yard - Elly Griffiths

Third in the Harbinder Kaur series - Kaur has now transferred, with a promotion to DI, to the Met and moved into a flatshare with a tall Scandinavian blonde.

Her first case is the suspicious death of a Conservative MP at a Manor Park school reunion, where one of the attendees is Cassie, a DS on her team. It turns out Cassie was part of a starry little group (known as The Group) whilst at school, and the chapters are told from the perspectives of Anna and Cassie, along with Harbinder herself. At the end of A levels, The Group were involved in the death of David Moore, a fellow student who had assaulted both Anna and Cassie. That death was ruled a suicide... back then.

A bold for me - I liked the pace, the sense of London as a place, the switching viewpoints and unreliable narrators.

Read this as a little detour from my current NF book - back to that now!

Happy birthday @RazorstormUnicorn 🎂

Happy birthday to you, @RazorstormUnicorn - enjoy those books!