50 Books Challenge 2025 Part Seven

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the seventh 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 , the fifth thread here and the sixth thread

Best wishes to @EineReiseDurchDieZeit and @noodlezoodle . I also really liked The Husbands.

Let the Bad Times Roll by Alice Slater. After Daniel goes missing in New Orleans, his friends gather together with the help of a tarot card reader to piece together what happened. Over the evening they all reveal secrets about their relationship with Daniel, and only one knows the truth about his disappearance. I thought this was great, not world changing but a really solid, well paced thriller with a nice bit of witchy atmosphere.

Island Calling by Francesca Segal. Follow up to last year's Welcome to Glorious Tuga, about a vet who moves to a fictional remote island in the South Atlantic (a British overseas territory that we somehow acquired without so much as a hint of colonialism...) and gets involved in various local dramas. Nothing much happened in this one, but perfectly pleasant and enjoyable.

The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden. Beautiful, almost entirely autobiographical novel about a group of children who spend their summer without any real supervision in a dilapidated French hotel. Very sexually charged, but when the real coming of age moment happened it was entirely not what I expected.

Good luck Eine, I hope it all goes well for you.

Thanks all, again. In newer strife I’ve just wandered round my whole house looking for my remote with no joy, dear readers, it was in my cleavage!

Classic work, well done!

Best wishes to @EineReiseDurchDieZeit and @noodlezoodle

47 Butter by Asako Yuzuki

I think this has attracted mixed reviews on the thread. I enjoyed it. Rika, a slim, young female journalist, spends time trying to get an interview with Manako Kajii, a woman found guilty of seducing older men with her cooking then killing them. Kajii is plump and does not fit Japanese standards of beauty, so the fascination with her case is all the greater. Rika's best friend Reiko suggests asking for one of Kajii's recipes and Rika gains access, launching us into a long, at times meandering exploration of Kajii's cooking (together with luscious descriptions), her life and how it intersects with Rika's and Reiko's. There's a lot going on here - criticisms of expectations and limitations on women in Japan - and that sometimes bogs the book down, but it's a good story with interesting characters and a satisfying ending. It could have been quite a bit shorter (but hey, before long I'll be reading The Hallmarked Man and 451 pages will seem like a novella).

48 A Touch of Silk by Caro Fraser

This is the last in Fraser's Caper Court series about a chambers of oversexed barristers. I have read all the others but didn't realise this one existed, or that Fraser sadly died in 2020. This series is my guilty pleasure, following the career and loves of bisexual Welsh barrister from the wrong side of the tracks, Leo Davies, his protege and sometime lover, Anthony Cross, and a whole cast of others, all of whom have sex with each other at some point in the nine book series. Far fetched as it is, some aspects of the books ring surprisingly true and Leo is a great character. This last book was surprisingly touching in places, and although the denouement was reached by way of the casual deading of a long-standing character, it got us to the right place. I'm glad Fraser managed to give the series the ending it deserved before she died.

You know, I just want to be absolutely in LOVE with a book. Like swept away into its world. Not “this was distinctly average and I won’t remember it in 6 months” I want a Night Circus or Poisonwood Bible or Tenant Of Wildfell Hall Meh!

I'd like that too. It is possibly years since I had that feeling about a book.

Do any examples (for you) spring to mind?

Just off the top of my head, The Bee Sting was a book like that for me, and Cuddy .Plus the Bryant And May series. It’s so personal, though, isn’t it? There will be 50 Bookers who disagree

Hope all goes smoothly Eine and you make a good recovery.

I'm glad you didn't tell me Terpsichore how you felt about The Secret Place or I might have put off reading it.

Thank you SheilaFentiman for the tip about the re-appearance of Antoinette and Stephen. I am trying to do RWYO and not buy anything new at the moment. The only time I have fallen off the wagon is at the 50B meet up so feeling quite virtuous. But will put on my list for when I feel I can buy again.

HATED Cuddy but am out of step with most people on that. Maybe the book was unsuited to audio. I DID enjoy The Bee Sting but found it flawed.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit hope the procedure goes well and you’re feeling better soon. It’s on my TBR pile but have you read The Covenant of Water? It’s been highly recommended to me by a few people.

I have it @TattiePants but it’s 700+ and I’m put off by it

That’s the only reason I haven’t read it yet!

I'm glad you didn't tell me Terpsichore how you felt about The Secret Place or I might have put off reading it

I didn’t want to influence you in any way, @TimeforaGandT !

I'd have to go way back to Captain Corelli, Beloved, God of Small Things, A Suitable Boy. Maybe it's age!

These are amongst my favourites too especially A Suitable Boy. I haven’t read The God of Small Things though and I do have it so moving it up my TBR.

Hope you feel better soon @EineReiseDurchDieZeit

Books I got swept away by - Victorian fallen women (Madame Bovary, The Crimson Petal and the White, The French Lieutenant’s Woman), eunuchs in love with Alexander the Great (The Persian Boy), invented versions of English (Riddley Walker, To Calais in Ordinary Time).

Oh and White Teeth.

I think the closest recently wax Munichs but I didn't feel swept away.

Captain Corelli I read in Sixth Form, one of my early forays into lit fic. I think they stay with you. Hated the end at the time but it’s grown on me. Film came out in uni. Abysmal.

God, yes. Dire.

Bringer of Dust by JM Miro
The sequel to Ordinary Monsters which I enjoyed a couple of years ago. This one was okay but overlong and too busy. It also took some getting into, as I remembered so little from the previous one.

A book to get totally drawn into imo:
A Town Like Alice

I know I’m on one tonight but this Strike I truly couldn’t care less about the investigation I’m not even entirely sure I’m following it! It’s not a compelling one, yet!

I agree with The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Crimson Petal and the White as sweeping away books. Also, for me, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (I do love a really absorbing crime novel and I couldn't put this down; the sequels didn't live up to it), The Secret History, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, The Untouchable byJohn Banville and Augustown by Kei Miller. Random selection there off the top of my head!* *