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

The Carer - Deborah Moggach. James, an elderly and once eminent professor, needs a carer, so Phoebe and Robert, adult children, employ Mandy, who seems happy to relieve them of their responsibilities. I thought there were some relatable observations about relationships in the first half, but the second half took a different and less engaging turn and overall this novel was too cosy, too mild for me, and made me wonder how much more successful it would have been if a similar story had been written by someone like Kate Atkinson.

DNF'd The Names, by Florence Knapp. I couldn't get on with the forced writing style ('I've just finished a creative writing course and I want you to know all about it") and the story was confusing and boring.

24.Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald. This depicts the slow unravelling of the lives and loves of a community of houseboat dwelling eccentrics moored at Battersea Reach.

There was very little plot in this very short book, until the end when a vast amount happened at a great pace. I preferred the gentle night time mudlarking sections and could have done without the author's seeming panic to throw in a few dramatic turns. The weird pacing didn't bother me too much though, as the characters were so warmly depicted, and the writing was smart and witty and made me laugh.

@Benvenuto – I really enjoyed the adaptation of The Other Bennet Sister but I don’t think I’ll get round to reading it. I loved Introducing Mrs Collins by Rachel Paris. Would recommend.

Thank you @ChessieFL I’ve just ordered Murder at the Spirit Lounge on Audible. However its not narrated by Siobhan McSweeney, wah! Narrated by Philippa Dunne, who played Claire’s mother in Derry Girls. So still the Derry Girls connection

I think the Mitfords aren't all as straightforward as they sometimes seem. Soppiness warning: I think Sydney genuinely loved all her daughters very much and there was also a lot of love between the six sisters - to have produced all those letters, even though the differences got more than serious. Such as Nancy reporting Diana and Oswald Mosley, who were interned in Holloway as a result, during WWII because they were far right subversives. How did their mum deal with that? I can't remember from the last Mitfordiana book I read but it was a bio of Decca (Jessica) who arrived in the US I think just before/during WWII and never really left permanently. No bio can fit everything in, especially a Mitfordian one!

@elkiedee No one knew it was Nancy had reported Diana until it came out in declassified papers. Only Debo was alive then and she was dumbfounded and glad Diana hadn’t known

Oh I just saw this thread. Picking lots from peoples list. Here’s mine

1 A thousand splendid suns - Khaled Hosseini
2 Heated Rivalry - Rachel Reid
3 Brimstone - Callie Hart
4 The people we meet on vacation - Emily Henry
5 Beach Road - Emily Henry

1. Mabel - Sally Hepworth
2. The Ledge - Christian White
3. Last one out - Jane Harper
4. Everything I know about love - Dolly Alderton

10. Slags - Emma Jane Unsworth 11. Sometimes I lie - Alice Feeney 12. Before we were yours - Lisa Wingate 13. True colours - Kristin Hannah 14. Want - Gillian Anderson DNF 15. The lost Bookshop - Evie Woods

Still to go on the list

Great Big Beautiful Life - Emily Henry
Starling House - Alix Harrow
Normal People - Sally Rooney
The Blair Club - Kate Quinn
The children of Blood and bone - Tomi Adeyemi
Dont let him in -Lisa Jewell
Wild Dark Shore - Charlotte McConaghy
Blood over Bright Haven - ML Wang

I agree with @SpunkyKhakiScroller Libby and Borrowbox are great. You can join multiple libraries on them so lots of books

48. Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman - I am not quite sure how to react to this book. It is about Carl and his cat Princess Donut who are stuck in an televised intergalactic survival game set in a dungeon. A setup familiar to anyone who has ever played an RPG and in fact this genre is apparently called LitRPG. It comes complete with gamer vocabulary including tutorial guilds, mobs, and grinding. It feels like it's written by a smart teenager gamer dude and I was astonished to find that the author is in his late 40s, married with 4 kids. Less astonished to find that it was originally self published. It is poorly written, gory, chaotic, has a juvenile sense of humour, and its writing of women made me deeply uncomfortable. BUT what a ride!!!! It is propulsive, addictive, and a real dopamine hit. While it is no Hunger Games, it has things to say about the way media is created and consumed, how participants in reality shows have no real agency, and how modern media has robbed us of more and more of our humanity. The problem is the points it makes are almost off the cuff and the real focus is on Monsters! Bosses! Loot boxes! More than a work of literature, it is a fascinating sociological insight into the minds of a certain group both in itself and also because of how popular this series is. I enjoyed it very much but I am annoyed with myself for enjoying it. And I don't want to read the rest of the series but I know I probably will.

Too hot and too bright to read outside. Wasting a lovely day to stay inside. Conundrum.

I got to 23% on Dungeon Crawler Carl before DNFing @SpunkyKhakiScroller just not for me at all

I think you need to have been a gamer at some point in your life to get past the first 30%. After that it's hard to stop - or perhaps I am just weak!

19 The Siege by Ben Macintyre
If you like Ben Macintyre, you’ll like this. Probably. Because the subject is a short, claustrophobic event (the 1980 hostage siege at the Iranian Embassy in London) , the focus is tight and claustrophobic too. That works pretty well and at times I felt the sweaty tension. I’m quite embarrassed in retrospect to think how little I knew or understood about this event that happened not that long ago. It feels quite topical with the current war as well. The view of what else was in people’s minds at the time feels a bit media driven - it was a bit more than the snooker - but then I was only 11 at the time. The political insights are interesting but perhaps there could have been more.

Having said that, I didn’t love it quite so much as The Spy and the Traitor, which I thought gave a broader context of world events - but then that’s one of my top ten books of the past few years.

Warning - I take no responsibility for adding to your TBR (if I do)

I came to report hidden Kindle deals that I just found by looking at my wishlist, cheapest books first - 1 free - 3 99p each

Kate Lord Brown, Silent Music - freebie, historical family saga - 1960s - first came across her other work because a review website I used to write reviews for - sent books via The Bookbag - posted about one of their reviewers who had written a novel as well as positively reviewing it "by our own".

Tayari Jones, Kin - newish 5th novel, is it women's prize listed? by author of An American Marriage

Lee Cole, Groundskeeping - can't remember why on TBR but it's blurbed by several writers who are automatic want-to-reads for me - prepublication reservations etc - Lily King, Maggie Shipstead, Ann Patchett. US, Literary love story, a Bosnian-American character (Bosnia and Kosova I think are the ex-Yugoslavia fragments that are Muslim like the UK is "Christian" (though multidenomination - I haven't read that far but are religious prejudices an issue?

Rhiannon Lucy Coslett, Female, Nude - not read another book by her but I'm sure I've come across her as a writer. Think she's a feminist. Eyecatching title but the woman on the cover is a speck in a bikini, not a large pic where all you see is a naked woman! Sophie is a painter on holiday in Greece and paints a nude picture of her friend Alessia (Greek?) - this sounds literary but might not be.

Sorry to write more about new TBR books than ones I've read. I feel I'm not actually in slump but have had the worst reading week since COVID though practically every page I actually read is excellent and I will soon complete 2 double bolds (non-fiction) with at least another on the go (#8 series novel about a an English former communist and his German actress partner, now wife in McCarthy's US/Cold War Germany etc) - 1st book that starts outside Germany.

32. The Road to Lichfield - Penelope Lively

RWYO. I do like Penelope Lovely as an author - not much may happen but she is very good at characters. Anne's father is dying and has moved into a nursing home so she spends a lot of time on "the road to Lichfield" visiting him and sorting out his house and affairs. During the course of this we learn about Anne and family (her husband and children), her brother and her parents. Anne also learns about herself as she spends time outside the family unit. It's quite dated (set in 1970s) but still lovely.

@PermanentTemporary
You've just confirmed what I thought, that we are very close in age. I was still 10 in May 1980 but only for a few weeks (so many political events over the years in May around the world, apart from elections - many on DS1's birthday! so it was easy for my mum to remember). Checking my order history, this is TBR, so no "book bullets" - what we call writing about books so others want to read them on Librarything.

Too hot for outside,
Should I stay inside to read;
What a conundrum.

Hope you don't mind. I read your post as a Haiku.

This was the first book we read in the Rather Dated Bookclub. Oh, nostalgia!

Nice renaming of author! Already TBRR or TBR for me, can't remember! I might have read it in my teens or very young as I read most of her kids books that were published at the right time, and it would have been logical to try the adult ones. I had a reading age of 18 or off chart by 12, but of course I didn't have the life experience to fully understand everything I read, from literary books to bonkbusters!)

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh

Really OT but I want to share here rather than with strange people on AIBU? threads etc. Real life goggling out of the window is definitely distracting me from reading - police - uniform and non uniform earlier over the road, next door neighbour back from elderly residential care after a fall, which also brought police to our little street.

In defence of having a goggle out of the window, DP has just told me that DS1, young white man, had police on his back within 2 minutes walk of here, another street, and goggling neighbours came out to defend him and say we've watched and he's done nothing wrong. I hope, and do think, they would do the same for DS1's mates and our other young men/people who are not white.

@elkiedee Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett writes for the Guardian which might be where you've come across her (if you read the Graun)

@PermanentTemporary I remember the Iranian Embassy siege happening in real time, much to the rage of my DF because it meant coverage of the snooker final was yanked off the telly to cover it (the BBC was bombarded with complaints). Many years later I ended up working in a building literally round the corner from where it all happened which seemed v odd at the time.

I had not realised until reading The Siege that it took place on my sixth birthday!

The Ending Writes Itself was recommended in the crime thriller round up of The Sunday Times. It is a collaboration between two writes I haven't heard of . It is a locked room mystery, set on a remote Scottish island. yes, it is as cliched as it sounds. This is deliberate but it really isn't that meta.

Also, I don't know if both authors are from the US. All the characters bar one are, even though it is set in Scotland. The one British character repeatedly says dollhouse which irritated me a lot. The whole book irritated me, to be honest. I need to stop being sucked in by these 'smash hits'. Stephen King is quoted on the front cover, comparing this to Christie. Stephen, no.

I read something similar to this a few months ago but that was really really bad so I can't remember what that was called!

I have tried to read a few of The Times crime recommendations and rarely get on with them. I think their crime reviewer and I have very different tastes.

Thanks that is where I heard of her, though maybe online links.

I am a recovering print Guardian buyer. I do read articles online and no I don't want to make voluntary contributions because I am not wealthy and I still run out of money at the end of the pay month. I also don't feel that the Guardian entirely deserves our not very plentiful cash. I'm critical of the BBC but I can't imagine being without Radio 4, 4 Extra, BBC Four, Iplayer etc)

Thanks @elkiedeeI picked up Kin- loved An American Marriage