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

Agreed. It felt almost like it was written by a different person.

I had a horrible afternoon at work today. Escaped early and have just had an hour crying in the bath with the first half of the glorious 84 Charing Cross Road. Feeling almost human again.

Sending bookish good wishes, Remus

Oh no Remus, hope that bath and book works its magic.

Oh Remus, I am sorry to hear that - at least some time off looms

Thank you, you wonderful lot. I’m fine. I got into bed and finished 84CCR and cried some more. It’s such a beautiful book, and I’m ready to emerge from bed soon and eat comforting potatoes and biscuits of solace. And then I’ll be ready to be a bundle of joy again tomorrow.

Sorry to hear that @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie but you've inspired me to have a bath with a bookafter supper. I've been out for the last two nights - very unusual - and really need some warmth and comfort.

2 reviews:

138. Katabasis - R F. Kuang. I keep trying R F Kuang books by have yet to be blown away by them. She has interesting ideas but a rather inflated idea of her own intelligence I feel.
     This is her latest book and is set in Hell. Cambridge "Magick" Phd students Alice and Peter travel to Hell to try and recover their professor so he can come back and they can get the jobs they want. In Kuang's world, Magick is based on philosophy, calculus and logic, particularly paradoxes. This give Kuang the opportunity to info dump intellectual concepts all over the place. I did a philosophy degree so lots of it was quite familiar to me, in fact I was asked a version of the Hangman's paradox in my Oxford interview about a hundred years ago. Hell is based on a mixture of various accounts, Dante, Virgil, T S Eliot - again well done for being so learned! The pair journey through Hell encountering a few adventures and escaping rather easily. I did actually enjoy this more than my review sounds like - I am actually interested in the subjects Kuang is like philosophy, literature and linguistics - but there is something a bit pretentious about the whole thing. And I do struggle to like her characters.

139. The Wedding People - Alison Espach. This on the other hand was thoroughly enjoyable. Someone recommended it to me and I was rather sceptical that it was going to be chick lit but it was darker and more entertaining. Phoebe, a lecture in Victorian English has had a terrible covid - her IVF failed, her husband has left her and her car just died. She decides to go to a luxury hotel for a night but when she gets there, discovers a week long wedding is taking place. This was a great bit of light relief.

Biscuits of solace are always a good idea @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie. Sorry to hear about your upsetting day.

Chucks everybody some shortbread. I’m fine, honestly. I was cross, but I’m over it. I might take Miss Pettigrew to bed with the rest of the shortbread.

Sorry you’ve had a crap day Remus. Miss Pettigrew will definitely help!

Latest reads:

Beautiful Ugly - Alice Feeney

This started well, with a man struggling with life going to spend time on what turns out to be a very strange island. However the last 25% or so, as things are revealed, is not good. I can’t really explain why without spoilers but I was very disappointed with the explanations of events and the ultimate ending.

The Bookbinder’s Secret - A. D. Bell

A female bookbinder in the early 1900s discovers letters hidden in books and ends up on a quest to try and track them all down to piece together the story told in the letters. I liked the story and the technical details about bookbinding were interesting.

Our Beautiful Mess - Adele Parks

Connie is thrown when her daughter brings her boyfriend home and he looks exactly like someone Connie had an affair with several years ago. This relied too much on unlikely coincidences to be plausible.

The Final Vow - M.W. Craven

The most recent in the Washington Poe/Tilly Bradshaw crime series. I’ve really enjoyed these, especially the friendship between the two main characters, and I’m looking forward to the new one next year.

25 Library Terrace - Natalie Fergie

This is the story of several generations of a family (and various servants/lodgers) living in the same house in Edinburgh over a period of around 100 years. I liked this although some storylines didn’t go anywhere (it mentions an early character being interested in the suffragette movement but then she doesn’t do anything about it) which was a bit annoying.

Flappers and Philosophers - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Collection of short stories. As with most short story collections I really enjoyed some while others were just OK. When he’s on form though he’s really good!

Edwardian Childhoods - Thea Thompson

Someone on this thread read this earlier in the year and I can’t remember who now, but thank you to whoever it was as this was really interesting! Nine people interviewed in the 1970s tell us about their childhoods in the early 1900s. There’s a range of social classes included so you hear about a very poor boy with lots of siblings and a rich only child. It’s all told in their own words. Fascinating stuff if you’re interested in social history.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie sorry to hear it’s been a rough day. Hope Miss Pettigrew is doing the trick.

Three weeks till Christmas - so it’s that time again! 📚 🎄 I’m happy to wrangle the Excel spreadsheet and compile some stats for a year end summary of the 50 Bookers’ most loved (and most hated) reads ?

I’ll start the thread at the weekend if so.

@RomanMum you are the hero we need, thank you ❤️

Thank you @RomanMum for volunteering to be Chief Wrangler

@ChessieFL 'twas me who read Edwardian Childhoods - glad you liked it. I felt so sad for some of them, but the ones with lovely parents restored my faith in humankind a bit.

Thanks @RomanMum.

More Maeve Binchy
Evening Class and Scarlet Feather tying up loose ends for some of the characters from Quentins and Tara Road
Nights of Rain and Stars bringing together four strangers on a Greek island. Probably the weakest so far.

I like your style @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie, those sound like excellent salves for the soul.

@Stowickthevast interesting review of Katabasis. I can't get over how similar it sounds to Leigh Bardugo's Hell Bent, and given that Kuang's last big book (Yellowface) was about plagiarism, I wonder if there's some weird meta joke around the whole thing that I'm missing.

Thanks, everyone.

instead of Miss P, I opted for watching a 1970s Christmas edition of All Creatures Great and Small. The traveller girl’s sick donkey was saved and Tricky Woo lives to bark another day.

Hope you have a better day today Remus and thanks for the data analysis again Roman Mum

Hope today is better, Remus.

Thank you RomanMum!

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel - ‘It’s hard work’ said the Oxfam shop volunteer when I bought it. 870 pages later I can’t really add much to this. Paragraph by paragraph it’s witty and readable, but there are a lot of paragraphs. We don’t often witness the main events and I struggled to keep track of who was who and to grasp what was happening - my knowledge of the French Revolution beforehand was minimal, that it started ok but went to shit - and I can’t now tell you a great deal more. I started it with the Footnotes and Tangents online readalong and it was nice to get the weekly emails of background, and I listened to the podcast it recommended (Revolutions) but otherwise I wouldn’t have followed much. I have sometimes felt that other fiction isn’t Hilary Mantel-enough; sadly I think I need to accept that Hilary Mantel is too Hilary Mantel for me.

Pleased you are feeling better @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie& that James Heriot helped (I forgot to mention him when writing about teenage reading).

@Stowickthevast & @noodlezoodle- interesting reading about Katabasis. It has a scarily long waiting list on BorrowBox. I suspect I might pass on it, as I enjoyed Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House (the first one in the series), but don’t feel the need to read something similar (particularly as I suspect I would be irritated by the pretentiousness).

You’re brilliant

@CornishLizard I have A Place Of Greater Safety lurking on my kindle. I had the suspicion that I should probably know more about the French Revolution before I started it, sounds like I was right! (I knew a decent amount about Tudor times pre Wolf Hall)

My latest:

132. Bunny - Mona Awad

A student on a prestigious writing course gets involved with a group of women who all call each other "Bunny", and things start to get weird, to say the least. It's described as a "darkly satirical horror comedy novel". I had heard a lot of positive reviews before reading, but spent quite a lot of it feeling I was not quite smart enough to get WHAT it was satirising and how much of it was real vs drug induced hallucination/ mental illness. On reflection, I think that's the whole point, and I should have just rolled with it more instead of trying to figure it out while reading. It's certainly a wild and original ride with some memorable imagery and an interestingly unreliable narrator. Overall I enjoyed it, but still feel I wasn't quite cool enough to appreciate it fully.

133. No Friend to this House - Natalie Haynes

This is a retelling of Jason's quest to retrieve the golden fleece, seen through Medea's eyes. It rattled along and I certainly enjoyed it, but didn't feel overly invested in the story or the outcome. However Haynes is a great storyteller who makes long and meandering myths very accessible, and I enjoyed the feminist lens.

91. Doctor Serocold - Helen Ashton

Sometimes I make the fatal mistake of visiting the 'Neglected Books' website and immediately fall down a rabbit-hole of obscure titles. So it was with this 1930 novel by a prolific writer who's had one book republished by Persephone (Bricks and Mortar, about an architect) but who was herself a doctor, and wrote several novels with medical themes.

The premise here - one day in the life of a slightly crusty, but fundamentally good-hearted 65-year-old widowed country doctor - is simple but brilliantly carried out. Most of it is conveyed by the free-ranging thoughts in his head as he moves through his day, with worries about his own health hanging over him. As this is very much pre-NHS, there are rich patients he hates having to endure, and poor ones he likes (a lot of the medical language is characteristic of the period, understandably enough, as is the often-dismissive attitude to lower-class women - messy, 'slatternly' housekeepers from 'bad stock'). I liked the fact that he has a young woman assistant who’s presented as ultra-capable and rides around on a motorbike, swathed in leathers, but ultimately the wonder of this book is how amazingly believable it is - Ashton creates an utterly convincing country village and a set of characters who live there. A properly immersive read.