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 was surprised at how slight it was, compared to his others. I did enjoy it though.

Thank you for the new thread

1. Tombland - C J Samson

2. Death in Disguise - Caroline Graham

3. Written in blood - Caroline Graham

4. The Tao of Pooh - Benjamin Hoff

5. Stop Reading the News - Rolf Dobelli

6. 6.20 Man - David Baldacci

7. The Mysterious Affair at Style - Agatha Christie

8. The Diet Starts Monday - Laura Adlington

9. Sense & Sensibility - Jane Austen

10. Redemption - David Baldacci

11. Wintering - Katherine May

12. 1984 - George Orwell

13. Women Living Deliciously - Florence Given

14. The Testaments - Margaret Atwood

15. A Room With A View - E M Forster

16. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

17. Why Don't You Drink Alcohol - Sienna Green

18. Judi Dench - Shakespeare, the man who pays the rent

19. Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen

20. The Spell - Charlotte Brontë

21. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

22. Mythos - Stephen Fry

23. Madame Bovary - Gustav Flaubert

24. The Court of Henry VIII - Alison Weir

25. Food Isn't Medicine - Dr Joshua Wolrich

26. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

27. Unruly - David Mitchell

28. Faithful Unto Death - Caroline Graham

Another Midsomer Murders book. I really enjoyed this. I love her writing. It's a bit Jilly Cooper-esque, (but less sex and more murdery). Not high brow or anything, but enjoyable.

29. Ghost in the Machine - Caroline Graham

This is the last book in the Midsomer Murders series. I liked it a lot.

30. Meurtre avenue des Champs-Élysées - France Dubin

This was an audiobook in French for people learning/improving their French. A fun little murder mystery set in a French language school for adults in Paris. I bought it to help me improve my French listening and comprehension skills and was mainly just glad I could follow it tbh. It was good fun to listen to as well though. Recommend, if anyone is learning French too.

Yet to catch up properly but just wanted to share my latest library haul with people who would appreciate my excitement levels (i.e. not bemused DP pointing out the unread stacks we have at home 🙄)
To All the Living was a rec from @Terpsichore and @elkiedee ) and I think Rachel Clarke is also well liked here - I'm hoping hers will be my 5th bold of 5 from this year's WPNF list. But Bookish up first of course!

I’m liking the look of Dress in the Age of Jane Austen, @inaptonym 👀 (closet historical costume geek here)

Ooh! Nice haul inaptonym! I would be excited too. I'm going to look up the Persephone one to see what that is.

'Unfortunately she was a ... ' what's that?

• *A nymphomaniac is it?

You've got it Fuzzy! About 'bad women' in the classical world, Messalina etc.

Thank you! That sounds good.

Love a good haul

Great haul @inaptonym Do you have any shortlist predictions for the WP for NF?

Wonderful haul.

Trust Hernan Diaz

My opening comment is WHY did no one tell me about this book and insist I read it immediately - truth is I am sure you all have, probably more than once, since this is a few years old, and as usual I am late.

For those who haven’t read this, I don’t want to say too much as part of the enjoyment was having no idea what to expect. Set broadly in the inter-war period in New York it’s an examination of a wealthy financier’s marriage. It uber meta and thought the prose was wonderful, each section having its own voice. At the end of the first section, I was emotionally drained and rendered speechless. That was the best part for me, so it was hard for the rest to live up to my expectations.

In a sea of usual 3 stars and very very rare 5 stars this is ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐! Best read of 2025 so far.

Make sure you have a very large box of tissues on standby for The Story of a Heart. I finished it yesterday and sobbed through much of it.

Summer Pudding by Susan Scarlett
Still struggling with sleeping, exacerbated by a migraine over the weekend, so another nonsensical bit of escapism is all I’ve managed. If you want old fashioned, nonsensical escapism then here we are, otherwise stay clear of this silly, frothy little bit of fluff.

Trust was a DNF for me unfortunately. Just couldn’t get into it.

The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths

I love a time travel book and I love a crime book so this should have been right up my street but I was left feeling a bit disappointed. Nothing much happened when she went back in time and then the time travel bits seemed to have no real link to what was going on in the present day. It also left too many things unexplained - I know this is because it is the start of a new series but it is still a bit frustrating that more wasn’t resolved here. I will probably give the next in the series a go and hope it improves a bit.

The Last Passenger by Frances Quinn

A rich woman travelling on Titanic takes the opportunity to steal someone else’s identity so she can leave her controlling, repressive marriage and live a new life in America. This had a slow start (and the way Elinor got herself into her marriage was rather frustrating) but once they got on the Titanic the story improved and I really enjoyed the rest. However, while the story is good the language used just feels too modern to really make you believe it’s set in the 1910s, and the ending felt a bit abrupt - I would have liked to know more about their later lives. I do like a Titanic book though and this is one of the better ones I’ve read.

14 The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

I loved The Garden of Evening Mists and felt very much the same about this. Based around (tweaked) real life events, we follow Lesley in Penang two timelines: 1921, when Somerset Maugham comes to stay with her and her husband Robert, and 1910, as a famous trial unfolds in Kuala Lumpur. At the same time as the latter, Sun Yat Sen, the Chinese revolutionary leader, comes to Penang and his presence catalyses the changes in Lesley's own life. The mannered style Tan uses here is perfect for the buttoned up characters, and the slow revelation of what lies behind their masks. The evocation of place is fantastic; you can get lost in the names of the trees alone. I know others feel this isn't as good as The Garden of Evening Mists, but I thought it was great.

@ChessieFL I definitely think it’s a right time and place type book.

I can’t recall now what I didn’t like about it so it’s quite possible that I just wasn’t in the right mood!

@Welshwabbit I have somehow missed any reviews of both The Garden of Evening Mists and The House of Doors, but both sound very much my sort of thing. I'll add both to my wishlist.

#31 Becoming A Sober Rebel - Louisa Evans

Some useful parts, but I struggled to get past the writing style, which was not to my taste at all. Generally a bit 'mid' as far as quit lit goes

Thank you @Southeastdweller for the new thread (I mean, it's still kind of new, right?!).

@Arran2024 I read Pearl last year and loved it! There's a great twist at the end.

@FortunaMajor thanks so much for your Women's Prize reviews! So far it looks like we have basically enjoyed the same books, but I liked Dream Count more than Nesting and for you it was the other way round. Congratulations on your life-improvement regime; I'm envious! Am still stuck in too much of a doom-scrolling rut myself, and could definitely do with some more physical movement.

😂@inaptonym on The Ministry of Time; that book has had some serious marketing, much of it prior to publication from what I've seen. Incidentally I'm really looking forward to the new Lucy Mangan.

@Stowickthevast I'm a fan of All Fours! Or a qualified fan anyway. The book ultimately won me over, but I'm not sure I would want to know Miranda July in person. I'm a million times too boring for her, and that includes not being keen on intense emotional affairs with people who are already in committed relationships.

My most recent reviews, apologies for length:

16. The Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes, trans. Ann Goldstein 5/5
    A wonderful novel, recommended to me by a friend. De Céspedes is an Italian-Cuban writer who published this novel in 1952. This is a new English translation by Ann Goldstein, the translator of Elena Ferrante, and clearly it’s aimed at Ferrante fans (of which I’m one!). However, in some ways I found this work even more compelling than Ferrante’s, because when De Céspedes writes about the 50s, she is writing about her own time. She’s a neo-realist writer (like Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg). The work is framed as a first-person diary: Valeria is a woman in her 40s who has no private space of her own, and she finds it through keeping a diary (even though she has nowhere safe to stow the diary in her small house, so constantly moves it round from room to room). Caught between generations, she finds herself in conflict both with her highly intelligent 20-year-old feminist daughter, and with her own snobbish, aristocratic mother (who is horrified by the fact that post-war poverty has forced Valeria to become a working woman rather than a SAHM). Valeria loves her husband, but he has ceased to view her as an object of desire (he calls her ‘mamma’). As she records her thoughts in her diary, she grows increasingly unhappy in some respects: the writing, which brings clear-sightedness, also brings discontent. Although this was written in the 50s, I found it extremely relevant to today. It’s just very very good (even though I’m always personally drawn to the diary form - eg Annie Ernaux - whether memoir or fiction), and I now want to rush off and read everything else this author has written.

17. Nesting, Roisin O’Donnell 4/5
    Much reviewed here already! A frightening plausible account of a woman’s attempt to break away from a relationship of coercive control. This could easily be a story unfolding on the MN Relationships threads. The concrete details about the housing shortage in Dublin, and the everyday challenges of looking after small children while living in a hotel room long-term, are very powerful. The characters did seem to me quite black and white, either good or evil, but in the case of domestic abuse, this binary ethical lens seems justified.

18. Fundamentally, Nussaibah Younis 4/5
    The idea of a comic novel about abandoned ISIS brides in a refugee camp sounds like an oxymoron, but (mostly at least!) Younis pulls it off with panache. This is a very colourful, original novel, and the depictions of conflicting egos and dysfunctionality at the UN were both funny and depressingly convincing. That said, I did have the sense at times that the highly educated, academic author was dumbing things down a bit in an attempt to reach a broader audience. Her heroine is a university lecturer but has remarkably little gravitas (ha) and is quite childlike in some ways: as childlike as the Shamima Begum-like teenage girl she is trying to rescue (though I know that’s part of the point). I would have liked more info about politics on a nitty-gritty level: for instance, at one point we find out that a character has had their citizenship removed, but there’s no mention of statelessness and dual nationality and all the complexities that go along with the removal of citizenship by the Home Secretary (a pressing issue in the UK today). However, Younis is clearly trying to keep things simpler, which is fair enough. I heartily recommend this book, but if anyone wants to know more about ISIS brides, I would recommend Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of Isis by Azadeh Moaveni (which I read a few years ago due to recommendations by 50-Bookers).

19. The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley 3/5
    A hugely inventive story, with some great characterisation, but ultimately frustrating for me as I found it harder and harder to make sense of the plot.

Finally, two DNFs from the Women’s Prize longlist. I read the first hundred pages of both, but just wasn’t enjoying them enough to carry on. This doesn’t mean they’re without merit obviously; it’s about the kind of book I do/don’t enjoy.

DNF: Birding, Rose Ruane
The prose was very flowery and neither of the two main women characters appealed to me; I’m afraid I just wanted to give them both a good shake and tell them to stand up for themselves.

DNF: A Little Trickerie, Rosanna Pike
I found the narrator’s voice too cutesy and didn’t believe I was in the Tudor period. The representation of religious unbelief seemed overly simplistic to me. In 1500, most Europeans take the existence of God for granted, the way we might take the existence of atoms or gravity for granted today. Atheism doesn’t really get going until the 17th c. and the Enlightenment period. This is only one minor quibble, I know, but what can I say, I’m a grump.

@cassandre I’m so happy to see someone else who doesn’t like A Little Trickerie. It’s getting rave reviews on booktube and had a few positive ones on here which made me felt very grumpy old woman in my dislike. Glad to see I’m not alone!

18 Butter - Asako Yuzuki (tr. Polly Barton) This is a difficult book to categorise and I'm not sure how much I liked it. I've never read a book by a Japanese author before, and I'm wondering how well the translation matches the original - the tone certainly felt not unlike the reserved way of speaking that my one Japanese friend from university had. I found this article by the translator which I thought was interesting: La Piccioletta Barca | The spirit of the words: a conversation with Polly Barton - by Konstantinos Doxiadis

It took me a long time to get through the book and I think that was because the story is not compelling and there's a lot of "tell not show" - it was a real slog at times. But at the same time I did want to keep reading, and I especially liked the food descriptions (we've ended up eating more Asian-style food over the last week or so than usual, and that's definitely no coincidence!). The overall message seems to be one of self-acceptance, and on that basis I think it works, even if there is a lot of meandering in order to reach that point. Some of the plot points were a bit OTT or unnecessary, and it definitely suffers from the sledgehammer effect (see also RF Kuang...though Butter is far less irritating on that front!). Overall, a thought-provoking book that I don't regret reading, but I'm very ready to move on to my next book.

Ha, @ÚlldemoShúl it's clearly a matter of personal taste! I didn't think the book was badly written; I just didn't like either the quirky prose style or the way the faux-Tudor themes were unfolding, so decided life was too short. I kind of wish I'd stopped before reading the castration scene, ha.

18 The Spy And The Traitor - Ben MacIntyre

Much read and reviewed on here, and a timely read as Oleg Gordievsky, the double agent hero of this book, died this week. I found it a gripping but ultimately quite sad tale.

The Women's Prize Non-fiction shortlist is out

A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry

The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Courageous WW2 Resistance Fighter Elżbieta Zawacka by Clare Mulley

What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean by Helen Scales

Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang

I've read 4 of these and I'm 25% into another.
So far I'd like The Story of a Heart to win.

Of those not listed, I'd really recommend Sisters in Law and Ootlin. I quite liked Autocracy Inc as well.