50 Books Challenge 2025 Part Eight

[Southeastdweller]

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

If you liked The Mirror Crack’d…

I did of course mean The Cracked Mirror (by Christopher Brookmyre) in my post above!

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupieThat made me laugh, I read Thin Air a couple of years ago and the only thing I now remember about it is the haunted rucksack. Good to know it made a similar impression on someone else :)

Finished two more
Crowfall by Ed McDonald
The third part of the grimdark fantasy I’ve been listening to- first part was great- fresh voice, interesting world. Second part was great. This one jumped the shark. Disappointing.

Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle by Thomas Sankara.
I’ve started a Read around the World challenge within my book group and this was our first read from Burkina Faso. Thomas Sankara was a communist revolutionary who led the country from 1983 until his assassination in 1985 and this is his speech about women’s liberation (75 pages) which he sees as essential for the success of the country. He likens women’s oppression to the class system and colonialism. It’s an interesting read and while some of his ideas are outdated in today’s society, he does seem to be genuine in his desire for equality between the sexes. It’s caught my interest enough to find out more about Sankara and what’s happened in Burkina Faso since his assassination

It’s very silly.

I found my old review and I’ve actually been much kinder about it second time around.

I found the Haunted Rucksack quite alarming, <gets coat>

65 Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil by Oliver Darkshire

Someone mentioned this was 99p in the deals a few days back and I bought it because I had a very clear recollection of a long discussion with a friend, many years ago, about the Keats poem, the title of which tickled me greatly. It's a Prachettian riff on the story of Isabella and her pot of basil, originally told in the Decameron, with added talking donkeys, fungal goblins, a grimalkin and a whiff of feminism. It's a bit hit and miss - some of the footnotes were very funny; some were annoying; the pacing is a bit off so some early bits dragged and the end was rushed, and the debt to Pratchett (especially the footnotes) is obvious and somewhat overshadowing. But whilst not laugh-out-loud funny like the best of Pratchett (the witches for me, YMMV), it was gently humorous and clever and I enjoyed it.

202 The Other Valley - Scott Alexander Howard

Read by several on here, this was good. Odile lives in a town in a valley by a lake, and to the west and east of her town are repeats of the same place, 20 years in the future and 20 years in the past. It is possible to visit/view the other valleys, but only by permission of the Conseil, which is very carefully controlled, for risk of time-ripple effects. When she turns 16, Odile seeks to be apprenticed to the Conseil, but learns of a potential tragedy when she accidentally sees masked visitors from the future. Borrowed on Prime.

I've really enjoyed the M W Craven books too @ChessieFL

126. The Driver's Seat - Muriel Spark. I'm reading a new biography called Electric Spark for book club so thought I'd better read a couple more of her books first, as I've only read Miss Jean Brodie. This is very short and really quite odd, following Lise, a 30 something eccentric who is going on holiday and who will come to a gruesome end (we're told early on). I'm not entirely sure what to make of it but it was short and entertaining, if a bit macabre. Hard to describe without spoilers. One of the very random bits of info I garnered from this book was that there were no allocated seats on planes in the 60s! I've got Memento Mori to read too, but let me know if there are any others if hers that 50 Bookers recommend.

127. The Glorious Heresies - Lisa McInerney. Having completely failed to RWYO, I thought I would try again to clear some of the back log.. This won the Women's prize in 2016 and is about dealers and prostitutes in Cork, interspersed with some religion. I thought it was very good, great characters and writing, with va satisfying plot. I think it's a bold for me. unfortunately I've heard the sequel is disappointing.

128. Stoneyard Devotional - Charlotte Wood. One from last year's Booker shortlist that I never got round to, this is a meditative bill and a woman who hits to live in a nunnery in Australia. I really liked this too, although nothing much happens except for a plague of mice which was quite gruesome. I'm seeing my cats in a much more favourable light after that!

@Stowickthevast apart from Brodie, my favourite Spark books are The Girls of Slender Means and A Far Cry From Kensington. Both also short and beautifully written.

I second The Girls of Slender Means

Ah, it's a long story but I taught GOSM and there are two characters inexplicably with the same name. My class wrote to Muriel Spark, in the style of GOSM , and we got a very brusque reply from her agent:

Muriel cannot recall that she did this or why she did this.

Thank you for your letter.

I like to think this was meta.

I cherished it for many years but have now lost it .

This is fantastic @Piggywaspushed

It was definitely supposed to be alarming. I’m probably just a cynical old cow.

45. Death at the White Hart by Chris Chibnall

Perfectly decent police murder mystery, written by the scriptwriter for lots of top tv shows including Broadchurch. Enjoyable, easy read.

That's amazing @Piggywaspushed

83. Chopin’s Piano: A Journey Through Romanticism - Paul Kildea

There's a lot going on in this exploration of a fascinating bit of musical history, but Kildea conveys it elegantly and vividly. The starting-point is Chopin's journey to Majorca in late 1838 with his lover, George Sand (scandalous woman writer) and her two children. Their stay there was supposed to be an idyll of sunshine and warmth, but it rained; the locals near the monastery where they stayed in Valdemossa were suspicious, and they escaped back to Paris after a few months.
But Chopin spent his time there composing some of what became his miraculous 24 Preludes, working on a small, unremarkable Spanish-built piano.

Kildea then traces the story of what happened to Chopin, Sand, and the piano, right up to today. Chopin's legacy and his preludes have lived on, handed down through generations, but modified as the memories of his own performances faded; the piano was saved, bought by the remarkable Polish keyboard player Wanda Landowska, whose own travails at the hands of the Nazis dominates the second half of the book. But today the piano remains lost, perhaps sitting somewhere in a private collection after going astray in the great chaos of the end of WW2. Lots to think about here in terms of memory and loss, and how we all deal with cataclysmic events in our lives. A quiet bold for me.

I have finished Rebecca Wait's I'm Sorry You Feel That Way. I like a dysfunctional family read so it ticked my boxes. She mixes levity well with darker moments. Does anyone know if Rebecca Wait has ever taught? Her passages describing a staff room and teaching in general are very accurate, unlike many school settings. I haven't read Havoc yet to pass more judgment on that although that seems to be more about pupils?

Thanks for the recommendation @Piggywaspushed . I’ve never read any Rebecca Wait books and a quick sample read suggests a cross between Clare Chambers and Lissa Evans, so they’ve gone on my Wish List.

I should really stop looking at this thread because I’ve barely been reading and yet I’m constantly adding to my wish list because of all the wonderful books mentioned on here.

I’m moving in a month and it’s been so incredibly stressful and time consuming that I’ve barely glanced at a book. I’ll post what I have read until now and hopefully I can join in with the thread again next year once I’ve moved. I am going to be living literally next door to a library which I’m excited about and hope that it means that I buy fewer books as a result.

Next door to a library is living the dream, @ShelfObsessed ! Good luck with the move!

@Piggywaspushed I love your Muriel Spark story!

I'm falling behind with everything it seems, online and in real life. Work is just too much at the moment.

That said the Booker Prize is announced tomorrow so here are two more Booker reviews:

66. Endling, Maria Reva 5/5
    Booker Prize longlist. When I read reviews of this, I thought it sounded weird and not really up my street, but I was wrong, I loved it. It IS weird, but in a brilliant way. A Ukrainian scientist is breeding rare snails, and decides to fund her research by joining an organisation that matches potential Ukrainian brides with Western men. The novel is amusing and fairly frivolous until the war breaks out, at which point the author intervenes in her own novel and asks how she can carry on with her own initial plot, given that it has been interrupted by conflict and trauma. She does carry on, and it’s brilliantly done, with a kind of dark humour that the book suggests might be unpalatable to Westerners. An original and engaging story; too bad it didn’t make it to the Booker shortlist.

67. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai 4/5
    Booker Prize shortlist. A very ambitious, original novel, that deals in a very thoughtful way with themes of migration, family and identity. Much as I like sweeping multigenerational family sagas, however, I got a bit bogged down at certain points. The language is wonderfully exuberant and digressive, but I never became absorbed in the life of the characters in the same way that I would do in a lengthy novel by, say, Dickens. I’m glad I read it, but overall I could have done with more narrative focus and fewer digressions. I loved the ending though.

I've now read the whole Booker longlist, apart from One Boat. I'm not sorry I read it, because I think the judges this year were less Bookerish than they sometimes are, and chose books that tell a good story rather than just books that wear their literariness on their sleeve (this is my ongoing gripe with the Booker). That said, the Booker has monopolised my (already too limited) reading time for the last couple of months, which means that I've read Booker books at the expense of everything else. Never mind...

Anyway my final shortlist ranking is:
Land in Winter 5/5
Flashlight 5/5

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny 4/5

Flesh 3/5
Audition 3/5
The Rest of Our Lives 3/5

If Flesh or Audition wins, I'll be disappointed but unsurprised, because they count in my head as classically Bookerish books. Much intelligence, little soul.

For the record my other Booker bold was Seascraper. I also liked Love Forms, The South and Misinterpretation, even though they weren't quite bolds for me.

Anyway I'm relieved to get back to my normal TBR pile now!

52 What I Saw: Reports From Berlin 1920-33 - Joseph Roth

Collection of some of the novelist’s columns for various German newspapers during the Weimar Republic. It’s an absolutely fascinating and highly evocative window into the period, examining the issues of homelessness and displaced people, and covering Berlin’s traffic, commerce and nightlife. And all the while, overshadowed by the looming catastrophe of Nazism. Really want to look into some of Roth’s fiction after this.

I’ve got a physical copy of that, still unread @MegBusset Really need to get around to tackling my remaining German pile.

125. Boy Parts - Eliza Clark

This is another bold for me! I'm either being very lucky with this month's reading or just enjoying everything immensely after the relief of finishing Wolf Hall 😅

Boy Parts is about a photographer who takes explicit pictures of young men and sells them as art. To me the narrator was absolutely fascinating - charismatic but monstrous and I loved the explorations of consent, power, class, gender and objectification. It goes to some dark places, and seems a bit of a marmite book from looking at reader reviews, but I genuinely found it exciting and compelling.

I have added My Invented Country to my wishlist, thanks Remus! I am hoping to go to Chile next December for a hiking trip, so if anyone else has any Chile related reads (fiction or non-fiction) recommendations gratefully received. My brain won't remember all I read, but I do like to have at least tried to understand the country I have visited not just taken photos of myself drinking a beer against the pretty scenery...

Also added Endling as that sounds like my sort of weird.

I've just finished Mountain Ghost Stories (And curious tales of Western North Carolina) by Randy Russell and Janet Barnett

Purchased in Great Smoky Mountains National Park visitor shop for $14 (!) I was hoping to learn more about the spookiness of the mountains. The Appalachian Mountains have a long history of mysterious events and people going missing and general oddness and I was interested to read more, especially prompted by the fact it was Halloween. I'm not actually that interested in the supernatural.

This turned out to be a book about Cherokee legends which I quite enjoyed. It had almost nothing about ghosts. Incredibly mis-leading title.

The were many references to The War Between States which is apparently what southern USA would call the civil war, and I am wondering if this down playing the confederacy and the facts of slavery.

So not what I was hoping for, left a bad taste and it was the most expensive book I purchased all year by a long way. D'oh!

Got hours on a train tomorrow so will treat myself to something very readable next I think.