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

I do love a bottle of Coke. Shame I’ve had to give up fizzy drinks for medical reasons!

I think I've read 3 Sarra Manning books and quite enjoyed them. You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is a comic chicklit novel about a fat woman living quite near me in north London - I can't remember the whole story but it's not that she suddenly gets skinny, I don't think, a contemporary version of Vanity Fair, and a historical novel set in wartime London (WWII) - one of my major reading obsessions. I just looked and I can't believe how many of her books I have TBR. Yes, Unsticky is one.

I can't believe it's any worse written than Barbara Taylor Bradford. I'm currently reading To Be the Best - #3 in the Harte dynasty series that started with A Woman of Substance - such clunky writing and so many references to things that haven't dated well, such as a "retarded" child. I read the first 3 books in the 80s, but yes, I have the others - Kindle bargains some years ago - and I may well pick up #4 quite soon.....

@cassandre thank you! I think I did enjoy it - but also have been feeling very tired and tbh struggling to engage with the more literary books on my pile.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I remember quite enjoying Unsticky! I think I read it when I was in bed with a fever, an ideal book for that scenario. Sarra Manning generally is a good source of book reviews and recommendations I find.

Oh Congratulations @GrannieMainland

Lisey's Story by Stephen King

This was absolute rubbish. I'd have put it down but I was being stubborn about my read through.

Lisey is married to a famous author who died two years previous and we look back over their relationship and the odd things he does. They have what is described as a private language but it's just using different words instead of swear words and they make a really big deal of it.

I didn't care about Lisey, I didn't care about the secrets. I felt like I couldn't follow what was going on, the time lines jumped loads and I don't know if it was my inattentive ADHD refusing to properly read something so boring or if King jist didn't lay it all out very well.

Oh well. Onto some other books I think before I pick any more of his up. Hopefully something a bit more page turny.

118 . Shy by Max Porter

This did not take long as it’s only 123 pages. It depicts a snapshot of Shy, a young man in a residential school for hard to reach young men. It’s very sparse/spare/stream of consciousness. I’ve had this for a while but read it now because I want to watch Steve on Netflix which is the same story from the POV of one of the teachers.

With Shy I kind of felt like it was too short, over before it had properly begun.

I was coming on here to recommend The Benefactors but see lots of people have beaten me to it. I'm currently listening to the audible but picked up the Kindle too as sometimes lose track of the characters. I really like the short extracts in between the chapters that build a picture of the world although was listening to the adoption one while cooking last night, and had to stop to check I'd heard it properly!

Have also picked up the Hattie Williams one and Theft by Abdulrazak Gurman.

116. The Mercy Chair - M W Craven. 6th in this detective series which I enjoy. This was a bit darker than previous outings of Poe & Tilly but kept me entertained. I thought I'd spotted the rather obvious twist but then it agreed a few more that I definitely wasn't expecting.

Reading Operation Mincemeat from my parents’ shelves and tickled to learn that a key player in the ruse was Ewen Montagu, the nephew by marriage of Venetia Stanley - co lead character of Precipice, my current favourite audiobook 😀

@SheilaFentiman- that is really interesting. I noticed that I recognised some names Operation Mincemeat from A Spy Among Friends. Probably not surprising as there was an overlap in time, but it did feel like it was a very small world.

Other than books already mentioned from the deals, I have Citizen Clem, which is a biography of Clement Attlee (as I know very little about him which feels wrong given how significant his government was) & The Familiars by Leigh Bardugo (which I’ve had my eye on for a while as I liked the look of the hardback).

Congratulations to @GrannieMainland(that is such a lovely literary username - I have very fond memories of reading the adventures of Grannie Mainland, Grannie Island and Alecina).

Congrats, @GrannieMainland although I will need to adjust my mental image of you as a sweet old gran.

Thank you everyone for kind words. And no I am very much not a gran! But obviously concealing my identity well... I loved rediscovering Katie Morag with my first daughter and felt inspired :)

But Grannie Mainland is the glamorous Grannie. High heels, pearls and perfume.

Never read the Katie Morag books.

74. Pied Piper - Nevil Shute

Despite trying very hard not to buy more physical books, I did weaken while away last week and looking for something to read, but it was a scruffy secondhand paperback which cost virtually nothing and can be passed on. It was also a gripping read that I tore through in not much more than a day.

The story's framed as a tale told during an air-raid (it was published in 1942) by 70-something widower John Howard to a fellow-member of his gentlemen’s club as they wait for the bombing to pass. Howard unfolds the incredible story of how he took a solo fishing trip to France and found himself suddenly anxious to get back as news filters through of the rapid German advance. Fellow hotel guests plead with him to take their two young children with him and he agrees, confident that the simple journey will take a day and night by train.

Of course, it doesn’t work out that way…and the two children turn into seven as he picks up assorted waifs and strays during his increasingly perilous journey through German-occupied France. It's a classic Shute scenario - ordinary man faces daunting odds yet somehow wins through with quiet heroism - but he does it all with his usual skill. There were some moments of 'you what?' and believability does strain a bit, but overall, a great tale, well told.

This is very true (& was my thought on reading the text) - but she is also very kind to Grannie Island (who doesn’t initially behave well towards Granma Mainland) by forgiving the use of her stuff to beautify Alecina the prize sheep and later by tracking down Granpa Island. That shouldn’t be overlooked simply because Grannie Island is the cool, independent Grannie who drives a tractor.

(I have clearly spent far too much time doing a critical reading of the Katie Morag books - I could probably write a decent essay to be entitled something like “Feminism and feminity : contrasting views of female empowerment in the works of Mhairi Hedderwick.”).

I’ve never heard of all these Grannies and assumed @GrannieMainland was a granny so I’m delighted (but surprised) to congratulate you on your pregnancy news!

I’ve finished 2 more RWYO
146 Blackwater by Michael McDowell
Atmospheric southern gothic where a mysterious woman appears in Perdido in 1919 after a flood and supernatural shenanigans ensue. This was an easy read. The story is split across 6 short novels all of which I picked up at some point in kindle deals. I’ll probably read at least the next one but won’t bother logging any more as I imagine they’re all pretty samey and as short as this first one (240 pages)

147 The Ice by Ryan Cahill
A novella as part of the Bound and the Broken epic fantasy series. Ryan Cahill started out as an indie writer and his success in that world has led to a 6 figure trad deal for him. Great to see for a young guy who seems thoroughly decent. There’s another novella before the next novel so again I won’t count it. This one is an action packed prequel story for one of the main characters which I thoroughly enjoyed.

174 Flash Boys - Michael Lewis

Much better than the SBF book. This was written in 2014 about high frequency traders, big Wall Street banks, dark pools (opaque trading arenas), high speed optical fibre cables etc, all of which gave certain traders and platforms microseconds of advantage and hence fee/commission/price income, to the cost of investors from small retail to large pension funds. Very interesting.

Congratulations @GrannieMainland on your pregnancy - I got the Katie Morag reference in your name (not read the books, only saw the tv series) but did still think you were a granny!

148 The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr
This is one of my oldest remaining kindle books since @bibliomania ’s thread- from 2012 (I have one more from that year left). It covers British history from the death of Queen Victoria until the end of the Second World War. I liked how Marr dealt with different themes in each section- with a nice focus on social history at times such as cinema in the 20s and music hall in the 1900s. I particularly enjoyed the Edwardian/WW1 sections- such a great historical period- the growth of the labour movement, Lloyd George, the Irish war of Independence, the Suffragettes. The second half wasn’t as riveting for me personally but still informative.

149 A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay (audio)
One of my oldest audio books! I really enjoyed this historical fantasy. Kay’s writing doesn’t get the praise he deserves because of his genre- though it’s only very loosely fantasy- more historical fiction from made up places. In this one two neighbouring countries with very different cultures come to war but it’s so much more than that. Religious and cultural clashes, enmities within kingdoms, family issues. Great entertainment beautifully written.

I read a load of Guy Gavriel Kay a few years back. Agree he is underrated - I think Tigana was may favourite.

Congratulations @GrannieMainland my Dds were big Katie Morag fans.

I finished two books today, both bolds 🎉. I'm starting a new contract next week so it was good to finish my all too short "resting" stage (since August) on a high.

117. Ootlin - Jenni Fagan. Intense memoir of Fagan's life in care from when she was born to age 16. This is heartbreaking in content but the way she writes about it all is amazing. Really great writing that lifts this. I haven't read anything else by her but want to.

118. The Benefactors -Wendy Erskine. This is about an incident where a working class girl is sexually assaulted by 3 boys from rich backgrounds in Northern Ireland. The story is told quite opaquely from the points of view of the boys' mothers whose background we hear about, the girl's father and the girl herself. Between each chapter, there's a monologue from other people who have heard about what happened or are just pulling out different themes in the story. I started off listening to this and the audio, partly narrated by the author, is excellent. I thought the writing and characterisation in this was great and it cleverly captures the different parts of the situation. I also liked her choice not to give a voice to the boys.

53 Ripeness by Sarah Moss
Told in two time periods of one woman’s life. Edith narrates in the first person the summer when she was 17, sent to help her older sister, Lydia, who is pregnant in the Italian villa of (possibly) the baby’s father. The other strand is written in the third person, when Edith is in her 50s, having made a life in Ireland.
Themes of feminism, ingrained misogyny, what family means and displacement. I enjoyed it and some of it was very powerful. No speech marks, which I don’t usually mind at all, but it bugged me slightly this time. Perhaps I wasn’t fully tuned in to the reminiscing style this time. Not quite a bold but definitely worth a few evenings of my time.

Another one here who thought Grannie was a Grannie!

The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present - Paul McCartney and Paul Muldoon

Thanks to @Terpsichore for alerting me to this in the Kindle deals.
Paul McCartney discusses the inspiration behind approximately 150 of his songs with and without The Beatles. I listened to every song as I read so it has taken me a few weeks. From the sublime (Blackbird) to the frankly unhinged McCartney II stuff (Temporary Secretary), I loved every minute. My DS who likes a bit of avant-garde and off the wall music thinks that McCartney II is one of the greatest albums of all time. I’m not convinced but truly the man is a genius. I cried a bit too, especially when he talked about his relationship with Lennon and the songs they wrote together and about each other after the break up.

Raven Black - Ann Cleeves

This weeks ‘wide awake at 3 am yet again’ reading. A re-read but as I’d entirely forgotten the story, it didn’t matter.

Oh congrats @GrannieMainland. How lovely.

175 Operation Mincemeat- Ben McIntyre

Excellent as ever on the history of a specific piece of espionage. In this case, the planting of papers on the body of a Welsh labourer dressed up as an officer, with the goal of misleading the Germans into thinking the Allies were going to attack Sardinia and Greece, rather than Sicily, in 1943. It was an elaborate and detailed plot, spectacularly unbelievable in a few places and yet somehow successful. I have seen the film - which is also good - but this gave so much more fascinating detail.

If anyone fancies Operation Mincemeat, it's in the deals today at £1.49.