50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Five

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fifth 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, the third thread here and the fourth thread

I said this about her in 2023 and you replied and said Thank God I am not the only one
@BestIsWest

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

I got this when Barbara Pym was discussed on the thread about 3 years ago and she has recently been discussed again on this years thread. So I thought I'd get on with it. I didn't particularly get on with Quartet In Autumn previously though I haven't looked up my review.
Whilst I do love a bit of English Jolly Ho Spiffing Boarding School Wot Wot and am therefore not averse to Britishness in Literature; I think in Excellent Women I've found a book that I can point to and say that is the EXACT type of book I hate
Spinster Of The Parish, More Tea Vicar, Jumble Sale, Are They Catholic Do You Think? Lyon's Cream Tea, Repressed Sexuality, Stilted Conversation Resulting In Embarrassing Misunderstandings AND ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENS
I actually think that in summary I've made it sound better than the utter borefest it actually is

Spinster Of The Parish, More Tea Vicar, Jumble Sale, Are They Catholic Do You Think? Lyon's Cream Tea, Repressed Sexuality, Stilted Conversation Resulting In Embarrassing Misunderstandings AND ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENS

You could be describing Jane and Prudence here

It’s just that I feel I must be missing out so keep trying. This attempt was triggered by reading that Jilly Cooper loved this book (and wrote the intro which I enjoyed much more than the actual book).

You could be describing Jane and Prudence

Exactly! And that’s the problem with her!

My apologies to your wallet, @MaterMoribund 😁

Although I am a huge fan of her best friend Hazel Holt who was Pym’s biographer and wrote a series of crime novels set in a fictional town that she and Pym made up based on Weston-Super-Mare. The Mrs Mallory books are great.

I’ve had Barbara Pym on my list and own both Excellent Women and Quartet in Autumn because of good reviews on here, but everything you two are saying is putting me off- like a female slightly more modern PG Wodehouse. I’m now moving her right back down my tbr…

I love a bit of Pym. There are times in my year I need something light, sometimes silly, and utopian and nostalgic in a way I don’t really understand. All the lunching and vicars is just so fluffy and hits the spot.

In my reading grid, it’s the ‘Twee Vicar’ category.

@ÚlldemoShúl

you could kill 2 birds with one stone by giving one a go and then KNOWING you won’t read both

Having read both I would choose Quartet in Autumn

Nooo, don’t be put off Pym, @ÚlldemoShúl Just be aware that Quartet in Autumn is very much an outlier. It's kind of like Samuel Beckett trying to write a Barbara Pym 😂

So do you agree with Eine that that’s the one to try or should I try Excellent Women?

Ive got to say the twee vicar stuff isn’t selling it to me…

IIRC there isn’t a vicar in Quartet In Autumn and it’s about soon-to-be retirees

I’m not a fan of Barbara Pym either, but definitely thought I was in a very small minority. This was my review from a couple of years ago.

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

I think quite a few people read this last year, or the year before. I was really looking forward to it, as on paper it’s exactly like my kind of thing, but unfortunately I just found it a bit dull. It wasn’t bad, it was just inoffensive, and didn’t spark any real interest or emotion for me.

I don't know how long for but for anyone who likes social comedy mixed with murder, and with a struggling actor lead, I bought the first 6 (of over 20) crime novels in the Charles Paris series for 99p - had already read up to #5 from the library.. These are dated a bit as written and set in the early 1970s. They've recently all been adapted for radio by Jeremy Front and that is great comfort listening. too

www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GZWSHRMR

Thanks, that sounds like it’s more my thing than the vicars. I’ll give that one a go I think.

I’ve managed to finish half a dozen books since the last time I posted so will try to keep things brief:

42. The Future by Naomi Alderman

Set in the near future and featuring characters who are clearly based on certain real life tech billionaires.
The tech billionaires are planning escape routes, bunkers etc for the believed inevitable end of the world in whatever form that takes.
Lai Zhen, an internet famous survivalist, stumbles across their plans following a hook up with Martha, PA to one of the billionaires, and gets tangled up in the whole thing.

It’s very readable, although there’s quite a lot of suspension of disbelief required. Not so much for the whole bunker plan, I can easily imagine the real life billionaires plotting that. More so the actions of the other characters involved. It’d be nice to imagine things working out so positively in real life.

43. Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint Vol 2 by singNsong

Dokja’s journey continues, with more scenarios and boss monsters to be tackled.
Very similar in tone to Vol 1. Entertaining but lots of video game style violence.

44. Talk With Your Kids by Michael Parker

Contains over 100 conversation starters based around ethics and philosophy, slanted towards the sort of ethical dilemmas that would be more relevant to teenagers. One that’s more suited to dipping in and out of.

45. A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

Felicity has returned to her exclusive boarding school to resit her senior year after the tragic death of her girlfriend the previous year.
The girlfriend’s old room is now occupied by the eccentric and charismatic teenage novelist Ellis, who soon enlists Felicity’s help in researching the witches rumoured to be haunting the school. Witches that Felicity had been obsessed with the previous year.

This all gets quite dark and neither of the main characters were particularly sympathetic. I kept reading because I wanted to know how it would turn out, but I’m struggling to decide whether I liked it. Which is an answer in itself I guess!

46. The Promised Neverland Vol 10 by Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demizu

In this volume the children are enacting their plan to take on the demons in the hunting ground at Goldy Pond.
It all goes surprisingly well, given how physically outclassed the children are by the demons. This volume ended before the end of this story arc though, so I’ll have to see whether it’s still going so well in the next volume once the library get it in.

47. My Hero Academia Vol 7 by Kohei Horikoshi

The internships are ending, and it’s back to school, where Midoriya and Bakugo have to team up together against All Might for their end of year exam. Lots of action, and hints about a big bad supervillain on the horizon.

Sorry, didn’t see the replies. Well, Quartet in Autumn is unlike all her other books and quite bleak. Pym had had cancer and a mastectomy, fallen way out of favour and couldn’t get published any more. She didn’t expect QIA to be published either but it found many admirers (Larkin for one) and ended up being nominated for the Booker Prize, but didn’t win.

It's just that it’s not really like her earlier books very much at all. I'd slightly dispute the 'twee vicars' label too….but each to their own!

Thanks- it was someone else who said twee vicars as I haven’t read her. I shall have to put my money where my mouth is and give at least one a go soon!

Recent reads

The Ratline by Philippe Sands
Tells the story of Otto Wachter, an Austrian Nazi who was responsible for running a large area of Poland during the Second World War, and the Holocaust, who escaped at the end of the war and died before he could use ‘the Ratline’ to travel to South America. His youngest son, Horst, convinced his father was a ‘good’ Nazi asked Sands to look into the history. The book is well written and deeply researched, and reading about Horst’s blinkers and his awful late mother Charlotte is fascinating. But the book doesn’t really look into the Ratline much at all, which was what had drawn me to it in the first place. It’s an excellent history, just not the one I was looking for.

The Silent Places by Sarah Mellor
This is the second in a series of police procedurals set in 1980s Liverpool. In this one DS Leigh Borrowdale has recently returned from maternity leave and has to work with ex boyfriend and father of her child DI Des Chung in the investigation of the murder of a suspected child murderer. The protagonists are outsiders in this setting which makes for an interesting perspective, but this one wasn’t as good as the first. It took a while to get going properly and the subplot about Leigh’s missing brother was more interesting. That said I’ll give at least a third one a go if and when it’s released.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
I had seen the movie of this before so knew the general storyline, which I thought was just okay- Irish girl emigrates to the US away from family- well trodden roads. Toibin’s writing is lovely and I did feel emotional at one part of the story. However, I don’t think it would have as much acclaim had it been written by a woman (which a gazillion of these stories have been)

The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens
Winner of the 1970 Booker Prize. Norman Zweck is seeing silver fish everywhere. A former lawyer, he’s now an addict with poor mental health and his father, the rabbi, and sister Bella have him sectioned. So starts a story which is at times darkly comic but also very moving of family relationships, social norms, secrets and mental health. I loved the rabbi, and enjoyed this book much more than I expected to.

Oh gosh, I love Barbara Pym. That said, I didn't warm to her straight away. I came back to her after a delay of some years and then adored her. Maybe this is because I had become a more boring middle-aged person. But I hope not! 😂

It's true that not much happens in terms of plot. Her novels are all about the tongue-in-cheek observation of daily life, and human nature. There is often a single woman protagonist (a spinster if I can use that old-fashioned word) who wryly watches and observes everyone around her. There is also an amazing sense of time and place; you feel like you've stepped into the world of 1930s/40s/50s Britain.

I find her novels very restful when I'm stressed. Her characters worry about trivia, and we as readers can see that it's trivia, but they can't... it reminds me that the everyday stuff I get so anxious about in my own life is not actually that important.

Jane and Prudence isn't my favourite. And @terpsichore is quite right to say that Quarter in Autumn isn't like Pym's other novels. The protagonists are older, and the narrative overall is bleaker.

My favourite Pyms are:
Crampton Hodnet: satire of north Oxford, amazingly well-observed, and Pym wrote it when she was only an undergrad herself, which amazes me. It was published posthumously.

Some Tame Gazelle: Pym's first published novel. As so often with Pym, the male characters are comically self-important and the women see right through them.

Less Than Angels: a satire of academic anthropologists. Pym herself worked for years as an editor at the International African Institute in London, and she draws on her own experiences when writing this novel.

These are my favourites, but they're not necessarily her best; they're just the ones I loved the most. (I like academic satire.) What draws me to Pym I think is that she recognises silly human foibles so well, but doesn't necessarily condemn any of her characters, no matter how blinkered they are. She satirises them but also recognises their humanity.

Sorry for the long post; I'm procrastinating and am spending way too much time online at the moment...

I’m another one who didn’t get on with Pym when I tried to read one of her books a few years ago - if I remember correctly I was bored and didn’t finish. It’s odd because on paper she sounds right up my street. Perhaps I should give her another try.

The bleakness of Quartet in Autumn put me off Barbara Pym for years. I listened the other day to the of A Good Read in which they discussed Jane and Prudence, so that inspired me to buy a copy of J&P, which I'll get to later this summer.

I Want You to Be Happy - Jem Calder. Contemporary romantic fiction set in London, this follows Chuck, who works as a lead copy writer, and has recently split from his fiancée.* *He soon meets the also annoyingly named Joey, an aspiring poet who works in a coffee shop. Despite both of them being at very different stages in their lives, a romance of sorts begins. The story wasn't hugely gripping, but I liked the elegance and fluidity of his writing; I'd read another of his.

The French Vendetta Simon Michael
This was book 11 in a series of Legal Thrillers. I've not read any of the others, and dont feel that you need to read them all.
Dual timeline, set in 1940s France and 1970 England/France. In the 1970 timeline, barrister Charles, his wife and child go on holiday to France. They end up staying at a remote farmhouse and end up caught up in a vendetta between those who opposed the Nazis and those who collaborated.
In the 1940s, some Jews are living under false papers. Rumours abound. Someone blabs some resistance secrets to the Nazis.
Thoroughly enjoyable, and a lot of the minor plot points were based on the authors family history.

Im delving into the fog of memory, but I think I quite liked Excellent Women. I enjoyed the period detail and although gentle I thought it was quite evocative of a certain type of loneliness (if I am rembering right). However, Some Tame Gazelle set my teeth on edge to say the least. I know someone who really enjoyed it though, despite being from a world far removed from the one Pym describes. I can remember us discussing it at the time - I was surprised how much she enjoyed it. I think some people just warm to the style more than others.

I read Some Tame Gazelle last year - i found it in a very old fashioned Welsh holiday cottage. I had zero expectations. I was a bit bemused by it tbh but it has really stayed with me - she definitely has a bold style. I'm not sure I would read another one.

I am a Barbara Pym fan. I like the observational writing and the humour. Agree with @cassandreon most enjoyable ones (of the ones I have read).