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

Bad influence!

I try! 😂

I’m bookless again and can’t find anything that’s tempting me. This is Very Bad News both for myself and for DP.

I’m so sorry @PermanentTemporary

You never like my suggestions so I’m no good to you. I did try and persuade you to try a Maeve Binchy ages ago and you were put off by the cover!

Oh I’m horrible, I know. For some reason, MB makes me exhausted just hearing her name. Ignore me. I don’t deserve any recommendations!

In my defence though, I’ve just googled and the covers are truly bloody awful.😂

They are! They really don’t suit the books. They are too heavily marketed as “Fiction For Ladies” when they are just good books and shouldn’t have twee covers

@PermanentTemporary I am very sorry to hear that. I'm glad you could escape into a book for a while; I hope you can find more to read that is comforting / enioyable.

@PermanentTemporary

I can't seem to find the flowers emotion but anyway wishing you books to comfort you at this time.

Sending you all my support from afar @PermanentTemporary ❤️

Dear @PermanentTemporary I'm so sorry for your loss 💐 Mind yourself.

So sorry @PermanentTemporary . Take care of yourself 💐

I'm so sorry @PermanentTemporary . I hope your reading offers you brief solace from all the things that go along with the death of someone close

I love a Maeve Binchey though there are a couple of duds. No idea what the covers are like because mine are all Kindles. I'm reading a Prime reading loan at the moment called Hitler's Secret by Rory Clements. I'm really enjoying it if you like a fast paced spy thriller set in WWII Germany rather than a gentle witty Irish saga?
@PermanentTemporary sorry for your loss.

Thanks @NotWavingButReading I’ve read a few by Rory C, but the last one I tried (a WW2 one but can’t remember which) was poor enough to put me right off him. Any other historical crime recs always potentially useful though.

@PermanentTemporary sorry for your loss. My dad died 10 months ago and I found that reading was a real help xx

@PermanentTemporary - very sorry to hear about your mother. Reading was a real comfort to me (in amongst all the death admin) when mine died.

I’m so sorry for your loss @PermanentTemporary 💐

So sorry for your loss @PermanentTemporary 💐💐

I think it was me. I got very nervous when you started reading it, in case I'd jinxed your return to reading. Glad you enjoyed it! (and that poor Merritt grew on you once she stopped being so hideous)

Sorry about your mum @PermanentTemporary

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie did you ever try the historic queer vampire one I recommended? Bury Your Bones in The Midnight Soil - it's quite enjoyable.

8. The Melancholy of Resistance - Laszlo Krasznahorkai. This is a book for people who hate paragraphs and like sentences that go on for three days. It doesn't specify when it's set by the consensus is that it's just after the fall of communism in Hungary. Civil order is breaking down, the streets are covered in rubbish and it is very cold but won't snow. In the middle of this, a circus comes to town with the body of a whale as it's main spectacle. Along with the circus come a group of n'eer do wells who follow it around. The main characters are Mrs Eszter who sees this as an opportunity to seize power, Mr Eszter her estranged husband who is obsessed with a strange rewriting if musical scales - around a 10 page treatise on this which mainly went over my head - and Valuska, the village idiot. It's all quite intense, claustrophobic and depressing. There's also a 5 page section about someone hammering boards into a window. I don't think I'll be looking out for more books by him, though he is quite a typical Nobel prize winner I'd say. Interested to know how you'll book club will find it @ÚlldemoShúl. I read it as part of an online book club and it was a DNF for quite a few, though some also loved it.

@PermanentTemporaryso sorry to hear this.

Closed Casket by Sophie Hannah - I felt this was better than the first book in the series, but still doesn’t quite catch the essence of Poirot and the plot was rather convoluted. Will give another in the series a try though.

@PermanentTemporary – I’m so sorry 💐

23 The Mourning Necklace – Kate Foster. This is Kate Foster’s third book, set in 1720s Scotland. It’s the retelling of ‘Half Hangit Maggie’, Maggie Dickson, a Musselburgh fishwife, who was hanged for concealing a pregnancy. She survived the hanging and came to in her coffin, en route to the cemetery. For those of you who know Edinburgh, there is a pub in the Grassmarket named after her. I enjoyed this. So awful to think that in both Scotland and England (Foster doesn’t mention Wales or NI) that concealment of a pregnancy was punishable by death if the baby died.

@Stowickthevast
I would probably be interested in the title The Melancholy of Resistance and the setting in Hungary, but I don't find unbroken paragraphs and endless sentences easy to deal with. I don't mind so much speech without punctuation masks, but I do need the kind of pauses offered by full stops and paragraphing.

I forgot another library book!

24 Dolphin Junction - Mick Herron. Collection of short stories, which feature Zoe Boehm and Jackson Lamb, amongst others. Enjoyable, twisty turny stuff. I might give the Zoe Boehm series another go.