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

@elkiedee Yeah I will definitely still read Fall and Rise in the daytime and possibly in print. It doesn’t work for bedtime. The voice makes me sleepy as well which doesn’t help.

I’ve never heard of Janina Ramirez……

I like Steinbeck, and I think The Grapes of Wrath is a great book, but it is angry and depressing (because it's meant to be). East of Eden is one of those books that grabs you by the throat and doesn't let you go - it's one of the few where I still have a mental picture of at least one of the characters many many years after I read it (Cathy, of course). I think it's astonishing and I must read it again some time.

She's an academic art historian, TV presenter (BBC Four) and has written several books, eg Femina - I have it and another TBR, several of us here have actually read it! Interest in medieval art and women's history.

JR is in her mid 40s, and dresses the way I wanted to dress when I was about 18 if I had the confidence and money to buy the right black clothes or whatever. I've read that she is of Polish descent. She has straight black hair which may be dyed, not necessarily to cover grey but as part of her look, it looks too even and flat to be entirely real, even on TV. Or it could be real.

My slighly younger sister at 18 was a much more fashionable "Gothy Girl" than me, when she started medical school. I had a Gothy Girl flatmate in my first year. It was a big thing in the late 80s in the north, and so maybe my response is about nostalgia.

Just looked up Fall and Rise - if it's the 9/11 book, I wouldn't listen to it at bedtime. I often fall asleep when radio programmes I love most are on. There are some lovely romcom and social comedy things on R4 Extra, and there are still a lot of abridged book adaptations, but I doze off and wake up just in time for the few comedians I really don't get at all.

@HagCymraeg I am retired and old and I read about the same amount as you and seem to have similar taste. My reading dropped significantly when I had my DC in the 90s but didn't increase much once they were older because of me faffing online instead. I made a concerted effort over the last couple of years and have increased my average from about 20 books a year to 50.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I have had Grapes of Wrath on my TBR for years. The only Steinbeck I've read is Mice and Men and that was because DC were doing it for GCSE, it wasn't on the syllabus when I did O levels in the 70s. I can't remember what we did but there was some H G Wells, Far from The Madding Crowd and a collection of science fiction short stories.

@HagCymraeg Working full-time here. I have one dd, currently doing A-Levels. She insists on using the sitting-room to revise so I can't get at the TV these days. But I like to go to bed early and read for aaaages so I get through quite a lot.

@elkiedee yes it’s the 9/11 book and it’s lots of stories about the individuals who perished including children it just isn’t conducive for going to bed

I’m also a Steinbeck fan. I read GOW at 15 and it devastated me. I’m really looking forward to the EofE TV series.
My reading dropped significantly when I stopped commuting for three hours a day and moved to a job 15 minutes away. I changed jobs for convenience but I missed that commute, especially in the mornings. Radio 2, a flask of coffee and my kindle, bliss. I am retired now and probably read less.

I’m currently listening to East of Eden picked for Goodreads spring challenge as wouldn’t be my usual go to. I am enjoying it but it is extremely long (26 hours) and feels it! Maybe reading to book would be a different experience but I keep speeding up the audio to try and get to the end so I can move onto something new. It is an epic story but I’m just not entertained by it. Perhaps I’d feel different with a written copy. Though I loved Demon Copperhead which was just about as long and sprawling but felt a lot more invested in the characters.

@campingwidow I do the Goodreads challenges too! I picked The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny for the marathon read and had to pause/DNF at 440 pages. I might still finish it and will give you thoughts here when I either finish or officially DNF. Am now reading North and South for the challenge which I am enjoying a lot more.

Thanks for the new thread @Southeastdweller

I read Grapes of Wrath with my book group many years ago, I loved it . I will give East of Eden go @Welshwabbit

10 Ripeness by Sarah Moss
A novel with two time lines about a young woman Edith, tasked with looking after her pregnant ballet dancer sister in rural Italy in the 1960s. The story is interspersed with Edith as a sparky 70 something in rural Ireland reflecting on her life and recognising themes of belonging, loss and identity. A bit slow in parts but overall an engaging and thought provoking read for me.
11 Private Lives by Emily Edwards
I read this as I had previously enjoyed The Herd . This wasn’t as good imo . Similar themes , moral dilemmas but I found it quite tedious and repetitive after a while .
12 What the Wild Seas Can Be by Helen Scales
I don’t often read non fiction but I absolutely loved this book. A totally engrossing book about the state of the world’s oceans and the impact of climate change. Wonderful descriptions of marine life with impassioned narrative about the perils being faced. I think I got the recommendation from early in this thread, so thanks for the inspiration.
13 Saltwater by Jessica Andrews
A coming of age book around heritage, family, growing up and what it means to belong. I quite enjoyed it but not as much as her other novel Milk Teeth.
14 The Burning by Jane Casey
Thanks again to this thread for the recommendation. First book in the Maeve Kerrigan series and I look forward to reading more.
15 The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters.
I loved this book. A historical fiction novel about a Mi’kmaq family whose youngest daughter goes missing from a blueberry field in Maine. It is a fifty year old mystery told from differing perspectives and tackles loss, trauma, identity against a backdrop of familial love and forgiveness.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (sp?) is 99p in the deals today.

Case Files Vol 1 Rachel Amphlett
This is a collection of 12 short stories, the longest took less than 15 minutes to read, so I've been dipping in and out of it for a week or so. Most of them felt like whole stories, a couple needed a bit more fleshing out and one or 2 would have made brilliant full length novels.

Auschwitz: My First Train Journey Conrad Jones I think the title makes it kind of obvious what this is about. Kurt is an 8 year old Jewish boy living in Poland with his family, He's somewhat of a prodigy on the violin which works to his advantage when the Nazis invade. The book mainly centres on Kurt, although also follows his family into the ghetto and then the camps. It's not a happy read by any stretch of the imagination, but had glimmers of hope and love.

@HagCymraeg yes I am retired at 60 (for the time being) but I don't read as much as I would like but I appreciate that the extra time is a luxury especially for a book lover. Like @NotWavingButReading I didn't read much when DC were young and I too spent far too long faffing around. There are so many books I would like to read but I resist motoring through them. I would just forget them if I read too quickly. Sometimes, I even read to myself out loud as I find that slows me down.

Very sad news from Paris today.

Heartbreaking news from Paris, and no, I don't know exactly her political views on her country of origin, or the one she then spent the rest of her life in.

Being a refugee and living with that family history is complicated; I still haven't got round to reading her most famous book, but she also wrote a children's book that my son totally adored.

Marjane Satrapi, some time child refugee, author of an autobiographical graphic novel about her family's fllight from Iran, author of graphic novel Persepolis and a sequel, and a children's picture book that also deserved to be famous, called Monsters are Afraid of the Moon - DS2 was obsessed with this as a child, and DP actually added details like giving the monsters names.

She also edited a book called Woman, Life, Freedom, a slogan associated with
Kurdish women still fighting for their lives, quite literally

Only 56, and said to have died of sadness after her partner's death

I enjoy it as it forces me to step away from my trashy popcorn thrillers for a few hours!! I’ve not closed an LGBT one yet, was thinking of Kin as I’ve seen some good reviews.

good luck with the marathon read!

I saw that @elkiedee she's so young. Not sure about dying of sadness, maybe she took her own life which would be tragic.

I loved Persepolis and highly recommend it.

Ah another thread I am in danger of missing.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I did technically miss out on Of Mice and Men at school as the second half of our year did that and my side did To Kill a Mockingbird but I made sure to read OMAM too as I had FOMO :-)

I think "morte de chagrin" implies more than dying of sadness, somehow. Something stronger. Her husband of some years died last year, and it must be a hard time to be an Iranian abroad, particularly if you don't entirely embrace Iran's enemies as allies....

But whatever, today it feels like a tragic loss.

42 . Look What You Made Me Do by John Lanchester

I’ve previously read and liked The Wall and Capital by the same author. Picked this up in the recent deals. Needed something to be extremely different from Grapes Of Wrath and this delivered that.

Phoebe has written the latest Netflix hit

Kate thinks it’s about her marriage.

This was quite slight, less than 300 pages, and sometimes it felt like plot development was missing, and it also had a tendency to go off on irrelevant tangents, it could have done with more substance.

That said it was easy, done in one sitting reading with some good twists, though I didn’t necessarily buy the end.

Diverting enough but not unmissable.

I think "chagrin" in this specific tragic case may be sorrow for Satrapi's country, her people, as much as for her late partner although of course this is speculation. Just a few weeks ago, my cousin's ex-dp's friend, an Iranian Kurdish guy, said that "we can survive a bad government, we can't survive no government" - perhaps a reference to what has followed forced regime change elsewhere in the region. Imagine following news from home and missing her dp at the same time. Not to mention the impact of war. Soldiers too. Mental health is a huge theme in refugee stories, fiction and non-fiction, and it doesn't just stop if you become successful in a safe place.

I just came on to talk about Marjane Satrapi. I loved Persepolis and it’s one of the books that got me into graphic novels as I’d really seen them as comics before that. Such sad news.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit the 911 book is really good, as good as The Only Plane In the Sky.

I've just been telling DS2 about Marjane Satrapi as she wrote his favourite picture book, about a kid who is afraid of the dark and the monsters it brings... written by a refugee child who became a refugee woman living in a country which isn't always kind to migrants. The more I think about it the more this little picture book, a lovely story with a happy ending, makes me wonder what she actually thought as she produced it.

Thanks, I bought this as I've read several of his books and want to read the others, including Lanchester's, non-fiction too. It sounds very different but possibly light relief, valuable in breaking up a reading slump.