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.

Will look forward to your review in due course,@noodlezoodle. Not in my library so far but I'll keep an eye out. And thanks for those links, @Terpsichore .

Definitely not a bold for me, but I found it weirdly compelling. I just think it probably worked better in his head than it did on the page overall. I found some of it brilliant. And some of it very silly.

I finished 9: Educated, by Tara Westover. I think this is my first bold. It’s a memoir, Westover grew up in Idaho, seventh child of Mormon parents. Father was a survivalist, distrusted government, completely paranoid. Wouldn’t allow medical attention when it was needed, which it frequently was as they all worked in his scrap yard, where safety measures were casual at best. The kids were, in theory, homeschooled, but in reality they were not really schooled at all. Abusive older brother. Mother was quiet and compliant. Westover took matters into her own hands to educate herself. I’m probably not doing it justice, but none of the blurb I found online did either.

Just catching up on the thread as I've been crazy busy at work this week. I started To Calais recently but had to give up on the audiobook as the female narrator was driving me crazy with constant, loud, sharp intakes of breath - it was all I could focus on. Might just switch to the kindle version.

I liked the concept of To Calais, but stopped after a few pages. I couldn't get on board with the voice and the language, specifically. It really grated with me. LadyBird's review sounded very interesting, however.

@Castlerigg glad you enjoyed Educated, I thought it was excellent.

9 Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor. This is an unusual book, set in the 1930s on a fictional island somewhere off the coast of Wales. It is remote and sparsely populated. Two academics arrive from the mainland to document the island and its inhabitants. The book is told from the perspective of Manod, who lives with her father and little sister. She has recently left school and is wondering whether her future lies on the island or the mainland. I think this has been popular on the thread and I can see why - it's original, with a rather "haunting" quality to the writing.

10 Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo. This is set in Nigeria, mainly in the 1980s with another timeline in the 2000s. The protagonist is Yejide, with some chapters written from the point of view of her husband Akin. Yejide is a young married woman running a hairdressing business, dealing with issues around her husband, her mother in law and brother in law, and desperate to get pregnant. Yejide is flawed but relatable; I enjoyed reading her story.

I felt as you did Fuzzy about To Calais, I too only gave a library copy a few pages, but have also been thinking of giving it another go after the interesting reviews here.

I'm with Cornish and Fuzzy on To Calais. I didn't give it enough of a chance. I think if I'd stuck with it, I'd have liked it (which somehow reminds me of Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice: "If I had ever learnt [music], I should have been a great proficient").

The talk of Helen Garner is making me think I should read more of her books. She's a wonderful novelist, but I was put off by her nonfiction book The First Stone, which she wrote in the 90s about a sexual harassment case at the University of Melbourne. She expressed sympathy for the male perpetrator early on, as a result of which the women victims (understandably enough) refused to let her interview them when she decided to write the book. Her stance as I recall was that the women were making too much fuss of a trivial incident (being groped by a college Master) and that they should be robust enough just to move on from the incident, instead of seeking legal recourse.

I strongly disagreed with her take, but my Australian SIL and MIL (who live in Melbourne) agreed with Garner. Obviously that was decades before the Me Too movement, and mentalities have changed a lot since then. I think her views about feminism were quite typical of many Australian women of her generation.

Anyway, since then my view of Garner hasn't been unequivocally positive, but I need to remember that it's not necessary to be 100 percent in agreement with a writer ideologically in order to appreciate their works. People are complicated. I would certainly be interested in reading her journals.

I haven’t read The First Stone, @cassandre - I believe she’s subsequently expressed her own regrets at writing that letter of support. And I was extremely surprised to read about the whole incident because she’s not a person I would expect to be anti-feminist, very much the reverse actually.

Actually I've now just read the Times and Guardian articles (thanks @Terpsichore and @Boiledeggandtoast !) and they discuss The First Stone controversy, so my post was a bit redundant.

Terpsichore, I've just seen your comment. Yes, she's definitely a feminist! She did say in the book itself I believe that she regretted her impulsive writing of the letter of support. I think she was kind of an old-school feminist (or was at the time) and believed that feminists should focus on broader issues of gender inequality rather than on the odd grope. Whereas a lot of other feminists (me included) didn't see the two kinds of struggle as mutually exclusive.

I do very much dislike cancel culture and the whole tendency (fuelled by Twitter and social media) to berate a person because they're deemed to have said or done one so-called Bad Thing. You have to take the whole picture of their lives and their cultural context into account.

I'm glad Garner is getting some well-deserved recognition for her many achievements.

Her novel The Spare Room is fantastic.

@cassandre yes, I believe her view was more of the ‘why didn’t those women just give him a bloody good wallop in the nuts instead of going legal on him’ variety (I paraphrase very loosely!!) - which is kind of what I was thinking when I described her as ‘bracingly unsentimental’ 😂

10.My Friends by Hisham Mater. Khaled is Libyan, and moves to the UK for university studies in literature the 1980s. He connects with a number of other young Libyan expats. They remain strongly connected to their home country and are directly affected by the political turmoil there from Gaddafi's regime to the Arab Spring.

Beautifully written, this drew heavily real events and figures including the Libyan embassy shooting in London and the killing of Gadaffi, and weaved complex fictional relationships around them. Focusing on trauma and vulnerability, authoritarianism, national culture and the experience of exile, it was very sad and wistful, although Khaled finds a degree of solace in the novels and poetry he studies.

38. Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life - Helen Czerski (NF)

From the frontlog (acquired in 2018). I read her more recent book about thje oceans (a Xmas present) in Dec 2024. This was an earlier and more general wander through physics with "everyday" examples like why your toaster pops up. I like her TV work and she is a good communicator, so this was an interesting pop-sci read.

Happy Friday 50 Bookers, I've knocked off another 2 this week, finding it hard to keep up with the chat.

19. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van pelt
    This is the story of Tova who cleans for a local aquarium and develops a friendship with Marcello the giant octopus, whose voice one of the narrators.
    Tova's son disappeared years ago and her husband is recently deceased and she is now alone. She doesn't need to work, but does so to combat the loneliness. Marcello is also lonely and yearning to return to the sea.
    A nice easy read about friendships and families. I was initially put off by the idea of a talking octopus, but it is done well.

20. 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds In This Strange World by Elif Shafak
    This was chosen as a bookclub choice, and would never have picked it up ordinarily. The Booker shortlisted status made me think it was going to be heavy going (I have experience of this!) which I just wasn't in the mood for.
    That said, it wasn't a difficult read, though harrowing in places. It is a book of two parts really - the first part is the consciousness of a newly murdered prostitute in Istanbul, Leila, know as Tequila Leila to her friends and clients. Over the 10 mins and 38 seconds, while her heat has stopped beating but she is still aware and waiting for her body to be found, the story goes back over her life in the form of memories as her consciousness diminishes, eg the moment of her birth, early childhood memories, sexual abuse at the hands of an uncle, running away from her family etc.
    The second part is her five friends, each of which also have a backstory, trying to find her and once they know she dead, trying to claim her body and give her a decent funeral.
    It all sounds very bleak (and it is in places), but the latter part does descend into somewhat of a farce with her friends driving round Istanbul with a body in the boot being chased by the police.
    An odd story, not entirely sure what I feel about it really. Not a bold, but not what I was expecting either.

My list so far:

1) The Trials of Marjorie Crowe by CS Robertson
2) Bad Fruit by Ella King
3) Unruly by David Mitchell
4) Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent
5) Butter by Asako Yuzuki
6) North Woods by Daniel Mason
7) Nothing Left to Fear From Hell by Alan Warner
8) How to Solve your own Murder by Kristen Perrin
9) The Palace by Gareth Russell
10) Strange Pictures by Uketsu
11) Night Swimmers by Roisin Maguire
12) The List of Suspicious Things by Jenny Godfrey
13) The Whispering Muse by Laura Purcell

So half are books I would recommend. My favourites were Bad Fruit, Night Swimmers and The Palace (Hampton Court). The Whispering Muse was also great fun if you like an easy gothic thriller.

I finished 44. Nesting by Roisin O'Donnell earlier. Wow. The 'laid bare' aspect of this story really got to me. It'll stay with me for a long time. I could think of friends with partners who are controlling in some of the ways described in the book. Absolutely heartbreaking.

I'm starting an international Booker longlist novel next - Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

I agree with everyone that the first few pages of To Calais are hard going - but I am a bit of a language nerd and tend to like novels with invented versions of English, either faux-historical or futuristic (Riddley Walker; Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake; A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess - obviously I need to read A Clockwork Orange too).

To Calais isn’t perfect and a review along the lines of ‘It ne liked me, it was a pile of pretentious wankery’ would be perfectly valid. I didn’t really understand the story thread about what the leader of the archers’ band was up to, and didn’t care enough to go back and work it out. But Will, Berna and Cess’ stories will definitely stay with me.

I just lost a long post, so here is a shorter version!

15. The Colony: Audrey Magee

An English artist and a French linguist travel to a remote outcrop of an island off the coast of Ireland in 1979. They have a complete clash of personalities and ideals and the islanders get caught up in the fray, in particular the young boy who has his own dreams of becoming an artist. The story is punctuated by news reports of the atrocities that occur in the North of Ireland during that turbulent time. This was excellent. I loved the writing, the description of the paintings and the inclusion of conversational Irish. I loved Mairéad's chapters in particular.

16. Gone Away: Hazel Holt.

The first book in the Mrs. Malory series.
Very enjoyable. Good cosy crime.

17. After Midnight: Irmgard Keun (trans. Anthea Bell)

A novella about a young girl living in Frankfurt during Nazi rule. This was excellent in portraying the paranoia and hysteria of people and the creeping sense of horror and helplessness of life in Germany under the regime. Keun was blacklisted by the Nazi Party and wrote her books abroad in the years following WW2. This was brilliant. It is well written; sharply observed and not without humour although it's too horrifying to be funny. I am curious to read more by her in the future.

18. Perfect Prepositions: Olly Richards

A book to improve my Italian. This is a good series for language learning.

Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra

A woman wakes in the night and knows there’s someone in the house. She only has minutes to decide what to do to protect herself and her children - run, hide or fight? I was expecting a standard thriller but this ends up going in a direction I didn’t expect. I liked it, although I did find it a bit slow to get going and the way that no characters in the novel are given names is a bit odd.

Finally I've got round to writing another review, #8 this year but 4 of them were of books I read in 2024.

2025 #4
Elly Griffiths, The Frozen People
Read 29.12.24 to 08.01.25, reviewed 14.03.25

Detective Ali Dawson works in the Department of Logistics, a police unit working on cold cases, crimes so old that they are almost "frozen", jokes a colleague. The dull name hides an exciting secret - they are pioneering the use of time travel in their work. Her previous cases have been 20th century, but now Ali is told she is to travel back 173 years to 1850, to investigate a suspected murderer. There are complications: this will be Ali's first visit to the 19th century. Can she expect to get there and return safely? Also, the unit has been asked to look into the case by a Conservative government minister, Isaac Templeton, whose great-grandfather Cain was a prime suspect, though there wasn't enough evidence to convict him. Isaac Templeton is the justice minister, and Ali's son Finn works in his office in Parliament.

I was a bit nervous about what to expect. I've devoured Elly Griffiths' previous novels, contemporary and historical, and the premise of this one requires a certain amount of setting up by the writer, and then a suspension of disbelief.

I did really enjoy it though. I liked the contrast of Ali's contemporary life - a middle aged woman with a son aged 22, who claims not be a Tory although he's working for one - with that she must fit in to in Victorian London. The contrasts and the problems of day to day life are described with a wry humour, but she is in a genuinely scary situation and the tension builds up. It is hard to explain the plot but, as with Elly Griffiths' other books, I really came to care about Ali Dawson, and am looking forward to the next book in this series.

I received a review ecopy of this book via Netgalley, and hope to buy a Kindle ebook version in due course, but am really drawn to the UK hardback cover design (credits Ghost Design/Shutterstock) showing a photograph of Parliament, Westminster Bridge and the Thames, appropriate for a novel set in London, present and past.

@LadybirdDaphne It took me a long time to be able to cope with reading A Clockwork Orange but it is stunningly, horribly good.

I reread A Clockwork Orange a couple of years ago and this was my review:

My English teacher gave my class the first chapter to read when I was about 14 and I was so fascinated by the language of Alex and his droogs that I immediately went and read the full book. The ultra violence is difficult, but I don't think it's gratuitous, and although the language is an effort at first the internet translations made this much easier this time round. I was surprised by how much I remembered, but I wasn’t sure what I remembered from the book and what was from the film. The questions raised around free will and the rights of the individual vs those of society are still relevant and I found the use of music really interesting too. A classic work of absolute genius.

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh

I've been thinking about Irmgard Keun in the last couple of weeks - I read Child of All Nations a few years ago - shockingly when I looked it up back in 2019 (so Before Covid) and meant to read more. I have an older paperback of After Midnight (1980s perhaps). Did the copy you read have an introduction? I have a bit of a thing about reprints with introductions or afterwords, especially if they are by other novelists/writers. I'm also slightly obsessed with 20th century German history. Sadly After Midnight is not available in any of my libraries to investigate additional content, but I've borrowed another of her books in a stylish Penguin Modern Classics edition.