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.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeitthanks, but sadly not. I’ll keep on looking…

Thanks for the new thread @Southeastdweller . Had a busy week so only just catching up with the new thread now, hope everyone is doing well.

Here is my up to date list:

1. French Braid - Anne Tyler
2. I Will Find You - Harlan Coben
3. Friends Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing - Matthew Perry
4. The Crossing - Michael Connelly
5. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K Dick
6. We Solve Murders - Richard Osman
7. Winter Spirits- Various
8. Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
9. Funny Story - Emily Henry

10. Annie Bot - Sierra Greer 11. And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie 12. A Woman of No Importance - Sonia Purnell 13. Crooked Heart - Lissa Evans 14. Deadly Attraction - Diane Hoh

Currently I'm partway through The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, listening to At Home by Bill Bryson on Audible and very slowly falling behind with the Count of Monte Cristo readalong.

1. The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. Holly Jackson
2. Frank and Red. Matt Coyne.
3. My Sisters Keeper. Jodi Picoult.
4. Repression Ground. SM Carter.
5. Room. Emma Donoghue.
6. And then one morning, a personal odyssey. Aaron Le Boutillier
7. Avoiding Anxiety in Autistic Children. A guide for autistic wellbeing. Dr Luke Beardon
8. The Gathering. C.J Tudor
9. Divergent. Veronica Roth
10. Hell House. Richard Matheson
11. The Extraordinary Adventures of Alice Tonks. Emily Kenny.
12. The Listeners. Jordan Tannahill.
13. Bridget Jones Diary. Helen Fielding.

DNF Undoctored Adam Kay
thanks for the new thread. Just caught up on the last one. First time I have posted my list. No bolds for me yet and one DNF. the DNF was on audio and Adam Kay was reading it himself, however he sounded like Will from the Inbetweeners and in the end I found the voice to annoying to keep listening 🫣

My Good Bright Wolf - Sarah Moss

I’m not going to say much about this because although I can see it was well written, it was harrowing and sad and I found bits of it very irritating. Probably too clever for me.

I found most of it irritating @BestIsWest , you’re not alone. It was far too self indulgent for me. A free. ARC that I dnfed.

46 The Lying Game - Tess Stimson

This has been on my kindle for years. A quick read about two fifteen year old girls swapped at birth, one now in Vermont and the other in London, and the hat happened when one of the mums found this out. Highly implausible but passed the time.

Private Revolutions - Yuan Yang
Woman’s prize non-fiction long list which takes the lives of four women born in 1980s/90s China and follows them until just after the pandemic which is a time of great societal and economic change for people in China. Leiya wants to escape life in her village and gets involved in feminism and labour NGO work in the big city; June, inspired by teacher Song, sees university as her route out of poverty; Siuye initially struggles at school but falls in love with the English language and Sam becomes a labour activist radicalised by Marxism.

On one hand this book was fascinating, this is a country I know little about and the women featured are roughly the same age as me. Reading about their lives I was often amazed that what was being described was life in the 2000s/2010s and not some pre-industrial society as it is so different from my life experience and admired the women greatly for their resilience, grit and determination to make a life for themselves so different from their parents and grandparents.
On the other hand it took me about 40% of the book to hear the distinct voices of the four women, until then it was hard to distinguish between them and keep their lives separate in my mind. The sections also jump forward in time quite a lot which isn’t always clear so big changes happen off the page and this made me feel like I didn’t really know these woman, sections of their lives were being cherry picked to fit the narrative structure of the book but meant that they never became solid, real life individuals for me.

16) Pearl by Sian Hughes

This is a beautiful read. It was longlisted for the Booker in 2023 and I had it on my pile to read for ages - I should have got to it sooner.

It is about a girl whose mother disappears. She tries to make sense of what happened but falls into a path of self destruction. It reads like a memoir - it has been described as "a ghost story, a folk story, a story of loss and familial haunting". Highly recommended.

47 . Yes Ma’am : The Secret Lives Of Royal Servants by Tom Quinn

I was expecting lots of frivolous gossip from this and instead got a lot of old boring on of stories we have heard before and how things were done in Henry VIII’s day. I like a good bit of history but this was all old hat that I already knew. The last 20 pages were about Harry and Meghan and had nothing original to add to the discourse. I paid full price for this after seeing it discussed somewhere and feel like it was Money For Old Rope!

13.Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell. Ciara lives with her husband Ryan in Dublin with their two small daughters. Outwardly their life seems happy to all but Ciara's closest family, who are aware that Ryan's behaviour towards Ciara is controlling and abusive. Towards the start of the novel Ciara herself begins to realise that she is the victim of abuse, and takes steps to end her marriage.

What follows is partly a psychological drama dealing with the difficulties of leaving an abusive relationship and the extent to which abusers will always seek to exercise their power, and partly an examination of the lack of support for women leaving such relationships, including financial difficulties, poor access to housing, and slow and inflexible court processes.

This was well done, with believable characters. Although the plot was gripping, at points I wondered if it was a bit rushed, and I thought the caged bird analogy was a bit overworked.

Ten Way Street by Susan Scarlett
I wanted crappy, easy fiction and that’s exactly what this was. Not her best but I needed something lightweight with a guaranteed happy ending.

Glad you found a way through a book, Remus.

Oh no @ÚlldemoShúl I am picking up The Persians at the library today, I hope it improves.

I've read up to 8 now I think of the Maeve Kerrigan books and enjoying them a lot, although still a bit confused as to how she's survived so many attempted murders as well as losing suspects at the last minute! They have all started to blend together but I think my favourite has been the one with the fire, I liked the sort of How To Get Away With Murder set up of zooming out of a busy crime scene to tell lots of different stories.

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie. I wanted to love this as I love her so much, but to be completely honest it felt a bit flat for me. It was based around 4 different women between Nigeria and America reflecting on their relationships during the pandemic.

Really beautiful writing of course and interesting and thoughtful about motherhood. But I missed any kind of plot or narrative tension - outside of Kadiatou's story (based on the hotel maid who was assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn) it didn't feel like any of the stories reached a resolution or even progressed. I'm sure this will be widely read and well reviewed, but for me it doesn't come close to Americanah or Yellow Sun.

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon. Well I can see how this divides opinion but I enjoyed it a lot! The set up is quite brutal - in Ancient Greece, hundreds of Athenian soldiers have been left to die imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse after a failed invasion. Two local men start offering them food in return for reciting bits of poetry, and end up staging Medea and Women of Troy with a cast of prisoners.

The twist being the whole thing is written in a modern Irish vernacular, which I'm sure lots find irritating but I loved the audacity of! Overall it was definitely imperfect and there were some gaps in the story, but I thought it was really original, funny, tragic, and very honest about the aftermath of war.

9 Norfolk by Elly Griffiths
A photo book of the locations in Norfolk. Lovely pictures and useful for Ruth Galloway fans but short.

10. Christmas at Apple more
    A romance set in a small village in the Scottish Highlands. This follows the fourth child in the family and her friendship with the local bar owner.
    I'm really enjoying this series and will keep reading them even though we have run out of siblings.

11. Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux
    The diaries of the Nobel prize winning writer detailing her affair with a married Russian diplomat.

The writing is exquisite but I had to read this in small doses because it is a difficult read. She's so talented but spends everyday going why didn't he call me. It is a bit infuriating. I will try her fiction and I hope the play of The years is picked up by national theatre live so I can see it.

7. James by Percival Everett
Amazing book. Not a cheery read, but it's funny and gripping even though it is full of pain and anger, and it's also a road trip.It would have been even better if I was more familiar with Huckleberry Finn - it's the story of Jim the slave that Huck Finn knew, so is a shadow response to Mark Twain's classic.
Jim overhears that he may be sold away from his family. Rather than let that happen, he escapes. But freedom is not as simple as leaving the place where he is officially owned.

36 Agent Zo by Clare Mulley
History of Elzbieta Zawacka, a Polish resistance fighter in WW2. The book goes on to detail her life under Soviet rule and after. This was a great read. ‘Zo’ is inspirational and meets many other inspirational women along the way. Not quite bold as it took a while to get going but a great read nonetheless.

37 The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji
This tells the story of three generations of an Iranian family- grandmother Elizabeth, her daughters and their daughters. Elizabeth and one granddaughter Niaz still live in Islamic Iran where the rest escaped to the US before the revolution. The characters are unlikable and selfish and blame all their problems on the generation before who are equally unlikable and selfish. It bores on about designer goods and wealth and drug taking. This could have been so much more. Disappointing. If you enjoyed Pineapple Street you might like it- it has the same poor little rich girl vibes. Sorry @GrannieMainland - Hope you like it more.

Just finished How To Expect the Unexpected by mathematician Kit Yates. Highly readable, entertaining and thought provoking. Some of the maths bits went over my head and I skimmed but I learnt lots of interesting things about predictions, non predictions, betting and forecasting, which he applies to highly relevant and relatable contexts and real life events.

47 Fatherland - Robert Harris

I didn’t enjoy this as much as other books by this author, and I’m not entirely sure why not. It was written in 1992.

In this timeline, the Second World War went differently. It’s a week before Hitler’s 75th birthday and the Greater Reich is about to enter a detente with the USA and President Joe Kennedy.

Xavier March, a member of the police, gets a call to look into the accidental death (whilst swimming) of a retired high-up in the Reich. As his investigations progress, he begins to smell a conspiracy, given the recent spate of deaths in this grouping. His investigations bring him into contact with various branches of the police, including the gestapo, and with a young American journalist.

This might have been better if I was more familiar with the history of the war. But it was honestly a little confusing with all the plotting and double crossing.

I've been a little quiet on here for a good few weeks but have continued to read. This week I have caught up with reading the posts and noted @elkiedee mentions about a meetup. That would be a lovely idea so I'll keep an eye open for the arrangements. I'm in London so it would be a great opportunity to put a few faces to usernames.

17) Killing Thatcher by Rory Carroll

Absolutely page turning. I loved it. I am from the west of Scotland where sectarianism was a huge deal when I was growing up in the 70s and I was always very aware of The Troubles. And the attempt on Mrs Thatcher's life was so audacious, but as the author says, the authorities were so determined to brush it off like nothing much had happened, it wasn't given the importance of some other atrocities. So he has pieced together what happened and it is a hugely impressive piece of work. I read it in one day.

I'd asked you 'whereabouts did you stay?' but that could be fishing for your religious affiliation! Genuine question. I'm West End, followed by Helensburgh, followed by Knightswood so that's a bit enigmatic.

North Ayrshire, which is one of the bastions of sectarianism. My mother worked in a cotton mill before she got married. They employed Catholics but not in managerial or office roles. She was a secretary. I genuinely didn't know any Catholics until I left school! My dad was from the north of Scotland and thought the whole thing was daft. I wasn't brought up that way at all. But still we all supported Rangers.....

Helensburgh didn't have much of this at all (lots of English there and an army base - the army weren't well liked but their kids were at my school and we all rubbed along. The disdain was reserved for the nuclear base and the Americans). Moving back to Glasgow was a culture shock. I did go to school with both Rangers and Celtic players' kids, mind! But Glasgow City Centre on Old Firm days or Partick on the days of Orange marches was not fun.

I didn't get the casual testing of where I was from , what my surname was and so on again until I met someone from NI at uni and then not again until I went to NI last summer.

I guess the clue was in your user name!

Tbf it isn't really! It's my dog's name. I've only been there twice. I doubt there is much sectarianism on the island.

We had Orange lodge marches which ended up at the church opposite us. My dad hated it. My mum had grown up surrounded by it so it was normal to her. My brother had an official Glasgow Rangers album which had the players singing The Sash on it - seriously. My dad made him get rid of it. He liked the Dubliners. So I wasn't brought up the way some other people I knew.

I remember the IRA hunger strikes and the Pope coming to Glasgow and all the kerfuffle.

So this book is right up my street.