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.

Can highly recommend the BBC Drama adaptations of the Smiley novels which are on Audible. More accessible than the books and Simon Russell Beale is a brilliant Smiley.

I really must not buy Any More Books. I counted up my kindle purchases and my kindle reads in 2025 and it is the Same Number. Gah!

31 Death at the Sign of the Rook - Kate Atkinson. I've loved the rest of the JB series but I nearly didn't finish this one. It was such hard work and took me almost two weeks to read as I had to put it to one side several times. I think the only way I can describe it is shambolic, very disjointed and way too much time given over to irrelevant characters.

DH has all of them and it was his very battered paperback I read! I’m definitely going on to the rest but I now also realise there are two novels that precede TSWCIFTC which might have made things slightly less confusing. So now I’ll have to get hold of those, I think….

On another note, I’m now due to read a non-fiction (according to my self-imposed rule) and am highly annoyed that my library reservation of Posthumous Papers of the Manuscript Club has apparently been 'lost' irretrievably somewhere in transit to my branch. I’ve been waiting weeks, so had to crack and buy a copy using a Christmas book-token, even though I’m trying incredibly hard not to buy any more physical books. Bah!

@ReginaChase Yes, the thread has been divided over DATSOTR I was in the thumbs down 👎 category

60 . The Secret Room by Jane Casey

Maeve Kerrigan #12

Devoured this this evening. I don’t want to say too much for spoilers as I know lots of you are fans but I did think making X conveniently evil all of a sudden was a bit of a stretch. Very, very satisfying. A bold even though it’s extremely flawed as a Kerrigan outing.

I’m another one who inhaled The Secret Room yesterday and loved it. The team are investigating the apparently impossible murder of a woman in a posh hotel but there’s also a key plot featuring Josh Derwent and there’s also the usual focus on his and Maeve’s private lives. As Eine said it’s not perfect but I still loved it and when I’d finished it I went back and reread a couple of chapters which is something I almost never do! Wonder how long we’ll have to wait for the next one?

I'm so excited for The Secret Room, weighing up if I can wait for my library reservation to come through or if I just want to buy it today!

11. Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
Much reviewed already on here, the story of a woman going out to Iraq to set up a UN programme to deradicalise Isis brides. I really enjoyed it, with one major issue with a sexual practice i consider should never be presented so lightly, and a few niggles, it's a bit clunky at times in style but hell, if only all novels were as meaty and funny as this.

68 Promising Young Woman - Caroline O’Donoghue

This was good and kept me up late trying to finish it. Jane is 26 and works at a marketing agency. After a break up, she is preyed upon by 40-something Clem at work, and this charts what happens.

I’m also undecided on whether to buy it now or wait until it comes down in price. I never pay full price for kindle books but I think I’ll likely relent this weekend.

I never usually pay more than a couple of quid for a kindle book but I was too impatient to wait so did pay the full preorder price for this one!

My copy of The Secret Room arrived to my house from Waterstones yesterday but I don’t get home from holiday until Sunday so no spoilers!

@elspethmcgillicudddy I downloaded the Complete Alan Grant series by Josephine Tey in the Audible sale a few weeks ago and listened to The Man in the Queue on the drive back from my daughter's on Easter Monday. Lovely dated comfy whodunnit - better than the Thursday Murder Club genre IMHO.

I'd forgotten that The Secret Room was due out, so thanks for the reminder - put myself on the library list.

For the Josephine Tey lovers, Miss Pym Disposes is great fun. Alan Grant doesn't feature, but the setting of a young women's training college in the 1940s is really well evoked.

I have just finished Diane Abbott's memoir, A Woman Like Me.

I really enjoyed this. It's well written and really interesting. The story about her 'romantic' date with Corbyn to visit Marx's grave is well known by now but certainly whimsical. She pulls no punches on the issues in politics and her own party , including specific Labour politicians.

I am a fully signed up fangirl but I don't think you have to be to read this. It's not at all heavy going.

45 A Fatal Grace – Louise Penny Three Pines/Inspector Gamache 2. I’m enjoying this slow burn series. I’m finding the books absolutely charming and I want to move to Three Pines. I suspect in real life, I would last about 30 seconds. I don’t think that I’d cope with a Quebecois Winter and would actually die. The coldest I’ve ever dealt with in Scotland is minus 15 and that was a total shock to the system. Its also pretty rare to be that cold in my part of Scotland. Anyway, back to the plot. A dreadful woman is murdered in Three Pines, while the whole town is watching a curling match. How did the killer manage to murder her without anyone noticing? Very clever. I guessed some of it, but that was due to some specialised (?) knowledge. Cant say more without giving away the plot, but I think my specialised knowledge might be wider known, certainly within this group and perhaps in the UK. Anyway, would love to chat more with someone who has read the book and knows what I am rabbiting about.

@SheilaFentiman – Frozen People is my current read :) Be strong. No more book buying!
@Terpsichore – Interesting. I thought that John le Carre’s novels were all about George Smilie @MegBusset – I LOVE Simon Russell Beale, so may have to investigate the Audibles.

@Tarragon123 Smiley makes a very fleeting couple of appearances in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold but he’s much more central in the ensuing books.

61 . Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (Spotify)

Sara is apprehended at LAX and detained because algorithms show she has a high risk score and may pose a threat to her husband.

Longlisted for the WPFF. Reviewed a lot. Black Mirror vibes, particularly the episode Nosedive but I thought the Dream Tech stuff was poorly explained and executed, I don’t remember half my dreams and they are usually not very clear, this didn’t seem plausible as a concept particularly when concerned with actually detaining people. I felt that most of the book was a thinly veiled allegory for the experience of Immigrant Detention and as such was heavy handed and unsubtle

It was Ok. Would still place above All Fours

@Stowickthevast - I hear you, I too am an absolute sucker for an Irish narrator!

Disappointed to see the thumbs down for DATSOTR as I’m working my way through the Brodie books and this week I finished - (15) When will there be good news? by Kate Atkinson Which I absolutely LOVED!

Also just finished listening to the wonderful Sandi Toksvig narrate her autobiography Between the Stops. This has been languishing in my audible library since I bought it in a 2-for-1 deal in early 2021. I thought it was great. She uses a London bus route as a way to tell us all sorts of things about her life, past and present, woven very skilfully with historical and cultural snippets about the places the bus travels through. Absolutely brilliantly done, with very little name-dropping. She seems to be passionate, caring, erudite and I find her downright hilarious at times. Would love to have her as a mate!

23 Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes
Another fabulous book recommended on these threads, thank you!
Body swap novel from the 1930s, written by a member of the aristocracy but from the point of view of a lower middle class housewife.
Polly Wilkinson finds herself suddenly ‘transformed’ into the body of Lady Elizabeth Forrester with no warning and no prior knowledge about the latter’s life. This leads to some amusing set pieces (playing bridge like a demon when Lady Elizabeth detests it, layering on mismatching jewelry just because she likes all the sparkles, clinging onto a horse for dear life during a hunt….) with a thoughtful subtext about the roles in society of both women. At first, Polly blames Lady Elizabeth for the body swaps as some sort of malign game, but it becomes apparent that the reason is somewhat more mystical.
An absolute hoot and a definite bold

I’m not sure what my last review was so am starting here with
57 The Women of Troy and bundling it together with 61 The Voyage Home. Both by Pat Barker
These two continue from The Silence of the Girls which was a retelling of Troy from Briseis’s POV. The second book continues the tale of the captive women and the third follows Cassandra, Priam’s daughter and the slave Ritsa as they are taken back by Agamemnon to Mycenae and his wife Clytemnestra. The second lacked focus and the third took far too long to get to the point- I see why as otherwise it wouldn’t have been a full novel but it still lacked forward momentum. I see what Barker wanted to do with these but I think she should have stopped after the excellent first novel.

58 Those who Leave and Those who Stay- Elena Ferrante
Third in the Neapolitan quartet in which we see how Lila and Lenu deal with careers, motherhood and marriage (for Lenu). The relationship remains toxic as the tables seem to turn and turn again. I can’t wait to read the next one and yet I don’t want to finish it. I’ve loved this series- all bolds so far. I’ll save the last one for as long as I can.

59 Medea and other plays by Euripedes
I read a different translation of Medea last year and decided to read this compilation of plays while in Athens to keep me in the zone. Medea itself was good, Euripides version of Elektra built a lot on Aeschylus (from what I can remember). The other two (Hippolyte and Helen) were just okay.

60 Chasing the Dead- Tim Weaver
Recommended by someone on here. Our protagonist, David Raker is a recently widowed private investigator whose focus is missing persons. An old colleague of his late wife’s asks him to look into the disappearance of her adult son, 5 years after the event. This is very twisty, action-packed and fast paced- people who like thrillers will love it. I’m more of a slower paced police procedural kinda gal for my crime reads so this one wasn’t for me.

Thanks for this. I've just bought it.

The Frozen People - Elly Griffiths

Not a fan of time travel books, never yet found one I liked, hated TTTW, 11/22/63, the St Mary’s books, Outlander. However I generally like Elly Griffiths’ writing so was prepared to give this a go.

Hmm. I liked some of the bits set in the present day, the central character, Ali is likeable but it did nothing to change my opinion on time travel. The science is skimped over to say the least and the historical bits were irritating, I just wanted to fast forward them. I might try another if it’s on a 99p offer and there’s nothing else going on.

Leave the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff to the Doctor.

For my birthday DH signed me up to Drift & Focus book subscription which is quarterly and non fiction on a topic. Two books, and notes and interviews with the authors. My first box was Wellness which I worried might be crap but the two books were The Phone Fix and The Good Virus both of which sounded interesting. Previous boxes contain lots of books mentioned on here which I've ended up reading so I have high hopes!

The Phone Fix by Dr Faye Begeti

This is quite dense and heavy on the science so I had to read in small chunks and not all of it has gone in I don't think.

She starts by pointing out phones are not addictive by definition and we have ascribed morals to phone use which is not necessarily useful. She goes on to explain how we form habits and how hard it is break them and that if scrolling is stopping you from achieving things, you might want to take some actions.

She has good ideas for reducing use, explains a lot about how our brain works, led by our executive function but we go into low power mode when tired. As someone recently diagnosed with inattentive ADHD and therefore a bit short on executive function, this was really interesting. And might explain why I say above i don't think all of the info really sunk in...

Anyway this was more accessible than Digital Minimalism which I tried to read a year ago and put down when it was suggested I give up my phone for 30 days detox.

What I am doing is moving my phone to a different room while I work. Making a list of things I want to look up when it is genuinely time for a break and stopping taking my phone with me round the house eg to get dressed or get ready to go out.