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

@AgualusasL0ver I think your view is entirely understandable, and doesn’t mean you’re not a feminist! To boast about rescuing women writers from obscurity has become a bit of a cliché. What interesting things does the 'rescuer' have to say about said women writers, would be my question.

That said, things have dramatically changed over the course of my own lifetime when it comes to including women writers and BAME writers in the literary canon. When I studied French literature at university in the 1980s, there was an introductory literary anthology used called Poèmes, Pièces, Prose. I found it in a secondhand bookshop a few years ago, and bought it out of nostalgia. I was amazed to see that there was not a single French/Francophone woman writer or non-white writer featured in the entire anthology! This was a 700+ page anthology published by Oxford University Press in 1973. What amazes me almost equally is that when I was an undergrad, dutifully studying this anthology, I never noticed the fact that ALL the many authors included were white men. It just seemed normal to me.

So in that sense, things have very much changed for the better. Needless to say, there were many, many amazing French women writers and Francophone post-colonial writers who could have been included in that anthology. The editors just didn’t see fit to include them. Extraordinary.

On a related topic, there’s a new antiquarian/secondhand bookshop that has just opened in my city. The people who run it seem lovely. But I did notice walking round that the (carefully curated) selection of books was all very much the Great Western Canon. Almost no books by women or writers of colour at all. I felt that the bookshop was designed to appeal to US tourists, who think of England as the land of Shakespeare and Dickens and the Inklings, and aren’t really interested in the full range of Anglophone literature. I felt like the bookshop badly needed some Virago Classics, like Stella Gibbons or Elizabeth Taylor. Or Edna O’Brien!

On the subject of O’Brien, I read her Country Girls trilogy last year and thought it was great, although a little bleak. I think the first volume of the trilogy was also a read on the Rather Dated book threads? Which I always think of joining but haven’t managed to yet. There’s not enough time to read all the books I wish I could read!

You can still get through AQA A level English Lit without doing a single text by a non white male, unbelievably. Apart from the odd poem.

@AgualusasL0ver 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 thought that Pereirra Maintains was excellent too. I gave my dad a copy - he was scarily highbrow - and it was a hit. He had learned several languages including Chinese, so I could only give him books in translation if he had never learned the original language. Although this may have been translated from Italian not Portuguese, I don't think he spoke/read either. he now has dementia but listens to audiobooks all the time on headphones, and I'm sure he's listening to old classics not any old rubbish.

37 on that list for me - quite a few of them are more ones I know I’ve read (in my late teens/ 20s probably) and can’t remember a thing about though.

Finished my number 23 of the year Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
This was a RWYO, had been hanging around unfinished as when I started it previously I just found it irritating and not as good at what it was trying to do as say Wodehouse for example. This time I rather enjoyed it, goes to show how much your mood at time of reading influences your experience of the book.

I chose to write a Comparative Literature dissertation as part of my degree in my final year. Because there were only 2 staff in a little corner of the French department, there was only one subject available - the short story. I think the reading list included Katherine Mansfield, whereas the other lecturer in the 2nd year had taught a course on The Novel of Adolescence and Self Development - and the books were old and white but there were lots of women.

I did draw on quite a few African-American writers though I didn't come across so many outside the UK/US and France at that time. Many of the stories I worte about came from Angela Carter's anthology Wayward Girls and Wicked Women. One author has become the 2nd most famous painter in Mexico now - after Frida Kahlo (1st) but probably before Kahlo's husband Diego Rivera - and I think Kahlo is well known outside Mexico whereas I'm not sure her husband is.

think the first volume of the trilogy was also a read on the Rather Dated book threads? Which I always think of joining but haven’t managed to yet. There’s not enough time to read all the books I wish I could read!

It was. Would be great to have you aboard @cassandre but I totally understand (and sympathise) with the too-many-books problem!

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford
I hadn’t read this before because the author’s name made me think he might be a bit of a patronising arse. By the end of the book the jury was still out on that, but I did largely enjoy it.
Iris is a secretary on the London stock exchange during WW2. She’s a bit of a fast cat and one evening in a club poaches a young radio engineer, Geoff, from under the nose of society girl Lalage Cunningham. Lalage/Lall has a Cunning Plan to let that nice Mr Hitler win, involving an ancient Order and some Angels.
Liked: the Angels, the construction of the path to Nonesuch, the wartime stock exchange minutiae, the humour, the passages of beautiful writing on faith, hope and loss.
Hated: he can’t write women and he especially can’t write women’s sexuality - the Ick was real, people <shudder>. I particularly disliked how he tied in Iris’s lifestyle with the ending (vague to avoid spoilers).
It did keep me reading, with quite a lot of eyerolling at the self satisfied Male Writer Shows How He Writes Female Character signalling. The plot was great, a jolly terrific adventure, chaps! Deeply irritating cliffhanger ending To Be Continued but if I have to spend the sequel cringing at Iris frotting her way back to her true destiny then it’s going to be a DNF.

I’ve read 18/100 on the new list (which I do prefer to the earlier one) which just tells me I’m not the sort of person who reads list-worthy books 😊. Two heist-themed books from my slowly-reducing RWYO pile:

27. Spitting Gold – Carmella Lowkis

Paris 1866: Sylvie Devereux is reconnected with her estranged sister Charlotte to plan one final con to finance their ill father’s medical treatment. Their past crimes were based around conning wealthy families as fraudulent spirit mediums – and they will need to deploy every trick to terrify their latest marks into handing over the family treasure. Until they start experiencing paranormal horrors themselves…

This had it all – history, gothic settings, suspense, plot twists and sapphic romance to boot. I preferred Laura Shepherd-Robinson's The Art of a Lie in terms of the plot development, but I can see how this has been compared to the work of Sarah Waters. It was a solid debut novel, but for me nothing exceptional.

28. The Usual Suspects – Ernest Larsen

A short book, more an overlong essay, studying the making of and themes behind the 1990s thriller/heist movie. It was moderately interesting - film studies or film-making students would probably appreciate it more as there was a lot of perceptive stuff to say about the film.

As someone who has seen The Usual Suspects many times and even plotted out the various strands of the story in a notebook to try and work it all out, that sounds great @RomanMum

If you PM/DM me I can send you my copy!

That’s extremely kind of you @RomanMum but I’m strictly incognito on here. Not because of other members but because MN is leaky like a sieve and so I don’t put any details anywhere, not even a number for WhatsApp via PM. Thank you anyway

43. Before the Coffee Gets Cold - Toshizaku Kawaguchi

I love Japan, have been there several times and indeed have visited many Japanese coffee-shops, but I can safely say I'd never have read this if it hadn’t been required as a book-club choice.

At the Funiculi Funicula coffee shop in Tokyo (huh?) it’s well known that customers can go back in time if they follow certain Rules. These Rules are precise, onerous, and repeated so many, many times during the course of the book that you'll want to scream when you sense them approaching yet again. Not least is the requirement for time-travellers to drink their coffee before it gets cold, or they'll be stuck in the past. A number of stereotypes whose clothing and eye shape are described in lieu of character then proceed to undergo the process so they can achieve…..erm, not very much? A bit of mild personal development, maybe, but as one of the Rules is that precisely nothing in the present can be altered by going back in the past, this all seems a bit academic.

It's so clunkily written - or maybe badly translated - that I was astonished to learn that three further helpings of this mawkish stuff have been published, and millions of copies have been sold.

Now, how to say all this really politely at the book club……🤔 😱

@Terpsichore I agree with your review. Lots of people love it though!

I enjoyed your review @Terpsichore 😄

No problem, I quite understand.

If you decide to go searching it’s in the BFI Modern Classics series, published in 2002. 😊

@Terpsichore I quite liked it. But I think Japanese cosy is very fable like. The repetitiveness is a feature not a bug! But definitely an acquired taste as I realised at my book club where I was the only one who liked Water Moon.

Yes, as I read on i could see there was a lot that was distinctively Japanese about it - and also, it started out as a play, and I can see it working much better in that format.

@CornishLizard I didn’t know there was a book about this! I heard a podcast (I think it was this American life) about it and listened to it a few times. I have tried to describe it to people but haven’t been able to do the bizarreness of the whole thing justice. I will have to look this book out.

The People Next Door. Carla Kovach
As a teenager, Gemma used to spend her summers with her Aunt on Clover Lane. Then one year something happened and she vowed never to return. Until 20-odd years later when she inherits the house, her husband has made some bad financial decisions so they move there with their 2 daughters, 14 year old Morgan and toddler Cora. But the past refuses to lie silently. Someone knows what happened and someone is sending everyone malicious notes.
I really enjoyed this, a quick read for me with plenty of mystery and twists which meant I had no idea who was doing what.

6 Rocabarra Terrace. CC Gilmartin
This was a tense supernatural thriller. When 18 year old Mairi finds herself pregnant and unmarried she does the only thing she can and abandons the baby, leaving him to be raised by her father and grandmother. I found that slightly unrealistic as it was 2006 and unmarried mothers were really common. But then again, I don't live on a tiny Scottish Island. And she had her reasons which are revealed later on. 18 years later and Mairi gets the phone call that her son has died in a tragic accident. She heads home for the funeral and then to Glasgow to clear out his flat. Then things get really weird. I don't want to say too much because it would spoil it if anyone wants to read it. But there were some great supernatural elements, and I still feel a little uneasy having finished it a hour ago.

This evening I went to an event where Sarah Moss was interviewed by Wendy Erskine. It was a really good conversation and both writers came across as very likeable. Moss was very funny at times. I found it interesting that she deliberately gives herself a technical challenge in every book in terms of how it’s written (in her most recent Ripeness, (which I loved) it was writing the same character at 17 and 73, she has to be the same essential person but shaped by her life. On Tuesday DH and I go to see Patrick Radden Keefe which I’m also really looking forward to.

I’ve also finished two books
Tess of the D’Urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
It’s many years since I’ve read any hardy and this was my first time with Tess. it’s beautifully written- the descriptive writing in particular, and very bleak- though most of the story is sadly very realistic. It made me very angry. Especially at the supposed romantic lead. I like that Hardy wanted to expose the double standards of the Victorian age and thought that was done well. Although the constant descriptions of Tess’s mouth gave me the ick, it’s a bold for me.

The Wolf Tree by Laura McCluskey
This is a police procedural set in a remote Scottish island where two detectives are sent to investigate the apparent suicide if one of the island’s inhabitants. The sense of place is excellent with some gorgeous nature writing and the tension was built up really well. I found this because it’s been nominated for a Crime Writers Association dagger and it deserves it. She has a new book out which I also intend to read.

@ÚlldemoShúl that sounds fascinating and explains some of the variation in Moss's books. I do think she's under looked by the prize people.

@Piggywaspushed that's very depressing about Eng Lit A level. I was very excited a few years ago when my then babysitter was doing Home Fire as one of her texts though. It was an option and she did say only about 3 people in her form had chosen it with the rest doing something old white male I think.

Not shocked by the lack of women although I would have expected an extract from La Princesse de Clèves. Does Dumas count as BAME?

I’ve read 36 with a few DNFs, but I have quite a few on my TBR pile as well.

One Day in the Death of America has also stayed with me. Thinking about female authors I think The Handmaid’s Tale was the only book by a female author I studied at A Level.

I’ll look up the podcast elspeth. It really is such a bizarre story and the book plays to it well with all sorts of weird and wonderful facts.

Your cold coffee review made me laugh Terpsichore.

@Terpsichore , I said pretty much the same thing to the friend who's loaned me 'Coffee'

Of the Guardian Readers Favourites list I've read 50 but have an additional 27 DNF. At least I tried, I guess.

However, my NCT Book Group started in 2004. After 22 years we've picked loads of those titles which explained my disproportionate high score.