50 Books Challenge 2025 Part Four

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fourth 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, the second thread here and the third thread here.

Dear 50-bookers, I have a question about the books by Tristan Gooley that are in today's kindle daily deals (most specifically the one about how to read water but they all look interesting). I was wondering if they're good on kindle - I would imagine they might have photos, diagrams, etc. Anyone have any experience on these books in any format?

May I recommend Black Angels by Maria Smilios to you all? What a fascinating book. Sandi Toksvig brought it with her to the BBC2 Between The Covers show and talked about it with enormous enthusiasm. I have read books recommended on there that are very meh but this one was worth the read.

Ostensibly the story of the hunt for the cure for TB and an isolation hospital in Staten Island staffed almost entirely by Black nurses, it also tells the stories of the nurses who worked there (one, Virginia, is still alive). It does this via a fascinating social and medical history of the USA (and at times Europe, including George Orwell) - this covers, but is not limited to slavery, segregation, the Jim Crow Laws, discrimination against black people in liberal New York, immigration, both World Wars and so much more.It is really fascinating on the race for medical patents and the pharmaceutical giants evolving in Europe and the USA. It is compassionate and detailed and has such huge scope. Smilios spent 7 years researching this book and she tells the stories of the nurses, their families, various doctors and the patients with admiration and tenderness. The epilogue made me cry.

It's also a really good read.

52. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin was brilliant. Such a pacy read! I always find this with his novels.

Now on 53. Why Women Grow by Alice Vincent and enjoying it so far.

I’m really in the doldrums - hundreds of books to choose from and nothings taking! I don’t know what’s up with me!

Oh no @EineReiseDurchDieZeit 😞 would a re-read help?

I rarely re-read due to the vast volume of unread books I have it feels like reading time conquering books on TBR wasted. As well as that it’s basically everything I am picking up regardless of genre/author is a big NAH- it’s a malaise it’ll pass.

When I feel like that @EineReiseDurchDieZeit I find re-reads useful because at least it shows me that I can actually still read.

Has anyone read the Ambrose Parry books? I’ve just bought the first two cheap on kindle. Crap fiction seems to be all I can cope with recently, so I’m hoping that these might prove readable crap.

29 Passing by Nella Larsen

Irene is a light skinned black woman who runs into a childhood friend, Claire Kendry, who is similarly light skinned. So much so that Irene discovers that not only is Claire ‘passing’ as a white woman, but she’s married to a racist man who is pretty vocal about his hared of black people. This meeting reignites something in Claire, a longing for her own people, culture, and race and she begins spending more and more time with Irene and her family and friends, despite the danger of her husband discovering her. I thought this was excellent, and enjoyed the narration by Tessa Thompson. I bought this a while ago and listening to it I had thought it was a modern novel, I hadn’t realised it was written so long ago. It was very evocative of a time and place though, and I loved the fact that the characters were so well rounded. I think this will be a bold but I want to let it sit with me for a while.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie not read it but I did buy the first one because I love Brookmyre

Yes, I’d say the same (I haven’t read Middlemarch but have read a lot of the rest). I’d start with Austen, I think.

52 Here One Moment - Liane Moriarty

A plane full of passengers are heading from Hobart to Sydney, when their flight is interrupted by a mysterious passenger rising from her seat to point to each of them in turn and predict their cause of death and age at death. This has huge repercussions, especially on those given a relatively short timeframe. The chapters alternate between each of several passengers/crew and the so-called Death Lady herself.

I don’t love all of her books, but I did really enjoy this one; the variety of voices coming to terms with their possibilities and lives, plus the developing back story (complete with fortune teller mother) of the Death Lady herself, were gripping.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie I've read the first three and enjoyed them. But I love Edinburgh, like Victorian fiction and crime fiction and, like @SheilaFentiman I'm a big fan of Chris Brookmyre so I was well disposed to them in advance.
This series is written (in tandem with his wife, an anaesthetist) in a more straightforward narrative style than his usual stuff and there's less of his dark humour and amusing dialogue, but a decent read I'd say. From memory, I liked the second in the series better than the first.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit would you give short stories a go? Table for Two by Amor Towles is worth a look if you enjoyed A Gentleman in Moscow. I very rarely read short stories but enjoyed these a lot. Just a wee bit frustrating when you really engage with the characters and it's all over twenty minutes later .. I think that's why I generally prefer a good novel to get lost in.

I like the Ambrose Parry books but the “will they? won’t they?” relationship is getting a little jaded by book 3. 1 and 2 are excellent all round and the two authors work really well together, which I find is rare.

Thanks for all the suggestions re classics. I shall go back to my Bumper Book of Classics and see what else is in there.

@Piggywaspushed I bought that book a couple of days ago, it looks really good.

@Castlerigg I’m a bit late to the classics suggestions but I’d really recommend Wilkie Collins.

I’ll second Wilkie- his books are long but so much fun.

Black Angels is 99p on Kindle today.

#TeamWilkie - he was friends with Dickens but he’s so much funnier- and liked women much more than Dickens did.

@highlandcoo I’m also v partial to Victorian / medical history and Edinburgh, so hopefully they’ll work for me.

Not sure why that’s in italics but can’t get it to go away!

I shall look for Wilkie Collins, thank you!

Just bought Black Angels

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit have you read James by Percival Everett or Nesting by Roisin O'Donnell? I feel like they'd snap anyone out of a reading slump.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wilkie-Collins-Complete-Moonstone-Haunted-ebook/dp/B07MFVHDH5/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?crid=C1V62L35ME83&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.gunkvMQW9kVxA4icYm6Vwh8d5E4-LVkQvH8cbb1GdmT-NBSTfiBB32PIxVUzLAUuEbFAkY3Cb927Y7Gn7CxiHByVbfoZF2supXZLAH01W4PYeZFeSUWOhYOukDrpkOFnzZcraEAJJ4An7LLXJKwn0Fmt7ibVKXcmQkVD16tekDsFQPNq9QfvZZsrUMc3B9gcFkPVmkGG_vWXHCMqMTyv0A.A4e8FaIV65uXhmyO_3FkktH_oCUmtnjl3--1ewxvmmY&dib_tag=se&keywords=wilkie+collins+books&qid=1743408674&sprefix=wilkie+%2Caps%2C122&sr=8-2

The Complete Works of Wilkie Collins for £0.85? Go on then.

Nice one @Castlerigg I suggest starting with either The Moonstone or The Woman in White

25. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh

Hilariously offensive on every possible level, this was Waugh's thinly-disguised portrait of his own experiences as a journalist in Abyssinia in the 1930s. Lord Copper, mighty overlord of top rag The Daily Beast ('up to a point, Lord Copper') decrees that a promising young journo named Boot be sent to the African Republic of Ishmaelia to cover the impending civil war there. The trouble is, a mix-up results in the paper's timid and reclusive nature correspondent William Boot being prised from his ancestral home, Boot Magna, and forced against his will to embark on the journey, accompanied by mountains of luggage including a job lot of cleft sticks ('for messages'), a Christmas dinner in a tin, and a canoe.

This is a book club read and I look forward to hearing how my fellow-members react to Waugh's 1930s sensibilities (political correctness is very definitely not under consideration here), but I snorted my way through this nonetheless. A hoot.