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.

@MonOncle have a look at Trespasses by Louise Kennedy. A novel telling the story of an affair between a young Catholic woman and an older married Protestant man set in the same time period.

@MonOncle My recommendation would be Killing Thatcher - Rory Carroll. The Audiobook is excellent.

The TV adaptation of Say Nothing is also very good although I got far more out of it from having read the book.

14. Murder at the Altar by Veronica Heley I picked this up free on a stuff your kindle day and it's the first in a series. Recently widowed Ellie is roused from her sedative and grief induced stupor by a friend arriving at her house to tell her she's just found a dead body in the church opposite Ellie's house. We then follow Ellie as she navigates her new life as a widow and blindly dismisses all the strange occurrences happening to her as unfortunate accidents despite them being, quite obviously, assassination attempts due to someone thinking she saw the murder

I have mixed feelings towards this book. I think the author, probably, captures the early days of widowhood really well as well as the frustrations of being dismissed by the police as an old lady who's not quite all there (I've no personal experience but this element of the book feels very real). However, I found Ellie really quite frustrating. She was a real wet blanket at the beginning and the way she allowed her daughter to treat her made me want to shake her. However, she did develop a backbone eventually which was nice to see. In terms of whodunnit, it's one of those frustrating books where it's impossible to guess as we've not been introduced to all the players so I didn't enjoy that element. I won't read any others in the series but I didn't hate this one

Thank you @highlandcoo @BestIsWest , have added both to my TBR list

Next time I am pondering DNFing a book, I will advance search on here instead of looking up reviews!

I loved the Finkler Question, but I don’t think one lone voice in a chorus of raspberries here would qualify it for the Bloody Boring Butler Award. My book club are pretty suspicious of my choices as I’ve made them read both that and Portnoy’s Complaint. I have a dysfunctionally high threshold for literary big swinging dicks, but that’s probably something I should work on without inflicting it on others…

I persuaded my (ex) book club to read The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford, my all time favourite book. It was the winner when we all picked our most favourite book. Anyway, I was so excited to hear what they thought. None of them even finished it. They all hated it and were bitching to each other!! I did have the fact that it's considered a classic to my case, but they didn't see it at all.

I was obsessed by The Good Soldier as a student and read it over and over. I can’t remember a single thing about it now.

Agatha Christie by Lucy Worsley

I don’t love Worlsey on TV, but I did see her speak about this book at a festival and she just seemed so genuinely into Agatha, I changed my mind a bit. The book didn’t disappoint, it had short chapters, which I find myself being more and more grateful for, moved at pace and was interesting. A few spoilers I could have done without, but overall a lovely biography. There wasn’t anything particularly profound that I didn’t have an idea of, just more fleshed out I suppose. I did not know though, that Agatha and Max had lived in Belsize Park in a very famous building - so next time there is an open house I will pop along. I walk past it all the time.

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard".

Opening line - not your forgetting the story!!

It's very rare that I really hate a book, but I detested The Finkler Question when I read it. It's not funny and I really dislike the views expressed, which from other things he has said in the media etc, I'm fairly sure are the author's own. I have liked some of his broadcast work, for example, a series about Australian culture.

I still do have a couple of his other books TBR but I might not be in any hurry. Although one of them is in the Hogarth Shakespeare series so I might try it for that reason.

34 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Having an aversion to Dickens that started with me being force-fed Hard Times at A level, I’ve never read David Copperfield. Coming at this as a book in its own right all I can say is that I absolutely loved it.

19 Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell
This was ok, nothing memorable. I got bored in the middle, rolled my eyes at some of Ciara’s decisions and wildly improbable things that happened to her. The husband was a cartoon villain. All a bit Meh.

28. Van Gogh’s Finale - Martin Bailey

Thoughtfully-written exploration of van Gogh's final months living and working in the small rural village of Auvers, where he’d gone after a year in an asylum, in the wake of the breakdown involving the mutilation of his own ear. His close and devoted brother, Theo, had found someone who could act as a kind of guardian for Vincent: Dr Gachet, who quickly became a close friend of the artist. Bailey is a van Gogh expert and this very readable book is profusely illustrated, including beautiful colour plates of Vincent's last Auvers canvases (although my ebook copy was very frustratingly laid out).

29. Roseanna - Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, transl. Lois Roth

I've gone back to start the Martin Beck series from the beginning and most enjoyable it is, too. This edition starts with an intro from Henning Mankell, who explains what an impact the books had when they appeared in the late 1960s as the first series of Swedish police procedurals. The authors planned it meticulously to comprise 10 books, developing from start to finish with the same set of characters, and to portray police work in all its everyday, repetitive, often frustrating reality - they were both committed Marxists and their political beliefs were very much a factor in how and what they wrote. None of the policemen are hero-types; they’re ordinary, flawed people with bad marriages and quirks and problems of their own - something we're used to now, but which was unusual then.

As with the book I read out of sequence, the central crime here is again a baffling one: a woman's body is discovered while dredging a river channel. Nobody knows who she is, or how she died. The process of finding out what happened to her is long, arduous and painstaking but somehow Sjöwall and Wahlöö make this journey compelling as Martin Beck and his team refuse to give up on a seemingly-impossible task.

1. Spring - Ali Smith

A security guard working an immigration detention centre is persuaded by a young girl to accompany her on an impromptu trip to Scotland. After rescuing an grieving man from a suicide attempt at a train station they travel in a coffee van to a battle site where a Scottish version of the Underground Railway is rumbled.

Of course, being an Ali Smith novel there is much much more to it than the sparse plot outlined above. Loved this one, my favourite of the seasonal quartet so far.

Loved this too. It then led me to listen to David Copperfield on Audible narrated by Richard Armitage which was amazing. I'm aware that it's one of his most accessible works but I'm working on overcoming my aversion to Dickens.

I finished 57. Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali yesterday. It was okay - not as good as I expected it to be! Has anyone else read it?

I did the same @ReginaChase . I enjoyed David Copperfield although not as much as Demon Copperhead. Am planning to try A Tale of Two Cities this year.

I can't decide whether I want to read Demon Copperhead. I'm getting such varied reviews. I quite liked David Copperfield as I did the Readalong a few years ago, but it was a bit of a slog. I'm glad I have read it, and enjoyed it in retrospect is probably the best description.
How does it compare to Shuggie Bain because that was definitely a slog (but I can see its merits)

25. Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell This is quite an old book now, first published in 1990. Police procedural about a team, including the female medical examiner who are investigating a serial killer. First in a fairly long series, not read the others yet. It was good, I had a few niggles- the hyper intelligent niece who happened to be staying with the medical examiner and conveniently helped her figure out the computer stuff was a bit contrived and I spent most of the book hoping the killer wouldn't make an attempt on the main character because that made it too sensational and dramatic (like the nonsense later seasons of Silent Witness) rather than realistic procedural, and lo and behold that's exactly where they went, but I can live with it.

I found the most interesting part was the forensic science they used back in 1990 (which doesn't seem that long ago to me) but for forensic science it was another age, pre-internet, some computer use but very limited, early days of DNA analysis etc.

I'll probably read more in the series, but didn't love it enough to do them back to back.

I'm currently listening to Our Mutual Friend which I'm thoroughly enjoying. The majority of Dickens works are free on Audible and beautifully narrated.

@MonOncle @BestIsWest I'm also reading Say Nothing at the moment, after really enjoying the TV show. Although I've also read some interesting criticism from some of the people who worked on the Boston interview tapes, saying he misinterprets and sensationalises their material.

I've made my way though all the Jane Casey books, aside from the Rob stand-alone which I've got on my kindle, and waiting very impatiently for the new one. DCI Josh Derwent!!

I hated it, but remember a couple of people really rating it.

I have just read There Are Rivers in the Sky which seems much loved. I preferred it to The Island of Missing Trees as it was less syrupy but I didn't love it. I know why the contemporary story was in there but I found it unconvincing and the characters stilted and dull, especially Helen, shoehorned in for plot reasons and the irritating tattoo artist who is also an expert on cuneiform. I don't think Shafak does dialogue all that well and her endless exposition of historical contexts can get in the way.

The Victorian story was good and I was interested by the Yazidi tale from 2014 - certainly not stories we often read and clearly the Tigris was the unifying thread but somehow I can't quite remove the feeling of being gently patronised.

As a side note, the modern protagonist was brought up from the age of 7 by her aunt and uncle but still refers to them as 'aunt and uncle' which seems formal and not very authentic. Does anyone actaully begin speaking to their relatives by going' Hello, Uncle'? Abd Helen , who is 'like a sister to her' say 'my father' when speaking about him which really doesn't ring true at all.

Yes. I read it last year in December. I liked it very much. I enjoyed the setting of 1920s Berlin. I liked the structure of the book where the narrator discovers the notebook and this discovery frames the story of Raif's doomed love affair which is a story of longing and regret.

@Piggywaspushed in Turkish we do refer to people like that, in fact if I met an old lady today I would call her aunt every single time I met her or spoke about her from that moment onwards. It’s quite common in the near/middle East. I would probably walk into a room and say ‘hello aunt’ in a way I wouldn’t in English.

@IKnowAPlace I have read Madonna in a Fur Coat and I adored it. I found it consuming and truly wonderful. I have it in Turkish to pick up at some point, I do enjoy a slow, no real action character piece though. He was also writing at a pivotal time in Turkish history and his work censored and ostensibly (depending who you ask) killed by the regime.