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.

Yes Book of Disappearance, Perfection, Eurotrash, Small Boat and Heart Lamp were the others I’d had my eye on. I would like to get to them all at some stage. Usually I’m more of a Women’s Prize than Booker kinda gal but I’ve really enjoyed all the ones I’ve read so far from the International and am really looking forward to the Booker with Roddy Doyle as the chief judge whose work I’ve really enjoyed in the past.

C’est La Vie by Ian Moore

The sequel to Vive Le Chaos, following the author’s family life in rural France, with three sons and lots of animals. Quick entertaining read.

The Time Of The Fire by Emma Kavanagh

Parallel worlds story. Robin discovers her father’s body - he’s been murdered on the morning a wildfire is threatening their California town. Suddenly she wakes up in a different world where her dad’s still alive and the fire is contained away from the town. Can she solve her dad’s murder and protect the town? I usually like parallel world stories but here the worlds were too similar and I kept getting very confused about which world I was in and what was going on.

The One That Got Away by Mike Gayle

Amazon freebie short story. Reuben plans a day out with his friends on the day his ex is getting married, only for her to ring him asking him to rescue her from her wedding. Unfortunately both main characters were really irritating and behaved in very stupid ways so I didn’t enjoy this. Glad it was free.

A Stranger In The Family by Jane Casey

A reread of the latest in the Maeve Kerrigan detective series in advance of the new one coming out later this month. Very good.

Wicked! by Jilly Cooper

Another reread and probably my least favourite. It’s a shame because the core story, about the rivalry between an independent and a comprehensive school, is good but I don’t really want to read about teenagers having sex and Jilly’s snobbery is off the scale here - I’m not sure she’s ever set foot in a comprehensive school!

Death At The White Hart by Chris Chibnall

Murder mystery/detective story by the Broadchurch/Dr Who writer. The landlord of the local pub is found murdered with his body posed in a very unusual way with links to local folklore. This was good and if it turns into a series I’ll read more.

Noel Streatfeild’s Holiday Stories

Collection of short stories she wrote for various magazines. I especially enjoyed the ones that revisited characters from Ballet Shoes and White Boots.

Three Mothers by Hannah Beckerman

Amazon first reads freebie. Three mothers of teenagers cope with the aftermath of one of the children being killed in a car accident. This is told from several different points of view and flips between the weeks after the accident and the months running up to it. It was fine but nothing particularly memorable.

The Women by Kristin Hannah

I loved this! I picked it up on a bit of a whim and didn’t think I would like it that much but was very pleasantly surprised. It’s about the women who were army nurses in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and how they coped returning to a country that didn’t value their service and didn’t even recognise that women had been part of the war. The scene setting is brilliantly done and I could really picture what was being described. This is the first I’ve read by Hannah but I will definitely look out for more.

A Corruption of the Blood by Ambrose Parry
By far the best of the three imo. This one had much less gratuitous and largely unnecessary description of women dying horribly and had also reduced the irritating obsession with piling on loads of historical research and medical information, which the two previous novels wore very heavily. The plot was better, characterisation stronger and the schlock reduced. It could still have benefited from tighter editing, but nowhere near as annoying as the second.

33 The Reckoning by DM Taylor

Really terrible, even my love of time travel couldn’t make me overlook how badly written this was.

24 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid. I know lots of people loved this but it was just ok.
25 Big Sky - Kate Atkinson. Definite bold from me. I've loved the whole Jackson Brodie series up to now though I'm slightly concerned about approaching the next one give the slightly lukewarm reception in recent posts.

@ChessieFL
Thanks for the book haul post. I do miss the Persephone Bookshop in Lambs Conduit Street, Holborn, London - for some reason I didn't actually make it to visit until 2010 but when I was working the shop was in walking distance, and for a few years after I used to visit to buy the new releases and work out what else I would buy to make up my 3 - or occasionally, my 6 books. I also found a few secondhand. I loved Miss Buncle's Book and enjoyed High Wages. I still have a Virago Modern Classics edition of The New House TBR* (so haven't bought the Persephone version of that or several others which I already have yet), but I have read Lettice Cooper's other Persephone, National Provincial*, set in my home city in the late 1930s.

I only discovered Persephone books fairly recently so never went to the London shop, sadly.

The Dentist by Tim Sullivan

Book 1 in the George Cross detective series. I read the latest in the series recently and enjoyed it so decided to go back to the start. A homeless man has been murdered and the police don’t even know who he is let alone how he died. However when they do find out his identity they realise that his murder may be linked to an unsolved murder from several years ago. The main detective has Asperger’s which makes this more interesting - I don’t know much about Asperger’s so no idea how accurate it is but it makes a change from the usual alcoholic/workaholic detectives. I enjoyed this.

I feel a bit meh about book prizes this year. I hope the Booker pulls it back!

In terms of the international Booker, I've read Perfection. It wasn't bad, but not particularly memorable. I'm interested in reading Small Boat and On Calculation of Loss - although, not sure I want to commit to the seven volumes expected for the latter.

That’s very funny @EineReiseDurchDieZeit . I do recall wondering if I had it right but didn’t care to look back and check. The opinions of human Croquet are good to hear. I have oft mulled over it as it’s the only one of Kate Atkinson’s I haven’t read I believe. I might give it a miss.

I have read your reviews of the Ambrose Parry books with interest @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie. I have really enjoyed those books but agree in hindsight with your comments on editing and a rather gruesome focus on the women. I have wondered if this was finding the balance between Christopher Brookmyre’s skills as an author and Marisa Haetzman‘s medical history expertise. I did read that the next one in the series will be the last. I will be sad about that but I do think they have probably gone as far as they can with the characters

17 Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

I think this is my favourite of the Sarah Moss books I've read so far, and I'm a fan. 17 year old Silvie and her family join an academic party conducting an Iron Age re-enactment. Silvie's father is a self-taught history enthusiast, whose feelings of inadequacy spill over onto his family. A modern-day story of abuse plays alongside the treatment of women in the times the party is re-enacting. As always, Moss's writing is tight and beautifully expressed. The moor and woodland where the story takes place is brought to life and the story unfolds without a word being wasted.

15.Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. Sonia is a British Palestinian living in London and working as a jobbing actress. On a visit to her sister in Haifa to get some distance from an ill-fated love affair, she gets involved in a theatre production of Hamlet in the West Bank as a favour to a family friend.

I felt like this was absolutely the kind of thing I would love, but I was a tiny bit disappointed. I can objectively see that it’s well done, but I didn’t find the story or the relationships all that interesting. That being said, the setting provided fascinating insights into the struggles of daily life for Palestinians living Israel and Palestine.

@Passmethecrisps I was late in realising it’s two writers and I think you’re right that this might be where some of the flaws of the novel lie: the medical stuff, for me, is shovelled in a bit too heavily and not always necessarily. And some of the dead women could definitely have been edited out. I also find the references to Raven’s father a bit clunky and repetitive. Having said all that, here I am reading the 4th!

Percy Jackson and the Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan

Fourth book in the popular kids series. Still great fun and despite being 15 and having girl trouble Percy is still a very entertaining companion.

20 The Secret History of Twin Peaks - Mark Frost

Carrying on my TP revisit (and 35 years this week since it first aired), this book further develops the lore of the TP universe and fills in some narrative gaps between seasons 2 and 3. Will make no sense at all to someone not familiar with the series, but enjoyable for those of us who enjoy exploring this mysterious world.

58 The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson (P)

This won the Booker in 2010. I did not enjoy it and almost DNF’d several times.

The story is largely about Julian Treslove, who is not Jewish. It also covers two friends of his: Sam Finkler and Libor Sevcik, both of whom are Jewish and both of whom are recently widowed. Finkler is the same age as Treslove and Sevcik much older (in his 80s: he used to teach the other two).

Treslove is obsessed both with deep and tragic love and with the possibility that he might also be Jewish. He falls in love at the drop of a hat, envies his widowed friends for knowing tragic love, has two sons who he couldn’t be bothered to get to know, is all round completely self indulgent and needs a long night in Thomas Cromwell’s basement to think about his failings. And some of the things he and the other characters say about Judaism are… yikes.

All female characters in this book are ciphers to the men (I have no doubt this is deliberate by the author) which got rather annoying also.

Reviews described this book as comic - I honestly did not get that from it.

Onwards to Joan Didion!

The Christmas Book Hunt - Jenny Colgan
This short story about a hunt for a rare missing illustrated copy of A Child’s Garden of verses remembered by an elderly ailing aunt made me cry a lot. Perhaps because we’re going through some stuff at the moment with DM who used to read it to me as a child.
It’s a sweet little book, the heroine searches the second hand bookshops of Britain from London to Edinburgh via Hay on Wye and Alnwick with evil-minded second hand booksellers on her tail once they get wind of what she’s looking for.

@SheilaFentiman Finkler was my stinker of the year for 2022. A thoroughly dislikable book.

Oh thank goodness, not just me!!

I’ve just woken up to an email from Waterstones saying that Patti Smith is releasing a memoir later this year. I’m delighted as Just Kids is one of my favourite books and she’s an icon. I’m going to do something I’ve never done before and place a pre-order.

Run by Ann Patchett

I have started and deleted three attempts to describe this without spoilers!

Ok, the main character is a girl called Kenya. She is 11, intelligent and can run like the wind. I love a well written child character as at that sort of age I liked to pretend I was in a book and capable of being witty and properly listened to by adults.

Kenya finds herself thrown into the family she has been watching from the outside and gets to find out what life with them is really like.

I enjoyed this a lot, I found it hard to put down and I was thinking about it when I was wasn't reading it. It did go in the direction I guessed, but that's ok, it's not supposed to be a plot twisty book I don't think.

I am definitely going to read more Ann Patchetts. Tom Lake got me started, and this is encouraging me to keep going.

@PepeLePew oh I’m torn by this as Just Kids is one of my absolute favourites, but M Train was a DNF.

I loved Just Kids so also excited about this.

Not as excited as the news that there’s a new Thomas Pynchon novel out this year! I had thought that there wouldn’t be any more (he’s 87!)

I quite enjoyed Death at the Sign of the Rook but agree it was patchy. Some of the dialogue really made me laugh but at other times the humour felt tired and forced. I liked the characters and the central plot idea but somehow it didn't come together as a whole. When Will There Be Good News? is by far my favourite in the series.

@SheilaFentiman I can't be doing with Howard Jacobson at all. He comes across as terribly pleased with himself and I don't think it's coincidental that you found his women characters very thin. I avoid his writing completely.

@RazorstormUnicorn I'm a big Ann Patchett fan. Bel Canto, State of Wonder and The Dutch House are all very good, and quite different from one another, which I like. Her non-fiction books are also worth a look. These Precious Days is a very readable collection of essays.

I have the 4th Ambrose Parry book waiting to be read and feel I should reread the first three before I tackle it but don't have time. I agree @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie that the ending of the first in the series was poor - I don't think I'll bother going back but willl just go for it with the new one.

Finkler the stinkler?
Sorry <gets coat>

12 The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, Helene Hanff

A companion piece to 84 Charing Cross Road. It was fine, very short, nice to see Helene make it to London.

13 Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe

I expect this is another one that has been mentioned in these threads a lot over the years. For anyone unaware, it’s a narrative non fiction book regarding the Northern Ireland troubles, with its focus on contextualising the kidnapping and disappearance of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 children, by the IRA.

I thought it was excellent, so well researched and structured, with copious notes at the back of the book. I was a child during the 80s and 90s in New Zealand so while I recall NI being on the news I couldn’t really claim to know much about it until recently, when I watched the amazing tv documentary series Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland. This book has helped me understand more of the history and the politics, particularly the role of Gerry Adams. Will be interesting to watch the tv adaptation now that I’ve read it.

If anyone has any recommendations for other books on the subject I’d love to hear them.