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

1 - Free Speech and Why it Matters - Andrew Doyle (finished)
2 - Charles - Catherine Mayer (finished)
3 - A Little Lie - Hanya Yanigahara (ongoing)
4 - Only Here, Only Now - Tom Newlands (ongoing)
5 - The Happiness of Dogs - Mark Rowlands (Next up!)
6 - The Young Team - Graeme Armstrong
7 - Intermezzo - Sally Rooney
8 - Now We Shall be Entirely Free - Andrew Miller
9 - Hame - Annaleena McFee

My list of books. I do like a biography and a bit of contemporary culture but with a heavy focus on Scottish books.

I also wasn’t a WH fan when I read it. I thought I was missing something but I think it just wasn’t for me

Thanks @EineReiseDurchDieZeit will check that podcast out

On The Proof of My Innocence, I always enjoy Jonathan Coe, but didn't feel that his usual state of the nation material blended well with the murder mystery.

10.The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. In postwar Suffolk, widow Florence Green acquires a damp and neglected old property, and opens a bookshop there, despite the strong opposition of others in the town, some of whom have designs on that property themselves.

The petty squabbles of small-minded people in small towns is brilliantly and often comically evoked. The novel is very short, so there’s not a whole lot of plot, but the characters are instantly recognisable. I was really moved by a subplot in which Florence’s schoolgirl helper Christine fails her eleven plus and sees her future, including the possibility of marriage to a nice white collar chap, go up in smoke. There’s a slightly daft bit about a poltergeist that didn’t add much but otherwise this was excellent.

11.Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë. Agnes is the daughter of church minister who loses all of his money in a business venture that goes wrong. To help the family finances Anne decides that she must earn a living, and take up employment as a governess. Her first position with the Bloomfields is a disaster. The children are feral, but their lack of progress is blamed on Anne, and she is dismissed. A second position with the Murrays is slightly more successful, and the curate in the village is very earnest and kind indeed.

I picked this up after enjoying The Tenant of Wildfell Hall last year. This isn’t as good as that, but then not much is! It’s a relatively classic autobiographical coming of age novel with an Austen style ending. The most entertaining parts were Anne’s battles with the awful Bloomfield children. Anne isn’t an obvious heroine, and her attempts to educate her charges spill over into pious moralising at times, but this was still a very engaging story and I loved the soppy ending.

The Oresteia - Aeschylus, trans. Oliver Taplin

I am seeing an 8 hour immersive adaptation of this at the weekend so I wanted to get the story straight first! I'm not sure if much of it will feature but I feel prepared now 💪

I knew the story of the first play pretty well: Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War and is murdered by his wife (who funnily enough didn't seem to have forgiven him for sacrificing their daughter to get a fair wind for the army's ships).

However I was surprised how many good speeches there are for Clytemnestra and Cassandra. Overall there's unsurprisingly loads of systemic misogyny going on but the female characters at least are interesting and have plenty to say.

The other plays deal with Clytemnestra's son Orestes taking revenge on her, and then a trial to see if he should be punished for matricide. I enjoyed it, except I never quite can get my head around Greek Choruses. I feel they're quite unnatural to a modern audience and I've not liked many of their bits in stage portrayals.

However I like the Gods meddling in the lives of humans and the other powers at play here: Fates and Erinyes.

I can't compare to other translations but this one by Oliver Taplin did seem clear and accessible.

Have dropped off with my reviews owing to stressful times at work and personally

Have continued to read my way through it and caned through the rest of the Maeve Kerrigan books (an excellent distraction) plus a couple of other reads.

7 Night Flight - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Finally got to the top of my TBR pile - having bought it at last year’s 50 Bookers London meet-up! This is a beautifully written novella concerning one night over South America in the late 1920s/early 30s, where three mail pilots are delivering post overnight, but there’s a storm brewing… Particularly poignant given Saint-Exupéry’s own death after his plane disappeared in 1944.

Hope you’re OK? @SheilaFentiman

Hope all okay soon @SheilaFentiman

Sorry to hear you're having a tough time @SheilaFentiman

Hope things are improving.

Hope things improve soon @SheilaFentiman

Sorry to hear things are tough @SheilaFentiman , hope reading is providing some escape 💐

I enjoyed the first episode, very insightful and entertaining. Looks like it could be really good given some of the books they said they would be discussing in future episodes.

Sympathies, @SheilaFentiman and glad that Our Maeve could provide you with some distraction.

9) 33 Place Brugmann by Alice Austen
Very much a bold for me, this is a novel about the inhabitants of an apartment building in Brussels just before and during WW2.

At first I thought it was going to be fomulaic - we are introduced to the various inhabitants, some of whom, like the rich Jewish family, you expect to come to a gruesome end at the hands of the Germans.

But it is much cleverer in the way it tracks everyone's fortunes. It only goes up to 1942 so we are left wondering how they would all be faring by the end of the war.

Would recommend- reviews are generally good too.

@SheilaFentiman 🌺 glad you have found some escape in some books

Mind yourself, @SheilaFentiman 🌸
I hope things get easier soon.

Yes @ReginaChase every book mentioned I’ve read, looking forward to it

@SheilaFentiman hope the books are helping provide a buffer against real life while it insists on being crap.

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

I found this very messy. It jumps around and sometimes we're on the current timeline and sometimes we're in the recent past and sometimes I couldn't work out where we were.

He tells us constantly what the book is or isn't about. Is it about a bank robber? Or the lies we tell ourselves? Or maybe it's just about idiots. I stopped caring. I persevered because I really enjoyed A Man Called Ove and Beartown but this is not nearly as good.

I don't know if I've ever read the whole Orestia @Frannyisreading but I've seen bits here and there and studied some in Greek. I think Elektra is the third one and the one that seems the most popular to perform, though I always find her rather annoying ( see also Antigone) I saw an appalling version with Brie Larson last year, like a bad GCSE drama production. I hope yours goes better!

Hope you're ok @SheilaFentiman . Maeve is the perfect comfort read.

@SheilaFentiman, hope the universe gives you a break very soon.

@Stowickthevast, well I just had a google as I was not sure myself. But seems like Elektra is pretty much the plot of the second part of the Oresteia, but from a different character viewpoint, written by Sophocles instead of Aeschylus. But then I found there's a version by Euripedes too!

I'd love to be knowledgeable about Greek drama but it does seem complex at times. I'm impressed you read parts in Greek. I feel like that's the only way to really judge a translation, but alas, I know zero Greek and doubt I will learn at this point.

8) Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite - According to family lore the Falodun women have been living under a curse for multiple generations. Doomed to never have a success in love, their matrilineal line is haunted with tales of heartbreak and abandonment.

Eniiyi, the youngest of the family, has an additional hardship to bear. She's the spitting image of her dead aunt, Monife, and feels smothered by her family's belief that she's a reincarnation. As a result she's shied away from relationships to date, but when she rescues a handsome stranger from drowning it's time for her to find out if she can beat the curse.

This was a definite bold for me. The story is told from 3 different perspectives - Eniiye, Monife, and Eniiye's mother, Ebun. I particularly enjoyed Monife's chapters, and felt devastated for her at times. While my description above probably makes it sound like a light romance read, it's really not. There are some difficult subject matters in this book, such as suicide, abortion, depression, and loss.

5 stars. I can already see myself rereading this.

Sending best wishes @SheilaFentiman - I hope things turn a corner soon .
I just noticed in my earlier review I have inverted Anne and Agnes. This is partly extremely tiredness, and partly due to this being such a thinly veiled autobiography, happy ending aside! Anyway, I'm sure it's obvious enough.

@Frannyisreading ah yes I think I was getting mixed up with Sophocles. Most of the Greek playwrights wrote versions of the same stories so it's easy to get them mixed up. Except Aristophanes who is doing his own bonkers stuff.

My Greek reading was in school/uni days so a distant memory now, it is something I think I may try and revisit when I'm retired to keep my mind sharp. Though Latin is far easier!

15. The Antidote - Karen Russell. This was shortlisted for the National Book Awards and I thought it may be one for the woman's prize but I think it was published too early. It's set in 1935 Nebraska dust bowl and starts with the tornado of Black Sunday. But this is a magic realism tale. One of the main characters is the Antidote, a prairie witch who people tell their memories that they want to get rid of to, and she stores them in her vault until they want them back. There's also a Polish farmer whose land seems to be growing when no-one else's is, a photographer with a quantum camera that takes pictures of the past and future, and a teenage basketball player. The point of all this ends up being about lost Native American land, and the suppression of memory. There are a lot of sub-plots going on, definitely a bit of a nod to the wizard of Oz, and various other themes which sometimes make it feel a bit bloated but in the end I really liked this, and may well end up as a bold.