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

Duplicate post

I’m listening to Betrayal by Tom Bower.

Last Days in Old Europe. Trieste '79, Vienna '85, Prague '89 by Richard Bassett

Written by a former Times Correspondent this memoir of central Europe in the 1980s is full of nostalgia for a much earlier age with amazing anecdotes. Beautifully written and absolutely fascinating in the last chapter about the collapse of the Soviets in (what we then called) Eastern Europe, Bassett spent the autumn of '89 rushing from country to country as nobody quite knew or believed what was happening. I went interrailing in Eastern Europe the next year and it was interesting to compare his descriptions with my memories of what those countries were like a few months later.

Thanks everyone for the good wishes! I have been doing plenty of scrolling and TV watching so definitely not all reading time.

@Stowickthevast I’m impressed you could read a Mantel with one hand! The Mirror and the Light was my trigger for buying a kindle.

@cassandre what a treat to be discovering Ballet Shoes. The play was really great, and actually much more explicit about the lodgers’ relationship.

I tried this and couldn’t bear the narrator. I might buy it for Kindle

Octavia - Jilly Cooper

Despite the mention of fat on every other page and values that were abhorrent in the 70s let alone today, no one evokes a heatwave in the English countryside like JC.

am also deep into the diaries of the Australian writer Helen Garner, which are excellent (How to End a Story)

@cassandre Snap!

25 A Spell of Winter - Helen Dunmore A gothic novel about Cathy and her older brother Rob, brought up by their grandfather and - mostly - the servants, especially Kate, an Irish girl only about 10 years older than them, after their mother left for a life of pleasure on the continent and their father became ill. Their sheltered Edwardian country life is clearly odd from the outset, but gets increasingly weird and isolated, and their close sibling bond crosses a forbidden line.

This was creepy and horrifying, and very well-written, though I can’t say I actually liked it - the incest was too much ick for me. Also, I think the ending could have been done better. However, it won the first ever Women’s Prize for Fiction, so it’s obviously a critical success and objectively is a good book.

Aaargh, fell off the last thread because I was reading Patrick Leigh Fermor, which took FOREVER. Anyway, here's my list:

1 Edenglassie – Melissa Lucashenko
2 All the Colours of the Dark – Chris Whitaker
3 Boymum – Ruth Whippman
4 Bramble Fox – Kathrin Tordasi
5 Salem’s Lot – Stephen King
6 Scattered – Aamna Mohdin
7 Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
8 Due to a Death – Mary Kelly
9 The Reckoning – Jane Casey
10 The Last Girl – Jane Casey
11 Factfulness – Hans Rosling
12 The Stranger You Know – Jane Casey
13 Recitatif – Toni Morrison
14 The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin
15 Whites: on race and other falsehoods - Otegha Uwagba
16 The Sparsholt Affair – Alan Hollinghurst
17 The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club – Sepideh Gholian
18 The Kill – Jane Casey
19 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin
20 A Woman of Substance – Barbara Taylor Bradford
21 Chosen Family – Madeleine Gray
22 The Secret Hours – Mick Herron
23 The Hallmarked Man – Robert Galbraith
24 The Silence of the Girls – Pat Barker
25 The Women of Troy – Pat Barker
26 The Voyage Home – Pat Barker
27 The Gift of Rain – Tan Twan Eng
28 After the Fire – Jane Casey

29 Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor

I decided to give this another try because I have recently visited the Mani and my husband, who loves PLF, insisted on following in his footsteps, which was quite fun. However, I hated it last time I tried to read it and this time round wasn't much better. I managed to drag myself through because it was nice to read about some of the places we'd visited. But I remain firmly of the view that PLF uses far too many words and tumbles off into wholly unnecessary and tedious flights of fancy. I appreciate that for many (my husband included) that is his magic. For me, it's just turgid.

Now to catch up on the thread!

And now I've caught up, congratulations @GrannieMainland! I read virtually nothing between 2012 (when my eldest was born) and 2018 (when my youngest was 3) and it was this thread that brought back my reading mojo. I'm so impressed you're reading anything!

41. Empire of Gold by SA Chakraborty - the Daevabad trilogy draws to a close. I have enjoyed this series, especially the Middle Eastern fantasy setting, which was new and fascinating to me. I also really liked the character work. All the main and most of the side characters are complex, and nuanced people. The main villain does get a bit pantomime villain at the end which is a shame given how well written the others are. I also appreciate that the romance is very restrained and grown-up, unusual in my limited exposure to fantasy novels.

Having said all that, the plot is sometimes needlessly complex and the middles of the books drag a bit. I also thought the ending of the final book was disappointing given how good the rest of the series is. SPOILER ALERT: All the main characters survive and the supernatural intervention feels unnecessary.

However, I did enjoy the series very much and will read more by this author.

A belated congratulations to @GrannieMainland ! Or is it MummieMainland now? I have happy memories of reading Katie Morag to DD.

22. Nicholas and Alexandra – Robert K Massie

I finally came to the end of this biography, an intimate cradle to grave account of the life of the last Tsar of Russia. First published in 1968, so it was written within living memory of the events it describes, and with an immediacy in the writing that comes from the closeness of history. However, this inevitably made it dated in places, for example when talking about latest haemophilia treatments and the later lives of the Russian nobility who survived the Revolution. This doesn’t detract from the engrossing story of the Romanovs through fin de siècle society, revolutions and Great War to the eventual disintegration of a 300-year-old autocratic rule. The book was very sympathetic to Nicholas and Alexandra, rulers of a huge sprawling empire, maybe overly so at times. Massie showed the massive effects on the country of the personal tragedy of the Tsarevich Alexis’s haemophilia; Nicholas’s, and particularly Alexandra’s, intimate nursing care; and the influence of Rasputin, with the problems of ruling a vast country where official communication moved slower than scurrilous gossip.

I spent a while online diving into the minor characters in this drama, both political and family, and learned a lot about Russian politics, which was explained as clearly as possible for something so complex. This is a book I’ll be thinking about for a long time, most likely a bold.

On later Googling I found this was the third in a four-book series, the others being on Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and the fourth book on the 1991 discovery of the remains of the Romanov family. While I think the latter would be a well-researched and very readable book, it was published in 2007. I’ll add this to my wish list, but in the meantime can a 50 Booker recommend a more recent work that includes the subsequent finding of the last two family members and the work of identification? Thanks.

@RomanMum I quite liked that book and the one I recently read about the 4 Grand Duchesses. You could try The Romanovs The Final Chapter by Robert Massie as this was about the discovery of the remains of the Imperial family. I didn’t actually finish it as it wasn’t what I was looking for, but I think it covers everything.

53 The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K Dick

Set in an alternate reality where Germany and Japan won the Second World War. Japan occupy the West Coast of the US and Germany the East, with a weird neutral type zone in the Rocky Mountains region. We follow several characters, whose stories are loosely connected, and a main plot point is a wildly popular fiction set in an alternate reality where Germany and Japan lost the Second World War. This was a bit of an odd book, not the straight science-fiction book I was expecting, it’s more a meditation on the nature of reality than anything else. I swore after listening to The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith that I never wanted to hear about the I Ching again, alas this book may have just smashed that book’s record for mentions of The Book of Changes. All in all it was a bit mid as DD would say.

Thanks for the recommendation @MamaNewtNewt, I vaguely recall seeing the four duchesses book somewhere (Waterstones?), I’ll check it out. I’ve added The Final Chapter to my wish list already.

@MamaNewtNewt- ‘a bit mid’ - that made me laugh. A very popular expression with my kids too, and surprisingly apt on many occasions!

26. The Every Other Day Diet by Dr Krista Varady & Bill Gottlieb

About a diet where, basically, you eat very low calories every other day and you eat normally the rest of the time.

27. Promised Neverland Vol 7 by Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demizu

Manga.
The children are continuing to hide from the man-eating demons. They’ve followed clues to find a safe bunker, which unfortunately contains an unfriendly fellow escapee, and now are trying to figure out how to find the mysterious William Minerva. Fairly fast paced, although not as interesting as the escape the orphanage arc.

28. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Second in the trilogy starting with The Three Body Problem.

The Trisolaran Fleet is now on its way to Earth, and their sophons, which allow them to spy on and sabotage Earth’s efforts at defence, are already here. Which leads to the Wallfacer project, designed to allow four individuals to design secret strategies to try and ensure humanity’s survival.
Hibernation technologies allow the Wallfacers the prospect of seeing the Trisolaran Fleet’s arrival in several hundred years time.

This was an interesting and intense book, but quite a challenging one to read.
There’s a lot of technical details and ideas in there so it’s one where I needed to be sure of a chunk of uninterrupted time before picking it up, because otherwise I’d find myself having to backtrack to previous chapters to reread bits.
And the dark forest theory is pretty depressing.

29. Wolverine: Origins Vol 4: Our War by Daniel Way, Steve Dillon & Kaare Andrews

This series is about Wolverine looking into parts of his past that he’d forgotten and is now remembering. This particular instalment had way too much of Captain America in it for my liking and got a bit boring.

2 short Bank Holiday weekend reads from me
Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu
Book group read. This Chinese classic is from the late 18th/early 19th century where Shen Fu writes records of different aspects of his life (though only 4 survive- marriage/ leisure/ misfortune and travel). It’s nicely written and a real insight into Chinese culture of the period as well as a lovely telling of a real love marriage, somewhat unconventional for the times. We also learn of the role of poetry, concubines, work and family relationships from the time. Fascinating.

Persuasion by Jane Austen
How have I reached the age of 52 without reading this masterpiece? No need for a summary as I’m sure I’m the only 50 Booker not to have read it but it’s an absolute delight. Definite bold.

*20.The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Sonia and Sunny are young people from India, both educated in the USA and trying to start their careers there. At the start of the novel they are not known to one another, although their families are linked by a failed and shady business venture a couple of generations back. Sonia and Sunny are both in relationships with white westerners that they don’t discuss with their families. When Sunny’s partner ends their relationship he half jokingly suggests that his parents should arrange introductions with someone suitable, and they try to engineer a meeting for Sunny and Sonia, but there are too many barriers in the way for things to get off the ground.

This intergeneration saga was long to the point of occasionally being a bit rambling, but I didn’t mind too much. The writing was beautiful. I did feel that the long cast of supporting characters was perhaps better drawn than Sonia and Sunny, but maybe that was the point. Certainly I’d read a whole novel about Sonia’s much maligned divorced auntie Mina Foi, or the struggles of Sunny’s friend Satya working as a GP in a poor Appalachian community. Sonia and Sunny’s loneliness appears not to be as a result of their failed relationships, but their struggles to fit in in the US as migrants, and equally back home in India where they are now viewed as privileged and westernised. There were some supernatural/magic realism elements that I didn’t think added much and could have done without, but overall I really liked this.

This book actually didn't appeal very much to me from the blurb and review, and I only read it as I realised I'd read all of the other Booker shortlisted novels from last year, but I'm glad I did.

I haven't posted for a while as one of my dogs was ill then had to be put to sleep, so it's been hard.

But I have read two interesting books.

Both bolds.

19. Wise by Frank Tallis
    Tallis is a psychologist and this book is about finding purpose, meaning and wisdom in the second half of life. Genuinely thought provoking and an easier read than it probably sounds.

20. The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski
    This is a heavily touted debut novel. Great reviews. It is about an old stately home which is now being turned into a hotel and the lives of the family that lived there, told through features of the house and discarded objects, the various rooms and buildings etc. It's a neat idea. The characters are well drawn and I was gripped by the story as it progressed. I struggled with the style at first - I found it a bit "cozy" but it suits the story. Definitely worth a read.

11.A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult
4/5 I have had this on my shelf since it came out and have deliberately avoided reading it as would be a difficult read. It is about Hugh a hostage negotiator and his daughter Wren who is held hostage at an abortion clinic. It started on a time line working backwards on what happened at each hour. It not only told their story but the stories of the other patients , dr and nurses and the protesters outside the building. Very good and glad I picked this up at long last.

So sorry @Arran2024 sending hugs

@ÚlldemoShúl I had to put Persuasion down but I really must give this another go.

I’m sorry for your loss @Arran2024

31 . Strange Houses by Uketsu

Billed as “The Japanese Mystery Horror Thriller” so covering a lot of genres

An author and his friend, an architect, speculate about the floor plan of a house. The house has a creepy dead space and a strangely appointed child’s bedroom. As they look into it they get more than they bargained for.

This was good and I powered through it in an evening. It’s 99p at the moment and there are a couple of sequels which I will probably read.

There is an afterword which suggests an element of unreliable narration that just feels tagged on and unnecessary, it also suffers from a confusing amount of people who are just “names on a page” with no depth, but it was certainly diverting enough to continue.

Note : Because of the visual element this would not work as an audiobook