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.

Two week kindle/book sale, I might be the last to spot it! 15-28 apr

https://www.amazon.co.uk/b?&node=266239&ref_=dbs_f_w_s1_8e58d5fd-e3e8-4d61-81fd-7f45852c12a6

37 Truth and Lies by Caroline Mitchell

Det Amy Winter is contacted by Lillian Grimes, one half of an infamous serial killing couple, who offers to tell her the location of her last three victims. She also drops the bombshell that she is Amy’s biological mother. While juggling the search for Lillian’s victims with a kidnapping case Amy struggles to cope. This was very clearly based on the crimes of Fred and Rose West and I found it a little bit grim at times. There were a number of absolutely ludicrous twists at the end too. I love a good crime novel, but this was not that. This is what I get for dipping into kindle unlimited freebies again (on audible this time) but I’m determined to get my moneys worth this year.

56 . Pearl by Sian Hughes (Audible)

This is a book about a woman, Marianne, reflecting on her childhood after her mother went missing when she was eight and was never found. It catalogues how much this damaged her over time and multigenerational mental health issues.

i thought this was a good, solid, four star in line with a Clare Chambers or Sarah Winman. It’s definitely worth a look and was really well read as an Audible.

it was however longlisted for the Booker in 2023 and I just don’t see it. It’s solid contemporary fiction but not outstanding

57 . All Fours by Miranda July

A bored perimenopausal woman does a lot of navel gazing and has an affair

This has been reviewed by a lot of people on the thread and everywhere else and I’ve seen/heard/read some raves. Unfortunately I Hated it and everything about it from the prose style to the characters I loathed it to such a degree it was nearly a DNF. Hope it doesn’t win WPFF. Bleurgh.

Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife : The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women - Hetta Howes
A portrait of the lives of Marie de France, Julian of Norwich, Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe based on their own writing and what it tells us of the lives of medieval women.

This is more for the casual reader than the serious historian, but it's well researched and written. I enjoyed it.

I really enjoyed Pearl,which I read a couple of weeks ago. What I didn't understand was the blurb, which said "discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete" because, yes it cropped up a few times but it wasn't as much of a theme as I was expecting and I didn't feel it was properly explored, at least not to the depth the blurb suggested.

I hate it when books do that. I don't have a kindle and always read actual books and I like the imagery, the blurb, the recommendations. For me it's all part of the experience and sets my expectations.

And I was just confused with Pearl, waiting for the poem to reoccur over and over, and yes it was mentioned, but not what I was expecting.

53 Mrs March by Virginia Feito
Mrs March is unhappy because people assume that the main character in her husband’s new novel, a sex worker called Johanna, is based on her. We see this world entirely through Mrs March’s eyes and at times it’s darkly comic and at other times tragic as she spirals into paranoia and hallucinations. Or are they? Gruesome at times and very stylised I quite liked this one- not bold, but worth a read.

@Arran2024 yes! It’s not really about the poem at all. making it oddly advertised. I just went straight in on Audible as it was free so I had few preconceived ideas.

42. Sunrise On The Reaping - Suzanne Collins. The latest Hunger Games book which is a prequel following Haymitch's life. I read it with my 15 year old. It's ok, the theme is propaganda. Several characters from other books - particularly book 2 - make an appearance. She uses Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven throughout as Haymitch's girlfriend is called Lenore. I found it rather wearying especially towards the end when you just get huge chunks of Poe quoted at you.

Hmmm @Stowickthevastthats on my radar as something I might get when my Audible renews. No?

#14 The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O'Farrell

The second book I've read of hers and again I had the feeling there was something slightly missing, some depth maybe. I enjoyed the story though, and read it quickly.

I mean it gets good ratings on Storygraph so maybe I'm being harsh but I assumed the fans love anything @EineReiseDurchDieZeit . I do think the repeated Raven renditions would be even more annoying on Audible!

13 (unlucky for some) Anybody out there? - Marian Keyes
The 4th (I think) instalment in the Walsh Family series. I fear this is a series of diminishing returns for me. Listened to this on audible so I was able to zone out frequently!

24 The Wych Elm - Tana French Toby is young, handsome and clever, with a job he loves, a wonderful girlfriend, and a bright future. Then he fucks up at work and (unconnected?) gets attacked by burglars in his flat, leaving him with major physical and neurological issues to deal with. When his uncle is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Toby takes the opportunity to temporarily move in with him (in the old family home, the atmospheric Ivy House where Toby and his cousins spent happy summers as kids and teenagers) - with the intention of supporting his uncle and also recovering from his injuries. But then something shocking is discovered in the hollow of the old wych elm in the Ivy House’s garden, which turns the present and the past on its head.

This was great - the same slow-burn and deep characters as in French’s other books that I’ve read, and a thoroughly unreliable narrator with significant memory losses which leave us in the dark about the central mystery. It didn’t go where I was expecting, and the ending left me wondering how much of the whole story could be trusted, even after the revelations. A definite bold.

I remember enjoying The Wych Elm, but I haven't read anything else by Tana French. Is there anything you'd recommend @DuPainDuVinDuFromage?

62 A Spy in the Family - Paul Henderson and David Gardner (P) (NF)

This was v good - thoughtful gift from DS, written by two journalists. The first part of the book followed the story of Johanna van Haarlem, a Dutch teenager dating a Nazi soldier, who then raped her and left for the front, where he died. She fell pregnant, but was forced into giving her child Erwin up to a children’s home.

Fast forward several years and the identity of Erwin is hijacked by the Czechoslovakian state and assigned to a spy, code named Gragert, who is sent to London after training. However, Johanna has never stopped trying to find her baby and Gragert ends up having to meet her and be her long lost son, whilst continuing informing to the Soviets on London based intelligence. In 1989, having learned the truth, Johanna ends up testifying at Gragert’s Old Bailey trial. It’s a fact-focussed book but Johanna’s devastation is palpable.

10. How to Win an Information War by Peter Pomerantsev
A book of two propaganda wars. Sefton Delmer, who grew up in Berlin to Australian parents and moved to the UK when a teenager, became a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express, interviewing prominent Nazis and by Pomarentsev's account, suffering from an ineradicable Ministerial suspicion that he was not British enough, or even a spy. After WWII broke out, he eventually overcame this to become the brains behind an ultra-secret German-speaking radio station, which became highly popular in the Reich. Its success led to a huge expansion of radio stations designed to undermine the regime. The details of the propaganda approaches used are not pretty. Delmer's view was that the station needed to support Hitler while blaming 'the elites' for problems in daily life.

Alongside this Pomarentsev describes the unending barrage of propaganda used by Putin's regime to minimise its aggression and violence in Ukraine, and its cold war against democracies and alliances that threaten it.

This worked brilliantly for me as a combination but it's true that the book admits it isn't possible to say whether Delmer's schemes were actually effective against the Nazis. They might have made a difference. The book sparks uneasy thoughts about vulnerability to media manipulation now.

@Halfhardy the other books I’ve read by her are The Hunter and The Searcher - the first two books in what I think is intended to be a trilogy (waiting for the third one!) about a retired American police detective who moves to rural Ireland and gets caught up in local events despite just wanting to mind his own business. Great characters and great sense of place too - they’re better than the Wych Elm in my opinion! I haven’t read any of her other books but there’s a longish detective series that I have on my wishlist, I’m sure I’ll get to them eventually!

I've fallen so far behind with this thread it's ridiculous. Posting a few reviews and then I'll read back and catch up with everyone!

20. The Artist, Lucy Steeds 4/5
    Women’s Prize longlist. In the wake of WW1, a young Englishman travels to the south of France to interview a famously reclusive artist, and ends up living with the artist and his beautiful, enigmatic niece. A good read for Francophiles, with sensuous descriptions of Provence, food and art. Very engaging, with a satisfying feminist slant, even though some of the plot elements are fairly improbable.

21. Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami 5/5
    Women’s Prize longlist. I’m really disappointed this wasn’t shortlisted, as I thought it was great, and almost painfully timely. A young woman academic (Moroccan-American) is detained indefinitely in a futuristic America which uses all sorts of data (including dreams) to arrest people on the basis of the crimes they MIGHT commit. This sci-fi premise is belied by the realism of the bureaucracy that keeps Sara incarcerated, gradually deprives her of bits of her humanity, and even makes her question her own innocence at points. It’s impossible to read this novel without thinking of all the innocent people who are being arbitrarily arrested and detained in the US at the moment, and also the way the plight of prisoners and refugees is currently exploited in the UK by profit-making companies such as Serco. This isn’t a flawless novel (I confess I found the narrative of some of Sara’s dreams a bit boring), but I was impressed by Lalami’s polyphonic incorporation of different forms of discourse into the story (meetings of memos, automated email replies and so on). I also loved Sara’s reiterated point that data doesn’t prove anything on its own: you approach data already thinking about what you expect/want to discover. A Kafkaesque novel with huge political resonance for today.

22. The Persians, Sanam Mahloudji 3/5
    In theory this is very much the kind of novel that appeals to me, a sprawling multi-generational saga that focuses on women. And I’m keen to learn more about Iranian culture, because the British Iranians I know are without exception remarkable people. However, this novel never really gripped me for some reason. The fact that several of the main characters are wealthy and spoilt didn’t help (though the two youngest women, Bita an Iranian-American law student, and Niaz, who stays in Iran and runs into trouble with the government, have more integrity than the older-generation women). There is some interesting detail about Persian-American culture, but for the most part, the story moved too fast and the characters seemed too shallow.

23. Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens 4/5
    I can’t really follow up the extraordinary reviews of this novel that have already been delivered by @LadybirdDaphne and @FuzzyCaoraDhubh and others, ha! Not Dickens’ greatest novel, but very much worth reading. The portrayal of 19th c. America as seen through Dickens’ eyes is fascinating (and so searing that he backtracked and apologised afterwards to his American fans). The stand out characters are all British ones though: Pecksniff the hypocrite, Jonas Chuzzlewit the greedy plotter and wife-abuser, Sairey Gamp the alcoholic nurse and midwife with the imaginary friend Mrs Harris (otherwise the women in the text are a bit disappointingly one-dimensional), and Tom Pinch the gentlest of male heroes (so gentle in fact that it seems he’s doomed to remain perennially celibate). As always the novel was greatly enhanced by reading it slowly in serial installments along with @Piggywaspushed and her band. Having known these characters for months, it feels like a bereavement to tell them goodbye.

I enjoyed the same ones as DuPain. I've also read In the Woods the first of her Dublin Murder Squad series. I really liked it, but didn't get on with the second in the series which I DNFd quite quickly. More to do with my mood, than the book most likely.

In reply to the discussion a couple of weeks ago (cough cough!) about the Women’s Prize shortlist, I agree with @FortunaMajor and others that I rate the judgements of readers on this thread over those of the actual judges. In fact I find that I’m disappointed by the Women’s Prize shortlist every year, ha, so I’m not sure why I still get so excited every year when the longlist and shortlist come out. It’s the excitement of having a fixed selection of new titles to read I suppose, and hoping that I’ll discover something amazing. In fact few titles turn out to be amazing, but quite a few turn out to be interesting, and it broadens my reading horizons.

Anyway, my ranking of the official shortlisted books would be:
Tell Me Everything
Good Girl (which I'm 3/4 of the way through but like a lot so far)
Fundamentally
All Fours
The Safekeep
The Persians

The first four are all worthy of being shortlisted I would say; the last two, no.

@bibliomania , it sounds like you weren’t blown away by Bookish (which is coming up in my library queue shortly). I guess this proves you aren’t in fact Lucy Mangan, contrary to @inaptonym 's dark suspicions. Or maybe you just wrote a lukewarm review to throw everyone off.

@MamaNewtNewt , I loved The Man Who Saw Everything, but I actually turned back to the beginning as soon as I’d finished it and reread it, in an attempt to make more sense of the different layers. It’s very dreamlike as you say.

@Arran2024 it’s true that the medieval poem Pearl is only obliquely related to the novel, but there are interesting connections. Both are about parent-child relationships, and grief and loss, and gardens/landscape. Like the proper geek that I am, I read the medieval poem just before I read the novel, and I remember thinking that the links were suggestive but not very obvious! I think it was more about the creation of a mood than about the poem as a concrete plot point.

Another big fan here of Tana French's The Hunter and The Searcher. I've read most of her earlier novels and I liked those too, but I recall that I often found the endings unsatisfying. She's great at building up plot but maybe less good at endings.

Was Bookish her second? If yes, I DNF the first. I thought I’d really connect with it, but just didn’t like her writing. If the writer is on here, apologies, but not for me.

Last week I DNF’d Bookish because it felt padded out and rather twee and dull.

@Halfhardy I absolutely love the Dublin Murder Squad, but there is an element of the spooky/supernatural in most of them. They are all set in the same universe so characters reappear, but they can certainly be read as standalones (though I would read 1 before 2).

'Faithful Place' (book 3) is a straightforward story with lovely characterisation, so you could start there (its main character, Frank, is a supporting character in book 2, so if you like it, I would then go back to books 1 and 2)

I also expected to like Bookworm but really didn’t.

For both Bookworm and Bookish, I found them pleasant but she didn't tell me anything I didn't know - unlike, say, Claire Pollard's Fierce Bad Rabbits which gave me a new perspective on the picture book authors she describes. Lucy Mangan's stuff is "my life in books" rather than "the books in my life" and there's nothing inherently wrong with that - depends what you're in the market for.

Just finished The Road to Oxiana, by Robert Byron, a travel classic about the author's travels through Persia and Afghanistan in the 1930s. It's of its time - detached description of the hardships, and a confident view of his own expertise and superiority. He travelled to see the development of Islamic architecture, and to be honest I was pretty sated by his descriptions early on. One that I read to have read it rather than because I was pleasurably turning the pages.