50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Three

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the third 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 first thread of the year is here and the second thread here

A little review catch up for me.

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick
This has been on my wishlist for ages and when it popped up on the WP for non-fiction, I bit the bullet and bought it. And I’m very glad I did. It looks at the series of child abductions in China to feed the popularity of adoptions by people in the west. Which has started out as adoptions of children abandoned due to the one-child policy. Demick does that through a pair of twin sisters, one who was raised by her birth family, the other abducted and adopted out to an American family. Fascinating- a bold for me.

Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly
WP fiction longlist. I didn’t expect to like this one but it was available in my library and the audio was only 6 hours so I thought I’d give it a whirl. And actually it really surprised me. The blurb says it’s a story where a gay man falls in love with a woman. Actually it’s much more than that - an exploration of grief and identity and loneliness too in a way. All of the characters are very flawed including our narrator. Really enjoyed this. Narration on the audio is great too.

On Earth as it is Beneath- Ana Paula Maia
IB longlist- I’m the Longlist Queen right now! This is almost a novella- just over 100 pages long and set in a prison colony in an unnamed South American country. It’s gritty and visceral and violent and reminded me a lot of Tender is the Flesh but with very different themes. In this one it’s about whether the incarcerated are any different to everyone else in the right circumstances. I’m still thinking about this one.

@ÚlldemoShúl I'm also listening to Kingfisher on audio and finding it really engaging. I hadn't planned to pick this one up but there it was, sitting on Libby with no wait list so thought I'd go for it and glad I did.

I've finished The Benefactors, also on the WP list, and it was very good but didn't blow me away. It's about a teenage girl who reports three male friends for sexually assaulting her and follows events before and after this. There are a lot of random sections dotted throughout, almost like 'interludes', which i initially felt made things feel a bit disjointed until I realised what was going on then I began to almost look forward to them! I can see this making the shortlist.

Next up from the WP longlist is Heart The Lover which become available to me on Libby yesterday, plus I have The Mercy Step to collect next weekend from the library. I'm hoping to have a very lazy Mother's Day today and sit reading while DD brings me nice snacks 😂

12 For thy Great Pain Have Mercy on my Little Pain - Victoria Mackenzie
This was a RWYO, one I bought from recommendations on this thread a few years back. I’m not sure why I waited so long to read it, it’s a short, easy read but really impressive - as good as everyone said.

Happy Mother’s Day to those who celebrate! My reading is plodding along, I’ve made it over halfway through The Mirror and The Light on audio. It’s great but so long! Also occasionally reading a short story from The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Here’s a review of my fifth read.

A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara

I think this has been sitting on my kindle for 10 years… I’ve been avoiding it but a colleague recently finished it and said she loved it, so I took that as a push to finally give it a go.

Everything in this book is extreme and contrasting. Characters are either good or bad and if you’re a good character you’re probably going to die. The good characters are all incredibly talented and excel in their fields and are wealthy and have beautiful apartments. I guess this is to contrast Jude, who has the most inconceivably tragic and traumatising childhood. It’s a lot and it felt like the author was fucking with me.

This was the Jude St Francis show, but I would have liked to hear more about JB, who I think was probably the most morally grey character.

I can see why people both love and hate this book (so many either 1 or 5 star reviews on Goodreads). I think I have to be a fence sitter, I “enjoyed” reading it, but I prefer a bit more subtlety! I’m glad that I’ve now read it so I can understand the conversation around it.

For something totally different, I’ve started Starter Villain by John Scalzi which just looks like dumb fun.

@CrochetGrannySquare I live near Hull and know The Land of Green Ginger so I thought that The Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby might be set there. I've just looked up the book and it's gone right to the top of my list.
You might also like Val Wood. She's from Hull and her books are mostly set around the East Riding and feature strong female characters.

@Stowickthevast forgot to reply about Complicite's Drive Your Plow wow, that must have been amazing! Very sorry to have missed it but will keep an eye out in case of a return.

I've moved Kingfisher up the list, it was one of the ones I hadn't really heard anything about.

Also joining @InTheCludgie on longlist watch, I've just finished another one from the IB.

23 The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, trans by David McKay. This is set in 1922 in Belgium. A soldier in an asylum has lost his memory. The asylum advertises for family members and Juliene claims him as her lost husband, Amand. The book is told from Amand's perspective, in very long paragraphs, with lots of commas and very few full-stops, that generally start with the word "And", and shows us how Amand tries to pick up the pieces of his life with Julie, while dealing with memory loss and terrible, vivid nightmares from his time in the trenches, and we never really know whether what Julie is telling him is true or not and secrets are gradually revealed. This book really drew me in initially but then I got quite bogged down about 150 pages in and may have DNF'd except I did want to know what happened. It picked up again about halfway through (it's very long - over 600 pages) and I'm glad I persevered. I read it for an online book club and it's been very marmite on there. I'm probably somewhere in the middle. I'm glad I read it but didn't particularly enjoy the experience.

It's proving to be a pretty emotional day in nowanearly's house for all sorts of reasons and this just about did me in...

13 - The Light between Oceans – M L Stedman
What does it mean to be a mother? I haven't cried when reading a book for ages but this one had me sobbing my heart out.

Kind of appropriate on UK Mother's Day. My Mum is in the UK, as is my eldest DD - and my kids have always celebrated French Mother's Day so it's a weird day for me from that point of view too. Feeling lucky to have spent an hour chewing the fat with my Mum this morning, but also frustrated as I would rather have been having a cuppa face to face!

Fully aware that this will be a complicated day for some so sending and hugs to those who need them. And best Mother's Day wishes to all who celebrate 😍

@PermanentTemporary Glad it's not just me who can't resist tidying up bookshelves, though my own are quite chaotic

Thanks for your review of Daughters of the Bamboo Grove @ÚlldemoShúl - it's only 99p at the moment so I just bought it.

Great review of A Little Life @MonOncle and chimed with a lot of my thoughts about the book and its characters, who I felt were really one dimensional good/evil.
This book was pressed on me by one of my daughters who ranks it in her top 10 reads. We normally have similar taste in books, but I wasn’t a fence sitter, I hated ALL, all that misery heaped on misery!

Yes @MonOncle I thought A Little Life lost its balance with the sidelining of JB & Malcolm

Brining my list over as it is only small, I have been in a slump as I have been watching Middle Eastern drama which are 2h long, I am not up to date and have to watch week by week, so hopefully can dedicate more time to reading. I still have Palace Walk on the go, which has been forever.

1. Tawaifnama, Saba Dewan (NF)
2. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
3. Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
4. Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt's Roaring '20s, Raphael Cormack

Consent, Annabel Lyon
I am not really sure to make of this. I probably didn't give it the time it deserved as it was my Kindle read so I only really read in bed, where I usually fell asleep. There are two separate stories of siblings looking after, or feeling that they are responsible for looking after the other and the resentment and conflict of love vs guilt that causes. I am just not sure that this really worked and I cannot really say more without it being a bit of a spoiler. Suspect this will be forgettable.

Suffice it to say, I did not read either the Koran or anything the last month.

Congratulations @SheilaFentimanon reaching 50!

29 . The Ruffler’s Child by John Pilkington - an Elizabethan detective novel from BorrowBox. I think John Pilkington was recommended on this thread. This was readable, but there are other historical detective authors who I like better.

30 . Nation of Strangers Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century by Ece Temelkuran - this is my second Women’s Non-Fiction Prize read. This is written by a woman, who has quite a privileged lifestyle (successive university posts, trips to places like Venice and the Alps), but she is also a journalist who had to leave her own country (Turkey). The book is in the format of letters to the reader written over the course of three years containing her thoughts on what it is like to lose one’s home. I found her experiences and those of the people she encountered interesting, but I was less keen on the structure - it felt like a long series of newspaper opinion pieces and it did help that I had some extrinsic motivation to finish (as I wanted to reserve another book from the longlist on BorrowBox) when I felt my interest starting to flag. It did show the value of the longlist / BorrowBox combo to me as it’s not a book that I would have thought to read without the list, nor is it a book that I would buy although I am glad that I’ve read it. It did also make me think of how difficult it must be to judge the prize, as it’s hard to compare this one (very stream of consciousness) with Indignity (structure determined by the subject’s life phases and involving research in the Albanian archives) even though there is an overlap in the subject matter.

@ÚlldemoShúl - the Barbara Demick book sounds really interesting but it isn’t on my BorrowBox. I hope to finish the BorrowBox ones then decide if I want to buy any other from the longlist.

29 Small Secrets by Lucy Goacher

Nate and Stevie host a true crime podcast, with the catchphrase “it’s always the boyfriend”. They have to take a break when the boyfriend of the victim from their first episode is proven innocent, only picking up again when a fan alerts them to an eerily similar case. This was a little far fetched in place but was an easy read, which is what I needed as I have an awful cold at the moment. Overall, I thought this was pretty good and it’s free on kindle unlimited.

Ooh thanks @MamaNewtNewt i am doing the 99p a month for 3 months KUL deal so I will get that one.

The Other Couple - Claire McGowan

Formulaic murder mystery on KUL about a body discovered at a holiday resort where - conveniently - pregnant detective Alison is on a baby moon and already has concerns about chief suspect Vince, whose wife Beth seems very cowed. We get the Tenerife and post holiday stories interleaved, from the positions of Alison and Beth. Passed the time when I was tired 😀

A Woman in the Polar Night - Christiane Ritter

Recommended on here, an evocative account from the 1930s of the Austrian author overwintering with her husband Hermann and a Norwegian called Karl in a small hut on Spitsbergen. I enjoyed this.

Barbara Demick's book on China is still on offer at 99p for Kindle at time of posting.

@NotWavingButReading thank you for recommending Val Wood. I notice that she won the Catherine Cookson prize in 1992. I will see if the library has any of her books when I visit this week.

19. A Year With Gilbert White - Jenny Uglow

I don't know how many people read Gilbert White's A Natural History of Selborne any more, but it's an 18thc classic - White spent decades closely observing the flora and fauna of his small Hampshire village, and his book (perpetually delayed, but finally winkled out of him in what turned out to be the latter stages of his life) achieved worldwide fame.

Jenny Uglow's inventive biography takes the form of a sample year quoting from White's detailed daily diary, on which his book was eventually based, and cleverly draws in material by degrees to flesh out a picture of his life as it progresses, building to a fully-rounded picture of this pioneering naturalist.

White was the first person to note many aspects of the natural world, especially to do with the behaviour of birds (although he couldn’t fully verify some of his theories, eg that birds migrated). His modest but competent living as an unmarried curate, and comfortable house with sizeable garden (several acres) allowed him to spend most of his time happily producing staggering quantities of fruit and vegetables, observing nature, and communicating with his very large family of several siblings and dozens of nieces and nephews. And you have to love a man who lovingly chronicled the exploits of his beloved tortoise, Timothy.

This was a joy of a book, beautifully illustrated, and evocatively written, with a quick intelligence on the part of Uglow. Highly recommended for any nature-lovers.

@Benvenuto Thanks for reviewing Eve Temelkuran. She is one of many sadly living in exile. I met her at a launch for one of her other books when I was still researching and really liked her.

19 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Widely read and reviewed on here; I am late to the party. I think this is probably a book you have to be in the right mood for. I was initially not in the right mood and it didn't quite click, then from about 50 pages in, I was absolutely in the right mood. It's a bit sprawling and messy and sentimental and occasionally a little indulgent, but those are all things I can love in a book and I loved them here. Sam and Sadie bond over gaming as children when they meet in a hospital, and when their lives coincide once more, they start working together to design games. They are both damaged and flawed and the book is the story of their youth as they progress into adulthood, but it also has room for plenty of other characters, who are well realised and not mere ciphers. I think Zevin wanted to write about love in all its forms, and for me, she really succeeds in this. But it's also a well-plotted and engrossing story, and I ended the book feeling satisfied. Definitely a bold for me.

@Terpsichore thank you for posting about Jenny Uglow's book. That one had been completely under my radar.

I could listen all day to Jenny Uglow speaking; she's so engaging. I must get round to reading this book on Gilbert White. And The Pinecone. I really want to read that. And her book on the people who lived through the Napoleonic Wars. Oh dear, too many books on the TBR list.

I've got all those of hers on the shelf waiting tbr too, @CrochetGrannySquare. And The Lunar Men. And her biography of Charles II. I echo your Oh dear!

Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths - Charlotte Higgins

This was a deliberately meandering journey through thousands of years of humanity's obsession with creating and depicting mazes and labyrinths. It's a personal book with sections of memoir mixed in amongst explorations of mythology, archaeology, art, stories, interviews, and much more.

I saw some readers on goodreads were frustrated by it and its wayward approach to the topic, but I absolutely loved it and found it dreamlike and delightful. It's generously illustrated too and a beautiful book as a whole (I got a hardback copy second hand).

A definite bold from me.

8 Digging to America - Anne Tyler
Two baby girls are adopted from Korea to two very different American families. The All-American Bitsy and Brad befriend the second-generation immigrants Sami and Ziba and a lifelong relationship between the families is forged.

This is an engaging read. While the two little girls grow up in suburban Baltimore, Iranian Grandma Maryam reflects on her experience as a long-standing immigrant and the nature of American-ness