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

107. Show Me Where It Hurts - Claire Gleeson. This is about Rachel whose husband Tom drives their car off the road one day in an attempt to kill them and their two children. The book then jumps between before and after the incident, and how Rachel copes with the grief and other emotions. I thought this was very good, maybe a bold. I read it in a day.

ETA: obviously very triggering subject matter and very sad so not for everyone.

I remember nothing!!!

I'm going to read it again soon and hope that I love it again as much as I used to do when so much younger and so less bloody cynical!

@Stowickthevast I must find that interview- I loved Benjamin Wood’s writing and would like to read more by him. I also thought Show Me Where it Hurts was very good.
I must look out for The Good Soldier now.
I’ve burnt myself out a bit with Booker and (apart from my very gentle book club read) I am totally mood reading for the rest of September- probably fast paced genre fiction to get over all that lit fic!

32. Bertie by Jane Ridley
An enjoyable biography of Edward VII, giving what appears a balanced view of him surviving his really rather awful parents to become a visible and popular king, whose talent for imposing or inspiring friendship had many consequences; including receiving an incredible amount of money to subsidise his life from the banker Cassel, but also inducing his pals and those who wished to join his circle to lavish money on hospitals and healthcare, and exerting personal influence to complete the Entente Cordiale. He spent most of his time smoking, visiting friends and having tea with a bewildering succession of mistresses, who seem to have been gossipers and social companions to a much greater extent than sexual partners. Most kept that role for years. However, Ridley makes a decent case for him as a constitutional monarch marking a shift from Victoria’s unreasonable clinging to an idea of direct political action without public appearance and with a sickly insistence on the Ideal Family, to a politically neutral but public monarch whose family was far in the background.

49 Quite Ugly One Evening by Chris Brookmyre
Advance review copy. Will have to refresh my memory of it nearer the time for a fair review.

A Far Cry from Kensington - Muriel Spark

Narrated by the no-nonsense Mrs Hawkins from 30 years in the future this centres on a large rooming house with diverse characters run by Miss Milly in Kensington in the early Fifties. Mrs Hawkins works in publishing and has a number of run-ins with a pompous character called Hector Bartlett who causes her to lose several jobs. There are lots of witty character descriptions and scenarios but also a darker undertone and blackmail and death. Not sure I actually enjoyed it.

The Talented Mr Ripley Patricia Highsmith

This has been on my list, and my Kindle for years. I vaguely pushed it up the list when I watched Richard E Grant talk about it in some travel documentary a while ago, then forgot. I have finally got to it as a book club read - but sadly, I am a bit disappointed.

I am sure the plot is quite well known, not least because of the Matt Damon film, but Tom Ripley is a very ordinary, sociopath who gets sent off to Europe to find trust baby Dickie Greenleaf and bring him back to the US to take over the family business in the 1950s. He becomes somewhat obsessed with Dickie and various actions lead to consequences. It’s not very believable, and I didn’t really care. I wanted to be rooting for Tom despite the fact that he is an awful person, there are some background snippets as to how he may have ended up this way, but not enough to really build a picture.

There are more in the series, but this is it for me.

Yeah @AgualusasLover I felt largely the same. Alright. No need to pursue further.

155 The Facebook Story - Sarah Lacy

Very readable account from around 2009 of the early days of Web companies - not just facebook but PayPal, MySpace etc and others I had forgotten like Ning and Digg.

Live Lies Bleeding by Edmund Crispin
A very stupid crime novel including a literature professor who solves crimes (far more easily than I imagine such crimes could usually be solved), a public school, several dead teachers, Shakespeare, a belligerent dog and a truly magnificent and hilarious car chase. The last two of the list were by far the best things about it. Although I quite enjoyed it as a whole, it was entirely ridiculous.

112 . The Covenant Of Water by Abraham Verghese

A sweeping epic that spans 1900-1977 and features a multi generational family as well as Digby a Scottish surgeon who makes a home for himself in India, their paths overlapping. The book is set within the Christian community of Kerala and reflects historical issues.

This is nearly 800 pages long and I do feel a sense of achievement. It’s a bit of a lesson in “put the effort in, it will pay off”.

I was about halfway through before I was properly drawn in, I kept waiting for this to happen and feared I would only have a surface level interaction with the book, but in the end I found I shed a tear at a poignant moment and got invested.

The pages fell away it really wasn’t a hardship, I have managed it I think over three days. Though I was not head over heels in love with it, I thought it was very good, particularly with both characterisation and prose. It gets a bold as a mark of respect for a job well done and an ending I did not predict.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit This is on my TBR and this review has made me move it up. Once I get over Booker burnout anyway!

I think it must have been a Deal at some point because quite a lot of us have it @ÚlldemoShúl it’s a case of length not preventing readability!

It's my birthday and I have received a little stack of books:

The Artist by Lucy Steeds
My Name is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende
A History of the world in 47 borders by John Elledge
Blue Susters by Coco Mellors

Happy birthday @Arran2024 🎂
I read and loved The Artist from your haul.

Happy birthday @Arran2024! I enjoyed Blue Sisters recently.

Happy Birthday Arran

@SheilaFentiman – Is The Good Liar the one that has been shortlisted for the William McIvanney? Plus I really enjoyed Sovereign.

@Arran2024 – Happy birthday!

96 Carrie Soto is Back – Taylor Jenkins Reid. The premise of this book is a bit odd. Carrie Soto is a retired tennis player, who at the age of 37 decides to return to the tour. She does this because another player is about to match her record of 24 grand slams. The other player is 30, so realistically has a much better chance of overtaking her record. Anyway, once you get over that, its an enjoyable meander through the tennis tour. I’ve liked everything that I’ve read by TJR so far, so will look out for her other books.

When I popped down to the library to return the book, I spotted The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Weirdly enough, this was mentioned on a podcast this morning. The guest on the podcast said that she keeps buying copies to give to people. So I had to pick it up. Has anyone read it?

@Tarragon123 I read it this year. I definitely preferred Beloved. I think with The Bluest Eye, I could see how it would have been ground breaking at the time it was published, but hopefully things have moved on a bit since. It's very bleak.

Happy birthday @Arran2024. I also really liked The Artist earlier this year.

@Tarragon123 I read it before I came to Beloved and definitely preferred the latter, but well worth a read - although... bleak as @Stowickthevast says.

Happy birthday arran!

50 (woohoo!) Motherhood - Lisa Marchiano
Exploration of the psychological journey on which motherhood takes us, from a Jungian analyst. Having children can make us grow up, face our shadow side and claim our authority. Probably true - but a bit exclusionary for women who aren’t biological mothers - and probably a lot applies to any parent, regardless of gender.

51 The Lamb - Lucy Rose
Eden’s pie is people!

Bilge of the year so far. 11-year-old Margot lives with her mother in a grotty cottage in the woods, to which they lure lost ‘strays’ and… gobble them up. Margot’s grim life becomes even grimmer when her mother falls in love with one of the strays, Eden, and decides to keep her as a live-in people-pastry chef. The premise was good (folk horror, fairytale elements, my cup of tea), execution fairly dire.

It dragged so much with endless repetition - cottage is filthy, Margot is scrubbed roughly in the bath, Margot gets bullied on the school bus but has a chat with the nice driver, mother and Eden dance and fondle ad nauseum - and the author seems to think it’s important to let us know every time a character’s strands of hair come loose, which is pretty much every chapter. Maybe loose hair is some sort of symbol of out of control female appetite - if so, we get it, you can stop now.

Ending would work in a film, but not in a first person pov novel (interesting to see that the author is also a filmmaker, this whole thing might actually have been better in that medium). Also, would give money that author had seen TV adaptation of The Terror and nicked an idea from the closing parts of that too.

So, overall, avoid.

Happy birthday @Arran2024

@LadybirdDaphne The Lamb really was stupid, wasn’t it? I was so ready to love it and it got worse and worse so quickly. The ending was dire. I loved your review.

Many happy returns for yesterday @Arran2024 !

I quite liked The Lamb but agree about the repetition of themes. To me, that signified the hopelessness of the child’s situation, but opinions will vary - see above . I also had The Terror vibes from one plot development.

Belated Happy Birthday Arran!
Like Úll, I also enjoyed The Artist.

156. Fatal Incursion - Jeffrey Deaver and Isabella Maldonado

Borrowed from Prime Reading, perfectly serviceable US thriller where Agent Carmen Sanchez and her hacker 'consultant' Jacoby Heron are tracking down a serial killer nicknamed Spider. Creative deaths and red herrings ensue.