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

@Owlbookend- I think the transition to adult books can be tricky - I can remember needing adult books at that age as children’s books started to feel too thin, but some of the books that I dragged myself through at that age, I just didn’t have the life experience to appreciate. Emma was a big disappointment to me as I’d adored Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. I finally enjoyed reading it much more in lockdown when I realised a lot of it was written from a parent’s perspective so it was completely understandable that I’d failed to appreciate it as a teen.

Other suggestions are Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur trilogy (both a story of a medieval boy and a retelling of Arthurian legends) & Diana Wynne Jones if she hasn’t read them. DS really enjoyed working through Terry Pratchett at that age. Hons & Rebels by Jessica Mitford and To Kill a Mockingbird are both books that I didn’t read as a teen, but would probably have really enjoyed if I have.

I must have been about that age when I read Hons and Rebels - one of my parents brought back her second memoir from the US and I remember reading it during a Woodcraft Folk camp when I was 15 (I wouldn't recommend A Fine Old Conflict for a teenager - I had no problem with the words but the content was completely over my head). I can't think of anything very contemporary not mentioned already but maybe

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate
Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years (first of the Cazalet Chronicles]
Diana Wynne Jones, Charmed Life and many others are still children's books but the language is quite sophisticated and there's plenty of fun for readers of all ages. Some of her books are written for slightly older readers, eg Hexwood. My theory on The Dark Lord of Derkholm is that it's really about parenting teenagers, although they're in griffin form - I read it well before my kids hit their teens and thought it was really funny. The sequel The Year of the Griffin is a campus novel disguised as fantasy.
Maybe another year or two, but Winifred Holtby's South Riding and Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth
Jane Gardam's early books about girls in their early teens were published as children's books but have been reissued also as for adult readers - A Long Way from Verona and Bilgewater
Antonia White, Frost in May
Colette, Claudine at School (I think Antonia White translated this one)

A more contemporary suggestion - published 21st century, set in the late 70s and early 80s - Nina Stibbe's Love, Nina - letters to her sister for working as a nanny in an unusual literary set up would perhaps be funnier in a year or two, but her first novel Man at the Helm is first in a trilogy about a growing up in a Leicestershire village in the late 70s/early 80s.
Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky - first novel, child's point of view, written for adults, about two English girls and their mother living on not very much money in Morocco
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus - a girl growing up, though some quite dark content about violence in a family

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Emily at New Moon - and sequels, though the 3rd is a disappointment - I was really upset at Emily's life choice at the end of the book!

Some of Rumer Godden's books

Eva Ibbotson's books are lovely and would probably be perfect for a teen.

The Chaos Walking trilogy is a good call, although I was disappointed by the third.

Liam Hearne's series which begins with, Across the Nightingale Floor is brilliant.

Should add that the latter series contains sex, including homosexuality iirc but my daughter read and loved them all about 11. She said when older and looking back fondly on them that she just skipped the sex stuff as it went right over her head.

If she likes slightly scary, Michelle Paver's Dark Matter and Thin Air might be worth a shot.

At that age I read all the Agatha Christie novels. All of them!

I agree about the third CW Book, Remus but can’t remember the finer points

Me neither. Loads of stuff about a horrible but quite cartoonish man, I think, but can't remember anything else.

I read The Chrysalids when I was about 13, I'd say.

Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
This started off very promisingly. Set in a future where Big Pharma controls all drugs for money, Jack is a ‘pirate’ who manufactures those drugs to sell cheaply to anyone who needs them. She steals Zacuity before it is launched but it has some horrendous side effects - it will focus people on work, for example, but they become addicts to that work (whether critical like air traffic control or mundane like data entry). She is joined by an indentured young man called ThreeZed after his identification tattoo. They try to evade the authorities and find an antidote to Zacuity, helped by Jack’s research scientist ex and a robot who is ‘free’.
Sent to hunt down Jack are a human, Eliasz and a robot, Paladin.
The world building is excellent and it’s easy to see how we as a species could get there from here.
Then it all gets really, really stupid, with human/robot sex (because apparently Paladin has been fitted with a female human brain). Jack has over 20 years on ThreeZed but uses him for sex anyway (it’s what he’s trained for, after all ). Gender politics hits the reader over the head as subtly as a brick and there’s some extremely cringey sex scenes. I only read to the end to see if the cringey sex would fade out and we could get back to the excellent sci fi, but no, unfortunately not. I don’t like a lot of sci fi and I absolutely loathed this example of it.

At least in the parts about the controlling man (Dean Priest) something was happening - whereas at the end it took years and years of not much happening before the entirely predictable ending.

I did like the bit where Ilse absconds from her wedding though - possibly via the window.

@BenvenutoI think you’re talking about a different book!

Emul

@Benvenuto oh I wouldn’t be put off they were well worth reading.

@Benvenuto Isn't Dean Priest in LM Montgomery's Emily of New Moon books?

Computer gremlins for me tonight - I’d mixed up the posts about the book you were talking about, the Emily of New Moon & the last Sci-Fi review. Then my post explaining this seems to have misposted! Clearly not my night!

Thanks all - some more great suggestions. It is a funny age DD is desparate to appear grown up. In some ways she is quire young & naive, but in other ways she is really mature.
I love Carson McCullers @elkiedee . She is great at capturing adolescence. I cant remember if it is in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter or A Member at the Wedding where an attempt at a teenage party descends into just plain old 'playing out'. It captures that desire to be grown up so well. Very poignant - & i am far from sentimentak. It has always stuck with me.
I read all sorts at her age. Devoured Agatha Christie like @Arran2024 read To Kill a Mockingbird and Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, but also hoovered up early teen Jacquiline Wilson (now out of print and forgotten) and Flowers in the Attic (i remember my mum asking me if i waa enjoying it 😆).

I was a basic reader at 14, lots of chick lit, Agatha Christie and Catherine Cookson (still love the latter two). Things like du Maurier and Brontë were not on my radar and I am kind of glad I came to them in may later 20s, early 30s. I just feel like so much would have gone over my head. The only books meant for adults I read were in English and I still love all of them.

I know it gets a bad rap now, but Memoirs of a Geisha was the turning point for me. The conceit was just so surprising to me and I loved it, I even went to the cinema heavily pregnant by myself to see the film. Rightly or wrongly, my reading took a different direction after this book at 24 and the when I went to uni at 28 my reading exploded.

I read a lot of the books mentioned above at that age but also Jane Eyre (I have a vivid memory of sitting down to read it on Boxing Day age 12 with a box of After Eights). Northanger Abbey was a school read at about that age but was a great introduction to JA. Very gothic. And my favourite book at that age, which I must read again was Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.

I also loved the Jilly Cooper girls name books but I’m not sure they’re a good idea these days. And Forever Amber.

@BestIsWest I'm not sure when I first read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn but think it might be worth a try for a 13 year old if she's interested in reading much older books, obviously not contemporary.

Another slightly more recent novel - though I guess that it might be about 40 years old now (eek!) - Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

I read all of Agatha Christie's books in my teens - and even at that age, could probably only remember whodunnit in a couple (the ones that it would be hard even for me to forget the final revelation part).

I probably read some amazingly unsuitable things at 13 or 14: Jackie Collins, Shirley Conran's Lace. I don't think it matters reading any book that a lot might go over a teenager's head - a reread in her 20s/30s will probably be a totally different experience.

@AgualusasL0ver I LOVED Memoirs Of A Geisha when I read it in my 20s. It didn’t hold up when I did a reread 10 years later

Our Jane Eyre experience sounds very similar, Best - I was 12 and someone gave my mum a box of books for jumble; I went through it (already an avid reader by then) and near the top was this old book. It was something like an 1887 edition. I have a pin-sharp memory of sitting wedged behind the sofa with my back to the radiator (a favourite reading spot) absolutely hoovering it up in great chunks, unable to stop until i knew what happened. I’ve still got the book somewhere.

My 14yo recently said she wanted to read ‘a classic, like Jane Eyre or Agatha Christie’. I passed her Wuthering Heights and am looking out for library and charity shop Christies. I will have to get her a Jane Eyre too now Terpsichore! Enjoying the recs on here, might give her Rebecca for Xmas.

The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski This time slip novella was confused in my mind with the Yellow Wallpaper. I didn’t get drawn into this and only persevered because it was so short.

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller - I didn’t love this. 2 young couples in the terrible winter of 1962, struggling with their relationships, own histories, class dynamics and the legacy of war. Alternates between the 4 characters’ povs and so we get their inner lives - one character particularly unlikeable - but Miller is no Kate Atkinson. Period details sometimes felt as forced as product placement. There’s the occasional gratuitous reminder that women have boobs - e.g. from the pov of a woman out of sight of anyone else who has just let a cat out of the door - ‘her arms folded under her breasts’. Unless her arms were folded over her head, or behind her knees, I would say the position of folded arms could be taken as read. All in all, it was ok, and I liked the occasional trips to 1962 Bristol, but I didn’t particularly enjoy the writer’s company and wouldn’t seek out more.

The classic I read at that age was Tess which I adored but I find even prolific readers are more averse to lengthy Victorian classics as teens these days (the YA book industry is a double edged sword!) We just dumped Tess for Gatsby at A level because the kids won't read Hardy!

Books that might work more for 13- 16 years olds are - Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, Wyndham, Christie, Frankenstein (maybe at about 15?), Animal Farm, The Woman(s) in White and Black, Of Mice and Men, Little Women. I think of those as transitional books (but the racism and misogyny in some of them needs handling)

I hate Brontes and Austens but have found a few girls who have read them but not at 13. I also loved Spark and Bainbridge as a teen but not at 13.