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 can't say I particularly enjoyed it. Well, I enjoyed the story part, not the murder mystery.

It was my second book of the year. My review was " A group of friends gather for New Year's Eve at an airbnb and play a murder mystery game. In the morning, one of them is found dead. An eminent detective arrives to solve the murder, as everyone present falls under suspicion. This is described as original and genre-breaking and it is, but in an unexpected way. I wish Mumsnet had the spoiler tag in the same way that goodreads does because I can't really say any more without massive spoilers. What I will say is that it was very moving, and did indeed mess with my brain."

I did go back and re-read it, and also found some of the questions and answers about it on Goodreads to be very helpful!

@elspethmcgillicudddy I really like Tom Lake, though nothing much happens, and Bel Canto by Patchett. I wasn't convinced by the central premise of Whistler, and agree with Eine about Maeve in The Dutch House. I think I've read Run and Commonwealth too but don't remember anything about them.

90. None of This Is True - Lisa Jewell. I listened to the audio of this which was very well done but it's not really my kind of book. I used to read loads of these thriller types about 10 years ago and made a deliberate effort to cut down on them and read more literary books instead. I think the problem with them for me is the same as bingeing a tub of ice cream, I'm desperate to know what happens but don't really enjoy the experience and feel slightly sick afterwards.

91. Fruit Fly - Josh Silver. This is about Mallory, a writer who wrote a successful YA book a few years ago but has been stuck with writers block ever since. She decides to join Grindr too meet gay guys as that is apparently what sells. She ends up meeting Leo, a homeless addict who she ends up writing about. The chapters alternate between Mal and Leo's PoVs. I liked this at the start, it was quite funny and a bit cringey but it gets darker and darker as it progresses. Mal is in an awful marriage with a controlling husband, Leo does awful stuff to get his next fix. I think it was meant to be a dark comedy but by about halfway through,I was ready for it to be over.

I think I need something lighter! Life has been quite tricky and nothing much is working for me literary wise. I may reread something like Robin Hobb for escapism.

78. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel - This was very different from my usual reading material but I enjoyed it very much. It imagines a world where a pandemic that has killed 99% of the population (it was published in 2014 pre the actual pandemic). But it was very different from the usual disaster movie. There are no heroes, no one comes to save anyone, and none of the characters are especially heroic and most are morally grey. Though it is constructed like a mystery, its focus is on what is there to live for when there is nothing left to live for. Which parts of civilisation and being human are worth saving? I thought it was very well written and I couldn't put it down once I hit the 65% mark. It just missed being a bold for me because I thought the end was a little underwhelming. My critical head completely understands why it was written that way and it's the right ending for the book - but my emotional head would have liked a bit more bang and a bit less whimper.

Thanks for that. Definitely can't say too much about it as it will spoil the experience. I was pretty frustrated with it last night when I finished it but I have been thinking about it non stop today - well, part of it, that is. Not the murder mystery part.

I thought Tom Lake was lovely and I even enjoyed Bel Canto. I don’t know why Whistler left me cold.

The Story of a Heart - Rachel Clarke - A quick re-read, still a bold.

I'm doing a slow catch up on the thread as usual. Welcome @Theretheretheir!

I went to London yesterday to see a historian friend who knows loads about early 20th c women writers, and I'm still on a high. She took me to Skoob books and I had trouble tearing myself away.

Am about to depart on holiday to France and keep tinkering with my book pile. I'm bringing far too many books, I know, but just working out which books to bring is a great pleasure.

@Tarragon123 I'm so pleased to hear that Ian Rankin is a decent human being as well as an excellent writer!

@minsmum I'm wishing you a speedy recovery!

@Terpsichore I loved your review of Clouds of Witness.

@Pigtailsandall I enjoyed your review of Katabasis. My impression of Kuang is that she has brilliant ideas for novels, but doesn't realise them very well.

About Ann Patchett, I was a fan of Dutch House but not of Tom Lake. I thought Dutch House was a kind of fairytale writ large.

I have loved nearly all the Ann Patchetts I have read - Tom Lake, The Magician's Assistant, The Dutch House, Commonwealth, State of Wonder and Bel Canto.

The only one I was underwhelmed by was Run.

However my absolute favourite is her non fiction This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.

@Stowickthevast oh I’m quite sad that None etc didn’t do it for you - I’m reading Fruit Fly right now just started

@Tarahumara that’s unfortunate as Run is the only one of hers I own! 😀

@GrannieMainland I’m currently half way through The Calamity Club and really enjoying it despite a slightly slow start. I’m at the point where the plan is hatched (yes, very implausible) but not yet executed so I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.

I’ve recently bought Whistler and the Jane Casey so glad you’ve enjoyed both of them.

@StitchesInTime – I have the Mel Robbins book tbr. I think the premise sounds good, but agree with @EineReiseDurchDieZeit Easier said than done, I fear.

@GrannieMainland – I thought I was the only other person who wasn’t a fan of The Dutch House. I just didn’t get it at all. However, I will give Whistler a go now. I really want to like Ann Patchett. She runs a book shop, for goodness sake!

As much as I loved The Story of a Heart I don’t think I’ll ever be emotionally strong enough to reread. I absolutely sobbed.

Ann Patchett is a bit of a mixed bag for me. The Dutch house is the only one of hers that I’ve loved. I liked Commonwealth, thought Bel Canto was ok but found I was skipping parts of State of Wonder when I read it recently. I’ve still got Whistler and Tom Lake to try.

It's definitely a me issue with overdosing on those psychological thrillers when the dc were young as the only thing I had time for @EineReiseDurchDieZeit . I did think the audio was excellent.

Will be interested to see what you think of Fruit Fly.

😂

Oh I only ever hear people raving about The Dutch House! So glad to hear I’m not the only one who didn’t get it. I know I enjoyed Commonwealth at the time but it doesn’t stick in my mind. Bel Canto, State of Wonder and Tom Lake I loved.

I also read Fair Play last year and thought it was very clever though not sure it completely worked. Hard to discuss without giving things away but I guess it was perceptive about how we process trauma and what detective novels are for in general - which is certainly ambitious.

Besides The Dutch House (underwhelmed) the only ones I have read are Tom Lake and Bel Canto both of which I enjoyed much more.

On the Patchett chat -
I read Bel Canto in my mid 20s and can't remember a thing about it other than I really enjoyed it. It has survived house moves and book culls so maybe I need to reread (something I very very rarely do!)
Run was good but nothing exceptional IIRC.
Loved Tom Lake narrated by Meryl Streep on audible (which is definitely a contributing factor)

TBR on my kindle I have State of Wonder, The Dutch House, Commonwealth and These precious days

I didn't enjoy The Dutch House either. I thought I was too stupid to understand it! It put me off Ann Patchett for a while until I read Tom Lake, which I liked. Will be reading Whistler soon so we'll see which side it falls on.

Booth by Karen Joy Fowker

Story of the family of John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin. The opening part was fairly bleak- the Booths lost a number of children in infancy and with another writer I probably would have DNF, but I really liked her style. Enjoyed the sections about the Booth sisters more than the Booth brothers- they do a lot of prancing about reciting Shakespeare. If you're into Shakespeare you'd get more from the quotes and references to the plays than I did though. I learned a lot too about the American Civil War- she lays the history out in a very accessible way.

Yesteryear- Caro Claire Burke

A 'tradwife' Instagram influencer wakes up in the past. This is a hard one to describe without giving spoilers. I thought this was very clever and makes good points but the main character left me cold. I like books with a bit of light and shadow and this felt all shadow. I didn't think Natalie's character was particularly consistent either- it felt like her character was being shaped and altered to conveniently fit the plot, as opposed to the plot rising out of actions she'd genuinely take. I rushed through it but at the end I did get that bingeing on ice cream and feeling rubbish for it feeling that @Stowickthevast described so well.

And a DNF- Freya by Anthony Quinn

Gave up halfway through as I really didn't like the characters- lots of self-important unpleasant arty types, and I could sense a storyline coming up with two woman fawning over a man who was just a bit of a dick. Disappointing as I've really liked his other books (including Curtain Call, which this is a follow up to) but this wasn't for me. I seem to have DNFed a lot of books recently- disappointing when you've put a bit of time in but, I've learned from experience, better than that bitter feeling of pushing to the end of a book and wishing you really hadn't bothered!

51. The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout 5/5
    I’m a Strout fan and all of her books seem to turn out to be bolds for me. The protagonist of this book is a male high school teacher of history. I loved it. The epilogue is a bit unusual for Strout (it’s a kind of apocalyptic lament about what Trump has done to America) but I felt it was justified and well-earnt.

52. Se perdre [Getting Lost], Annie Ernaux 4/5
    Diary entries that chart Ernaux’s involvement with a married Russian diplomat (see also Passion simple). The narrator’s life (or this period of it anyway) seems to revolve entirely around waiting for her lover to contact her, having short intense sexual encounters, and then returning to a state of waiting again. Curiously, it reminded me a lot of Boccaccio’s Elegia de Madonna Fiammetta (14th c.), which is also a first-person narrative about a woman waiting for her lover’s return. Everything Ernaux writes is worth reading, but I’ve realised that I prefer those of her books which focus primarily on social class (or on sexual desire and social class) to those which focus primarily on sexual desire.

53. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Fractured a Faith and Corrupted a Nation, Kristin Kobes Du Mez 4/5
    This book was recommended to me by my American sister-in-law, who like me is an ex-vangelical (a term she taught me!). It’s a book that would probably appeal most to people who (like me) grew up deeply immersed in evangelical America. The book aims to provide an answer to the question of why conservative American evangelicals embraced Trump with such enthusiasm, and I would say it succeeds. Du Mez looks at evangelical Christianity and politics from the 80s onwards, and shows how the ethos of militant patriarchy became gradually stronger and stronger, choking out the gentler, more tolerant versions of faith and Jesus. She’s also interested in fundamentalist Christianity as a capitalist/commercial phenomenon (how Americans have been swamped with books and products to buy, which successfully spread and reinforced the militant ethos). The earlier chapters of the book are full of household names from my childhood (Billy Graham, Phyllis Schafly, James Dobson, Bill Gothard). Her discussion of General Douglas MacArthur reminded me that he was one of my dad’s heroes, and we had a plaque on our living room wall of MacArthur’s ‘Build me a son’ prayer – I hadn’t thought of that for years, sheesh. (My father was a Marine Corps veteran and a fundamentalist pastor, so we were smack in the centre of the demographic Du Mez is describing.) As the book progresses, I recognise fewer names, but presumably that’s because I broke away from fundamentalist Christianity in my late teens (and then moved to the UK!). The book is actually less polemical than its subtitle would suggest; in fact, if I have any criticism to make of it, it’s that I got a bit bogged down at points with lists of names and dates, and would have liked more analysis and argument. Still, an excellent book, partly because Du Mez teaches at Calvin College (Dutch Reformed, intensely conservative and patriarchal – I have homeschool friends from childhood who went there) and is herself a person of faith, so her critique comes from the inside. The book’s last chapter is a kind of litany of sexual abuse perpetrated by famous church leaders. It’s sickening to read, but the point is that militant patriarchal Christianity lends itself to violence not just in the international political sphere, but at home as well.

In other news, I’m slowly working my way through Lucan’s Civil War, an epic and a Latin classic, but I’m going on holiday tomorrow and have decided not to take that with me; it’s too much of a bloody downer! I need more frivolous stuff!

I was doing really well at reducing my physical TBR pile, but then a few days ago a writer who lives a street away from me put piles and piles of books on her garden wall for people to take (she’s moving to Ireland), and I took about 10. Argh! I’ve becoming better at not buying books unless I know I’m definitely, definitely going to read them, but when books are going free on a garden wall, I can’t restrain myself…

OMG I've just popped into my office to water my plants before I leave for holiday, and discovered that my (male) academic colleague has started doing his special version of academic manspreading again, by moving some of his books and boxes into our common kitchen space. ARGH!

He's a hoarder. We've been through all this before. We had a massive row about it a couple of years ago and HR had to intervene with mediation 😳

It might not seem like a big deal, but he is already taking up 90% of our common storage space with his stuff. And he's pulling rank because his academic status is higher than mine.

We went through the whole fracas of mediation, and he agreed to keep common surfaces clear (a compromise because he still has full possession of the cupboards), and now he's at it again. In summer it's really quiet, so he sneaks his piles of books and boxes back in.

He already possesses one of the largest uni offices available (it's enormous compared to mine) AND he's taken over all our communal storage cupboards.

It's a question of principle to me at this point.

The thing is, he greeted me very warmly when I came in, asking about the welfare of my plants. I was amazed and grateful that he had decided to be civil and let bygones be bygones. Now I realise it was all because he was colonising the kitchen again.

Sorry Professor Doctor, be careful which minor woman lecturer you choose to tangle with 😂

Apologies for derailing the thread, I'm just so very miffed!

That sounds incredibly difficult @cassandre. And no doubt he did it stealthily because he didn’t think you’d be back. The weasel!

I just bit the bullet and asked him very politely to move his possessions off the kitchen countertop. He said, 'Yes, I will. Eventually.' His face indicated that he was Not Pleased.

I'll see what happens. Let's hope this doesn't turn into a repeat of the past, which involved me piling his possessions in front of his office door in a moment of fury, and him threatening to report me to the university for harassment because I had Touched His Books.

First world problems I know.