50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Six

[Southeastdweller]

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

I got John of John, a brief history of the coast, the lost city of Z,.

and I’d highly recommend when the cranes fly south and trustee from the tool room, both favourites of mine which are 99p

Oh @ÚlldemoShúl I am excited for you to read The Museum of Innocence. I read it in Istanbul a few years ago and have been desperate to visit the museum he curated alongside but haven’t made it yet.

Thank you to whoever unthread mentioned the Kenan Orhan book, obviously I will need to buy this because he is Turkish and this is what I do, but actually just read about it and the subject matter is right in my space so now I’m quite excited.

I have never read any of the classic children’s books that have been coming up, I seem to have gone from Ronald Dahl to Catherine Cookson, stayed there a good while, Memoirs of a Geisha which was my breakthrough reading experience (accept it has not stood the test of time) but was my entry into what I would call slightly more complex reading. I still love a Catherine Cookson though and always pick up her old copies when I see them.

I checked the deals this morning as was resisting as quite a few books that have been mentioned is on BorrowBox and I’ve just reorganised my Kindle and a have a shameful amount to RWYO.

At least that was the case until @bettbburgmentioned Trustee from the Toolroom. I’ve also bought Kindred because it sounds interesting & an Abby Jimenez for when I next need some escapism.

@AgualusasL0ver- my library used to have a whole bookcase devoted to Catherine Cookson! Also on the subject of libraries, BorrowBox seems to have added Howl’s Moving Castle & House of Many Ways neither of which I need to borrow as I DS has copies, but it did brighten my day!

I've bought When the Cranes Fly South and The Road in the deals.

Antarctica by Claire Keegan
I seem to remember someone on here saying the title story was very dark and indeed it is. I mostly enjoyed these miserable little snippets of quietly desperate lives. My favourite is the one where the put-upon sister exacts a fitting revenge on her selfish sibling.

I thought it was a very good example of the genre. So many are not.

Lucy Caldwell and Sarah Hall both have several novels and volumes of short stories on offer at 99p. Not daily deals but I don't know whether these are available for the month or for a shorter time. I have a lot of these already, but I bought Intimacies and Madam Zero which I've read from the library, and I bought a Kindle edition of How to Paint a Dead Man which I've read relatively recently.

Also available at 99p each, £2.97 for all 3 on Kindle, Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga's trilogy Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not and This Mournable Body. About the childhood, education and life before and after the end of white minority rule in Zimbabwe, previously called Rhodesia.

87 A God in Every Stone – Kamila Shamsie. I think ‘sweeping’ is the best way to describe the two Kamila Shamsie books that I have read so far. I previously read Burnt Shadows, which opens in Nagasaki, August 1945. A God in Every Stone opens in July 1914. Vivian Spencer dreams of being an archaeologist and goes on a dig in Ottoman Empire with two Germans and an Armenian. Once war is declared, she returns to London and becomes a VAD. At the same time, soldiers from Pashtun are sent to France. Vivian meets up with one of the injured solders, Qayyum Gul. Vivien visits Peshawar in April 1930. This should have been a huge signpost to me, like Nagasaki August 1945. But I had never heard of the Qissa Khwani Bazaar massacre.

For me, there was just too much crammed into this book. I haven’t even mentioned Darius I and a missing silver crown. WWI, the Armenian Genocide, Indian Independence, Women’s Suffrage (in England). However, I will keep my eye out for more Kamila Shamsie books.

I just bought Dr Zhivago in the deals

Well, I popped out to two different bookshops to try and buy the Kenan Orhan book (apparently they often don’t get long listed books in time, because they don’t actually expect to be listed); Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon (unavailable) and Ajay Choudhury’s new thriller/police procedural as this is the one where I am the main character. Alas, two book shops, two coffees and a few hours later all I have is this one that no where had last week and I ordered from Amazon in the end.

I am so so behind with reviews again, argh. I have been reading a lot, but actually writing anything has seemed too onerous (??). I'm thinking of seeing the GP because I just feel so tired all the time. Maybe it's iron deficiency or something... anyway I had a lovely weekend away last weekend with my RL book group in a cottage in Wales. The idea was that everyone would read all weekend, but in reality we spent most of our time walking, cooking and most of all chatting 😂No regrets!

@Terpsichore I loved your review of Alba de Cespedes' No Turning Back. You put your finger on what I loved so much about the novel. I'm so glad you were impressed by it!

@StrangewaysHereWeCome I enjoyed your review of The Human Stain by Philip Roth. I agree fully that Roth is a manly writer for manly men, ha. I've tried to read him before and haven't succeeded... I did watch the film version of The Human Stain when it came out though, with Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins, and recall it as being quite watchable. I recently reread Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (for a RL book group) and she talks about how she gave up on Roth due to his sexism. (I identified with her there.) However, she overcame her aversion in order to read a novel Roth wrote about doubles, Operation Shylock. The novel sounded interesting but I think I'll stick with Klein's summary of it rather than trying it out myself.

@Piggywaspushed and @Tarahumara I'm happy you both liked The Benefactors; I thought it was brilliant and maybe deserves more acclaim than it has received.

About the rifling/riffling controversy (sorry I know this is old news now!), I was reading Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night (published in 1935) during my Wales getaway, and found the following sentence: 'he took out a bunch of notes from his pocket and riffled them over with a puzzled frown'. So 'riffled' isn't new...

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh great review of The House on the Strand. I didn't love it unreservedly, but it's a fascinating novel. I was also interested in your review of Offenses by Constance Debre (which I haven't read). I've read Love Me Tender by the same author (same title in French and in English translation) and it was an absolutely harrowing memoir about how she lost custody of her son due to her being gay. So even though she was a lawyer, she still suffered at the hands of the law... I would recommend Love Me Tender, but it's not an easy read...

@ChessieFL I read the Elizabeth Enright books as a child and haven't thought about them since! Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

I don't feel excited about the Booker longlist (maybe that's just me), but that's probably all for the best, as my TBR pile is so big already. The only one I've read is the Strout. I've reserved a few others at the library; if I'm lucky they'll take a long time to arrive 😂

40. A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing, Alice Evelyn Yang 5/5
    Women’s Prize longlist. A young Chinese-American woman takes in her alcoholic father, who has just turned up again after disappearing when his daughter was a teenager. The novel is split between three different generational timeframes and perspectives: the daughter’s experience in NYC in the present, the father’s experience of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and his own mother’s experience of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. There is a lot of history packed into this novel; there are also strands of magical realism, but these function mostly as symbolic representations of trauma and memory: of how trauma is passed down in a family from generation to generation. A very impressive debut novel. It’s a difficult read due to the violence of some of the historical scenes, but the violence never feels gratuitous, and there is a welcome glimmer of hope at the end.

41. Land, Maggie O’Farrell 4/5
    A gripping saga told in O’Farrell’s typically rich prose. I liked this a lot; I thought that the individual characters came to life in memorable ways, and that the ancient magical well where various characters experienced epiphanies had convincing psychological resonance: the ‘magic’ of the well could perhaps be interpreted as the characters encountering their own unconscious desires (hitherto repressed). That said, O’Farrell’s decision to evoke the timelessness of myth (as we see in the very title, which is Land not Ireland) meant that the novel felt less firmly anchored in 19th century Irish history than it could have been. Brian Friel’s amazing 1980 play Translations, which is also about the Ordnance Survey, felt more historically ‘real’ to me than Land. That could just be my own preference though… I was also a bit troubled by some of the stark black and white divisions in Land. The British are never humanised; they’re pure villains. And from my perspective as a medievalist, the blunt conflict between pagan Celtic tradition and the Catholic religion made me uncomfortable. I don’t know much about Ireland in the Middle Ages, but across medieval Europe, there is a lot of syncretism when it comes to the confrontation of pagan and Christian traditions. It’s not so much Christianity stamping out previous myth as Christianity latching onto previous myth and integrating it… so in Arthurian romance for instance you have the Holy Grail as a sacred object, but you also have Merlin and the Lady of the Lake and lots of different supernatural symbols merging, both secular and sacred. In the end, I prefer Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait to Land. But O’Farrell is a brilliant novelist and I want to read her backlist.

42. Leaving Home, Mark Haddon 5/5
    A short, gripping memoir by the author of the beautiful novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I think @Terpsichore recommended this and it did not disappoint! Mark Haddon is an extraordinary person. He grew up in a family where there was not a lot of love – in fact, there was downright emotional neglect – but he tells his life story with compassion and dark humour. He is an artist as well as a writer, and there are illustrations on nearly every page: photographs, drawings of his own, and sometimes drawings from books he has read (accompanied by ironic captions). It’s the portrait of an era as well as an individual. Incidentally, I didn’t realise when I started reading that he lives in Oxford (so some of the people and places he talks about are familiar to me in other contexts). I was impressed by the variety of things he has done over the course of his life, e.g. being a carer for non-verbal disabled people, and volunteering for the Samaritans. This is a book that brings literature and life together in the best way possible.

I'm so pleased you enjoyed the Mark Haddon memoir, @cassandre. I thought it was outstanding. There’s a big interview with him in tomorrow's Observer - I don’t think he’s been too well again, sadly.

1. Fundamentally - Nussaibah Younis

Didn’t love this, the premise that Our Heroine would have got the job she did (deradicalising ISIS brides) on the basis of an academic paper without any field experience or even people experience seemed so far fetched. Plus most of the cast list were caricatures not characters, IMO.

1. Five - Ilona Bannister

Liked this very much.

It is 0701 on a surburban platform. There are five main characters and one will die in five minutes when the 0706 arrives. Action switches between the current “countdown” on the platform and the backstory that brought the characters to this point. Very well written.

Evenings and Weekends - Oisín McKenna. Set across one hot weekend in pre-Covid London, this centres around a cast of linked characters, most of whom have secrets. Everything comes to a head over the course of this weekend as tensions rise, which sounds like a decent story, but the execution was lacking. I thought the writing was often a bit stilted, which resulted in me feeling distanced from the story and characters. Some good observations now and then along with some OK characterisations mean that I may read his next book - out next spring - but only after reading a few reviews.

Cassandre wrote: "I've reserved a few others at the library; if I'm lucky they'll take a long time to arrive"

Yes, I look at long queues for books and think, maybe I'll catch up a bit. I've finished one very overdue book which I'd like to write a review of, but if I don't manage to do so tomorrow I'll probably return it and try to borrow it again. There isn't a huge queue of borrowers but there is only 1 copy. Now I'm reading books due on 23 and 28 July, and will probably end up returning several others rather late. So it would be good if other reserves with a queue reach me in September or even October, when I might have got a grip on my library piles... hahahha....

Yeah @SheilaFentiman I just don’t understand the love for Fundamentally I thought it was very poor.

I really liked Fundamentally - I didn't think everything in the story was entirely realistic but lots of international roles go to people because of who they are rather than what they know. Britain has a long history of doing that - it may have changed form since the middle and upper class British "remittance men" sent off to do something in the Empire, with the US and other countries joining in the jostling for influence. And the author may well have based some of those "caricatures" on people she met in real life.

The writer of Fundamentally was writing from her own experience but somehow the story felt inauthentic.

Maddaddam Margaret Atwood. I'm glad I read this trilogy, but this one wasn't really for me. It was a bit rapey and patronising. And it was all wrapped up too nicely by the end. I preferred book two.
50 Atomic Habits. Well, I'm not sure there was much to see here. Maybe I have read too many self improvement books or am already perfect or something but I don't think I encountered anything new. As the title implies it is about developing habits that will help you achieve your life goals.
51 Zen in the Garden. Miki Sacamoto. This was almost a DNF. I listened to it as an audio book and the narration really put me off. It's a biography of Miki and her garden but the narrator was a man, which seemed inauthentic plus the plant names were often incorrectly and inconsistently pronounced. It lacked the detail to make it a gardening book but also the soul to be about the Zen experience. It was pleasant but didn't hold my interest at all.

Oh @SheilaFentimanI have Five either on my Kindle or I put it on my Kindle wish list (even though it was 99p - I’m trying to give myself cooling off periods).

I agree. She complicated it far too much with everyone's backstories being raised to absurd levels of complications. Then having the Iman they brought in being a hippie charlatan was really too OTT. It would have been a far better story had she hinted at how people joined not necessarily for altruistic reasons but because they were broken or greedy in some way and focused on the problems with the deradicalisation programme and the Shaminia Begum woman.

Yes, agree!

@elkiedee Pierre getting a job because of “who he knew” was more plausible than Nadia getting one without any practical background.

Younis worked with and not for the UN. I’m sure she encountered some people with some of these characteristics, but to have a team-load of them with limited redeeming features didn’t ring true, to me.

I do that! At the start of Deal Month I add the 99p ones to wish list and then decide through the month.

With Five, it was reviewed in my local bookshop’s newsletter and sounded great, so I bought it on kindle (I do buy fancy hardbacks from them so they get something from the deal 😀)

I am with you @cassandre and @elkiedee in often hoping that library reservations take their time! I am in a pickle with my BorrowBox reservations at the moment. Three that were originally well-spaced all arrived at once, and one of them is 26hrs long. I am having to listen during time I'd rather be reading my physical book in order to make it through!

On the plus side when I first reserved John of John it was showing as available in early 2027, but has now crept forward to October.