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

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie I was going to suggest one of Paul Theroux's books which I read many years ago but I cannot remember the title. I'm sure I enjoyed it though.

I was going through books in my parents’ house the other day and came across some Pete McCarthy and Tony Hawks books which might tick the box@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie. Might be a bit dated now, it’s a long time since I read them.

Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett was another. I remember thinking this was excellent.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupieDH raved about one called Around the World in 80 trains. (He loves a bit of travel writing)

Thanks both. I’ve read a lot of Paul T’s with varying degrees of success (he doesn’t come across as a very nice man sometimes). I’ll get some samples of the others,but I’d prefer contemporary, I think, or proper classics.

Not Cheryl Strayed though. I’ve read everything by Bill Bryson many times, most Palin and most Levison Wood.

This sounds fun. I’ll have a look.

Alastair Moffatt writes some excellent history/travel books about Scotland and Northumbria.

30 The Edge of Darkness – Vaseem Khan – Malabar House 6. Persis is back! She has been sent to Naga Hills as a punishment and so has her poor boss, Roshan Seth. She is staying at the colonial style Victoria Hotel, where the local Governor is found murdered. He was decapitated and there is no sign of his head or the murder weapon. Even more mysterious, his bedroom was locked, Persis had to break in. How did the murderer escape?

This is a great story, set in an area of India I had to look up. Its about as far East as you can get in India, on the border with Myanmar. The local people want independence from India and Nehru’s government don’t think that’s a great idea, given that India only just got independence. Persis is very much seen as a outsider, not just because she is a woman, but because she is from Bombay. I learnt quite a bit from this book. I’d never heard of the Battle of Kohima (1944) which is known as India’s Stalingrad.

As ever, Persis ends up in some scrapes. At this point, you expect nothing less! I really enjoyed this. There were loads of twists and turns and I had no idea who the murderer was or why the Governor was murdered. Very satisfying!

I read Around The World In 80 Trains!

It's not stayed with me, I gave it 4 stars so I liked it well enough. I think it might have been more factual about trains and less about characters she met along the way.

Although I am half planning a euro trip next year which will be city hopping via trains on the way there and then a flight home. So it's obviously lodged away somehow in my brain....

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie I can't personally recommend either of them but apart from Theroux, people speak highly of Eric Newby and Normal Lewis. I have a couple of books by each of them on the shelf, might turn to those myself as part of my 6 months of RWYO.

12 Black and Blue, Anna Quindlen

A police officer's wife flees an abusive marriage to live in anonymous Florida with her young son. They've been smuggled away by a women's network and given new names. As she starts to make connections and form relationships in her new town, "Beth" becomes increasingly blase about the risk of her violent husband finding her.

Like The Names, the most disturbing thing about this believable tale is how mundane the violence is.

13 Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I love Adichie. I love how beautifully and fluently she writes, I love how she observes the things that people say to one another that reveal how they see themselves and others: the interactions between men and women, black and white, African and non-African. She's a master of showing not telling, using these exquisitely imagined (often very funny) interactions to show us who her characters are.

That said, I tend to agree with a verdict that I saw on Goodreads, that Adichie is a great writer but not always a good storyteller. This latest book was enjoyable but felt kind of formless to me. Three wealthy friends drift back and forth from Nigeria to the US (and further afield as their money encourages plentiful travel), meandering in and out of unsatisfying relationships, complaining about their lives while self-consciously recognising their privilege. It was all extremely readable (I do love the way she writes awful men) but I found myself thinking "So what? what's this actually ABOUT?"

Alongside this, Adichie includes a fourth character, closely inspired by Nafissatou Diallo, the woman who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault. I found the imagined part of her life story leading up to the assault to be engaging, and the way Adichie writes about the assault and its aftermath fills you with horror and anger that such a thing could happen and be handled the way it was (I know that the charges against DSK were not upheld, but if it didn't happen to Nafissatou Diallo, then it has surely happened to other vulnerable young women at the hands of powerful men). It's an important topic, to be sure, but I felt unsure of Adichie's right to use this woman's story in her novel, even in a fictionalised form. I didn't like her choice to impose a made-up "happy ending". And it made the travails of her other three pampered protagonists seem all the more lightweight by comparison.

A disappointing read for me, as I count Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah as two of my favourite books of all time.

I’ve realised I’ve read some Newby. I read a few interviews with the train woman and I think she would annoy me, but I’ll give the sample a go. I do tend to prefer my travel writers to be male. Thanks again, everyone.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie Patrick Leigh Fermor?

He writes as an academic rather than a believer. He does think he has solved the mystery but it's quite a left -field solution (no aliens!). Can't guarantee you'd love it - worth trying a sample maybe.

Will do. Thank you.

No aliens though? Dang!

Don’t think I’ve come across him. Thank you.

21 . Killers of the King by Charles Spencer - history book from BorrowBox about the fate of the signatories to Charles I’s execution warrant & how Charles II set out to punish them after the Restoration. I chose it to continue reading about the 17th century, but while it’s a great subject for a book I didn’t find it particularly gripping. The best sections were the ones dealing with characters, who I already knew something about through reading Robert Harris & Elizabeth St John’s historical novels - it’s worth a look if you enjoyed an Act of Oblivion.

@Tarragon123- thanks for the review of the latest Vaseem Khan. That sounds like a return to form & I’m looking forward to reading it (once I’ve done more RWYO)..

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie- re travel I enjoyed Potholes and Pavements by Laura Laker last year, although that was more for the history of how volunteers built the National Cycle Network than her actual travels on the NCN.

@Benvenuto I know you were after non-fic but have you read Rose Tremain's Restoration? There's a sequel too.

It's taken me a while ....

13. The Beautiful and the Damned - F Scott Fitzgerald

God, this was depressing. Anthony Patch is a Harvard graduate and sole heir to his grandfather's fortune but currently lives off an annual allowance. He has no need to work and no drive to do so and spends his time socialising with his friends. He marries the beautiful but demanding Gloria and they embark on a mindless, aimless life together spending more than Anthony's allowance and drinking waaay too much becoming increasingly dissolute and less enamoured with one another. This part of the book went on too long for me but did, I suppose, ram the message home about how directionless and hedonistic they were. Thankfully war intervenes and Anthony goes off to military camp which brightened up the final third of the book for me. No spoilers as to how it ends but it's not happily ever after.....

@VikingNorthUtsire- thanks for the suggestion - it’s a really good one as I read Restoration years ago but didn’t get on with it. I was disappointed as it had sounded like a book that I would enjoy, so it’s probably worth trying again.

*Midnight in Cairo: The Female Stars of Egypt's Roaring ’20s *Raphael Cormack

I have been reading this alongside Palace Walk which is set in the very Cairo streets this book is about. It was a really interesting read and I enjoyed the story of Cairo and Egypt more broadly through the lens of the arts and through the stories of the women who graced the stages of Cairo’s clubs, cafes, casinos and dance halls. The interwar period is one of the areas I am most interested in and I have a niche interest in things like the history of belly dance. A very decent, accessible read .

I was underwhelmed by Restoration after all the love for it on this thread which was a pity as it sounded as if it would tick all my boxes.

7 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
‘Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters.’

A comfort re-read, I started it to find a reading for a funeral but really, no chance. So I just enjoyed it instead. At my age the most charming part of it is the deep and lifelong affection between Jane and Elizabeth. Mr Darcy as ever I find an awkward cardboard cutout of a man who makes no sense as a character, and though Bingley is nicer he doesn’t seem much more real. Instead Mr and Mrs Bennett, Lydia, Charlotte Lucas and Mr Collins live full and real lives.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie I don't know if it quite fits the bill (and it's by a woman) but one of my boldest bolds last year was I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, by Glyniss MacNicol. She is a single woman in NYC and after ages in lockdown she moves to Paris for a year. My review was "What follows is a joyful account of friends, dancing, sex, chilled rose, cycling round a very quiet Paris, hot chocolate, and the most glorious trip to an island off the French coast. She makes some fantastic points about women's place in the world and history, but also writes a brilliant account of having a rollicking good time. A strong bold."

I also admired The Indifferent Stars Above, by Daniel James Brown. I say admired rather than loved because it's a rather grisly account of the Donner Party who followed a wagon trail from the MidWest to California in 1846 and became trapped in the Sierras, but it's very well written.

My latest two:

7. Off the Cliff: How the Making of Thelma & Louise Drove Hollywood to the Edge, by Becky Aikman. Enormous fun, if slightly too earnest in places.

8. The Murder at World's End, by Ross Montgomery. Edwardian locked room mystery set in a country house on an island off the Cornish coast, accessible by causeway when the tide is low. As a sighting of Halley's Comet brings panic across the world, the master of the house is murdered, and a fearsome maiden aunt and the new footman try to solve the mystery before the police. Light, fun, very engaging and very well plotted - I will read the next in the series.

I've read and enjoyed Around the World in 80 Trains but thought that Monisha Rajesh's most recent book, Moonlight Express: Around the World By Night Train, published last year, was better. Since her first two books, Rajesh has married and had kids, and instead of being about one huge trip, Moonlight Express is about various separate trips, and I think there's more attention to the places and people involved.

PLF is the correct answer - everything he wrote is worth reading (there’s even a Mitford book as he was a long-time correspondent with Debo) but start with A Time Of Gifts - in my top 5 books of any genre ever.