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

Sugar Money is on my TBR shelf and Gillespie and I will no doubt appear there at some point.

@Tarragon123 Bloodlands by Timothy Synder it's not fiction but looks at the deaths of Jews and others from Poland right through the eastern countries committed by the Nazis and the Stalinist regime.It is horrifying but worth reading

Thank you. I've popped that on my recommendations tab. I can manage horrifying, but I have to space it out. I've not quite recovered from the tv adaptation of The Narrow Road to the Deep North and one particularly brutal scene. Although I understand that the book would different and it was actually worse.

69. Sing Me Who You Are - Elizabeth Berridge

Another of the British Library Women Writers series, almost all of which I snapped up a few months ago. This one's from the 60s (published 1967), by a writer I’d vaguely heard of but never read. Harriet Cooper arrives unexpectedly to take possession of her new home: the old bus in a field left to her by her aunt Esther. Harriet's cousin, moneyed local woman of substance Magda, owns the land on which it sits, and their relationship is a spiky one riven with ancient rivalry. Magda is unhappily married to Gregg, and all three are bound together by a figure from their past and a traumatic wartime experience. Harriet - a woman alone, self-reliant and independent - has to thread her way between a past that haunts her and an increasingly uncertain future.

I didn’t find this as satisfactory as the others I’ve read in the series, partly because I’ve kept picking it up and putting it down; partly because it’s not very well-structured (there’s a big chunk in the middle where Harriet just offloads stuff into a tape-recorder, which doesn't really work). I’m glad I finished it but it wasn’t a stand-out.

Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It Janina Ramirez (audio)

I am getting used to audio now, though I really don’t feel I retain as much. I have to really concentrate.

Anyway, I know this has been reviewed before and the title and sub title really tell you what this book is about. Janina Ramirez narrates the book herself and I am a fan of her excitable style, I’ve seen her speak before and just enjoy listening to her. I’m a modernist so whilst I had heard of names and events in passing this was a nice introduction for me.

153 Shrill - Lindy West

Took a while to get into but was good in the end - about her life as a fat (her word) feminist comic writer - internet trolls, debating rape jokes with misogynist comics and all. It was published in 2016 and rather depressing that we still have a lonnnng way to go.

47. The Orpheus Trail – Maureen Duffy

A tense thriller written from the point of view of Alex Kish, a small-town museum curator on the Essex coast who becomes involved in a series of elaborate murders of boys, each discovered in a grotesque artistic tableau where the corpse is wearing pieces of a Saxon amulet stolen from his museum. As Alex gets dragged deeper into the mystery, threats against him and his colleagues turn to murder and kidnap. Was this a trafficking ring, what is the religious symbolism of the boys’ deaths, and can the police solve the mystery in time?

Although this was a page turner, for me it fell short with a very unsatisfactory ending – I turned the page expecting to see another chapter, a short one at least, to wrap everything up. Both the action and Alex’s personal storyline just seemed to stop dead. The characters were believable but I’m not sure a provincial museum curator would be taken into the police investigation to the extent that Alex was. Having said that, it was a readable, if gruesome in places, thriller.

48. Here – Richard McGuire

Another first this year – my first graphic novel. It takes as the central theme the idea of place and time, looking at how an enclosed space has changed over time from the dawn of civilisation to imagining centuries in the future. An ordinary lounge in an ordinary (American) home, with the mantelpiece, appropriately as for so long the heart of the home, in stark white, with around it smaller cut out squares recreating scenes in that space from other times, each dated in the top left hand corner. There are small continuing episodes on some pages, others show a theme (laughter, broken objects, lost items) happening in the same space in different time periods. No plot as such, but an unusual, thought-provoking project and one which will stay with me as I look over my own domestic space and imagine what has happened here over time.

31 Sue Barton: student nurse, senior nurse, rural nurse

Stuck in a pile of half read books and struggling a bit, so turned to these favourites of my early teens to help me through. Sue Barton is a delicious character; a quick witted redhead training as a nurse in 1940s America and falling into and out of various scrapes. I read SO much about hospitals in my youth, it’s not really surprising that I eventually trained as an HCP, but my entire understanding of healthcare was based on books published approx 1920-1950, so it was a bit of a shock when I first encountered modern reality. Anyway, I still get tearful over these books 42 years after I first read them.

Oh, I loved Sue Barton too, @PermanentTemporary! I still labour under the misapprehension that newsprint is sterile if you want to do an impromptu operation or deliver a baby.

(And of course had no idea then about Helen Dore Boylston's fascinating links to the Wilder family)

ETA - I assume it’s a misapprehension….

@PermanentTemporary oh wow! Sue Barton - I'd completely forgotten about my obsession with those books. Feels like a lifetime ago 😂
Thanks for that blast from the past.

The Good Liar by Denise Mina is in 99p deals today

37) The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford

My most favourite book ever. I have read it so many times and always find something new in it.

It is regarded as a classic but when I chose it for my book club, no one could finish it. They all hated it. I was a bit stunned by that. So anyway I am not going to recommend it here in case I get the same response!

But if you haven't read it you might want to give it a try.

The opening sentence is famous: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard" and it IS a sad story, but also a bizarre and in some places unbelievable one.

It concerns an English couple and an Amercican couple who become friendly in Europe in the Edwardian period. They are both in Europe because one of each couple has a health condition which requires visiting spa resorts, and the other acts as nurse.

On the surface they appear to be the perfect couples, but all is not as it seems.

It has a terrific plot and brilliant characters. So much to enjoy.

From the title, I've always thought it was a gritty account of serving on the battlefield, @Arran2024 Based on your description, it sounds more my kind of thing. Might give it a go (and no reproaches if I don't love it - the things I like don't necessarily achieve universal popularity either).

Ha, looking at the covers of kindle cheap versions of The Good Soldier and there's one with a martial figure in fatigues carrying a Kalashnikov (possibly: weapon identification is not one of my strengths).

The English husband is in the Hussars, but that is a trifling detail. It speaks more about his character than his career. There is absolutely no war/battle content in it at all.

Ha ha, guns aren't my thing at all either but the only guns in the book are in the gun room at the country house in England - and no one gets shot!

This is the version I have. It includes an introduction, which you shouldn't read until after you have read the book

https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/good-soldier-book-ford-madox-ford-9780141441849?sku=GOR001247849&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=19553277260&gclid=Cj0KCQjwoP_FBhDFARIsANPG24OkRD39CK8TfG0R3M3uZGqHR9bwW0B2kJ8eZltS87c2q_TTah7F5f0aAkBiEALw_wcB

Thanks @Arran2024 and yes, it's very unfair when an introduction has spoilers!

154 Sovereign - C J Sansom

The third in the Shardlake series, and excellent again. This book sees Archbishop Cranmer sending Shardlake and his assistant to York, where HVIII and his fifth wife are headed on progress, five years after the Pilgrimage of Grace. Having made an enemy of Sir Richard Rich, once again, Shardlake is in danger as the papist/reform factions and the misdeeds of Catherine Howard's circle swirl around him whilst he tries to undertake his lawyerly duties in arbitration and also keep a prisoner safe for Cranmer. Really, he ought to stay home and take up beekeeping :-)

137 Universality by Natasha Brown
Starts with a piece of investigative journalism and further sections are in the POVs of people from the article all focusing around Lenny- a Katie Hopkins type character. The satire is subtle as a hammer and the structure didn’t work for me. This brings my Booker reading to an end for now as the last book The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny isn’t out yet.

Books I enjoyed from the list: The Land in Winter, Seascraper, The South, Flashlight, Love Forms
Books I disliked or were just meh- Universality, The Rest of Our Lives, One Boat, Misinterpretation
Books that weren’t my cuppa but I can totally understand why they’re on the list Flesh, Audition, Endling (DNF)

My predicted shortlist: Seascraper, Sonia and Sunny, Audition, Endling, Flesh, The Land in Winter
Book I’d like to see win- Seascraper with Flesh a distant second.
Book I think will win: Endling
Will read Sonia and Sunny when it comes out and will consider trying to finish Endling if it wins.

I have read The Good Soldier at least five times and used to absolutely love it. I now can't remember a single thing about it - must re-read.

I applaud you @ÚlldemoShúl because I just didn’t have the energy for it especially when so many have had mixed reviews. I just don’t want Audition to win, because, like Orbital I found it Emperors New Clothes which means it will probably win!

I knew the general gist of the story but had forgotten so much of the detail. Remember Mrs Maiden and her boyfriend husband? The Girl? Jimmy? It's a complicated plot so it's easy to get lost.

Well done @ÚlldemoShúl

I'm halfway through Love Forms which is fine but nothing special. After that I've got Misinterpretation, The South and The Land in Winter left - I'm glad to see 2 are on your like list. I'm not sure I'll bother with Misinterpretation unless it makes the shortlist as it's got some pretty dreadful reviews.

I didn't think Audition was quite as bad as Orbital, Eine. I wouldn't be surprised if it won...

Seascraper has also been my standout and probably the only one I would recommend to anyone - maybe Endling if they're into metafiction. Eric Karl Anderson has done an interview with Benjamin Wood which is well worth a watch.

No not quite as bad as Orbital but found it quite pointless @Stowickthevast a “shrug” book!