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.

@bibliomania I love a bit of Reacher.
I have a confession. I know this thread covers highbrow and lowbrow but I was surprised at how many people were reading Dostoyevsky and I've just realised that they aren't!

This thread moves so fast!
Just finished:
Book 5. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger. I enjoyed this, though it's not my usual thing at all. It's a family drama (which is very much my thing) about the aftermath of a car accident they are in and the role AI played in the accident, and plays in their lives more generally (this is not my thing!). I skimread a few of the musings on the ethics of AI, but overall I found it interesting, readable and neat.

👀

@NotWavingButReading Elif Batuman did thank Dostoevsky in her notes so you were right to see the connection

Re Louis Sachar, one of his I found fascinating is The Cardturner which is a delightfully weird YA about bridge tournaments, elderly relatives and romance. Sachar has the unenviable task of explaining the rules of bridge during the novel, which he does thoroughly and (to me) entertainingly. I think it's my favourite of his after Holes, partly because it's just so out there as a topic for a children's book.

Thanks to people on these threads talking about them so much, I've bought the first two Chalet School books to try.

@Terpsichore I've followed The Salt Path thread on and off - it's also the reason I read The Parallel Path recently.

@NotWavingButReading, there are times when only Reacher will do!

@bibliomania and other Reacher fans- David Baldacci has a copycat type series- possibly the Will Robie books. Not as good as Reacher but might do in a pinch!

8 The River is Waiting by Wally Lamb
This one is hard to review without spoilers. The book opens with a horrific event and looks at its impact on our first person narrator Corby which mostly focuses on his time in prison. I found it hard to empathise with Corby because of (a) the horrific event and (b) he’s a knob. Overall, I found it emotionally manipulative- the author’s purpose is to try and make you cry. Think A Little Life crossed with The Shawshank Redemption but written by someone crap. I suspect that some readers could love it though and I may well be in a minority.

Edited to add a DNF- Isola by Allegra Goodman on audio. Historical fiction that brought nothing new to the table apart from a bit too much Godliness for my tastes with a very irritating audio narrator. Having seen that @EineReiseDurchDieZeit didn’t rate it on the RWYO thread makes me glad that I didn’t bother finishing it.

I’ve read that British Library egg one but can’t remember a thing about it

thanks @noodlezoodle but I’m not fancying any rereads at the moment I don’t think

I’ve gone too hard too fast this year and now I’ve burnt out. I’m trying to read Witchcraft For Wayward Girls and Shuggie Bain but I’m failing to muster any enthusiasm for either!

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I have the same tendency to charge ahead and then crash and burn. I’m purposely trying to read a few long ones to slow me down (but they tend to be quite heavy in themes so I filter in a few fast-paced shorties and so the problem begins again!) No harm in soft DNFing and going back another time- I did that with Cecily by Annie Garthwaite last year and really enjoyed it second time around. It just wasn’t right for me at the first time I picked it up.

I’d recommend DNF Witchcraft if it’s not grabbed you. The first half is vastly superior to the second imo.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie 50 pages in and no desire to go back in unfortunately

3) The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits

I thought this was astonishly good - then I read the reviews and discovered it was shortlisted for last year's Booker. So I guess many of you have read it already.

It concerns Tom, a university law professor, who wife had an affair many years ago. He decided to stay until the children left home. Now his daughter is off to university. He drops her off and, instead of going home, starts driving - from Pittsburg to California.

He has work and health problems too and has awkward relationships with his children. He barely knows his brother and has some old friends he wants to catch up with.

So we join him on his journey, which involves pitching up to see these people.

It is very much an empty nest book, but from the point of view of the dad. But also an American road trip novel.

I will definitely try to read his other work.

10 Step Aside, Pops by Kate Beaton

This graphic novel is a collection of comics from the ‘Hark! A Vagrant’ website. There’s a mix of subjects, with a heavy slant towards feminism, history and literature. I liked the history comics in particular and there were definitely some that were amusing. The US focus did mean that there were some things I didn’t get, but overall I kinda liked it.

I Shop Therefore I Am by Mary Portas

Slight but heartfelt and entertaining canter through Mary Portas’ youth and years working in visual marketing at Harvey Nichols. A great read for anyone young at that time (basically the 90s). She makes it sound incredibly long ago. Anyone who’s read In The Mink will suffer Déjà vu.

Well, unless you like witchcraft mumbo jumbo that goes on forever, definitely kill it. I thought the descriptions of the girls and the centre, before the magic began, were brilliant though.

Two DNFs both library ebooks
The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie . Couldn't stand the style. The entire book is a series of letters. Lovely film though.
Munich Wolf by Rory Clements. Crime novel set in 1930s Germany. I quite liked the writing but it was a bit too full of famous characters who were just name dropped and too much detail about street names. Perhaps I was in a bad mood as I have a permanent headache ATM.

Still focusing on RWYO books and just finished my number 6 for the year People Person - Candice Carty-Williams which has been on my kindle a while.

I think I bought this because I had liked Queenie. This one was ok, I found it readable enough but any time I put it down I found I didn’t have any particular urge to go back to it. I enjoyed the characters and their interactions, I just don’t think they were best served by the sort of ‘caper’ plot line which brought them together and was ultimately silly and unsatisfying. The family story was more interesting and I’d have liked to have read it on its own merit.

I read The Rest of Our Lives last year @Arran2024 and enjoyed it, though I was surprised it made the Booker shortlist. I've also read Christmas in Austin, which I also really liked - the adult children come home for Christmas; it's a gentle, but perceptive, family saga. (I'm a sucker for a family gather in a small space for an intense few days read though.) There are other books about the same characters which you've remind me to put on my library list!!

I bought Christmas in Austin when it was 99p thinking it would be a good festive read, then totally failed to get round to it over actual Christmas, so it’s still queued up tbr. But I very much share your love of family-gathering novels, @thedoofus, especially American ones for some reason. Probably an extension of my passion for any old B&W American film with a family setting.

6.Shattered by Hanif Kureishi. Kureishi is spending Christmas in his partner’s home city of Rome. A fall on Boxing Day leaves him with a spinal injury so significant that he cannot hold a pen, let alone mobilise independently. This memoir, dictated to family and friends, is his account of the year that followed his accident.

This was terrific. Kureishi reflects on his new life as a disabled person and how he’d never previously considered what life must be like for this huge group of people. He also wonders if he would have been able to care as devotedly for one of his family as they do for him if the tables were turned, and worries that he wouldn’t. There is considerable caustic humour preventing this from being mawkish, and Kureishi evidences how much his life has changed with lots of bohemian, glamorous and sexy anecdotes from his past. Although I take issue with what he calls his Amsterdam Orgy anecdote - surely a threesome where one party gets cold feet and just watches is merely A Shag?. At times the rock and roll stories verge on being a bit self satisfied, but they're usually punctuated self-deprecatingly with someone in the present turning up to give him an enema.

@Welshwabbit I liked your review of 4 Bramble Fox by Kathrin Tordasi
You said your son enjoyed it. How old is he? I'm thinking of it for my nephew and wondering what age range you think it would be good for, roughly.

3 The Chalk Pit by Elly Griffiths

Loved my next installment in the Ruth Galloway series, I'm as interested in the lives of the recurring characters as I am interested the crime.

Homeless people are going missing and being murdered, interesting and very telling that it's only when an attractive, middle class mother of 4 also goes missing that the investigation is ramped up.

I was surprised it was up for the Booker tbh - I hadn't seen that coming. Surely much less "literary" than their usual picks. I loved it but wouldn't have put it in the Booker category either.