50 Books Challenge 2026 Part One

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the first thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2026, 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 and maybe authors as well of books you've read or going to read? It makes it much easier to keep track, especially when the threads move quickly at this time of the year.

Yes mostly Eine. I gave it 4.25 on Storygraph- the mystery, then the ‘feminist’ part was a good enough story to earn a good score and keep me engaged. I’m hoping it’s propelled me out of the slump!

@ÚlldemoShúl The piety side of things is more a sign of both the times and Anne Brontë’s upbringing with a reverend father. IIRC they were Calvinist leaning

Damn this thread. I've bought Nightwatching and Natural Beauty and my TBR is already over 40 and I try to keep below that.

Bought, thank you.

RWYO is going great, as you can see.

#SorryNotSorry

1. Hungry - Grace Dent was okish but a lot more about her family than about her work as a critic. I had been hoping for more about restaurants she reviewed and interesting bits of chef x did…. etc but had i read the blurb first would have realised it was more about her family.

1. A deadly affair - Agatha Christie short stories, a lot of which I have read in other collections, but some new ones. Typical Christie but I enjoy her stories

The Mash-up - Linda Grant a short story from the reader i married him collection, but a separate book on BorrowBox. Funny story about a jinxed wedding, would definitely look for something else of Linda’s to read. Not yet though as I have several hundred books at home to read

3.Bournville by Jonathan Coe. Mary is eleven on VE Day in 1945. We follow her and her family through snapshots at times of other major milestones in British history, including Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, the England men’s football World Cup win, Charles and Diana’s wedding, and the Covid 19 pandemic.

It’s state of the nation stuff, but on a small and personal scale, as Coe considers how family relationships are shaped by wider events, and a key theme is the struggle between prejudice and progress. As events move forward in time Mary’s children and grandchildren become the main focus of the plot. The sibling relationships are beautifully portrayed, especially those where it seems all you have in common is an accident of birth. I enjoyed this very much.

5 The Lost Bookshop - Evie Woods
My 5 year old chose this for me when DH got her to choose me a birthday present, she wanted to get me a book and she liked the look of this one because it had what she thought was a dolls house on the cover and she also has a book about a dolls house.

Otherwise I doubt I’d have picked it up and it would likely have been a DNF. It made DD very happy to see me reading it and do you know what? It’s not a great book but I actually quite enjoyed the story in the end - whilst forcing myself to overlook some clunky bits.

I enjoyed the lost bookshop @AliasGrape but I don’t know why. It felt like the author didn’t know how to end it but I was there for the ride.

I wanted something quick and easy, and that’s what I got with Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa. It passed the time, but I found the main character annoying, and the story lacked depth.

I decided to read Stephen King next, and knew I had bought a kindle book containing three Bachman books. Couldn’t find it on my kindle so went to Amazon and had to request delivery - not had that before, and it’s made me wonder how many books I’ve bought that haven’t actually been delivered 🤔

3: The Glassmaker
By Tracy Chevalier

This book skips through time from 1486 to the present day, following the fortunes of Orsola Rosso and her family, glassmakers on the Venetian island of Murano. Orsola wants to avoid becoming the kind of ‘spare woman’ who gets sent to a nunnery - she learns how to make beads because the men don’t care about them. She can safely make them and build a business without threatening the men’s work/feelings.

The same characters are moved through history experiencing ‘dog years’ of time ‘in the Venetian style’ where a hundred years can go by in the world on terra firma as Orsola works on a bead in her workshop. The author describes how people who make things ‘enter an absorbed state… in which hours pass without their noticing.’

In this play of time we see the value of Orsola’s beads shift up and down with events. Sometimes they are a lifeline, sometimes they are rendered worthless.

This book is clever and so well written. This is the first time I have read anything by Tracy Chevalier and I am really looking forward to reading some more of her work - yes I have somehow managed not to read ’The Girl With The Pearl Earring’!

Yeah the ending was rushed and unsatisfactory- in both timelines to be honest.

I preferred Opaline’s story, she felt like the main character. Didn’t like Martha much and failed to see the point of Henry at all - the academic researcher who had apparently built a career from this yet needed a woman who had never read a book before to google the name of the person he’d been searching for for years? Like that had never occurred to him - what had he been doing??

And Martha having an entire full back tattoo that her violent, jealous husband who stalked her everywhere somehow never found out about - he never saw her back?

It was silly, but I agree I was along for the ride all the same!

That is very sweet @AliasGrape that your DD chose you a book and liked seeing you read it ❤️

A couple with local interest:

2 The Forgotten Forest - Robert Vennell
Beautifully illustrated short book taking you on an imaginary journey through a New Zealand forest, focussing on the diminutive and forgotten wonders: mushrooms, mosses, lichens and slime moulds (which are something like a big maze-solving amoeba, but look like a pile of dog sick).

3 Did I Ever Tell You This? - Sam Neill
Good bits: I could listen to Sam’s lovely voice all day long. He also grew up partly in the city where I live, so there were plenty of references to places I know well.

Not so good: the endless endless name-dropping. This devolves into a ‘list of actresses I have worked with’ at one point. Then there’ll be a bit where he buys yet another field to grow wine in. But don’t worry, his field is almost certainly next to someone famous’s field.

Evidence of the Affair - Taylor Jenkins Reid

Short story/novella (88 pages) borrowed on Prime. Starts with a letter from Carrie to David regarding letter she has discovered from David's wife Janet to her husband Ken. The whole thing is an exchange of letters between David and Carrie, including the discovered notes between their adulterous spouses. Perfectly fine, I will have forgotten it in a day or two.

@AliasGrape I read The Lost Bookshop as it was in our local 'little free library' and I found it good hearted and undemanding.

Novel About My Wife - Emily Perkins

Tom is a screenwriter whose wife, Ann, believes she is being stalked by an ominous man who nobody else seems to see. Ann is pregnant and seems to be struggling mentally... Or is the house haunted as Ann's odd new friend believes?

Tom, meanwhile, can't find work, but can't admit this embarrassing fact to anyone. He's also trying to work out what happened on a fated trip they made at the time of their marriage.

Tom's narration reveals a lot about himself, the marriage and Ann's past - more than he ever seems to realise. It's cleverly done and the title becomes more ironic as the book progresses. I found it tense, compelling, and unsettling, however without being more specific and giving spoilers, ultimately it left me slightly unsatisfied.

MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service - Gordon Corera

I am working my way through books I picked up and put down in late 2025

This is a history of M16 up to c2012 (when the book was published) by a security journalist and host of 'The Rest is Classified' podcast. Some chapters, such as the Philby unmasking and the subsequent molehunt, covered familiar ground (for me) but the last section, which dealt with the twists leading to the 'dodgy dossier' and the suicide of Dr David Kelly, were less familiar and very interesting. As per most books written by journalists who are experts, this was well-written, informative and engaging.

Some good kindle daily deals today, The Correspondent is 99p and Chris McCausland’s autobiography is £1.99 and Atomic Habits is also £1.99.

@TeamToeBeans I’ve just finished Days at the Morisaki Bookshop too and agree that it lacked depth. It wasn’t the book I was expecting it to be.

I’ve also finished The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths. Looking forward to reading more in this series.

4 Live, Fight, Survive by Shaun Pinner. It starts with an introduction of his life until he went to Ukraine as an instructor, married his wife, bought a house in Mariupol and joined the Ukrainian marines. It then moves to fighting in Dnipro in 2019 , making friends and building a life. Then the attack on Mariupol from January to April on the front line , losing friends and comrades trying to break out to make it back to Ukrainian lines. Being captured, tortured, the show trial sentenced to death and out of the blue being released.
it was heart breaking and well worth a read.

@AliasGrape I read The Lost Bookshop last year an marked it as one of my duds. Lovely present from your DD though, that sort of behaviour is to be encouraged,

@Purrpurrpurr I reviewed The Glassmaker further up this thread, I quite enjoyed it but couldn't get on with the immortality. I liked the characters though, I just found it distracting and unnecessary. I was disappointed though as I loved the other Tracey Chevalier I've read. A Single Thread was my favourite.

I finally made it through Lincoln in The Bardo for my #6.
I mentioned up the thread I was struggling with it, and I know some of you love it. I did finish it. I can appreciate it as very clever, lovely writing, but (to me) virtually incomprehensible. I wasn't sure what was going on a lot of the time. I would be just getting into a passage and thinking "Ah, ok I understand where we are going" and then we would be back to chaos without warning. Maybe I wasn't in the right headspace for it. It would work as a stage play quite well I think, I might go and see that.

@SilverShadowNight Thank you for that. The Correspondent is on my Wish list

Mine too! Thank you for the heads up @SilverShadowNight

Me three @SilverShadowNight - I've just investigated and put it on my audio wish list rather than Kindle.