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.

I've spent the first weeks of January lurking on the thread and looking up titles to try. There are just too many!

Yesterday I finished The Iliad on Audible. I wanted to 'read' this before starting The Odyssey read-along on another thread. Wow, it really was an epic tale. Thankfully, I didnt buy a physical copy, otherwise I would have given up. While getting confused with all the names and gods, etc., the narration wasnt that great. The woman who narrated it was ok but it could have done with being edited and some pronunciation corrected, which kept me distracted. With close to 20 hours-ish, I am glad it's over.

Before starting The Odyssey, I'm going to need to read some of the chapter notes to ensure I fully understand it all. As I'm now out of Audible credits, I thought I would try Borrowbox. I picked the first Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, and so far, it seems like cosy crime fiction, which is a tad too gentle for me, although I didnt want to risk missing trying his series. I'm 4 chapters in and hoping I can be converted.

Despite Borrowbox being ebooks I found the idea of loaning a title quite strange, rather than many people being able to loan it simultaneously.

@LuckyMauveReader I’m the OP of The Odyssey thread. I’m doing both the Wilson translation as audio and the Rieu in print. The Wilson was very accessible and easy to follow/understand not tried the Rieu yet!

@MamaNewtNewt 💐

I have thought that myself before. In which case, I’d really like to get Stephen King’s entire back catalogue for very little money, please and thank you.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit We have a couple of weeks until the discussion starts, so that I will take a break. I haven't read anything like it before, especially as I attended a normal high school.

To be completely honest, joining these threads is encouraging me to try many different books that I would never have considered or had ever been in my orbit 30 years ago. Im definately making up for lost time.

I have purposely stayed away from the thread to ensure I don't come across any spoilers. I may need a couple of days then to catch up with the conversation.

5 The Ghost Orchid by Jonathan Kellerman
Kellerman writes fast-paced, formulaic thrillers with a main character who (like the author) is a psychologist. This is number 39. It’s pretty much write by numbers at this stage. Two rich people found dead by a pool in Bel Air. As it happened, fast paced formula was exactly what I needed so this fitted the bill nicely.

6 Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz
A book club read. Mahfouz is the only writer in Arabic to have won the Nobel Prize and this is the first part of his magnum opus The Cairo Trilogy. We follow a family living in Cairo during the British occupation in the First World War. The father Al Sayyid Ahmad is a misogynistic hypocritical bully. His wife and daughters live in strict seclusion while he sleeps around and gets drunk, and his three sons react to his bullying in different ways. The writing at the beginning of this is excellent slowly drawing you into the family’s lives. Then it gets a bit flat and slow in the middle with too much focus on the father and his horrible eldest son Yasin who seems to be following in his footsteps. But the last third is wonderful. It’s long and slow and uneven but I’m very glad I read it and definitely intend to read the sequels at some point.

Thinking of you @MamaNewtNewt

• The God of the Woods - Liz Moore

Much reviewed on here, so I won’t say much.The changing date points and narrators were confusing at times, but I enjoyed it.

thanks for the recommendation @VikingNorthUtsire - I'll have a look for Frankisstein.

3 The List - Mick Herron (Slough House novella) - a quick read, pretty good. Read slightly out of sequence as I didn’t know about the novellas until recently, but it worked ok. It gave a bit of background to one of the main characters, although that wasn’t the main point of the story.

Glad to see a mention of Heart the Lover, @GrannieMainland - it was probably my favourite book of last year. (I was part of a bit of a friend/love triangle in my university days - now married to one of the points and the other is one of my four or five best friends in the world; as you can perhaps imagine I over-identified with it all enormously, cried a lot, but also really loved and admired the writing.) It inspired me to re-read Writers and Lovers as well, which I enjoyed much more second time around.

I’m struggling to get into The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner. It had been on my list following it being popular on these threads years ago. I’m about a hundred pages in so far. It’s not that I don’t like it, but it isn’t pulling me in. Worth continuing?

6: The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza
By Lawrence Block

Bernie Rhodenbarr, a bookshop owner and burglar, is the star of this enjoyable crime caper, an easy read with a lot of snappy dialogue.

Set in New York, the author has fun with undermining the traditional hard boiled noir style. ‘I was getting exhausted just reading about him’ says Bernie of Spenser, a ‘terribly physical’ fictional private detective. Bernie hates guns, his henchperson is Carolyn, a lesbian poodle groomer, and he can’t bring himself to rob a dead man, even though: ‘One would think they’d mind it a good deal less than the living’.

A good book to snuggle down with on a rainy day.

A Botanical Daughter - Noah Medlock

This was a bizarre but charming tale of two Victorian gentlemen who create a kind of Frankenstein's creature from the corpse of a troubled young woman and various plant life forms, which they then decide is their daughter. It's quite gruesome in places and weirdly beautiful in others. I had to suspend a lot of disbelief and the characterisation went a bit haywire at times but I mostly thoroughly enjoyed it. It had a refreshing mix of humour, romance, fantasy, gothic horror and fairytale.

I was bought this as a gift and thought it took guts on my friend's part to buy a quite weird and bloody tale about gay victorian taxidermy which includes a moss and fungus steeped sex scene. 😂 But I am glad she did.

Here's my review of Frankisstein from 2020:

This bounces back and forth between a past where Mary Shelley is writing Frankenstein and the present where transgender doctor Ry Shelley is in love with AI specialist Frank Stein and discussing sex bots with Ron Lord. The historic scenes are evocative and touching and the modern scenes are a comic romp. An easy but thought provoking read.

I'd say now that my memory of it is that it's all a bit bonkers but it's packed with ideas. Worth reading but you may hate it.

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami. Translated by Allison Markin Powell

I've read a few of Kawakami's novels but this is her best known work. A woman in her 30s bumps into her old teacher in a bar and they tentatively fall in love. There was a lot of alcohol consumed in this book and I did wonder if we were suppose to think their tentative steps towards intimacy had a cause in their backgrounds but one was never revealed. Gentle and beautiful.

Finally finished my first book of the year!

1 The Umbrella Murder - Ulrik Skotte The titular murder, in September 1978, of Bulgarian dissident Georgy Markov on Waterloo Bridge in London, is a fascinating bit of Cold War history. A tiny pellet which appears to have contained ricin was found in his body, apparently administered by an unknown man who bumped into him on the bridge (possibly using the umbrella the man was holding). I would have loved a Ben Macintyre book about this (as you said upthread @Benvenuto about another book!), but ended up with something different - a Danish journalist's account of his Italian friend's decades-long obsession with someone he suspected of being Markov's killer (and the journalist's own involvement in the story - including thoroughly uninteresting information about his own life and the documentary he made about the book's subject matter). It was ok, but would best suit people who are interested in journalism and the behind-the-scenes aspects of tracking down a story - what I was after was the spy story itself, which was barely there.

Catching up on the thread - hello to new people, and hope you're ok @Owlbookend . I lurk on several longstanding threads (politics, tennis and certain TV shows in particular) and I do enjoy coming across 50 bookers (it helps that they all seem like nice people outside of the 50 books threads!). Impressed with how much people can be involved in other mumsnet threads while also managing to read far more books than me - I can barely keep up with just reading the threads, never mind posting!

My first read of 2025, Malice by Keigo Higashino, which is not a bold for me, unfortunately.

I got a couple of Japanese detective novels for Christmas. Higashino writes "classic detective story-puzzles reminiscent of Agatha Christie and EC Benley" according to the Wall St Journal. This is not his most famous novel but has excellent reviews.

But I was frankly bored. It is written in that faux naive style which a lot of popular Japanese books seem to adopt. The detective was functional, with very little background or characterisation. The story itself was a clever puzzle, but it lacked any drama and the twists were minor.

So, not a bold from me. Let's hope my next one is better.

The Garden of Shared Stories by Clare Swatman

Emma and Nick, both widowed, meet in their favourite place, the local bandstand, and gradually help each other feel better. However the twist is that they’re living 20 years apart and can only meet at the bandstand. This was fine although I found the ending a bit abrupt and the speed of their romance a bit unrealistic.

A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton

I’ve had the full collection of these hanging around for years and have read some (think I got as far as J). I have decided this is the year I will read/reread them all and then they can probably go to the charity shop. This is (obviously) the first in the series, introducing us to California based private investigator Kinsey Milhone. Here she’s looking into who really killed a lawyer instead of his wife who was convicted. The story is fine, but I do like the character of Kinsey. It’s quite dated now (this one was written in 1986) but I quite liked that.

@ChessieFL I love the Kinsey books, have read series through a couple of times now!

@DuPainDuVinDuFromage thank you for not loving The Umbrella Murder as I thought from your opening description that I was going to have to buy it.

The book sounds utterly bizarre, but I do admire your friend’s guts - I’d be delighted if one of my friends bought me something completely off the wall like that 😀

I just finished book 1: The Cut Throat Trial by SJ Fleet (aka the secret barrister).

It's the story of a murder trial of 3 defendants told from different perspectives - D1 and D2, the prosecutor, the judge, and counsel for D3, interspersed with some court documents e.g. witness statements etc. It's compelling reading, piecing together what you can from the evidence that is put before the jury, the evidence that is not put before the jury and then further info you discover after the trial. I would recommend it.

Kicking off the reading year over here...

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie- it's a hard book to describe without giving spoilers. She's an incredible writer- if the point of books is to make you see the world from another point of view then this a hundred percent succeeds. I also really liked Best of Friends last year, and have added A God in Every Stone to my list.

The Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz- Susan Ryeland investigates another literary-related murder. I'm not too into murder mysteries but he's a really clever writer. I liked the other Magpie Murders books and did like this, though had to do some serious suspension of disbelief towards the end.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (audiobook)- this felt like a slow burn to start but by the end I loved it- thanks for everyone who's recommended it on these threads. One of these books where the characters really stay with you, and the audiobook narrator was brilliant. I've had Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe on my kindle for a long time and this has made me think I really need to read it.

Now on to The Wedding People by Alison Espach.