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

@Welshwabbit I didn’t know about Chiltern Kills and it’s not that far from me - but I’ll be away that weekend, typical!

57. The Book of Lost Things: John Connolly.

This is the story of a boy, David, who is having trouble coping with major changes in his life; the death of his mother and his father's new wife and a new sibling, all in quick succession. In his grief and frustration, he hears his books whispering to him and is drawn into the dark world of fairytales and the crooked man who wants David for his own nefarious purposes.

I liked many aspects of this book. It was well-written and atmospheric, dark and creepy with a good main character. However, there was so much blood and gore (too much for me) and I found some details relating to the crooked man very hard to read, particularly towards the end of the book. Even as used as I am to reading this author, I was fairly shocked at times. So, I'm a bit conflicted. I liked how it worked out at the end, but I would hesitate to recommend this book unless you are familiar with the author already. It sounds a bit like a YA book, but its nightmarish quality makes it one for adults in my opinion. I think I'll go back to the Charlie Parker series next time!

2025 #158
Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet
Rating: 4.4

Bitter Sweet is ostensibly a story about a young woman in a totally inappropriate affair with a much older, married man. It is also a story of how Charlie struggles to find her identity and establish herself at work and even in her own life, and has to deal with some serious mental health issues. The story is a first person narrative, told by a woman remembering this period of her life 15 years later.

Charlie is thrilled to be offered a job in publishing PR, with a team working on the launch of a new novel by one of her favourite writers. She moves into a lovely houseshare with two new friends from work, Ophelia and Eddy. She has a busy social life and the chance to read Richard Aveling's new novel. Then, she meets Richard when they are both smoking outside the office, and is seduced by his interest in her into a secretive love affair and its consequences.

I really disliked Richard Aveling - he comes across as selfish (in bed and out), manipulative and exploitative, and as Charlie tells her story, he wasn't even good in bed. It seems that he sees her vulnerabilities and uses them to keep her hanging on. Charlie lost her mum at 16, and has a history of mental heath struggles and troubled friendships and relationships. Charlie knows and is often reminded through conversations with Richard, colleagues and friends, that if the affair is discovered she might lose her job, but what else is at stake?

So the affair is no great love story - almost an anti romance - but I loved the evocation of Charlie's working life, and the depictions of many characters other than Richard. I enjoyed reading about her glamorous boss Cecile and her friends Ophelia and Eddy, and some of the lesser characters who appear in the story. Overall, I found this compelling and thought provoking, but I am struggling to explain why.

2025 #159
Wendy Erskine, The Benefactors
Rating: 4.5

Setting: Belfast, Northern Ireland

A young woman is sexually assaulted by three young men. She reports it to the police. There is an investigation.

The assault took place at a party. Misty, Chris, Lyness and Rami knew each other. She thought they were mates. What did actually happen? Can Misty get justice? Does she deserve justice or did she bring it on herself? The story is told from a number of viewpoints, in a mixture of third and first person narrative including Misty, the boys who attacked her, their families, police investigators, local gossips/commentators, and a follower of Misty through Benefactors (an Only Fans style social media account, one of her side hustles alongside a little cannabis dealing).

This story is very much about class and social status, as the young people's families get involved. The boys' mothers are less concerned about what happened than protecting their kids, managing the situation, damage limitation. Perhaps, though, they have underestimated Misty, her rather accidental stepdad, Boogie, who works as a Belfast taxi driver, and his grandmother.

There are so many voices here that I want to go back and work out all sorts of things that I missed totally or struggled to understand on first reading. There is a lot of humour in Wendy Erskine's treatment of several difficult subjects. And everything isn't tied up very neatly at the end.

This is a first novel but Wendy Erskine has previously published two collections of short stories - I have come across one or two in anthologies and I look forward to reading more of her work.

36. Universality by Natasha Brown A man is hit on the head with a gold bar on a farm in Yorkshire and a journalist investigates the story. This is a satire and looks into the hypocracies of everybody in the political landscape.

I enjoyed this more than I was expecting too. It was very readable and quite funny in places. Very much a novel of now.

67. The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal - Jon Stock

Disturbing account of much-lauded psychiatrist William Sargant, who from the 1940s to the 1990s was a leading figure in British medical circles, treating patients for schizophrenia but also for much less severe mental 'problems' with his own highly-dubious methods. The 'sleep room' of the title housed patients who were essentially kept forcibly sedated for days, weeks or even months at a time, only woken for feeding and to be taken to the bathroom; this regime was often combined with huge doses of ECT (sometimes repeated hundreds of times) and even lobotomies, in some cases performed not just once but repeatedly. His resistance to any form of talking cure/psychotherapy was total and vehement.

Sargant comes across as the archetypal lordly male medical professional, especially given the majority of his sleep room patients were young and female, often anorexic, and many were sent to him by controlling fathers who simply wanted their 'disobedient' daughters returned to them in a more compliant state. The actress Celia Imrie was a patient, and the book is punctuated with horrifying testimony from her and others. Add in the evidence that Sargant dabbled in the CIA's experiments in mind-control, and that there are very real questions to be asked about sexual abuse of patients, and you have a pretty disturbing read altogether. I did finish it but tbh considered making it a DNF on the grounds of its length and the grim narrative, so not for the faint-hearted.

Digital Fortress - Dan Brown

One of his stand alone books. Here a beautiful, clever woman has to save the world from some sort of computer virus. Lots of tech stuff I didn’t really understand, and some tech stuff that hasn’t aged well (this was published in 1998). And of course the usual bad writing. But I still enjoyed it - somehow despite the bad writing he still manages to keep me engrossed in whatever preposterous story he’s telling.

The Greek House - Dinah Jefferies

Dual timeline book. It starts in Corfu in 1923, where a small boy goes missing during the Italian invasion. It then picks up in 1930 where the boy’s older sister returns to Corfu. More of a romance than anything else, the story of the missing boy is wrapped up very quickly and implausibly right at the end. Fine for a holiday read but won’t rush to seek out more by this author.

Beach Read - Emily Henry

Writers January and Gus are on holiday at a lakeside and they challenge each other to swap genres - he has to write romance and she has to write a literary novel. Of course they fall in love because it’s that type of book. The writing aspect rather takes a back seat. Fine if you like this sort of thing. DD loved it!

Uncommon Type - Tom Hanks

A collection of short stories which all feature a typewriter somewhere. I enjoyed a couple of the stories but most were just OK. The language was a bit too American for me in some cases with lots of references I didn’t get.

You lot are absolute menaces, I've just caught up on the last couple of days of the thread, and consequently added 7 new books to my TBR list!

@Welshwabbit is this the same book about walking? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Looking-About-Everything-There-See-ebook/dp/B009CBJ5RC

I think it must be but it seems to have been published under at least 3 different titles!

It's taken me a while but I have now finished Zeinab Badawi's African History of Africa. Meticulously researched, she spends most of the book, deliberately, in the period pre slavery but there is plenty of material about slavery , colonialism and post colonialism too. This was a real labour of love. I did drift off in some sections, mainly because I got lost in a a sea of words. But I think it right and proper that one should be educated more about the history of Africa outside of the Western gaze and focus. I won't remember most of it but in the past few months I have gone from knowing vanishingly little about Congo to knowing a great deal via three books!

@noodlezoodle yes I came by it via a recommendation and there do seem to be several different editions. But from the sample that looks the same as mine. I bought it in second hand hard copy as I knew I would want to lend it to a friend after reading. I'd snap it up at 99p on the Kindle!

Let me know if you are going @ClaraTheImpossibleGirl ! @Terpsichore maybe another year.

Alberta and Freedom by Cora Sandel. Translated by Elizabeth Rokkan

Second in the trilogy. Alberta has left Norway and now lives among the artists of Paris. She is a life model and writes throwaway pieces for the newspapers at home and lives in awful cheap rooms with mice and bedbugs. She is both free from and yet still stifled by home. You get both frustrated at Alberta for her passivity and desperate to read on because of the psycological complexity in the descriptions of her and her friends. I'll be reading the third book.

The Wreath Sigrid Undset

The first in the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy. I’ll save my fuller comments for the readalong thread, but this was just ok for me, without the group I don’t know if I would be particularly bothered by the next book. This is set in 14th century Norway and the setting and writing is very evocative and I disliked a lot of characters, including Kristin, but I quite enjoy disliking them. It’s a coming of age story I suppose and I am glad I have read it and maybe one we finish the trilogy and I’ve had some time to reflect I might feel differently.

36) Connective Tissue by Eleanor Thom

This is a very strong bold for me, one of the best books I have read this year.

It switches between two separate stories - one is the narrator, who has given birth to a baby boy, who has developmental delay. She lives in Scotland with her husband, and part of the story is how they cope with having a disabled child.

But the narrator is also a version of the author herself, and the other part of the book is her attempt to find out more about her grandmother, who died when she was small.

Her grandmother had an astonishing back story. She was forced out of Nazi Germany for being Jewish and stateless, and brought to the UK, where she served as a maid for rich Jewish families.

I won't give the details away of the story, but it is quite heart breaking. Taken together, both parts of the book look at motherhood, who we are, finding strength.

In the afterword, the author explains how she discovered her book is part of a wave of 3rd generation Holocaust survivor novels - a recognised genre in its own right.

The author's grandmother was a working class Jew, which makes this story particularly interesting - most of them were wiped out by the Nazis as they didn't have the resources or contacts to flee. Most of those who made it here were well off.

I was utterly captured by both stories and I would definitely recommend it.

Duly snapped up!

34.Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In this novel four fortysomething west African women take turns to recount their experiences of love, sex, work, racism, success, motherhood, and abuse. There's not a straightforward plot as such, but the main focal point of the novel is a fictionalisation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape of a Guinean hotel worker in 2011.

This was long, and it almost felt like reading four separate novellas. The characters are perfectly realised, although I wanted each story to blend with the others a bit more. Adichie's wit makes the passages about past relationships with men and the clashes of West African and American culture in particular very entertaining.

Kadiatu's story was far and away the most touching, vivid, and powerful, and this did make the sections that came after, although still well done, something of an anticlimax. I loved this nonetheless, and while I think it might be might least favourite of Ngozi's books that I've read it was still better crafted and more thought provoking than lots of things I've read this year.

Added to my tbr @Arran2024 - thanks for the review.

145 Spymaster - Martin Pearce

This biography of Maurice Oldfield, former head of MI6, was written by his great nephew. George Smiley wasn’t based on MO in the Le Carré books, but Alex Guinness met MO before taking the role in Tinker Tailor, and so the screen portrayal was pretty close.

Anyway. This was good but not great - the author doesn’t have the access that other experts in the area do, and there is some family bias, of course. But interesting and a good background to my upcoming read of A Spy Amongst Friends, as MO was one of the earliest to suspect Kim Philby.

There are 7 books from the Slough House series by Mick Herron in the daily deals today, if anyone needs to boost their collection!

@MaterMoribund slightly late to the Mary, Queen of Scots chat but the podcast Thé Rest is History has recently done an absolutely excellent 5/6 episodes on Mary. Would recommend highly and whatever sources they have used, which they must list somewhere, would be worth reading I suspect.

@ChessieFL thank you for highlighting. Exactly what I have been waiting as I have enjoyed the earlier ones in the series and can now complete the set. Although not good for the tbr list!

.45. The Women - Kristin Hannah

My first book by this author and it was a good one. Twenty year old Frances ‘Frankie’ McGrath, a nursing student from a wealthy Californian society family, sees her older brother go off to fight in Vietnam. Inspired by the idea that women can be heroes too, she signs up with the Army Nursing Corps and follows him out to war.

Spanning some 15 years, this was an epic tale of a young woman’s harrowing experiences and how they affected her life choices as a Vietnam vet in a society which was only just starting to consider the psychological after-effects of war, and only for men because “women didn’t fight”. An engrossing story.

.46. Longhand - Andy Hamilton

This was an unusual book so I’ll try not to give away spoilers. The central plot revolves round Malcolm Galbraith, who has written a letter to the woman he loves to explain why he is having to leave her for ever. Malcolm is telling her the whole story of his long life, in a 350 page handwritten note left on the kitchen table. This letter is the novel.

What makes the book unique (I think) is that it is handwritten by the author in his own cursive script on the page (I listened to an interview with the author who described the process and he genuinely wrote it all). The title is a play on this form but also on Malcolm’s life. Reading a novel in this form demands a different approach, but one outcome is the connection to the main characters - you can’t skim read so need to devote time to it and are more invested in the story as a result. Malcolm keeps being interrupted in his mission, sometimes for trivial reasons, sometimes with important plot points. The mistakes and crossings out add to the authenticity of the letter form from a man increasingly under pressure to finish his explanation before time runs out. A fantastic novel in both senses, an interesting experiment, with the central life story only a part of why I am still thinking about it. A gimmick? Yes. But there are more aspects to the book than the handwriting. I just wish my handwriting was that easy to read.

55 Old Bones Lie - Marion Todd
Almost a bold for the 6th book in the DI Clare Mackay series. The only thing that I felt stopped it being a bold was the lack of closure on one strand of the story, but that's maybe just me.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
Thanks to both @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie and @EineReiseDurchDieZeit for the recent positive reviews of this novel about the disappearance of two children from an American summer camp in the 60s and 70s. It really had me hooked from the beginning and i couldn't put it down. Great on unravelling relationships, loved the different voices and time shifts and it went off in interesting directions. It was going to be a bold, first 80% was great, but the ending wasn't for me. Would still recommend it though if you want something interesting, plotty and easy to read.