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.

I am going to read it too. Have ordered it.

I remember the Pope too! And all the fuss when Souness married a Catholic.

I like the sound of your dad.

16 Murder At Gull’s Nest by Jess Kidd
An absolute treat of a book!
Nora Breen is an ex Carmelite nun who has travelled to the seaside town of Gore-On-Sea following the trail of her friend Frieda, a younger nun who left the Order shortly before her. She stays at Gull’s Nest, a faded grand boarding house from where Frieda last wrote to her. There’s a young married couple, a Punch And Judy man complete with a Toby Dog, a charming bar tender/spiv who casts his charms at the glamorous landlady, Helena, a gruff housekeeper…….you get the idea. Someone is poisoned and Nora sets out to prove it wasn’t by their own hand, gradually bringing round the handsome war hero Inspector Rideout to her way of thinking.
Secrets are uncovered, a selectively mute and amusingly disruptive child slides unseen in and out of rooms and Nora uses all her brisk nun/nurse intelligence to get to the bottom of Frieda’s disappearance (amongst other mysteries).
It’s utterly charming, with a depth and bite that lifts it above more traditionally ‘Cosy Crime’.
The tone is reminiscent of the Old Baggage trilogy at times and there are twists of bleakness that are Kidd’s trademark. Nora is a fabulous creation and I do like a well-written woman in her fifties who takes no shit.
I look forward to the next murder mystery set in Gore-On-Sea and the fact it involves a psychic medium is a sly nod to an almost throwaway conversation in this book.
A firm bold. From time to time I read a book and think “Granny would have loved this!”. My Granny helped nurture my love of reading for pleasure and we’d tandem read the latest Barbara Vine etc then compare notes. She died a good few years ago but I’ve never broken the habit of wishing I could pass books like this on to her.

Like the sound of that @AlmanbyRoadtrip. Have downloaded the sample.
I miss sharing books with DM. She stopped reading about 3 years ago and it’s just the kind of thing she would have loved.

@Piggywaspushed @Arran2024 and didn't Souness sign the first Catholic player too? I remember the Pope coming to Murrayfield and driving past our flat in his Popemobile. It wasn't such a big deal in Edinburgh though

@AlmanbyRoadtrip that sounds like a fun read. I enjoyed the Old Baggage trilogy too.

Returning to the Pride and Prejudice (Sort Of) chat from a while ago, I saw it Friday and it was very clever and funny. It's on tour up and down Britain now. Highly recommended whether you're a P&P fan or not .. but possibly a wee bit more fun if you are.

Mo Johnston I think.

Thornyhold - Mary Stewart

Gill inherits a house from her slightly odd older cousin, and finds that all the neighbours expect her to have also inherited her cousin’s ability with herbs and potions. This was great - loved all the characters and the atmospheric setting, as well as all the period detail (it’s set in the 1940s/50s).

Reading Lessons: An English Teacher’s Love Letter to the Books That Shape Us - Carol Atherton

Loved this. I love a book about books and this is a particularly good one. She talks about lots of the books she’s taught and why they’re important. It made me want to read the ones I haven’t read and revisit those I have.

The Rain Before It Falls - Jonathan Coe

One of his earlier novels, and not as political as his later state of the nation ones. Here a dying woman narrates the story of her family on tapes, to be passed to a great niece everyone’s lost touch with. I really liked this - not a particularly cheery read but it really pulled me in. Not quite a bold because the
method of telling the story felt a bit contrived but almost there.

Bookish: How Reading Shaped Our Lives - Lucy Mangan

The sequel to Bookworm. I loved this and couldn’t put it down - read it in a couple of sittings today. Unlike Bookworm there’s more books mentioned here that I haven’t read - but that doesn’t matter because Lucy is basically me (except I didn’t go to Cambridge and I don’t have my own library at the end of my garden - I am very jealous!). All through it I kept thinking ‘I do that!’. I did spot one error (she refers to Adrian Mole’s elderly companion as Bert Digweed when everyone knows it’s Bert Baxter) which was slightly jarring, and we do not share the same opinions on Wuthering Heights, but there’s so much here that I agree with that it almost feels like she’s written this book just for me. A definite bold.

48 . Dead Lions
49 . Real Tigers by Mick Herron

I’m not entirely sure this series is for me. I find the POV jumps jarring and I’m not attached to any one character. As it is, I’m still doing RWYO and I’m not enamoured enough to want to spend £20 on the next few, if they came up in deals I would, but I’m going to take a break right now and focus on other books

I'm on the library waiting list for Bookish, Chessie - looking forward to it!

@Piggywaspushed we may have been neighbours at some stage! Small world.

I grew up in rural NI - super familiar with all the Orange stuff. As an adult, completely neutral and atheist. A failure to my grandparents!

Oh, and I've finished 48. Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval. A lot of pee chat.

I'm just starting a reread of a book I know this chat doesn't like! Boring butler, anyone?

48 The Infidelity Chain - Tess Stimson

Everyone in this book is deeply unpleasant, except the dog. Avoid.

I Feel Bad About My Neck - Nora Ephron

More amusing short writings, magazine ar and the like, mostly on the theme of aging. A very short book though.

Incidentally does anyone else hate longwinded introductions to books? This one had one by Dolly Alderton which rambled on for pages. It felt almost as long as the book itself. I didn’t read it.

@BestIsWest I tend to ignore introductions generally as they often have spoilers. I'll sometimes go back and read them after I've finished if I'm interested enough.
@IKnowAPlace I quite like the bloody boring butler. He's very divisive!

33. Tell Me Everything - Elizabeth Strout. I've finally got round to the new book after catching up on Olive and Bob Burgess's previous books. I like Strout world and enjoyed this one. I think it's interesting that it's being sold as the 5th Amgash book as Lucy doesn't narrate it and is not the main character - Bob Burgess is. In terms of it's Woman's Prize listing, it does work as a stand alone, but your experience of it is so much richer having read the back catalogue that I'm not sure this book would be a worthy winner.

@Stowickthevast what really annoys me is, if I’ve downloaded a sample of the book on Kindle and the bloody introduction takes up the entire sample.

I’m Team Butler too. @IKnowAPlace

I've read the bloody boring butler before, so I know what I'm getting into!

Apparently I have two other books by Tess Stimson on my Kindle, probably bought in a haze of PND/non-sleeping toddler/redundancy over ten years ago.

I think I might have a delete fest of anything I acquired back then which doesn't appeal to me now!

@IKnowAPlace I love the BBB! (And also live in NI, but grew up in the South so very different experience in my formative years)

@Stowickthevast I still have Lucy by the Sea to catch up on before Tell me Everything. I am a bit disappointed to hear it’s narrated by Bob- Lucy and Olive are much more interesting!

I'm hankering after Murder at Gull's Nest but it's not listed in my library and is expensive to buy. Will contain myself until it comes up on offer.

Recent reads:

27. Cat Among the Pigeons: A Catholic Miscellany, Alice Thomas Ellis
A niche choice this - a collection of her articles in the Catholic Herald in the early 1990s. I picked it up in a Little Free Library and read it on a train journey when there was nothing else to hand, as I can't really recommend it. It's like being talked at by a particularly strident elderly aunt who has strong views about the Church these days and how feminism has gone too far; women wanting to be priests indeed. I liked exactly one sentence in the entire book, a reminiscence of how adults dressed in her early childhood in the 1930s: "I can remember the misty, powdery smell of veiling, the slither of silk and the harshness of tweed on the face should you chance to fall asleep on the knee of a gentleman".

28. Absent in the Spring, Agatha Christie writing as Mary Westmacott
A middle-aged woman in stranded at a remote outpost while waiting for a train home. With nothing to distract her, she is forced to think about her own life and reaches some painful realisations. I found this very engaging and a convincing portrayal of how you can both know and not know things, and choose to deceive yourself.

29. The Broken Afternoon, Simon Mason
Book 2 in the police procedural series involving DIs Ryan Wilkins and Ray Wilkins in Oxford. Currently my favourite crime fiction - you can't help but cheer the main characters on, for all their faults. Touches on some fairly gritty topics but without being salacious. I have the next book lined up.

@AlmanbyRoadtrip and @BestIsWest
I quite often read books and really wish I could have shared them with my mum.

I bought copies of Bookworm for both my sisters. I now have a copy of Bookish from the library, though I'm sure I'll want my own copy of it in due course.

@ChessieFL - I have just added all 4 of those to my wishlist!! Disgraceful 😂

Sorry @nowanearlyNicemum ! Hope you enjoy them all!

I always avoid the intro. Usually full of spoilers. Sometimes I'll go back and read it at the end, but often not. It's worse on audiobooks, because you don't always realise straight away.

Agreed re introductions. I only read them after I’ve read the book, unless it’s Stephen King writing a forward to his constant readers.

#11. The White Darkness, David Grann

Account of the Antarctic expeditions by Henry Worsley who was obsessed with Ernest Shackleton and recreated some of his expeditions. Interesting for me as a fellow Shackleton fan, not as gripping as Grann's other books. As with many of these tales of daring exploits by men, my overriding feeling was "What about his family?" Uncomfortable.