50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Two

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the second thread of the 50 Books 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.

The previous thread is

I also remember reading a lot of Paula Danzigger and then jumping onto Danielle Steel. There was definitely a gap for teen readers looking back

Oh yes @RemusLupinsBiggestGroupieStephen King and James Herbert too. Also agree with Rebecca @EineReiseDurchDieZeitThis discussion is bringing it all back. I remember reading a great book about Richard the Lionheart too and a girl who pretended to be a boy to join his army. And the John Jakes North and South inspired by the tv miniseries with a young Patrick Swayze and Kirstie Alley

@MrsALambert Gosh yes, I read all Paula Danzigers! I’d forgotten her. I used to take her recommendations on Going Live as well!

Thanks @Benvenuto I know virtually nothing about them and don’t even know if they’re children’s or adults’ books, not that it matters, so am going in cold. Time will tell!

Definitely children’s books (as I first found them in the school library) - but then I found an omnibus of the first 3 a few years later in the adult library so possibly seen as a cross-over text. Books 4 onwards are possibly a bit older (they are the ones I have still to read).

I think at the time they were regarded as quite ground-breaking as the characters aren’t white. Will be interesting to see what you think.

Re YA books, I think this is an area where a good librarian / bookseller is absolutely invaluable to curate a mixed selection of YA, children & adult books as a bridge to adult books. One of my main memories of teenage reading is running out of books as I would finish an author and then having no idea what to read next as a lot of adult books just looked so boring. It made such a difference the times I came across a decent teenage section which mixed up adult & YA books and let me find authors like Daphne du Maurier that I could enjoy.

I was given a prize in Primary 1 for being one of the top pupils (tbh i was the oldest girl in the class as my birthday is early Sep so it didn't mean I was particularly gifted) and I was given a picture book really aimed at preschoolers, featuring a horrible clown. I was absolutely distraught - my mother took me to the only shop in our small town thst told books and got me a "proper" book, which would have been an Enid Blyton probably.

It was the startbof precociously devouring the books in the library and being utterly bored by what we were reading in school.

My parents didn't read much. They were a bit bemused tbh.

When I got to secondary, the head of English was a big SNP supporter - this was in the 70s. All our reading was Scottish books, with some Irish thrown in. I'm still annoyed I never got to read any of the English classics in a school setting.

So all my reading was really non directed by anyone. I would pick up a Thomas Hardy to read without having any idea who he was or the context.

Even now I have huge gaps.

Agree, I tried and failed twice to finish it

Our younger reading trajectory is probably a good indicator of our ages/contemporaries on the thread!

My younger reading went Enid Blyton, Chalet School etc, moved onto Judy Blume, Agatha Christie, Dick Francis, then Jilly Cooper (girl's names) and then Virginia Andrews, Judith Krantz, Lace etc interspersed with all the school reading list books.

SVH were too late for me.

I was a voracious child reader and then just stopped for a couple of years. There wasn't so much YA around then, or not that I knew of, anyway. Then one day I picked up an adult book and I was off again! There was definitely a gap for me where I'd outgrown kids books and not yet ready for adult fiction.

On a related note, I just read
The Sound of Distant Cheering by K.M.Peyton

I love K.M.Peyton so much but she was very prolific and they're not all of the same level of brilliance. My favourites are her YA series about Ruth Hollis, Patrick Pennington and Jonathan Meredith. I think they're near perfection in the way they get inside the head of teenage girls and boys and tell really exciting stories alongside. She's also fantastic at depicting people's passions, as in hobbies - intense and all consuming - and the unexpected and ill advised places these can lead us.

Anyway, The Sound of Distant Cheering is a gentle romance set in the world of horse racing, and I enjoyed it a lot. It's not her best by any means but often I'd rather read a less great Peyton than a top notch *insert writer of your choice.

I was a big fan of Point Horror as a young teen and a few years ago I started collecting them. Some have stood the test of time better than others!

I inherited a bookcase full of American bestsellers when I was 14. Alongside To Kill A Mockingbird and A Tree Grows In Brooklyn were John Steinbeck, Valley of The Dolls, Once is Not Enough, Peyton Place, all the Arthur Hailey books (Airport, Hotel etc), Roots, Love Story, The Godfather, Judith Krantz and Jaws. I read the lot. Lots of Bond and Agatha Christie too.

When I was a kid, we had library tickets, each a small folder which allowed you to borrow a book per ticket. I used my mum and stepdad's tickets as well as my own, and the library never questioned what I was borrowing - it included Jackie Collins, Chances and Lucky and Shirley Conran's Lace at about 13 or 14, and more literary but very adult books too - Colette, and Another Country by James Baldwin was an accidental read at 14 - I think I thought it was something else - connected to the film of the same name starring Rupert Everett. The copy I borrowed was a hardback with no dust jacket so I had no idea what it was about in advance, and while some of the content was over my head I really loved it.

I was told after reading tests at 12 at middle school that my result was off the scale the first time, and 18 the second time. I don't know if this meant I made more mistakes the second time or if 18 was the top of the scale. I also assume that the test judged ability to answer multiple choice comprehension questions on sentences with long words or complicated structures/ambiguity, but not necessarily to get the subject matter of "grown up" books, especially sex, drugs and violence.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie
I never really got the fuss about A Wizard of Earthsea, but did really like the other books in what was then a trilogy. A 4th novel, then a 5th novel and a story collection came much later I think. I have the later Earthsea books but still haven't got to reading them. I have read some of her other work and even wrote about one of her short stories in my dissertation.

I loved KM Peyton's Flambards trilogy as a young teen. I must have read them a million times.

From what I remember of my teen years, I read a lot of The Chalet School, Agatha Christie, Jean Plaidy, Catherine Cookson and some of the classics. I used to go to the library very often. I remember feeling a bit lost in the adult section when I went there first. There was no YA back then, I don't think.

6.The Betrayal: Helen Dunmore.

This is the second book in a short series, but can be read as a standalone novel.

Leningrad, 1952, Andrei, a young doctor, and Anna, a nursery school teacher, are busy working and rebuilding their lives in this fragile post-war era. They, like their fellow citizens, keep their heads down to avoid the scrutiny of Stalin's Ministry of State Security. However, when Andrei is asked to treat the seriously sick child of a secret police officer, he is fearful of being put in an impossible position that could compromise his credentials as a doctor, his freedom, and even his life.

A friend gave me her copy of this and assured me that it was very good, and she wasn't wrong. The build-up of suspense, the creeping dread and unimaginable fears of people living under a totalitarian regime are powerfully evoked. It's a good read if you are interested in this era.

I loved the Flambards books - I reread them and read #4 in 2024/25. There's also a recent book by another author, published before Peyton's death, featuring some 21st century descendants of the Flambards characters. It's a good read. I also enjoyed some of KM Peyton's other books. In my 20s, I bought my teenage sister one of her later books, Snowfall, as a birthday present. It was a real hit with my sister and her friends but I was disappointed to have no chance of borrowing it to read myself. I finally found my own copy and got to read it just a few years ago! I liked it but read it rather more critically than I would have done in my teens (or probably my 20s!)

I think there were quite a few books published for teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s but I don't know how many of them made it into public and school libraries or got borrowed - in the early 1980s Leeds City Libraries had some big library sales and I still have quite a lot of ex-library books, children's and teen/YA books on the shelves in my/dp's bedroom. And I'm not sure whether they were shelved separately or with children's or adult books.

Penguin had a sort of teen series in the 1960s and early 1970s, Peacock books - some of the books they published were YA even if it didn't have a name, and some like Beverly Cleary's Fifteen seem very innocent now. Others may have been written for adults but were included in the series because they might appeal to teen readers. Some have been reprinted in Puffin Books. I first read a lot of the Anne of Green Gables books in hardback from the library, but some of them were published in Peacock and Puffin editions. I had a lot of secondhand books, and came across others in the library or among my cousin's books (she is 8 years older than me and we (and our mums) had/have quite a bit of crossover in tastes.

From 10 into my teens I was reading a mixture of YA and increasingly books not particularly written for children, at a range of difficulty levels - I think most people first read Agatha Christie quite young, for example. And I'm not sure I really

On The Night Circus, my book club was pretty split - a couple loved it, I was a bit meh, one person violently hated it and gave up at 100 pages.

I read SVH and sneaked Point Horrors into the house (parents strictly evangelical Christian and against that sort of thing), then moved on to my mum’s Jean Plaidy’s and Catherine Cookson’s, and lots of Bernard Cornwall as I’d fallen for Sean Bean/Richard Sharpe in a big way by this point.

Also, Anne of Green Gables and Sherlock Holmes. We had a huge volume of Sherlock Holmes at home (wherever it came from!) and I loved reading it.

I've found a couple of my old teen reads available to read for free on the Internet Archive. I'll report back - currently reading Easy Connections (did anyone else read that? There was a sequel too) which is nostalgic and horrifying in equal measures.

Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad - Daniel Finkelstein

Much read in here and it was wonderful. Absolutely fabulous, clear bold from me. Everything I love in historical non-fiction/memoir with the human impact and stories in the broad sweep of history. Such a beautiful tribute to his parents and wider family who were swept up in the tragedies of the Holocaust.

@elkiedee although I was reading a lot of adult books, Fifteen stands out for me as one of the books I read over and over as a young teen. There wasn’t much aimed directly at that age group. I was too old for SVH and don’t remember reading Judy Blume.

I'm actually quite jealous of the YA fiction that arrived when I was in my late 20s.

As a 14 year old I was allowed to read anything on my mum's bookshelves at home (she had been a librarian before I was born) so I read a lot of Jeffrey Archer but I only finished Kane and Abel out of sheer stubbornness. Was very bored and had no idea what was going.

Looking back it's interesting to me that my television was closely controlled, as a child I wasn't allowed to watch the cartoon of Ghostbusters, and as a teen things like X-Files were banned (until my dad actually watched it!). However any and all books were fair game, which I assume was my mum's influence. She didn't direct my reading in any way, just encouraged me to keep doing it. Although she did refuse to buy me Point Horror or SVH from the shops on the basis that I would read them in three hours flat in one sitting, £5 was very poor value for money! As an adult I completely see her point!

I remember quite enjoying Jeffrey Archer @RazorstormUnicorn although I do remember reading one of his short stories that was a complete rip off of a Road Dahl one. Actually Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected were another one I loved as a teen. I still remember the royal jelly one and the leg of lamb.

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh The Betrayal is a great book. Helen Dunmore is very impressive in how different all her books are, but I think that's one of my favourite.

I think the Dahl story was called Lamb to the Slaughter, we read that in English class and I remember being horrified 😂