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

Snap @countrygirl99 have read 43 of those. We’re about to read another for book club. I think that’s an ok list.

Another Gary Younge admirer here by the way . One Day in the Death of America has really stayed with me.

I like David Olusoga a lot.

I’ve read 55. Loved some. Hated others (A Little Life I’m looking at you…)

@Piggywaspushed- just scanned the list & will go back to it later, but it feels a much richer and less pretentious list & I like the range of genres as it feels like there is something for everyone, both re recognition of personal taste & finding reading recommendations. Re French Lit I’m pleased to see Stendhal, Zola, Dumas & Camus have entries - but I’m completely mystified that Proust (still cheating by being allowed to class all of the massive tomes of À la recherche as a single book) beats Les Mis.

Also pleased to see school stalwarts like Animal Farm & To Kill a Mockingbird (both of which I like - although I get that there are issues with the latter now) on the list as it shows the impact of English teaching on reading when there’s a decent book choice.

LOTR is back in its rightful place on the list too - technically that’s cheating too as it’s three books, but I don’t find that as irritating as Proust as you can buy all 3 in a doorstopper omnibus edition if you really want too.

49 for me. 49.5 if you count the two times I got halfway through LOTR (not trying again)

22.5 (halfway through Les Mis 😄) and one DNF - but there are lots more that are on my “to read” list. Definitely a better list than the authors’/critics’ one!

65 for me on that list a couple on TBR and a couple of DNFs there too. Much better list.

Quite a lot for me - 71 or 72, depending on whether I can count one Elena Ferrante as I'm not going to read any more. A couple of DNFs too and some I feel I should read - mainly the classics like Hardy, Steinbeck and most of Dickens.

Agree it feels like a more even list - though perhaps modern lit is slightly skewed to the 21st century.

25 ish for me. Could be more as I haven't counted the ones I think I have read but can't remember and some I read one book of the series.Glad to see Gentleman in Moscow there- one of my favourite reads this year.

46 for me if I include Les Mis which I am part of the way through. Some others on my TBR pile.

The Sea Sisters - Louise Douglas (Touissant Detective Agency 4)

Thank the goddess that’s over.

I loved her book The Secrets of Villa Alba and I very much enjoyed the first book in this quartet (very nominally about a detective agency in coastal France, actually about Mila who returns to the town when her step sister Sophie drowns) but I rather get the impression the mystery of Sophie’s death was originally going to be wrapped up in two books, except the first one did well and so the resolution got elongated, annoyingly.

This one was particularly irritating because there was a highly obvious step that the client would have taken before approaching detectives and it didn’t “occur” to anyone until a fifth of the way in.

There is rather too much turgid prose (eg they sat a table amongst the other tables and Mila opened her cold drink, which was an orange flavour) and rather too little detecting, but the French seaside sounds very idyllic, especially if you get to work at an agency that never mentions anything as crass as payment to the one client they have per summer 😀

I’ve read 56 on that list. Much more like it. (Though I’d put Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon above Gravity’s Rainbow - and everything else tbh - any day of the week.)

I can't seem to get the whole list to load, there's nothing between 98 and 75 for me.

But of the ones i can see definitely read 4. Possibly a few others and am horribly behind partway through Les Mis.

There's lots on there that are on my TBR so maybe I'll start working my way through it.

DH was looking for something for on holiday next week. He likes detective series which isn't my genre. Thanks to these threads I've suggested Ann Cleeves so fingers crossed.
I have 56 unread books on my Kindle so I should be ok for a week 😂.

I’ve read 25 from that Guardian list, DNF a few more and also have several on my TBR list.

35 for me, a few DNF, another few on my reading list & like @BlueFairyBugsBooksI’m trying to desperately catch up with Les Mis.

Including series unreasonably annoys me as it just feels like cheating - Dance to the Music of Time & the Neapolitan Quartet are also on the list. Surely if you love an author that much you can narrow it down to one book on the list?

There’s still not much comedy there though - the only purely comic book that I spotted was Hitchhiker although Jane Austen, Dickens & A Suitable Boy have a lot of humour. I can remember hearing a lecture about Molière many, many years ago that claimed that comedy was much harder to write than tragedy - maybe that explains why comic books are missing on all these lists?

I would recommend Ann Cleeves in general - I've read books from 2 of her series - Shetland and Two Rivers. There are at least 2 others. plus other bits. Plus I've met her several times, from just before Vera got Tv Rgihts on. Did you recommend a specific book?

I'd say I've read around thirty books from that list.

I'm counting Les Mis (in progress!) and also Ulysses although I listened to Ulysses as an audio book and most of it went over my head.
Also, I never got round to reading the last of the Elena Ferrante quartet.

45 for me and 10 DNFs. I’m counting LOTR as finished even though I had to give it back to the person I’d borrowed it off with one chapter to go and I’ve never gone back to read it. I reckon if I made it that far I can count it.

What’s interesting to me is I have read 32 on that list, and 35 on the critics list, really not a lot in it. They don’t seem greatly different to me, the readers one is broader and less euro centric.

Readers, I have FINALLY finished a book:

Last Train to Lisbon Pascal Mercier, trans by Barbara Harshav from German

The first 40% I was still slumping and the least 60% I read over the last two days. This is a slow book about a man in his late 50s who teaches Greek and Latin in Bern. A chance meeting with a Portuguese woman about to throw herself off a bridge and stumbling across a rare Portuguese book sends him on a journey to Lisbon where he tracks down the family and friends of the writer. The ‘writer’ thinks himself a philosopher and there are long sprawling italicised passages from his ‘book’. The protagonist clearly values and aspires to him.

It’s a man having a midlife crisis against the backdrop of memories of Salazar’s Portugal and the Carnation Revolution. For those interested in the latter, in the world of fiction Perreira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi is vastly superior (and would make my top 20 never mind top 100). I’d read more by Mercier if it appeared in the deals but wouldn’t seek him out.

I read the Country Girls when I was about 15 (early 1970s). I've got rid of 95% of my paper books but I still have Edna O'Brien. I might buy one or two on kindle to re-read because I can't read the print or hold the book very easily now.

I've read about 25 on that list and have several on my tbr. For some reason I've never got round to reading Madam Bovary but have a copy.

I'm assuming some people named the whole series and some individual books form within a series so they probably then counted that as one 'book'.

I have just finished Lucy Steeds' The Artist. This really is beautifully written and evocative. I liked reading a book set just after WWI rather than in it. Themes such as control, possession and trauma are well explored. Her creation of Tartuffe is so convincing I did check if he was real.

Quite a slow read but sometimes that is a good thing as I have raced through a lot of very average , plot driven stuff recently. I look forward to more form Steeds.

Just to say I didn’t mean to denigrate Mary Beard; I may not see eye to eye with her on every issue, but I think she’s great. It’s interesting that she’s the chair of this year’s Booker. She’s very much a historian rather than a literary critic, but I’m sure she’ll do a good job.

Anyway, the world would be a worse place if we only read books by writers whose views we agreed with on all points. Sometimes reading is primarily for comfort, but I also see reading as about expanding your horizons and looking at the world through someone else’s perspective.

There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to read someone’s books either though. I’ve decided not to read any more Lionel Shriver as I find her anti-immigration views so reprehensible. That said I didn’t like her writing much anyway, so that wasn’t a difficult decision!

Then there are writers who seem to be really good people in real life, but whose books just don’t speak to me. Matt Haig for instance. And Yael van der Wouden who wrote The Safekeep. I’m sure there are others.

The world of books, like the world of people, is a rich and multicoloured tapestry 😁

I have read 49 or 50 on the Guardian list as have only read 2 of the Neoplitan novels. Two more I am currently reading.

@AgualusasL0ver I didn’t love The Last Train to Lisbon. I had to switch to audio to finish it. Shame as I liked the opening.