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.

1. Holes by Louis Sachar . This was a RWYO. It's a short YA book I had read it when DS2 did it at school, probably 15 years ago, and remembered enjoying it.

Engaging story of coincidence, morality and fate. A boy is wrongly convicted and sent to a youth penalty camp where the boys are made to dig holes in a desert. Historic wrongs are righted and it has a neat way of tying up the ends.

I'm going to have to buy a Ben Macintyre as Rogue Heroes was my favourite thing on TV last year.

Lonely Castle in the Mirror - Mizuki Tsujimura

This was a sweet and whimsical Japanese story about a group of "outsider" children who find themselves in a mysterious castle, ruled over by a little girl wearing a wolf mask, with the challenge of finding a Wishing Key. They visit the castle secretly each day and we slowly learn more about their lives and difficulties with school, bullying, mental health etc. It's a little like a magical realism Breakfast Club for kids (it's not really... but the thought entertained me).

I found it baffling in places - I wondered if they would EVER look for the bloody key!! But overall charming, gentle and intriguing with fun fantasy and fairytale aspects. The relationships between the excluded children are heart warming and I found it an interesting glimpse into the pressures of Japanese childhood and attitudes to education.

@NotWavingButReading Holes is a big favourite of mine! I often expect other books to tie up as impressively as that and am disappointed when they never do. I've enjoyed all his kid and YA stuff, but Louis Sachar published a book for adults this year and it just didn't live up to my expectations 😕

Holes is brilliant. The film is great too.

Your poor DD! Hope no long-lasting effects. I have a friend who did the same while trying to do a stunt on his bike…he was in his 40s though, so it was his wife who had to do everything for him for several weeks 😭😆

7 Blitzed by Norman Ohler
This book looks into the use of drugs by the Nazi regime including by Hitler himself. It’s interesting but a lot seems to be based on conjecture- for example there is evidence in his doctor’s records that Hitler was given opiates on several occasions but the author assumes that every time the doctor records x in the records that this means Hitler has been administered an opiate.
There’s some interesting ideas including how the use of methamphetamine fuelled blitzkrieg but some of the other suggestions don’t really stand up (for example that Hitler’s ill health before his death was due to opiate withdrawal when it’s widely agreed by medical historians that he had Parkinson’s). I started listening to the audio but the narration was terrible so I switched to a library copy and kind of wish I hadn’t bothered.

2 Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf. This is the story of Addie and Louis. They are both retired, have lost their spouse and their children have moved out, so they are rather lonely. They start quietly building a relationship, somewhat to the disapproval of their neighbours (I didn't really understand why. They're both single and it's set in modern America - what's the issue?). This is a calm gentle book. It's okay but nothing amazing.

3 Orbital by Samantha Harvey. This won the Booker prize in 2024 and was popular on last year's thread. It is set in the International Space Station, and follows a day in the life of six astronauts stationed there, with details about their daily routine and their thoughts and feelings, while they orbit earth 16 times in a 24-hour period and see it in the light and dark from different angles. This is an original idea and I enjoyed it very much. Maybe not quite worth a Booker though!

I really enjoyed Holes as well - brilliantly pulled together
4) Remarkably Bright Creatures - Shelby Van Pelt - clever octopus brings 2 people together …solidly written liked not loved
5) Everything Under - Daisy Johnson. Based on the myth of Oedipus, set on the Oxford riverbanks - could not put it down. It tells the story of Gretel and her mother, past & present set out neatly via 3 different points of view, beautiful writing with the story told at pace. Loved it.

@SharpPoet we read Everything Under for my book club a few years ago and were talking last week about how the imagery from the river has really stuck, great book.

@Tarahumara I gave my mum the Kent Haruf book a couple of years ago, and she says everyone at work found the title hilarious - "Arseholes at night!" I guess it sounds different in an American accent!

I can see why Holes appealed to DS1 who likes logic and patterns but not reading....

4 Bramble Fox by Kathrin Tordasi (translated by Cathrin Wirtz)

This children's fantasy was originally written in German - which surprised me, as it is set in North Wales with an impressive knowledge of Welsh language and legends. Portia goes to stay with her aunts in rural Wales. Their house is fantastic and strange - and when Portia finds a key and follows a very unusual fox, she finds herself in between worlds and is eventually led to Faerie. But opening the door also opens a path for the terrifying Grey King. Can Portia, her new friend Ben and her aunt Rose survive and save both Faerie and their own world? This is exactly the sort of book I would have loved as a child, with a healthy dollop of myths and legends, endearing central characters and some more unusual elements, including a lesbian relationship between the aunts, which is casually and sympathetically dealt with. My son liked it very much and I did too.

5 Salem's Lot by Stephen King

I have read The Dark Tower and The Stand but up until now I've steered clear of King's horror books, because I've never really been a fan of being scared. But I thought it was time to grasp the nettle, and I thought my older son might like this because he's a vampire fan, so I gave it a go to encourage him. It's really, really good. What I hadn't realised is how much of the book is spent building the small-town world of Salem's Lot. Because King is such a good writer, it's masterful; a bit like Olive Kitteridge without the literary trappings but just as good at evoking the feel and the atmosphere. I enjoyed this bit more than the vampires, but the vampires were pretty awesome too. My one quibble - and I noticed this much more in this early book than in King's later work - is the lack of proper female characters. It felt particularly jarring here because the clear opportunity properly to develop an interesting woman goes begging about halfway through, and that comes together with plenty of casual misogyny. That did annoy me. Also, the edition I bought has two short stories which were written later tacked on the end and I couldn't (without googling) make out whether they were part of the original or not. I would have preferred it without them. But it says a lot for King's writing and plotting that despite flaws that would really have turned me off in other books, after reading, the characters are still running around in my head, in their doomed town, which was a fully-formed character in itself.

Another fan of Elif Batuman's The Idiot here! I've been meaning to read the sequel for ages.

And Louis Sachar is great. As well as Holes, my DC also enjoyed Someday Angeline and There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom. We also read most of his Wayside School stories (the earlier ones at least). Some of the Wayside School stories were actually a little too dark for me in terms of their humour, but the DC thought they were hilarious.

We also read The Boy Who Lost His Face but the DC liked that one less. Some of his plot lines are downright weird. I do admire the fact that he's so daring in his writing for kids!

4) Coming Clean - Kimberly Rae Miller

The memoir of a New York based writer/actress who grew up with hoarder parents. It wasn’t an easy read in places but an interesting story. It’s inspired me crack on with RWYO to tackle my TBR, not that my pile of books is in any way close to how they lived…

I think that I only realised Either/Or was a sequel when I started reading it and realised that I'd read about this character before. I think the novel is somewhat autobiographical and just hope that not all Batuman's relationships with men before coming out as a lesbian were quite so, errmmmm, challenging. Some of Selin's adventures really made me shudder for her.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie would the Dark is Rising sequence be decent re-read, or have you read it too recently?

Keeping The World Away - Margaret Forster

Begins with the life of the artist Gwen John, her childhood in Tenby, her time at the Slade School of Art and her journey to Paris where she has an affair with the sculptor Rodin. As his desire for her wanes, she paints a picture of a corner of her attic room. She gives the painting to a friend who promptly loses it and the book follows the painting as it is variously lost, sold, stolen, given as a gift to different women over the next century. Each section tells the story of the women through whose hands it passes.

Well, what a miserable, mimsy bunch of drips they were.

I’d read this years ago and thought I’d enjoyed it, I went so far as to recommend it to someone on here last year - I apologise.

Plus Gwen John’s full name is misspelled throughout the book.

'Arseholes at Night' 😆😆

My DD loved 'The Boy Who Lost His Face'. I bought 'Holes' for her, which she didn't read, but I read it and then gave it to my friend's daughter. I thought it was good.

8. Write on Both Sides of the Paper - Mary Kelly

Briliantly tense, twisty, thriller-ish 1969 novel by a writer I fell for after stumbling over one of her books in a green Penguin edition a few years ago. The inevitable happened and I somehow acquired almost all her books, most now out of print.
Kelly had a knack of conjuring up an intensely real sense of place, often in striking settings - other books are set in a pottery and a common-cold research facility - and here the action revolves around a failed burglary in a paper mill - but it’s not really about that; more about the 4 main characters and their interactions.
It's not a book anyone else is likely to read but a bold for me.

There are two of Mary Kelly's books on Kindle, Terpsichore; Due to a Death and The Spoilt Kill. I'll check my library and see if they have any.

The same two Mary Kelly books are in my library, so I'll give them a whirl. I do like a bit of Golden Age crime.

Speaking of "not a book anyone else is likely to read", book 4 for me was *Destination Lapland by Mark Wallington." This is a travel book written in the 1980s. The Lapland part is really just a running joke, as he doesn't get past Newcastle, cycling north from St Alban's over seven weeks. It's not literature for the ages, but I found it oddly soothing to join him on a cycling holiday forty years ago, the year when Andrew married Fergie, the weather was terrible, and communicating with people meant finding an unvandalised phone box.

I've put a hold on the two I mentioned in the library. If they don't come through, I'll get them on Kindle. Thanks @Terpsichore:)

5. The Hard Way, by Lee Child
More manly doings by Jack Reacher. He's innocently sitting in a New York cafe drinking an espresso when he observes someone picking up ransom money, and gets swept up in a kidnapping situation. Rather unusually, part of this is set in Norfolk. Another page-turner. It was published twenty years ago, and Reacher is startled to be told that modern phones can send text messages and emails.

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh @bibliomania those two, and The Christmas Egg, are the Mary Kelly books that are gettable - then it becomes more of a hunt! I don’t think she’s Golden Age exactly - she’s a bit late for that - but I just love the quality of her writing and (as I said) the sense of place. There’s a creeping unease in Due to a Death (the one that got me hooked) that isn’t like anything else I’ve ever read. You don’t quite know what’s going on but you have to keep reading to find out.

(And biblio, I don’t know whether you’ve dipped into the - now epic - Salt Path threads, but Mark Wallington's 500 Mile Walkies is often cited as suspiciously likely to be an, ahem, possible inspiration for the Wynn/Walker oeuvre….)

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh you may have seen that Due to a Death is available on Kindle Unlimited and there is a free trial offer for 3 months on at the moment. I've just signed up to that in order to read it!

That's an excellent idea @Welshwabbit
Smart thinking ;)