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.

Jealous of your bookshop travels @AgualusasLover

70. Ripeness - Sarah Moss. I listened to this and really enjoyed it. There are two different viewpoints of the same woman - Edith, a 17 year old Yorkshire farmer's daughter, who goes to Italy to help her ballerina sister give birth to an unwanted baby in the 60s. In the alternate chapters, Edith is a 73 year old woman living on the West Coast of Ireland in the present day musing about family and belonging. The audio has a northern first person voice for young Edith and an Irish third person voice for old Edith. It's not particularly plot driven, but the time and place of the various sections are beautifully evoked.

71. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh - Colwill Brown. @AlmanbyRoadtrip dnfed this one and for the first part, I thought I might go the same way but I ended up really liking it. Doing for Doncaster what Trainspotting did for Edinburgh, the Northern dialect is quite hard to get into. It follows 3 friends, Shaz, Kelly and Rach from secondary school in the late 90s through their teens and up to 2016. It's not at all linear and different chapters are narrated from different perspectives including "we", but after about a quarter of the way through, I found myself really invested. It's very experimental and can totally understand a DNF on this but it worked for me.

I think both of these may end up being bolds. I am finding rating really hard - most of the Jane Casey I have given 4 to, but then I think things like these which are so much more ambitious should get 5 but I also hate giving 5* ratings!
Then I think I'm being over generous with Jane Casey, but they are really good for what they are. Classic over thinking!

23 The World I Fell Out Of by Melanie Reid. The author is tetraplegic due to suffering a serious spinal injury when she fell off her horse in 2010. She wrote the columns Spinal Column in The Times about her injury, but I hadn't read them so this was new to me. Really interesting stuff about how she coped after the accident, both physically and mentally, and gradually learnt to accept her new body.

24 The Chain by Adrian McKinty. Rachel gets a call to say that her daughter Kylie has been kidnapped. The only way that she will be released unhurt is if Rachel, as well as paying a ransom, kidnaps another child herself and blackmails their parents. In this way the Chain continues, with no one daring to step out of line out for fear of reprisals. Page-turning thriller - I enjoyed this.

@Stowickthevast at one point I struggled in the same way about ratings and now I rate based on how good I find them for their genre/ writer’s intentions.
I’ve just finished
90 Show Me Where It Hurts by Claire Gleeson
Strong trigger warnings here. This was a difficult read. Rachel’s husband Tom drives their car off a cliff purposely in an attempt to kill himself, Rachel and their two children. We follow Rachel’s life from when she met Tom up until the events, and in the aftermath and years later. I cried a lot- and I have no children so I imagine this would be a very difficult read for parents. The author is a GP and deals very sensitively with aspects of mental illness. I’ve given it a bold for now because I can’t stop thinking about it and it had such a huge emotional impact yet it didn’t feel emotionally manipulative. I don’t know if it will stay bold over time.

@AgualusasLover do you happen to know where your very splendid colleagues bought your bookends? I love them!

@noodlezoodle Oliver Bonas I believe

Munichs - David Peace
Wonderful, moving, beautiful novel about the Manchester United Munich air disaster. Recommended up thread and thanks.

@ÚlldemoShúl I've got that on my wishlist as thought it sounded fascinating. Good to know it's intense.

102 The First Girl - Claire McGowan

Needed something formulaic so borrowed this from Prime.

Karen is publishing her memoir, Becoming Bagman, about her ex-friend/ex-boyfriend Aaron, a convicted serial killer. Some chapters open with extracts from the memoir, with Karen trying to defend herself against the often stated claim that the wife/girlfriend “must have known something”. But then a young woman goes missing in Karen and Aaron’s hometown, and a symbol found at the scene indicates this might be another Bagman victim, though Aaron is safely in jail.

A fairly gripping read, though the denouement was a bit unsatisfying.

I don't rate many books 5 - on Librarything, which I much prefer for adding my book acquisitions and listing my reading to Goodreads, I am quite generous with 4.5. I do like Storygraph's quarter star ratings and that it's reasonably easy to add editions and get stuff changed - a lot of people I've talked to online over the years are on Goodreads and that's the only reason I still use it, because at the same time they automatically import a lot of nonsense and put up lots of barriers to corrections and what should be very common additions. And people you have to ask for help, who are volunteers, seem to think they've volunteered for the opportunity to be snotty, officious and rude!

I meant to edit my previous post to make it clearer it was a response to posts about ratings, but my laptop is getting very glitchy in its old age, and the window in which you can edit has closed.

I'd wishlisted Audition already when it came up in the deals, and placed a library reservation (now cancelled). I was interested to read your thoughts, @Stowickthevast I've had several of Katie Kitamura's books TBR, but as there's no expiry date or needing to take books back to the library to borrow others, something else ends up taking priority. Interested also by the Cusk comparison as I haven't read all Rachel Cusk's books but I have bought most of them over the years since reading her first novel, Saving Agnes, way back when it might still have been her only one (pre Amazon/wikipedia/internet access which has made it much easier to find out such things) and was pleased by the chance to fill in gaps in my collection and have everything on Kindle - no need to search through 20 cardboard boxes to find the ones.

32 Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
This was just incredible and as always, thank you so much to the 50 Bookers who recommended it.
Elwood Curtis is a conscientious Black student in 60s Florida, who lives with his Grandmother and is taking tentative inspiration from Dr Martin Luther King Jr. He works hard in his part time job and at school and is headed to college, until he accepts a lift in a stolen car (unknown to him). From then on, he is pitched into the nightmarish surroundings of Nickel, a segregated reform school. There are 4 ways out of Nickel - bought out, age out, run away or be killed - but Elwood slowly hatches a plan for a 5th way that involves appealing to the Authorities and using his diarised notes to expose the corruption, violence and murder.
It is so beautifully written, a striking contrast to the evilness depicted. It never descends into pathos, instead treading a shining and righteous path through a fictional version of events that aren’t isolated or far fetched. The last ‘Nickel’ was only closed in the 2000s. Boys were suffering in real life what is down on these pages within living memory.
The ending is….well, spoilerish, but it made me cry. The whole thing is a quietly raging wake up call to just one era of institutionalised racism in the US. A definite bold and I will be seeking out more by Whitehead very soon.

I’ve finished Less (Patrick Grant) and really enjoyed it, despite its faults. I do think he’s unrealistic about what people can actually afford, and his picture of factory work in an industrial town is somewhat rose-tinted, but as a northerner with ancestors who worked in the mills, I enjoyed the history aspect of the book. It has really rekindled my interest in weaving, and I’m massively regretting selling my loom years ago (although I hadn’t used it in ages and it took up loads of room). Not a bold, and I can understand why it was a DNF for some, but a good one for me.

Potentially of interest to 50Bs - talk from the writer of "A Woman of No Importance" about her latest book, "Kingmaker"

https://www.iwm.org.uk/events/iwm-in-conversation-sonia-purnell-kingmaker

Vianne by Joanne Harris

This is a prequel to Chocolat, set around 6 years earlier and following Vianne’s story at that point in time. I loved this. Harris’s writing is so descriptive and evocative and there’s lots of lovely food descriptions. However, I also loved Chocolat so if that wasn’t for you, Vianne probably won’t be either. Anyway I really liked Vianne’s story and this one doesn’t run all the way up to Chocolat times so there’s the potential for there to be another book or books filling in the gap (no idea if this is Harris’s plan).

Glad you liked it. It's extraordinary.

A Funny Old Quist by Evan Rogers ed. Clive Murphy Memoirs of a gamekeeper who lived and worked on a Herefordshire estate from pre-WWI - the book was written in 1978 when he was 81 and only semi-retired. An interesting and engaging account of a life so very distant in time and experience. Rogers broke off his working life to serve in WWI, lying about his age. He then returned to the estate, raising pheasants and partridges for shooting parties, outwitting poachers, serving as a special constable, and supplementing his income in all sorts of ways such as supplying moleskins to furriers. There’s a lot of killing involved: there’s nothing he doesn’t know about catching rabbits, foxes, birds or anything else, but even as a squeamish vegetarian I enjoyed the company of this hugely practical and dignified man, who knew his work and the land and the society and the people so deeply.

Not posted for a while as got caught up in

37 A Memoir of My Former Self - Hilary Mantel - agreeing with a previous reviewer I really enjoyed the bits about her life and her writing inspiration but the inclusion of some of her articles such as film reviews made it seem a bit disjointed and over-long

38 The Running Grave - Robert Galbraith
Good story and like the Robin/Strike relationship but also a little on the long side

Have a few books to finish off before hopefully joining the Kristin Lavransdatter readalong at the end of the month. Think will have a lazy weekend reading in the sunshine.

28 When the Dust Settles by Lucy Easthope

Echoing all the excellent reviews of this book from threads passim (and this one!). The explanations of the mechanics of dealing with disaster are interesting but what makes the book so compelling is Easthope's compassion for survivors and families, and how she has applied what she has learned in her own, challenging life. I thought these words towards the end of the book (when she talks about what she would tell her younger self) are ones I should apply more often:

"I would also tell her to get outside more, swim more, feel the sun and learn how to slow down her racing brain. To learn that there are moments to step forward and moments to wait."

39 Red Bones - Ann Cleeves Third in the Shetland series, and another good one - I do like the gentle flow of Cleeves’ books. After a book set in the depths of winter, and then one at midsummer, this time it’s spring and the action takes place on Whalsay, an island next to Shetland’s mainland and with a ferry shuttling back and forth - so not remote but certainly a place apart from Lerwick and the rest of Mainland. It also happens to be the family home of Sandy, the young DC who is a side character in the previous books, and I really liked his point-of-view sections here, and his character development.

Whalsay got the biggest benefit of the deep-sea fishing development in Shetland and there are some very rich families on the island as a consequence; this makes for some tensions between them and the poorer crofting families. I mentioned the book to my mum and it turns out she camped on Whalsay in the 70s, and the fishing money was the first thing she mentioned! It is in this context that an old lady who has lived there all her life is shot one night, seemingly a terrible accident - but does her death have something to do with the archaeological dig which is happening on the land beside her cottage?

@Piggywaspushed thanks for the rec. Have you seen the film with David Tennant? I might watch it again.

That was a TV series a few years back ( not based on the book). I remember it being pretty good. Nothing like the detail of this book, though!

No, this wasn’t as detailed either. DT played Jimmy Murphy so the story is told through him (as is the book really). But it was good. I’ll look for the series.

We're talking about the same thing I think!

27) Her Side of the Story by Alba de Cespedes

I was gifted this at Christmas. What an amazing book. It is apparently a feminist classic. First published in 1949 but I have the latest version from last year with an afterword by Elena Ferrante.

It is by an Italian woman who grew up in 1930s Rome, married at 15 and a mother at 16, saw the rise of fascism, falls in love with an anti fascist professor, works for the underground resistance.

She's no average Italian - she was the granddaughter of the first president of Cuba and she later became one of Italy's most successful authors.

It is really about the search for independence. A big recommend.