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

@Welshwabbit that is so interesting! I am from India and I did not know that. I am not annoyed anymore!

@cassandre the film did have bits I quite enjoyed but it's a stretch to relate it to the book Pretty sure EB wasn't thinking about S&M when she wrote it. Enjoying the WP reviews too. I'm holding off on Dominion for now as it's the most expensive on Kindle, but it sounds interesting.

I'm in the last part of Heart the Lover which I'm really liking too @InTheCludgie.

Just finished another WP one, Moderation by Elaine Castillo. This is about "Girlie", a Filipino internet moderator living in Vegas. She's the eldest child in her family and they all depend on her. She's also very good at her job and compartmentalizing her life. The company she works for is taken over by a Virtual Reality form, and she begins moderating VR worlds instead. This was ok, but I did feel there were a lot of themes going on that were partially explored - poverty, family bonds, PTSD, virtual reality and potential medical applications - but really it ended up being a kind of live story. Which was fine but didn't really blow me away.

Oh @Stowickthevast I was about to start Moderation and it doesn’t sound great

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie well this definitely puts the ‘challenge’ into reading. I’ve been meaning to read it for years and finally did so with the Footnotes and Tangents readalong - I would never have stuck with it otherwise. Egotistical, dripping with bodily fluids, often puerile, gloriously imaginative, brutal. My edition has a genuinely helpful introduction by the author himself, where he says that whereas westerners tended to read it as a fantasy, in India people thought of it as fairly realistic, with one reader telling him: ‘I could have written your book. I know all that stuff’. Well, I can only applaud that reader’s powers of skim reading. Every paragraph is so swollen by flashback and foreshadowing that there’s barely space for the narrative to move on. Still, it’s been an education, if more from the read along notes than the book. I can’t offer any insight other than that I don’t think the author likes his nose very much.

The Reckoning by Jane Casey (Maeve Kerrigan no. 2) Much more readable, fine to good, but the crimes are rather too gory for me (though we see the aftermath rather than crimes in progress, thankfully). I’m not hooked yet but keeping faith.

Eine it's quite readable but a bit slow to get moving. The second half is stronger.

11) Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell - I know lots of people loved this book, but didn't live up to it's hype for me.

I found the positioning of Agnes as a quasi forest witch/aura reader/seer quite irritating and unnecessary to the plot. It prevented me getting a sense of her personality beyond 'wise woman who just knows things'. Her brother Bartholomew came across as even more flat.

Although moving in parts, it was overall quite tedious to get through. A miss from me!

I'm sympathetic to your view on this, @TheDonsDingleberries . I felt much the same when I tried to read it pre-film, but I liked the film (Jessie Buckley was great) so that helped me with the book afterwards.

@CornishLizard your post made me curious to know what Footnotes and Tangents is (less curious to read Midnight's Children if I honest!) so thank you - I have subscribed.

I hope you enjoy it Viking. Someone here recommended it last year. I don’t find it as engaging and communal a read along experience as the ones on here but the 2 I’ve done (A Place of Greater Safety and now Midnight’s Children) did get me through books I’d long wanted to read (or perhaps just to have read!), and the weekly posts are beautifully done and a pleasure to read, though did bring home quite how much I’d missed. I’m going to re-subscribe for the Inheritors in June.

22. A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon

Recently-retired George lives with his wife Jean in Peterborough. He's building a studio in the garden. She still works part-time at Ottakar's in town. They are settled and contented, except that their clever, stroppy daughter Katie has decided to marry uncultured Ray, and their son Jamie has a boyfriend, who'll have to be invited to the wedding. And George doesn’t know that Jean is having a secret affair with his former colleague, cigar-smoking smoothie David. Then George discovers a small patch of roughened skin on his hip, and becomes convinced he has cancer. Soon, all he can think about is dying.

This was Mark Haddon's much-awaited follow-up to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and I galloped through it at top speed, laughing quite a lot despite the fact that it faces up to some very tough subjects within its deceptively cosy suburban-England setting. Haddon has an extremely droll turn of phrase that can lull you into not noticing the approaching knock-out punch. In fact it reminded me increasingly of an Alan Ayckbourn play, as the pace speeds up towards the final set-piece of Katie's wedding to Ray, and a fairly spectacular showdown.

I also found Hamnet overrated @TheDonsDingleberries

I found Hamnet tedious, uninspiring, tiresome, with its compulsion to group its descriptions in threes, trios, triplets.

I thought Hamnet was okay but I thought O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait and Esme Lennox (can’t remember full title) were excellent.

three kindle unlimited reads:

1. In Lieu of You - Keith A Pearson

Time travel/sliding doors book, in which the protagonist spends the first half deploring his marriage to and impending divorce from Claire. So when he gets the chance via a mysterious elderly lady to go back in time and prevent them ever meeting, he takes it. Shenanigans ensue. It was ok.

1. Belly - Emily J Johnson

A dud. This is a memoir of the author’s various difficulties with eating, from anorexia to binge eating. Spoiler: hypnosis helps her in the end.

1. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case - Agatha Christie

An old friend. Hastings and Poirot return to Styles, where they had their beginnings. Violent death follows, naturally, with a frail, subdued but still brilliant Poirot on the trail.

Duplicate!

Today I learned that there’s a final Talisman book from Stephen King and Peter Straub coming out in October… very excited!

Ooh I didn’t know that @MegBussetI wonder how much I put Peter Straub had as I’m sure he died a few years ago. I didn’t enjoy the first two Talisman books though.
I’ve finished two more- both RWYO
Call for the Dead by John LeCarré
The first George Smiley book (I’ve had the full George Smiley series on my kindle for years) which is apparently very different from the rest. I enjoyed this one. A man seemingly takes his own life after being interviewed by Smiley before a promotion in the foreign office. But did he really take his own life, and if so, why, considering Smiley had seen him as no problem. More mystery than espionage I enjoyed this novella. Don’t know if that bodes well for the rest of the series or not.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee
I’ve no idea how I ended up with this- realistically a kindle deal- but it’s been floating around my kindle for the last two or three years. A near future dystopia set in Margate where sea levels are rising and Chance and the rest of her family- mum Jas and older brother JD- have been paid to relocate to the town from an overcrowded London. The story ensues from there. It’s very bleak because it could so easily happen- I mean it’s not a million miles away from happening. Terrifying.

The original Talisman is one of my all time favourite books. Looking back, I suspect Straub was responsible for most of the bits I liked best. Dark House wasn’t very good at all imo.

Dreamland was a bold for me, iirc. Agree it was so very easy to see how we could get there from where we are today.

My post should say I did enjoy the first two Talisman books- like you @MaterMoribundmostly the first. I’m also toying with making Dreamland bold- I’m waiting to see if it sticks with me (which I suspect it will)

Starter Villain, John Scalzi

Hard-up ex-journo Charlie inherits his long-lost uncle’s secret super villain business complete with Bond-esque volcano lair.

This was very silly, not something I would typically pick up but a friend leant it to me and I’d just finished A Little Life, so a bit of silliness seemed like just the thing. I very much enjoyed the dolphins and the cats… to say anything more about them would be a spoiler.

The Burning, Jane Casey

I picked up a bunch of the Maeve Kerrigan books in the deals after the positive reviews on these threads. This was just ok, but I think I’ve read previously on here that that’s a shared consensus on here about the first book. I’ll carry on at some point with book 2.

@AgualusasL0ver- I’ve thought quite a bit about the Ece Temelkuran book since reading it & your comment. It has definitely converted me to reading longlists as I wouldn’t have read it otherwise. One thing that I’ve thought about is that a lot of the debate here re immigration / asylum etc. has a tendency to simplify what is happening so it can feel almost 2-dimensional yet her experience & writing were so complex in comparison. Although I had some reservations about the format, there were several matters that she mentioned briefly that I would have been interested to read more about eg the Greek Island with the refugee camp that she visited, the sofa surfing homeless German women or her own feelings towards Germany as it was clear that although it offered her refuge she didn’t like it very much.

@ÚlldemoShúl- thanks for the Vaseem Khan tipoff!

@DuPainDuVinDuFromage- I read P&P at a similar age to you & I think there is a good argument for reading it at that age as the Bennet girls are just a bit older (Lydia is 15). JA wrote the first draft when she was quite young, & I think that does make it quite “teenagey” as the girls’ preoccupations (attractive men, clothes, mean girls, embarrassing relations) were fairly similar to what was being discussed at school. Reading as a teen also means that you can see yourself in the characters (eg I of course aspired to be Elizabeth, but suspect I was closer to Mary). There’s also a good argument about reading it before watching an adaptation so the revelations of the text are a surprise - I had some idea of the plot, but as well as being suitably surprised by the Darcy / Whickham revelations, I remember being a bit disappointed that Elizabeth did not get to go to the Lakes (I was quite keen on her going there as I had been on holiday there). The bitchy comments irony are also very teen friendly.

That said, I completely understand the too soon argument. I loved P&P instantly & also Persuasion, but I pushed myself through the other 4 too soon because I had enjoyed P&P / P so much & I have never really warmed to the other 4 in the same way. It definitely helped that I had read some other adult books before so I had the stamina / fluency needed. I also think it helps that the first 2 chapters are Mr & Mrs B so are a bit off putting if you are too young - but if you enjoy them you will manage the rest of the text. I do notice the age of the text in the first few chapters - in my last few rereads I have wondered if I will enjoy it as much as I remember, but I stop noticing once Mr C appears as I get so caught up in the story. What I’ve also noticed is just how much dialogue there is in P&P - there really is a vast amount - and I think that does help with the text not feeling dated as you aren’t having to read pages of narration. The language used in the dialogue is also really clear & that helps a reader - there isn’t much 19th century slang etc. to make it feel dated (I remember being quite amused when I first started to read Georgette Heyer as lots of her characters say stuff like “the outside of enough” that only vulgar JA characters like Miss Steele in S&S use). P&P also really is consistently funny, which I think helps as a reader is both rewarded for coping with the age of the text & distracted from it.

I hope you manage to help your DDs to read P&P at the right age as it is such a special book (as is shown by my writing such long paragraphs & running out of time to post my book reviews).

Oh I saw that about a new Talisman book. I’m very excited as I liked the first and loved the second.

I also loved Hamnet it was my favourite read the year I read it.

Just finished 14 All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld which was a RWYO. I’d actually had it on my kindle since 2015 and I’m not sure why I never got round to reading it, but it was really good I thought. Intriguing and atmospheric, with a clever structure. I’m not sure if it will be a bold for me this year - there were parts I found a little frustrating and I can’t decide if they’re sufficiently accounted for once you get the whole thing together (there’s two strands to the story, one of which is moving backwards - which took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out!) I’ll have to give it a little while and see how I feel about it I think.

@Terpsichore thanks for the review of A Spot if Bother. I loved Curious Incident but didn't know he'd written a new one.

I am also in the enjoyed Hamnet camp, though it didn't quite make it to bold for me.

28. Holes by Louis Sachar is a bold for me though. It was a bedtime reading book for me and my son and I came to it with no previous knowledge. The almost parable like beginning was a bit mystifying but the threads were woven very unobtrusively and came together beautifully at the end. It is, of course, a children's book but it is a very clever and well constructed one. I enjoyed it very much.

@SpunkyKhakiScroller Actually I was surprised to see, on checking, that A Spot of Bother was published in 2007 - Haddon's written three more adult novels since then (but also had heart bypass surgery and struggles with Long Covid, sadly).