50 Books Challenge 2025 Part Six

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the sixth thread of the 50 Books 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, the fourth thread here and the fifth thread here

50 Fall Out - M N Grenside This was 99p and a good thing too, as it was pretty rubbish. Astonishingly it has an average of 4.44 stars on Goodreads so I’m obviously missing something, or not the target audience! It starts with a screenwriter sending copies of his new script to 5 people, and being murdered by what is clearly a trained assassin immediately after posting the packages. Then we tediously find out the backstory of the five recipients, and how they were all connected by a disastrous film shoot years earlier, and the deeper, darker secrets some of them were keeping. Lots of James Bond-style chases, deaths and shagging, and absolutely no characterisation; never misses a chance to tell you what could have been shown; and appalling grammar / proof-reading. Avoid!

And what a disappointment for my 50th book…the other book I’m halfway through is definitely going to be a bold so I should have finished them in a different order!

With regard to the Maggie O’Farrell chat. I really enjoyed The Vanishing Act Of Esme Lennox and her, sort of, biography I Am, I Am, I Am. Disliked The Hand That First Held Mine, and was ambivalent about Hamnet and This Must Be The Place.
I picked up Instructions For A Heatwave last week in the 2 for 1 Audible sale so it will be interesting to see which pile that goes on.

Re Maggie O'Farrell. I've enjoyed several of her books but My Lover's Lover was terrible. I finished it but only because I really don't like to DNF a book once I've started.

I quite enjoyed Hamnet as an audio book in the end but I couldn't get into it otherwise. The Marriage Portrait is on our Bookclub reading list, but it hasn't been voted for yet.
At the other end of the scale I am about an hour from the end of Verity by Collen Hoover. I have not read any of hers before and I am trying to decide if I want to finish it. Not quite sure how I got this far tbh, it is standard churn it out psychological drama with added blow jobs. I thought it was giving me Rebecca vibes for the first few chapters but now it is all about the blow jobs and child murders. Utter nonsense trying to be harrowing. Will probably finish it while I am washing up, but urgh

I've not managed to read much recently beyond readalongs as work has taken over, but have been enjoying the thread. These I finished a while ago:

Nunaga by Duncan Pryde - Memoir of a Scotsman who went in the 1950/60s to the Arctic to work for the Hudson Bay Company as a fur trader. At first I thought I was going to find it unreadable because of the attitudes towards the Inuit and the fur trading, but he fully immerses himself in the life and learnt the language to the point of having started a dictionary of it in later years, though he died still at A. I found it a fascinating record of time and place from his particular perspective and really enjoyed it.

Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell - no. 2 in the Hilary Tamar series, where Hilary and the barristers investigate a death in a wealthy family with an estate likely to pass on from the last of the elderly generation soon. As in the first book, there’s a sunny holiday (Greece this time). Really enjoyed this though they need spacing out as the tone is relentlessly arch.

34. Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister

Straightforward thriller set in London, involving a disappearing husband who murdered two hostages in some kind of hold up. It started well but the story line was utterly implausible and I was disappointed in the way it developed.

35) The Wedding People by Alison Espach

Loved it. It's about a woman who goes to a fancy hotel to kill herself - spoiler alert she doesn't, but instead gets drawn in to the up market wedding taking place there. It's a neat set up, as we get to know the various members of the wedding party, and also her back story which drove her to the hotel.

On one level it's a fun summer read but it is much cleverer than that. It is pretty philosophical, asking questions about loneliness, finding who you are, choosing life.

It's also funny. I loved it.

43 The Foot On The Crown by Christopher Fowler
A rip-roaring cross between Gormenghast and Game Of Thrones [condensed version], this was the last book he wrote, so I was destined to love it. That destiny was tested a tiny bit as it got into its stride but a few of the short chapters in saw me immersed in the alternative history of ‘Londinium’ during the time period after the Romans about which we know very little.
King Scaramond presides over a vast fortification, trying to marry off his daughter Princess Giniva to a succession of repulsive gentry in order to secure the continuation of the Royal line. Almost no one in the cast list is nice, or kind, or unselfish - from kitchen maid to Duke, everyone is pursuing their own desires. There is much wince-inducing cruelty and gore, plus a giant, murderous pike in the moat, an orangutan in the dungeons who is the antithesis of Pratchett’s Librarian, a huge python who guards the Library and a Black Dog in the basements that isn’t all it seems….
It’s gruesome, it’s gross, I had tremendous fun .

81. The First Time Laura Pailing Died by Alyson Rudd

I quite enjoyed this story of Laura, who merges with the Laura in a parallel universe, when she dies. We get to see what happens to Laura in her new lives, as well as the grief of those left behind in her previous lives. It had shades of Life After Life, and while not at that level it was a decent story.

The guy from Gunpowder Fiction and Plot has made me laugh, he basically hated the entire Booker Longlist except Endling. Love Forms Seascraper and Audition he was absolutely caustic about most of them but especially The South which RoRo Reads also gave 1 star to. I might not read any more til the short list!

Yeah Scott is pretty caustic- although sometimes I think he does it for effect- he DNFs ridiculously quickly too. I liked The South- someone else on here did too. I think BenReadsGood did as well.

That’s a glowing review for The Wedding People @Arran2024 I’d rather snobbishly dismissed it as chick-lit/beach read - but then what’s wrong with that if it’s well done! It’s going on the TBR.

After reading The Marriage Portrait and really not understanding all of the fuss, I haven’t bothered with any others.

The Secret History is all sorts of up my street but I have never read it. Must rectify.

A History of the World in 47 Borders Jonn Elledge

My most recent non-fiction finished on a long car journey yesterday. This is light, each chapter is about 4.5 pages, so like interesting, witty, slightly more nuanced Wikipedia articles designed to peak your interest. An easy, readable non-fiction, that I would recommend.

I have never read a chick lit tbf so maybe I was simply impressed by a new genre! It is possibly very well done chick lit. There are loads of literary references - the protagonist is a professor of English and her ex husband is a philosophy professor and the bride to be works in an art gallery. So it's not Love Island- like. Some people have found it hard going for that reason.

109 . Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

A woman struggles with her memories of a traumatic childhood whilst trying to care for her mother who has Alzheimers.

Shortlisted for the Booker in 2020, this is a short, worthwhile, believable book about dysfunction in parental relationships. It is however, a bit depressing. Not a lot more to be said!

The Secret History is in my top 10 favourite books of all time. It’s been 20+ years since I read it but I keep putting off rereading in case it doesn’t live up to my memories (see also The Color Purple).

I’ve read, and mostly enjoyed a lot of Maggie O’Farrell’s books but can’t remember much about After You’d Gone despite rereading the blurb.

I’ve just finished The names and wondering what to read next so might give Our London Lives a try after seeing it recommended on here.

@TattiePants cough Immaculate Conception cough though Our London Lives is very good

I'm saving all the book tube Booker reviews for when I get back on holiday but looking forward to Scott.

I finally finished Flashlight today which I started listening to about 3 weeks ago. It starts off with a mixed race girl Louisa, whose Korean/ Japanese father goes missing on a beach in Japan, with Louisa as the only witness. The book then jumps backwards and forwards via various characters including Louisa's white American disabled mother, Ann, the Korean father Serk, and Louisa herself. No-one is very nice apart from a couple of side characters, and Louisa is particularly annoying. It's a bit flabby, I think it could have been at least a hundred pages shorter, but it did keep me invested, and the Korean/ Japanese history bits as well as the stuff about not belonging were particularly strong. I think I'd recommend this if you fancy a long saga.

Just randomly went on my Wish List and Human Acts by Han Kang was there for 99p as was Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte - I think the latter is only there til midnight so grab if you see this message, it was IIRC very highly reviewed

@TattiePantsI found The Color Purple definitely stood up to a reread a few years ago.

Bought both! Reread your review of Immaculate Conception and you’ve persuaded me to give it a read.

@MamaNewtNewti last read *The Color Purple for my English Lit A-Level so that’s 33 years ago, definitely time for a reread!

I generally quite like Maggie O’Farrell. After you’d gone was the first one I read and I can’t remember much past a coma and a tragedy. Hamnet drove me round the bent on stylistic grounds. I think The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is the best.

I bought myself a paper copy of The Secret History a couple of months ago and must get round to it. Classics! Murder! Bridesheady machinations! Sounds right up my street.

46 The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh - Ingrid Persaud (I think this might simply be called Lost Love Songs in paperback)

Slightly disappointing second novel from the Love After Love author, telling the story of real life gangster/murderer Boysie Singh from the POV of four of the women in his life. Linguistically, I love being immersed in the Trinidadian creole of the mid twentieth century, but plot-wise it was too narrowly focused on Boysie’s impact on these women. His crimes were largely off-screen, as it were, and the wider societal context was noticeably absent - you’d have no clue that WW2 was going on, or that Trinidad was a British colony moving towards independence, from the text alone.

65. At Mrs Lippincote’s - Elizabeth Taylor

Wartime in an un-named provincial town, and Julia Davenant and her husband Roddy, posted here with the RAF, set up home in the house of the eponymous, absent Mrs L, who leaves behind cupboards rammed with china, much looming mahogany furniture, and years' worth of old letters and photographs. With them are their clever, perpetually ailing bookworm son, Oliver, and Roddy's cousin Eleanor, who worships him silently. Roddy, conventional and fretting about appearances, is baffled by Julia's behaviour, her failure to be a correct officer's wife. Trying to make the best of her unsatisfying life, she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Roddy's CO, the lugubrious and perceptive Wing Commander, who picks up on the strain in the Davenant marriage and on Julia's quicksilver intelligence. At the end of the narrative it’s his intervention that dictates the next phase of the Davenants' life together.

This was Taylor’s first book and it’s an impressive debut, beautifully written and deliciously witty. The small, domestic scale of her settings mean Taylor's often compared to Jane Austen, and fair enough: she's brilliant at saying everything about the human condition in a few deft exchanges between characters. The fact that I'm still thinking about what would happen to Julia and Oliver after finishing this probably says a lot about how cleverly Taylor draws you into her world.

I’m just starting to use Instagram and wanted to see if anyone had any recommendations for book accounts to follow?

55. Marianna Sirca: Grazia Deledda.

I read this in Italian and in English (translation by Graham Anderson).

Set in Sardinia in the early 1900s, Marianna Sirca is a thirty-year-old woman from a farming background, who has been a house-keeper for her uncle, a priest, in the expectation of being left a legacy on his death. Now, as an independent woman of means, she falls in love with a younger man, a former servant turned bandit, and declares that she will marry him once he clears his name and sets the record straight with the law. This does not go down well with her family who disapproves of the proposed match. The young man is also conflicted between his desire for Marianna and being a bandit (even if he is only a small-time not very successful bandit!) and this causes a rift between them both that is impossible to resolve.

I liked this book very much. The story is tightly-woven with a small cast of characters. Marianna stands out as a strong, independent woman who struggles to achieve her dreams in the repressive culture in which she lives. The description of Sardinia as a beautiful but remote and forbidding place is the perfect backdrop to the turbulence in Marianna's and Simone's fraught relationship. A very atmospheric and satisfying read.