50 Books Challenge 2025 Part Five

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fifth 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 or / and maybe authors as well of books you've read or going to read? It makes it much easier to keep track. Some of us like to bring over lists to the next thread- again, this is up to you.

The first thread of the year is here, the second thread here , the third thread here and the fourth thread here.

Almost tempted to get hold of the Genghis Khan book but realistically I don’t think I’d get round to it!

Uncivil Seasons by Michael Malone A 1983 mystery set in North Carolina, with 2 charismatic detectives: Justin Savile comes from the right side of the tracks but has rejected the glittering trajectory his family laid out for him; Cuddy grew up on the rough side of town and is forging a career well beyond the life that he seemed destined for. When a member of one of the town’s leading families - a family connection of Savile’s - is murdered, will Savile do what the family expects of him and make sure no mud sticks?

This was excellent - the mystery element is good, the relationship between the 2 detectives is a joy, and there are other good characters including a feisty love interest. It’s also - perhaps mainly - an interesting look at the town’s class and race politics, and the workings of privilege. There are 2 more in the series and I am looking forward to them.

Thanks @elkiedee I'm an economic migrant of similar vintage myself - though from Birmingham rather than Leeds. And yes, this was my first Joan Lingard reread in a long time (prompted by my first ever visit to Belfast) and I thought the books stood up rather well.

And since I lazily didn't write reviews under my list, I would also heartily recommend Sweet Home, a short story collection by Wendy Erskine, another Belfast writer. There seems to have been something of a boom in post-troubles writing from Belfast authors, and Erskine's style reminds me a bit of Anna Burns' Milkman (which I also enjoyed) and manages to be interesting about the city and its recent history while also being really well-written with some fascinating, and sometimes tragic, characters.

From reviews on here she does acquire some humility. I hope that leads to her concentrating less on the physical attributes of other Sisters. I’m sticking with it for the descriptions of Northumberland at the moment.

@elkiedee@grimupnorthLondon I also read the Kevin and Sadie books as a teenager !

I read Cloistered. I enjoyed understanding the daily life in a convent in the 90s but am just baffled by why she stayed there.

78 Precipice - Robert Harris

This was fabulous. Harris really does excel at creating great characters and a compelling story around real events.

Much reviewed on here already, but the book is based around 61 year old PM Asquith’s (real) letters to 27 year old The Hon. Venetia Stanley during the course of their affair before and during the start of WW1. Harris uses these as a starting point to create Venetia’s letters back to Asquith and details of their meetings and lives outside the letters. A solid bold.

73 . Killing Thatcher by Rory Carroll

Much reviewed. I don’t know what went wrong for me here as I very much was engaged with the first half but literally had to force myself to finish and I’m not sure why. I did prefer Say Nothing overall.

@Bibliomania – well done on getting a 10 year old book off your kindle

52 The Last Devil To Die – Richard Osman. Cosy crime bordering on jumping the shark, but yes, I’ll read the next one.

DNF Skagboys – Irvine Welsh. Managed a couple of chapters and just could not be doing with the blatant misogyny and fat shaming. I haven’t read IW since the 90s, I wont be reading anything else.

Yes to a Reggie spin off, hence the username

16. Killing Thatcher by Rory Carroll
Is this a record for the greatest number of thread reviews for one book in the shortest time?? I really enjoyed it - I know what you mean Eine about the change of pace halfway through, but I found it a page turner throughout. The manhunt for the bomber was gripping.
A few oddities; I don't mind Carroll explaining O-levels to the American reader, but I would bet money that not a single British Rail train door in 1984 'hissed open'. Banged open with people hanging out of it while the train was still moving, more like.

79 The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion

This has been hovering at 70-something percent completed for a while now and I finished it off tonight.

It’s a memoir of the year after her writer husband died - at the time of his death, their adult daughter was seriously ill in a coma (she did recover). She’s not an author I have read before and this has some absolutely beautiful and pinpoint phrases - “there is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought” - but it wasn’t one I could stick with for long and I don’t think I did it justice.

Yes! I thought exactly that!

Is he too young to know this?

@Piggywaspushed he's 53 - grew up in Dublin where, Google informs me, the Dart has always had automatic doors (it opened in 1984, coincidentally). Maybe it didn't occur to him that British trains would take so long to catch up - either just before or just after prioritisation IIRC, certainly in the southern networks.

Well the DART was most fancy! I reckon in parts of Scotland we were hanging out of train doors until 1990!

We had Pacer trains with swishy doors in the early 80s, on short lines. Longer distances still had lovely slammy doors.

We had Intercity 125s which could only be opened from the outside. You had to open the window from the inside and grab the handle on the outside of the door. Very clunky, no swishing.

Cinderella In Sunlight - Hermina Black
Inspired to read this again by the oldest book thread although I have read it many, many times.

Published in 1958 by the Romance Bookclub, it’s the story of manicurist Barbary who falls in love with aristocrat Ricky to the horror of Great Aunt Melisande and dark brooding Cousin Vance with the sardonic smile. Ricky’s destiny has always been to marry the sporty heiress Marigold whose estate lands border his.

As soon as you see the word sardonic you just know what’s going to happen.
They all decamp to a villa in the South of France for a month long holiday filled with parties, balls, swimming, yachts and tennis, wearing lovely frocks and eating ices. Barbary is dismayed at the amount of time Ricky spends playing tennis with Marigold but is a truly fine and decent young woman and tries hard not to mind. When dark, brooding Cousin Vance shows up she finds herself pleased to see him.

It’s a terrible book but for some reason I love it so much that I’ve read it practically every year since I was 14. I fell in love with idea of the villa as much as anything. I think it’s one thing I might rescue in a fire. It reminds me a bit of Jilly Cooper’s Imogen but without the puns. Another book I’ve owned since I was 14 and which I’m going to read next.

18 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I read this with the readalong on here and thought it was great (although I agree with some other posters that it sags a bit in the middle). A story of imprisonment and revenge with excellent characters!

19 Annie Bot by Sierra Greer. Recommended by several people on here, this is the story of the relationship between a sentient robot and her human owner. I enjoyed this, but it wasn't a bold for me.

20 Chances by Freya North. I read this as part of bibliomania's challenge to read the oldest book on your kindle - I bought it in March 2012 and I can kind of see why I've never bothered with it since! No, that's a bit harsh, it's perfectly readable and a nice story. Maybe a bit too long for this kind of book.

I would bet money that not a single British Rail train door in 1984 'hissed open'

I first came to London in the early 80s and have vivid memories of exactly what Best says - the whole line of train doors slamming back against the carriages as everyone pushed the windows down, grabbed the handles outside and shoved them open, before surging off the train in a huge mass of morning commuters (such a spirit-sapping experience that I quickly decided I wasn’t going to live outside London and do the awful daily commute any more!).

I’m sure that trains still had the doors that you had to lean out and open from the outside right up until the late nineties. That’s when I started using trains regularly going between home and university. This would have been on the Paddington-Penzance main line. It’s possible I’m misremembering earlier train journeys, but we rarely used the train before I went to university.

@ChessieFL My Kristin Hannah recommendation is The Great Alone. I enjoyed The Women as well, but that went downhill a bit towards the end, solid beginning and middle though

We still had Intercity 125s up until 2017 in Swansea. I used to commute to Cardiff every day, often catching those or the little ones which DID have swishy doors. They got replaced by less comfortable Hitachi trains when they electrified the line as far as Cardiff and no, we’re not bitter about that in Swansea.

Thanks Welsh, I’ll add that to my wish list too.

56. The Mystery of Princess Louise: Queen Victoria's Rebellious Daughter
Yes, yes, good works and an accomplished sculptor, but the main draw here is the gossip - did she really have an illegitimate baby in her teens, was her husband gay, did her long-term lover die while having sex with her, and did she have an affair with her brother-in-law? The evidence is unavailable as the archives are firmly closed, but the author thinks it's all plausible. A lively read.

17. Boomsday by Christopher Buckley
Many thanks @bibliomania for your 'oldest book on your kindle' challenge. It was published in 2007 and I have no idea when I bought it. According to the Kindle I had started it at some point, but no memory of that.
Entertaining satire of American politics by the conservative/libertarian columnist, now novelist. (He was thrown into outer darkness column-wise after endorsing Obama in 2008 apparently.) It's set a few years into the future, Cass Devine, a PR consultant and blogger in her 20s, sets out to bring the topic of Social Security bankruptcy into the light by suggesting a modest solution to the overwhelming ageing Boomer financial burden on the younger generation. It's both quite contemporary on the usual American right wing policy positions, and of its time (everyone blogs). I thought it was a lot of fun.

40. Agent Zo - Clare Mulley

An incredible story of an incredible woman - Polish resistance fighter Elżbieta Zawacka, codenamed Agent Zo. Somehow she survived WW2 despite continual acts of unbelievable courage and daring as a key member of the 'Home Army', but on vanquishing the occupying Nazis, Poland was promptly thrown to the mercies of Stalin. Ironically, it was this new foe, the Communist regime, that succeeded where the Nazis hadn’t and finally arrested her after the end of the war; even after release, into her old age she was in danger of new arrest for various trumped-up crimes (and this did indeed happen). Still, she remained an absolute powerhouse until her death just short of 100, having seen Poland regain its freedom at last. An extraordinary story, and I learned a lot about the truly horrific war history of occupied Poland.

41. The Man on the Balcony - Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, transl. Alan Blair

Third in this highly-addictive series. Martin Beck and his team are in a race to find the brutal killer of young girls after a series of murders in a Stockholm park. But they have no clues and the main witnesses are a mugger, who was carrying out a robbery in the park at the same time, and a three-year-old boy who can’t talk very well. As ever, the grinding foot-slog of police work is very much to the fore, with no easy breakthroughs and much frustration all round.