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

46. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe - Fannie Flagg
I saw bits of the film when I was 12 years old and it left a powerful impression. I have wanted to either watch it or read it ever since and finally have. With that kind of inflated expectation going into it, the book didn't really have a chance of meeting it though it is undoubtedly good.

It is a book of its time. A story about a community and a way of life in the southern USA in the 1920s-30s seen through the filter of 1980s USA. Which is itself a historical framing now and no longer contemporary as it was on publication. I can see how it's treatment of a lesbian romance and interracial friendships would have been modern if not groundbreaking in 1987 but the world has moved on and it lands somewhere between twee and uncomfortable.

But it is a warm, kind, joyous novel and I am glad I read it.

Having read Moby Dick for a book group as the choice of a man who later went on to choose a Hemingway novel, I agree with this! (and he's still wittering on approvingly about Moby Dick to this day, some years later)

Just another note on Fried Green Tomatoes. I looked it up and they completely straightwashed the lesbian relationship in the film, which makes me appreciate the book even more. Clearly things were a lot less inclusive in the 90s, which shouldn't come as a shock to me as I was a teenager then. Amazing how far we have come in a (middle-aged) lifetime.

I finished a couple more (and DNFed a couple too)

First the DNFs- A Rising Man by Abir Mukhergee I wanted to love this because I adore the Persis Wadia books by Vaseem Khan which are also Indian historical crime, but this one was a bit too slow for me and I didn’t love the main character.
The second SNF was Jane Harper’s new one Last One Out- didn’t care about the characters at all. Whole story up to 30% looking backwards- so why not just set it at that time?

And the ones I did finish
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
Dystopia set almost 100 years ahead of now where academics (in an England now formed of a set of islands as seas have risen) are looking into the a famous poem which has been ‘lost’. They learn of the poets family and friends who are mainly obnoxious, as are the people researching them.
the second part dips back into the past.
McEwan plays with his familiar theme of perspective but this one is no Atonement. The first half is dry and I almost DNFed more than once. The dystopia seems as if it should be much further ahead in the future as they talk of 2019 as if it were 500 years before rather than 100. It shows little faith in young people or the people’s understanding of the past and I found the whole thing very bleak. The pacier second part was not enough to make up for the first.

My second finished book The Hand that First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell was also split into two halves but this time it was more successful. There are two storylines- Lexie in the 1960s who is trying to find her way in the world after moving to London and Elina and Ted who are new parents. It took me a while to get into the Elina and Ted storyline (though it was all about the confusion and exhaustion of new parenthood so the mothers on here would relate more than me who has no children) but the Lexie one grabbed me straight away. Will keep reading O’Farrell’s back catalogue and looking forward to her new one.
Edited as I forgot to name the book. Menopausal much 🙄

@TerpsichoreI don’t know that I even care enough to find out the ending in the Jane Harper

37 . My Husband’s Wife by Alice Feeney (audiobook)

Eden Fox goes for a run, when she returns home she finds herself unable to get in and another woman declaring that this is HER home and HER husband

I’m not really one for HE’S BEHIND YOU type books, but I’m always looking for well read audiobooks and chose this solely because of the narrators; Richard Armitage and Bel Powley.

When it comes to Richard Armitage’s participation, his acting was too similar to his acting in Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell

When the first twist happened I felt like Oh OK great! I thought this novel was writing a cheque it couldn’t cash but everything made sense. And then there’s an additional twist and then another and it’s a bit OH FUCK OFF, like THAT would happen.

It was a good yarn, a great audiobook, but suspend your disbelief

I’m watching series 2 of the Slow Horses series and the way they have changed the story has made me realise how very clever the original was…I’m upping the book to a bold. Can’t understand why they took an excellent book and completely rewrote it for the tv show, especially after they stuck so faithful to book 1 in the first series!

Is that the one about the pilot, @DuPainDuVinDuFromage? I did it the wrong way trying, and agree the book was very clever. I guess too complex to work in a short series.

@ÚlldemoShúl I read the Ian McEwan last year. I thought the world building was really interesting but the actual story was rather dull. I find it hard to care about any of the characters.

Yes that’s the one @Stowickthevast . I guess you’re right about the complexity, but then they made the new storyline pretty complex too! Oh well, I’m going to have to learn to put up with it for series 3 or my family will stop watching with me, they’re already sick of me complaining that “it’s not like that in the book” every 5 minutes! 😆

Sorry to hear that What we can know was disappointing - I’ve got it on my to-read pile and thought the idea looked interesting.

@Benvenuto - I loved Au Bonheur les Dames too. Think it's the only Zola I have read - maybe I shouldn't bother with any others!

57. The Dangerous Stranger, Simon Mason
Oxford-set police procedural featuring the two DI Wilkins. This opens with an attack on a refugee hostel, and a scared boy on the run. I was rooting for the characters - some interesting subversion of expectations too.

58. Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, Sophie Gilbert
Similar line of analysis to Susan Faludi's Backlash from the early nineties, but updates to cover the first years of the 21st century. Post-feminism and anti-feminism; the impact of porn; "girlboss" memes; Lean In and the co-option of feminism by capitalism. Nothing strikingly new but interesting to have it all laid out.

59. The Killing Time, Elly Griffiths
The second in her police/time travel series. The author has pretty much lost the plot here - quite literally, as I can't work out whether there is any real plot at all. There are a few deaths, but not much by way of a link to the story, and the main jeopardy is a cat going missing. I'm happy to overlook the implausibility of the set-up, but the author seems to have dreamt up a setting and characters and now doesn't know what to do with them.

60. The Infamous Gilberts, Angela Tomaski
This looked promising - the narrator takes us into a crumbling big house and points out the faintly sinister reminders of the family that grew up there (why is there a bolt on a bedroom door and bloodstains on the floorboards?), and then tells us about their lives. There were a few moments that made me think of O Caledonia or something by Molly Keane - a kind of knowing, Gothic, slightly tongue-in-cheek tone. I liked Lydia's story the best, although it's possibly tied off a bit too neatly. Her siblings' stories don't entirely cohere. I can see what the author was aiming at but she doesn't quite pull it off.

61. Sceptred Isle, Helen Carr
A history of the fourteenth century, briskly told in under 300 pages. That's a lot to get through - Edwards I to III, Richard II, the Black Death, the start of the Hundred Years' War, the Peasants' Revolt etc. This rattles along at a great pace, not overlooking the human experience behind the headlines of history. I was vaguely aware of some of the historical events but didn't really have an overview of how they all fitted together, so I found this quite satisfying.

21) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - Years ago Ryland Grace travelled into space to save humanity from an extinction event. But, after waking from an induced coma, he discovers he's the only crew member to survive the journey aboard spaceship Hail Mary (Hail Mary full of Grace - get it?! And the ship got projected into space - get it?!). Now, with his memory still patchy from his time in stasis, he has to figure out how to complete his mission all alone. Until he gets an alien sidekick.

I thought this was ok, but very overhyped. It reads like a textbook in places, but that wasn't the main issue for me. My biggest gripe was that microbiologist turned high school science teacher, Grace, was also apparently an expert in physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, and linguistics whenever the plot demanded it. He could even fly a spaceship, despite not being an astronaut. Even though the book itself takes pains to explain at one point that this isn't how being a scientist works.

He's also lucky enough that any gaps in his knowledge can be conveniently filled by his alien accomplice, whose skill set perfectly complements his own. Dream team! Oh and he learned an alien language in about a week with no significant barriers to communication or misunderstandings, because... apparently culture & environment no longer profoundly affects language, I guess.

It was a very good audiobook @TheDonsDingleberriesI made it a bold

23. Rodham by Curtis Sittenfield. Fiction in the style of memoir, this imagines a reality in which Hilary Rodham turns down Bill Clinton's marriage proposal, and how that affects the course of US politics.

This was an odd book. It's quite an uncomfortable premise, in that Sittenfield goes very, very deep with imagined detail of the personal lives of the Clintons, who are of course both alive and well to know hear it. So deep in fact that while reading it I had quite a disturbing dream about Bill while reading this, although I suppose I can't really blame Sittenfield for that.

I enjoyed the first part of the book up as far as the marriage proposal, which more closely resembles Clinton's reality, more than that sections following her political career, which was quite tedious in parts. And I found then ending quite depressing in that even in Sittenfield's alternate reality it seemed that only an intervention from another rich and powerful man could nudge a female presidential candidate's campaign over line.

Just finished a Women's Prize book - The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson. I really liked this. Slightly reminiscent of Meera Syal and also Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Enjoyable to read whilst also dealing with troubling themes. I can see teenagers avidly reading this,too. It is certainly not pretentious or literary.

It is published by quite a small publishing house who focus on Black writers - which is great but they ,sadly, also need more eagle eyed proofreaders. I am obeying sharing the love for this book online,as they exhort at the end , but I rather wish they hadn't asked me to do so publicaly.

There was also a miniscule in the book but we may as well change the OED on that one!

@StrangewaysHereWeCome have you read her Barbara Bush one? I think I preferred it to Hilary but felt even more wrong thinking of Dubya as hot.

@Piggywaspushed I really liked the Mercy Step but I listened to it so avoided all typos. I thought the audio, read by the author, was great.

@Stowickthevast I loved American Wife

Ooh I do love a good book list, just looked at the full Guardian list and I hope I’m not too late to post my list. I have read 28 (see below), have 33 on TBR Mountain and have DNF 8 (see below).

Read

The Road (brilliant despite the bleakness)
The Vegetarian (liked despite the bleakness)
Rebecca (great but not the author’s best)
The Rainbow (went through a phase of reading Lawrence as a teenager and remember little about this, but don’t think I was a huge fan)
Dracula (loved this and persuaded one of my horror fan friends (who is now DH) to read it so fond memories of us chatting about this one)
Jude the Obscure (hated this, partially because of the bleakness)
The Color Purple (loved, loved, loved)
White Teeth (don’t remember much but know I loved it when I read it. Pretty sure it was set in an area where I used to live too)
Never Let Me Go (liked rather than loved this)
My Brilliant Friend (enjoyed but took me a few attempts to get into)
Wide Sargasso Sea (really liked this as a huge fan of Jane Eyre)
The Metamorphosis (pretentious nonsense)
Vanity Fair (loved this and think Becky Sharp is one of literature’s great, misunderstood heroines)
Giovanni's Room (intensely disliked this and everyone in it)
Song of Solomon (90% sure I’ve read this but I remember absolutely nothing about it)
The Age of Innocence (kinda read this when pregnant, woke up from a nap and carried on reading, only realising that I’d accidentally skipped to the end when falling asleep on my kindle, didn’t feel like going back once I’d realised)
The Handmaid's Tale (serious contender for my favourite book ever)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (I absolutely hated this)
The Remains of the Day (an absolute masterpiece and I won’t hear a word against my Butler)
Wuthering Heights (not a fan of the toxic, incesty relationship, but the song is genius)
Persuasion (liked, but don’t remember much about it)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (I really like this and think it’s a smart way to cover the Russian Revolution)
Emma (like even though I find Emma herself to be a right madam)
The Great Gatsby (reread in the last few years and found I enjoyed it much more that my previous read)
Pride and Prejudice (pretty good but not as good as people think it is)
Jane Eyre (one of my favorites, despite the fact that I would prefer another ending. As a not especially good looking teen this gave me hope that I’d still be able to find a great love. And I did)
War and Peace (I liked the peace more than the war, and it could stand to be shorter, but it’s a classic for a reason)
Beloved (I’m not sure if this was really pretentious, or if it was over my head, but I found it beyond dull)

DNF

Catch-22 (So repetitive, dull and overly pleased with itself)
Disgrace (recent DNF, whoever described this as whinging man had it spot on. I just didn’t have it in me to read about another entitled male)
Orlando (I don’t think I made it past the first page it was so boring)
Heart of Darkness (my book nemesis. I have talked on here before about how much I hate this book and how I couldn’t even finish it despite having to write an essay on it for A level English lit)
Lolita (you can dress it up as literature but it’s a book about a pedo grooming a young girl. I just cannot get past the subject matter)
Things Fall Apart (tedious)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (also tedious)
Madame Bovary (French tedium)

24 London Falling - Patrick Radden Keefe

Unsettling, compelling investigation into the mysterious circumstances in which a teenager from a comfortable middle-class background fell to his death from a luxury Thames-side apartment in 2019 after getting mixed up with the city’s dark underside. If you’ve read his New Yorker article then this is basically an expanded version of that - still definitely worth a read.

Latest Reads:
#13. Enough Said by Alan Bennett. The latest, and sadly, probably the last of Alan Bennett’s diaries. He charts his mental and physical decline as he heads towards and surpasses his 90th birthday. There’s a lot more napping than previous diaries, less touristic church visits and more funeral attending.
You know what you’re getting with Bennett and you probably know if it’s your bag or not, it very much is my bag and I enjoyed this gently humorous and thoughtful book.

#14. Bookish by Lucy Mangan. This was a superhuman effort of deferred gratification given I really wanted to read this when it was first published. Patience is a virtue though and I snapped it up on kindle when it was reduced to 99p (Returning the unopened £2.99 copy I’d bought the week before!) Very much a book that was worth waiting for though in my opinion. This felt a little more like biography interspersed with books as oppose to Bookworm which was vice versa, but I enjoy Mangan’s writing on both topics. A bold for me.

@MamaNewtNewt said: Lolita (you can dress it up as literature but it’s a book about a pedo grooming a young girl. I just cannot get past the subject matter)

Yes, this was on an American Studies course, and I really disliked it. It was one of a few books I found difficult to read on that course, though some excellent books too, and some I'd like to read again because I can't remember them at all. I also did a course with the same lecturer and format on America in the 60s and 70s, which included a Norman Mailer book, An American Dream, that starts with the main character murdering his wife in a really brutal and nasty way - may be sexual violence involved too.

A (male) student on the course commented about his enjoyment of reading books on sex and violence, and made a quip I can't remember totally, but I think this was that he identified because it was like his life.

One book I did like on the course was a non fiction work by Kate Millett called Sexual Politics - there were chapters criticising misogynistic and patriarchal attitudes, though I don't recall her choice of words, including many of the books on my American studies reading lists - I'm sure of the above Norman Mailer book and Lolita, but also that there were more.

Looking up on Wikipedia, Kate Millett also critiqued DH Lawrence and Henry Miller, and I had read the Lawrence texts mentioned on a 1st year English Lit course.

Bookish - Lucy Mangan
Follow up to Bookworm this continues the journey of reading into teenage years and adulthood.
I nodded along for the first half, grandmothers coming to stay and leaving fat sagas and detective novels behind (Forever Amber and Agatha Christie in my case). Discovering bonkbusters as a teenager (Jaqueline Susann and Judith Krantz although I was disappointed that she didn’t love Jilly Cooper). The joys of re-reading, I’m an inveterate re-reader. However I lost it in the second half where she goes on about her 30 foot long shelves and her 10,000 books and the indecision on what to shelve where and was extremely bored.

Aand on re-reading Harriet - Jilly Cooper, umpteenth reread. One of the sweetest of the ‘name’ books.

Woo! I’ve just looked up the Alan Bennett as I adore him but £18.99 on Kindle! That must be a record.

Try the library@BestIsWest. I got it from the library for a 90p reservation charge. No one had reserved ahead of me which was odd for such a new book.

I’ve been on the waiting list for it for weeks and there were something like 20 people ahead of me! I've made it to number 7 now….