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

90. The Rose Field by Philip Pullman

Much awaited final installment in The Book of Dust trilogy. I’m not a fan of Michael Sheen but his narration in the audiobook was excellent and brought it very much to life.

The action pieces and the storytelling in this were superb. I found the denouement and the final revelations about dust somewhat lacklustre. Indeed I think it would have been much better if it hadn’t been spelled out quite so clearly. Worth reading though.

91. The Cabin in the Woods by Sarah Alderson

A woman is on the run in Upstate New York. Gradually through the novel it becomes clear. I started this because I am a sucker for wilderness novels where people pit themselves against the environment. There was a bit of this but much more about her life in the city and the circumstances of her life. Relatively well done but nothing special.

92. The List by Yomi Adegoke

A young journalist is busy with the final arrangements for her wedding when she learns of The List which details name of men accused of sexual assault. Her fiance is on the list.

This was well constructed and carefully thought through about the implications of being accused in such a way. It was well balanced between lots of different perspectives and avoided being didactic.

93. Shallow Graves by Ray Fysh

Memoir of a forensic scientist who was involved in pushing through new ways of solving crimes from use of fibres in the conviction of Sarah Payne’s killer to the pioneering of DNA profiling to attempt to identify the torso of a child found in the Thames. The ghostwriting was not brilliant but the scientific and procedural information but fascinating. I enjoyed this.

94. A Month in the Country by JL Carr

Absolutely delightful balm for the soul. A bold. Thank you so much to all who have recommended this in the past. Another beauty I wouldn’t have found if not for this thread. Finally available on kindle!

95. The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

I love Lauren Groff’s use of language. She uses beautiful imagery and is innovative in her descriptions. A young woman has discovered she is pregnant with the child of her Professor. She comes home to consider what to do next. At the same time a Nessie type monster is pulled out of the lake by her home time.

I’m not sure the story completely hung together as the threads of the ancestors didn’t fully land for me. But I did enjoy the writing.

@AgualusasL0ver Do let us know how you get on with the film. I love the Robert Donat 39 steps. It is superb. In my imagination it is the same universe as Josephine Tey’s Inspector Alan Grant, traipsing through the heather.

@elspethmcgillicudddy I've got about 5 hours left of the Rose Field narration and have definitely enjoyed it more than the Secret Commonwealth. Although I did read that again in anticipation and didn't dislike it as much as the first time, probably as I knew what to expect.
I'm enjoying all the descriptions of the middle east, but the whole series is basically a road trip!

@StrangewaysHereWeCome great review of Flesh - agree with your summary!

I’ve added Shallow Graves and The Art of a Lie to my wish list. I saw the latter in Waterstones recently and thought it looked good - physically, a stunner of a book too.

@bibliomania thanks for the heads up re the book by Eva St John. I’ll check that out as I quite liked her Quantum Curators series.

Earlier this year I abandoned The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer but a while back I returned to it and have been reading a chapter here and there and also listening to some chapters. Shirer was an observer to the rise of the Nazis rather than a historian so his account is very narrative and ultra-detailed (the audio is over 57 hours long) so at times it was a slog. But I’m delighted that I got finished. That’s my third massive historical tome I’ve read this year and it’s years since I’ve read some of the biggies, sticking mainly to shorter more focused reads, several more of which I read this year. (The other two were The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr and The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes - the latter my favourite of the three). I’m really delighted to have fitted these three in and would like to get another three read next year.

Well done ÚlldemoShúl

I really loved The Fatal Shore.

I’ve not managed to finish anything by Marr. I find him a very dull writer, I’m afraid.

@ÚlldemoShúl I’ve had my eye on the Shirer book for a while but the length puts me off! I do love a thick historical tome though. If you haven’t read it then Simon Sebag Montifiore’s Stalin biography is a good chunky read - I want to read his Romanovs book but again that is a huge epic.

It was by far my favourite of the three- absolutely fascinating. Marr was more readable than I anticipated but then I like the early 20th century.

I got through Marr’s History of the World a couple of years ago, but it did not spark joy!

We need the laugh emoji back!

@MegBusset I really enjoyed The Romanovs, though with everything Montefiore it could have been shorter and there wasn’t much new material - but he does tell a good story. If anyone is interested, he also writes fiction - Sashenka is the first of the Moscow Trilogy and I never got to the others as I was so devastated by it.

I’ve read quite a bit more non fiction this year, but also like you @ÚlldemoShúl some proper tomes. I’ll save my analysis until EOY round up. I’ve had a good reading year I feel.

214 Ink Blood Sister Scribe - Emma Törzs

I enjoyed this, it rattles along nicely.

Half sisters Joanna and Esther haven’t seen each other for ten years; Esther moves on every year in early November and didn’t even return for the funeral of their father, Abe, who was mysteriously killed by one of the magical books he and Joanna were guarding in their Vermont home. Joanna’s mother, Cecily, lives in town, but cannot return to the house because Joanna has continued to cast the protective wards that her father taught her.

In England, Nicolas is kept in luxurious safety ( that looks a lot like captivity) by his uncle Richard and his assistant Marian. Nicholas is a Scribe, who can use his blood to write new spells, and he’s a very rare creature - hence the mansion-prison which houses the Library, a vast collection of magical books.

When Esther - on a base in Antarctica - falls in love with Pearl and doesn’t move on at the right time, she comes under threat and has to plan her escape.

I don’t read a lot of witchy/magic related books, but I liked this.

I actually just started a book about the Romanovs, but by Robert Massie, a couple of days ago. I also have The Anglo-Saxons by Marc Morris on the go, hoping to finish at least one of them this year as I’ve not had the headspace or concentration for anything challenging for much of this year.

I enjoyed the Marc Morris, @MamaNewtNewt .

67 Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

It is clearly my time of year for reading books that were shortlisted for, but did not win, major prizes. This one was shortlisted for the Women's Prize (non-fiction) and it's not something I would usually have picked out, but was given to me as a present, and I'm grateful to the giver because it was lovely. In the countryside during lockdown, the author, on an enforced break from her life in London as a political adviser, finds and raises a leveret. Her account of her careful relationship with the hare; always (except for in its youngest days, when she fed it herself) at a distance to ensure it can live well in the wild, is tender and thoughtful. It's an extremely calm book, even at moments of tension when the hare disappears, immersing you in the rhythms of the countryside and the wildlife. Inevitably, this experience makes Dalton reconsider how she lives her life and those sections chimed to some extent with my own thoughts after lockdown, albeit I spent it with my husband and two young children rather than a hare. A meditative and beautifully written book.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe looks fun - and is on BorrowBox so has leapfrogged to the top of my list! (As soon as work gets less busy and I have time to finish the two non-fictions I’ve got on the go)

And the Eva St John book is 99p on kindle, so thanks for the recommendation!

I have just finished The Covenant of Water. It's a hefty enterprise for sure!

I definitely liked and admired it - not as much as some readers , I suspect. It committed the sin of miniscule (sic) on approximately page number 9,726.

I thought the stories were great and the thread of ancestry is what I like in a book. I also tend to love Indian set books. It features medical people but it jarred a little that a doctor was characterised as thinking about everyone in terms of their Latinate anatomy. I feel like the Gray's Anatomy thing was also done (and perhaps better) in Atonement. I saw in the acknowledgement that he had been coached about Glasgow and its dialect by two friends but the Scottish accent and dialect didn't ring true to me and got in the way. Likewise his Geordie nurse. And the main character was born in the very early 20th century in distinct poverty and yet there was a clear, smiling photograph of him and his mother (this is an essential plot point and didn't seem right at all , historically).I feel like you can't hear and feel the voices as well as you can in , say. A Suitable Boy or even Remember , Mr Sharma - a more recent and , in every other way, inferior novel. I did feel emotion at several of the deaths but in many ways this book left me a bit detached - it needed fairly brutal editing in places. I think it wasn't served well by me just having finished Mishal Husain's book.

@MamaNewtNewt The Massie was the definitive before Montefiore and to be honest scholarship around the Romanovs whilst it has moved forward not so much that it’s particularly worth reading both, unless you really love the Romanovs.

I finished another history book, this one much shorter and much more moving- Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad by Daniel Finkelstein. The journalist tells the stories of his parents and grandparents during World War 2. It’s a story of horror and resilience. Finkelstein tells the wider story using his parents experiences as anchors. Bold for me.

Also two DNFs- the first Kairos by Jenni Erpenbeck- last year’s international Booker set in 1980s East Berlin and tells the story of an affair between a young girl and an older married man. The man is an absolute prick, the pace is glacial and the writing far too introspective for me right now. I might try this one again some time. The second was an attempt to read something fast paced to get me back on an even keel Who Took Eden Mulligan by Sharon Dempsey - the premise is good- new police case in Belfast brings up echoes of an old troubles related murder- but the writing is terrible and the characters stereotypes and I just can’t hack it right now. Hoping to find something that will suck me in. I have The Heart’s Invisible Furies on my kindle which everyone seems to love. Maybe I’ll give that a go.

I’ve just finished a series of four children’s books by Katherine Woodfine, the first of which is called Peril in Paris,

I’d highly recommend these for anyone who likes children’s books, but they’ll make more sense if you read The Clockwork Sparrow series first. Together the two series follow the adventures of Lily and Sophie, young detectives in the early twentieth century.

If you know Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart series, these have a similar vibe but with a lighter touch and for a younger audience.

I seem to be on a bold streak.

51.The Party by Tessa Hadley. In postwar Bristol bluestocking Evelyn is taken out at the weekend by her glamorous and artistic elder sister Moira. In a pub they connect with a pair of older men who invite them to a house party the following night.

And that's literally it. Not much more than a hundred pages, no character development, and no further plot. I have little to add to @ChessieFL's review earlier this month - short and boring sums it up quite well.

142. A Very Great Profession, Nicola Beaumont
This book is by the founder of Persephone Press and was first published in 1983. It's an overview of women's fiction from the mid-twentieth century. She went on to reprint many of the books she writes about here. I had high hopes for this but the book didn't quite live up to them. She describes some of the common preoccupations of the books, but it didn't seem to me to get much beyond "author x said this and author y said that". She mentions in an afterword that she was researching the book around the same time as Elaine Showalter was researching A Literature of their Own, and I found Showalter's writing much fizzier when I read it years ago. I still cherish Showalter's description of Virginia Woolf paring down her domestic obligations to the "slatternly minimum" and have modelled myself shamelessly on it.

My post should say between the wars rather than mid-twentieth century, with a focus on the 1930s.

59 The Napoleon of Crime - Ben Macintyre As always with Macintyre, a fascinating true story, told in a very readable manner. The subject matter was different from the other books of his that I have read: instead of 20th century spies, this book focuses on Adam Worth, a master criminal of the 19th century on whom Conan Doyle’s Moriarty was based and who had a long rivalry - which became a friendship - with William Pinkerton (one of the family of detectives who gave their name to the famous American detective agency, about which I hardly knew anything before reading this). The story takes us through the criminal underworlds of New York (which seems to have been an absolute den of iniquity), London, Europe and South Africa, and a key theme is the famous Gainsborough portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire, which Worth stole and then carried around with him for decades before finally returning it (I have an urge to re-read The Goldfinch after this 😄).

Really interesting and another bold for me.