50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Four

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fourth 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 as this makes it much easier to keep track of books or authors that may appeal (or not appeal) to everyone else.

Some of us bring over our updated lists to the new thread. Again, this is up to you.

The first thread of the year is here the second thread here and the third thread here

A Suitable Boy is so readable. It's luminous.

I really will make time for A Suitable Boy one day. I'm just so daunted by the size of it! @Piggywaspushed @FruAashild

There’s a new Ann Patchett out next month and a new Kate Atkinson in September

I would add The Trick is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway.

I loved Trainspotting and would add a vote for Shuggie Bain for best recent Scottish novel.

I've read 13 of the last tranche which I think takes me to a nice, round 50.

Wuthering Heights (A-level but has stayed with me)
Persuasion (can't remember much about it)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (great)
Mrs Dalloway (LOVE - but only second time round, didn't like it as a teenager)
Emma (not my favourite)
Bleak House (fantastic, my favourite Dickens)
The Great Gatsby (wonderful)
Madame Bovary (a long time ago but I remember rating it)
Pride and Prejudice (another A-level text but also really liked it)
Jane Eyre (not really my thing)
Anna Karenina (felt Madame Bovary did it better)
To the Lighthouse (thought it was terrible when I was a teenager, re-read in my 40s and I think it's the best thing I've read in the last 10 years)
Middlemarch (a very long time ago, but I thought it was great. Due a re-read)

I enjoyed the list; flagged up quite a few I feel I should read. Like others, there are a lot more on there that I've read now than there would have been 10 years ago.

Edited to add that I am also surprised by the lack of any Steinbeck, although I would have chosen East of Eden over The Grapes of Wrath.

@ChessieFL @carefullythere @Benvenuto Thank you for the words of encouragement! I shall try to feel less guilty about my lack of motivation / interest in reading more highbrow fiction 😃

I guess ultimately I’m reading as a leisure activity, so it makes sense to focus on books I’m interested in rather than ones I feel vaguely obliged to read. Some classics definitely interest me more than others!

I did read Midnight’s Children and A Suitable Boy some years ago, and I thought that A Suitable Boy was a very enjoyable and interesting read. Although the sheer physical weight of the book did limit how much of it I could comfortably read at once. That’s probably one that would be easier to read on a kindle. Midnight’s Children was a much more challenging read in comparison.

I’ve read 8 from the last batch, taking my grand total to 22:
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
Persuasion
Emma
P&P
Madame Bovary
Tristram Shandy
Middlemarch

Feeling inspired to read quite a few of the others, especially the ones that are already sitting on my kindle.

@Benvenuto said "my personal theory is he is far too low brow for the list (with all the s*x, violence & popularising science) but more realistically, I don’t think his individual works are well-known enough in English to make the list. It seems unfair that Proust was allowed to be entered as a series & not Zola as I suspect the same would have happened if Proust had had to split down."

I don't agree that Zola is lowbrow. Some of his novels are quite well known, and others not - it might be a problem that he wrote a series of 20 books, but most people have only read a few, some are quite well known - Germinal is probably the most famous - and some are really obscure. A non RM Zola novel was one of my French Lit in A level French - Therese Raquin. Some writers wrote one book which is much much better known than any of their other work (though not all of those are on the list either - such as Lord of the Flies).

I agree about Hardy's best known novels, and I think no Steinbeck is odd.

I think these lists show the problem of lists. This one does make me think I should reread lots of books that I've already read, and read some that I've had for years and haven't read a first time, but there is no way I'm going to read everything here.

@FruAashild

I have Sunset Song and the others in this trilogy TBR, and also want to watch the TV adaptations. I heard a lot of them in parts on radio, which often makes me want to read books properly.

Fair. I thought it was incredible, my sister hated it and said 'why would you make me read that depressing book'. O Caledonia and Morven Callar are other good options for more recent books.

The only Scott I've read is The Pirate (which is set in Shetland and Orkney and is based on the story of a real life Orcadian pirate - John Gow). I thought it was perfectly readable but nowhere near as good as the greats of Victorian literature (just googled and realised he was Georgian not Victorian so probably more of an innovator than I realised), should probably read Rob Roy to see how that compares.

Interestingly, with the exception of Scott I think the pre-20th century writers are more 'British' the 20th century writers are much more 'Scottish' in their sense of place and viewpoint.

I've mentioned this before - Janice Galloway joined my secondary school as a teacher when I was in the 6th form. She never taught me but she was a big personality - most of the teachers had been there for years, were married. She came in like a thunder bolt. Anyway, the school in The Trick is clearly my school. She barely disguised the location or teachers. And then the story....I started reading it and was immediately
reminded of the English teacher at school who had an affair with the married drama teacher, who broke his neck by diving into a swimming pool on holiday and died!!!

I feel sad that there’s no Philip Roth in there. But then I’ve forced my book club to read some Roth and everybody hated him except me. I think he does stuff that nobody else does.

Sorry to be clearer on Zola - I agree that he is a great author and an immensely enjoyable one. Lowbrow is probably the wrong word, but what I meant was that Zola is a sensational author, and that doesn’t seem to fit in with the vibe of the list. He had good reasons to make his works exciting (aside from this being a good thing in itself) as it disguises the educative aspect of his work (as he aims to show / educate about the development of society in the 19th century).

Thérèse Raquin is a good example of my point- it was wriiten shortly after Our Mutual Friend, but is so much more lurid than the work of Dickens & his English contemporaries as you have an adulterous affair, then the murder of the husband (during which one of the couple gets bitten by the victim), then a fairly bizarre bit when due to guilt / remorse the other one tries to bite the bite! It’s all very different to the rarefied atmosphere of Proust.

18 Thomas Cromwell: A Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch
Is there more to say after Wolf Hall? Of course; novels are not history, as MacCulloch graciously makes clear, though they may serve history by generating publisher’s offers for books like this one. This feels like proper, dense history to me - I started it a long time ago, unfortunately in a very heavy hardback, and it has been a long process. Biographies may be seen as low-rent by some historians, but few lives have been as consequential as Cromwell’s, and MacCulloch shows in clear, elegant and amusing prose just how much of his innovations in the affairs of England survived for centuries. The joy of reading extracts from his remarkable letters will stay with me. A bold.

I’ve read 42 of the Guardian list. I see that they compiled it from books nominated by a very small group (170 academics and authors, I think they said) though, so it’s a very skewed list and pretty meaningless, in my view.

Anyway. Back to the 50 Books Challenge! Book 24 was Solace House by Will Maclean, which I loved. Very sinister, incredibly clever, extremely well-written and right up my street.

Now just starting Night Film by Marisha Pessl for my 25th read of the year.

I’ve read 3 Roth so I feel qualified to comment. All of them were an uphill struggle

The Plot Against America
Portnoy’s Complaint

and

American Pastoral

Loved The Plot and Portnoy @EineReiseDurchDieZeit! but after the book club meetings I do get that he’s a personal taste.

@PermanentTemporary isn’t Portnoy the wanking book? It’s about all I remember

On the Grauniad list, I’ve read 33 in total. There are a good few in there that I’ve picked up and cast aside with no desire to return to (Catch 22, War and Peace to name a couple) and plenty more really don’t appeal (I will never get round to Proust or Moby-Dick I am certain). Of the top three, I hated and probably didn’t properly understand Ulysses. Beloved I admired more than I liked, but can absolutely see its merits. Middlemarch on the other hand I read for the first time last year, and I feel I would already like to read it again. I thought it was incredible.

22.The Fortnight in September by RC Sherriff. The Stevens family are preparing for, end embarking upon, their annual holiday from their suburban South London home to Mrs Huggins’ boarding house in Bognor Regis.

This was glorious. Sherriff describes each aspect of the trip, from sorting out who will be looking after the pets, to planning a coastal walk in solitude in incredibly rich and evocative detail. There are no surprises or twists and dramas are relatively small scale, not stretching much beyond the unbearable tension of whether the family will be able to secure a much-desired beach hut with a balcony. Sections of the book are from the perspective of different members of the family, reflecting their hopes for wringing as much joy as possible from their precious two weeks away. The dynamics are played out beautifully, and it shows how transformative a holiday can be, as we get a glimpse of eldest son Dick’s frustrations at his very dull job, and daughter Mary’s first and very chaste introduction to romance. This was just lovely, nostalgic escapism at its best, and the boldest of bolds.

I've read two Roths, American Pastoral and I Married a Communist. I disliked both immensely and decided he was a misogynistic git. I would need a great deal of persuasion to read another one.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe mixed feelings about this investigation by the eminent investigative reporter into the death of a London teenager who jumped from a fifth floor balcony into the river to his death. It’s a smaller canvas than the author’s Empire of Pain on the American opioid crisis - the balance is more towards the family and the circle that the son had entered, and less towards the wider context of billionaire London - than I’d imagined. PRK is a wonderful writer and it’s a compelling read, but going so deep into the lives of one rich family, whose son mixed with ultra-rich kleptocrats, often felt uncomfortable and intrusive.

Those who’ve read this - think I missed something- there’s a suggestion at some point that he claimed to have a heroin addiction - and the possibility seems to be left open - but surely this would have been confirmed or ruled out by the autopsy?

@CornishLizard I got the impression that the heroin addiction was a lie to give credence to the idea he’d jumped

36 . Tender Is The Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica is a dystopian horror novel set in a future where a virus has supposedly made all animal meat toxic to humans. In response, society legalizes the breeding, slaughter, and consumption of humans—euphemistically called “special meat.” The book follows a speciality butcher who begins to question his choices.

This is another YouTube recommendation that hasn’t done it for me. It vacillates between grotesque and dull and I got skimmy with it. It’s odd because I’ve never read a book about cannibalism and I’ve read 2 this year…The Lamb by Lucy Rose was better.

Eine I agree - but wouldn’t the autopsy have exposed the lie?