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

Gah, you've all made my add loads to my (obviously never ending) TBR list! Thanks for the recommendations for
Our Fathers
One Pair of Hands
The Cut Throat Trial
There’s No Turning Back
Ordinary Saints
How to Kill a Language
and John of John all* *of which sound right up my street.

Great review of Flesh @VikingNorthUtsire - I felt similarly.

@elspethmcgillicudddy I adored Trebizon . I loved (what was then) the modernisation of the boarding school novel, and I think Tish’s brother Robbie was my first literary crush.

30.The Human Stain by Philip Roth. Coleman Silk is a senior academic in the field of classics. Or at least he was, until he lost his job after accusations of racism, after making comments wondering if two absent students he’d never met were not real, and perhaps in fact “spooks”. In the course of wanting to air his defence, Silk meets with writer Nathan Zuckermann to share something of his background. Nathan uncovers a secret relating to the essence of Silk’s being and which changes entirely how Zuckermann views him.

This is quite a manly books for Manly Men.The women in it are a bit two dimensional and the writing is analytic to the point of being a bit cold and emotional detached. Silk’s affair with a much younger and vulnerable woman isn’t really unpacked. That being said, it was often sharp and funny, and grappled well with the issue of “cancel culture" long before it was really a thing, as well as looking at issues around racial identify. I don’t want to write in more detail as there’s A Big Reveal, and even though this isn’t a new book by any stretch I felt my reading experience was definitely improved for not having read spoilers. Anyway, it was good in parts.

manly books for Manly Men

Ew. Philip Roth. All his books are like that. I gave up after I think, 3 of them maybe 4

Just caught up on the new thread - I remember reading both One Pair of Hands" and "One pair of Feet (which if I recall correctly was about the author joining the war effort as a nurse?) - I think my grandmother gave them to me, and seeing as it musy have been 40 years since I read them, I must have enjoyed them to remember them. Might reread.

I would also recommend Project Hail Mary as an audio book - very enjoyable indeed.

I have just treated myself to Entitled in the Audible sale - I love a bit of Royal trash reading as a guilty pleasure.

@elspethmcgillicudddy I also loved Trebizon, but I haven't read all of them. I suspect I am about to go down a rabbit hole.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit entirely with you on Philip Roth. I've read two, I think, and American Pastoral was particularly heinous on the misogyny front. No more for me.

Just popping on to say I enjoyed One Pair of Hands very much. We’re off on what seems to be becoming an annual trip to Amsterdam and the Netherlands tomorrow so I’ve lined up One Pair of Feet, The Five Star Weekend and the second half of Olive Kitteridge as holiday reading.

Oh, a trip to Amsterdam - what a treat, @BestIsWest! excellent reading material too.

There’s a film of One Pair of Feet and Monica D is rather withering about it in her autobiography (which is also well worth a read - it’s called An Open Book and she gives the real story of how she came to write OPOH and OPOF. Short version: she was a deb from a very comfortable background, Dickens's youngest son was her grandfather and she certainly wasn’t expected to work for a living. But she seemed to have inherited the writing gene…)

41 The Killing Stones - Ann Cleeves A few years after the last book in the Shetland series, police detectives Jimmy Perez and Willow Reeves are settled in Orkney and preparing for Christmas with their young son, when Jimmy’s childhood friend and cousin is murdered. The mystery unwinds with twists and turns, red herrings, and more murders, in the standard Cleeves manner. Good fun but the revelation of the culprit was even more out of the blue than usual - the identity of the murderer was convincing enough in isolation but it really annoys me when the first 95% of the book deliberately gives no clues or hints. Still enjoyed it though!

61. Passage to Tokyo by Poppy Kuroki

Time slip book.

Yui’s younger brother Hiro runs off when they’re on a trip to a park, and she’s following him when she goes through a strange tunnel that takes her from 1995 Tokyo to 1923 Tokyo, weeks before a devastating earthquake is due to hit Tokyo. She can’t find Hiro at first, but is taken in by a young woman named Chiyo and her family.

The part of the book where Yui’s adjusting to living in the past, and forming a relationship with Chiyo, is fairly detailed, but later on there’s some pretty major time jumps, with the last 50 pages covering 30 years of elapsed time.

Overall it’s ok but not particularly engaging.

@Terpsichore on your recommendation we went to The Hague on a previous trip but never did find your sweet little bookshop. Maybe this time.

Just finished Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid. There was a lot about it that I liked, especially as someone who was watching lots and lots of tennis in the era(s) Carrie competes in. I liked Carrie’s open obsession with winning and her relationship with her father, and her uneasy alliance with player Bowe Huntley. The plot is predictable but satisfying. However, Jenkins Reid gets a hell of a lot of details wrong. She has the players on the circuit talking in press conferences in ways they literally never, ever would have done in a million years. She has third set tie-breaks at the US Open in the mid-1990s, thirty-odd years before they existed. She has players serving at speeds nobody served at back then. She has umpires calling ‘Set is Soto’s’ and ‘Point is Soto’s’ instead of ‘Game and first/second set, Miss Soto’ and ‘15-love’. She has the Wimbledon men’s Final going on until past 11pm when there was no roof at Wimbledon and the latest they could play was around 8.30pm before the grass got too wet and the light failed. She has Wimbledon being discussed on something called ‘BBC Sports London Radio’. All this stuff is tiresome when you notice it because it takes you away from being immersed.

Now reading The Island of Dr Moreau by HG Wells. Like a lot of Wells’ fiction it feels far more modern than it is and seems ahead of its time. It’s also much more gripping and much more unsettlingly unpleasant than a lot of Victorian horror/ sci-fi. I’m finding it very readable and I can’t put it down.

I’m also listening to the audio of The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie which is the grimmest and darkest of grimdark fantasy. Disturbed to find myself with a slight crush on Sand dan Glokta, a bitter, crippled and disfigured professional torturer with one eye and half his teeth missing who sometimes shits the bed due to horrific injuries sustained when he himself was tortured years previously.

Mrs Pargeter books by Simon Brett
Thanks to whoever recommended Brett. I enjoyed these even more than the Charles Paris ones. Very amusing and jolly good fun. If you like Mick Heron I think you would also enjoy these.

I’m also listening to the audio of The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie which is the grimmest and darkest of grimdark fantasy. Disturbed to find myself with a slight crush on Sand dan Glokta, a bitter, crippled and disfigured professional torturer with one eye and half his teeth missing who sometimes shits the bed due to horrific injuries sustained when he himself was tortured years previously.
You had me at ‘grimmest’ there, it’s going on my List

I remember now! The breakfast there was perfect, sitting out in the little garden at the back ❤️

It's really near the royal palace. Map attached!

Thanks @Terpsichore. I’m angling for a visit back there!

41 First Love by Gwendoline Riley

A writer and her awful relationship with her older husband.
I enjoyed the writing but preferred The palm house.

42 Booker 30: a celebration of 30 years of the Booker Prize for fiction 1969-1998 by Various

A collection of essays about the booker. The 90s were a different place and the prize didn't seem very rigourous in the early days

42 Dream State, Eric Puchner

Thanks to @carefullythere for a recent review of this which inspired me to pick it up from the library (I had it mixed up with another book which I hadn't liked, and would probably have continued to avoid it forever).

We start in rom-com territory. Cece, hurting and mixed-up after the death of her mother, travels from LA to rural Montana to make the final arrangements for her wedding to Charlie, a handsome and privileged junior doctor. Because Charlie can't get away from work, he sends a friend over to help Cece out - Garrett, a Montana local. Cece and Garrett (outdoorsy, taciturn, secretly heartbroken) hate each other on first sight but yet despite themselves... well,you know what happens next, right? You've seen those Hallmark movies?

I won't spoiler exactly what happens next. Suffice to say that after a period of estrangement, the three love triangle members end up back in one another's lives for good. The mood switches from Emily Henry rom-com to a Ann Patchett or Maeve Binchy small town family saga, where we watch young people grow into older people, working out relationships with one another and with their children in a narrative that reaches into the future and the characters' old age. We may not exactly see the sins of the fathers being laid upon the children, but certainly Puchner explores how the characters' younger actions/desires/hurts develop long-lasting consequences as they grow older.

Honestly, an Emily Henry-Ann Patchett-Maeve Binchy mash-up is kind of the perfect book for me and I loved lots of this. Puchner is very good, imho, at writing the same character at different ages throughout their lives - Garrett in particular feels authentic and consistent in the different versions that we get of him from a 20-year-old boy to a reflective old man. Cece is less convincing - I'm not sure whether the author meant her to be an odd character or if he's just not as good at writing women as he is men.

The thing that gives this book its real transcendent special something is the descriptions of the Rocky Mountain landscape. As the novel opens, Cece crosses Charlie's family land to swim in the lake: "The water was so bright she had to squint. The Mission Mountains rose to the left of her, bristling with pines, and then farther across the blue expanse of water were the ghostly peaks of the Salish range, hovering in the distance...The water in Salish Lake was so clear that you could see straight down to the rocks, picking out minnows and lost lures as if they were at the bottom of a swimming pool. The swim ladder shone as brightly below the surface as above it; in fact, the submerged half looked somehow sharper, truer to the eye, though the two halves didn't match up. It was like a more perfect world that had snapped off from the first".

This is a climate change novel and by the last chapters, that lake, and the mountains surrounding it, have changed enormously. The deterioration in the environment and the loss of species gently reflect the change of the characters, from youthful naivety and optimism, to the wisdom and sadness of old age. This is done without too heavy a hand, and leaves the reader with a painful sense of nostalgia, of longing for things lost which will never come back round.

oooh @VikingNorthUtsire that's on my wishlist. will prioritise as it sounds great.

I really enjoyed it. It's like someone asked themselves "Okay, what would happen AFTER the city girl considers running off with the plaid-shirted local hunk?", and actually did it with care.

48. Cloistered - Catherine Coldstream

Read as part of RWYO and bought last year after recommendations on here. I am always up for some nunfiction so this book about Cathy's life as a nun was right up on my street. It was really interesting to read about the detail of her preparation and the beliefs of the Carmel order. However, it really does lay bare the claustrophobic environment and, in her case, the power plays and toxicity that can occur amongst a small group (approximately 20) who are stuck with one another. I found it all quite sad and disillusioning - although I appreciate that this is one convent/monastery of a specific order and is hopefully not reflective of all.

Finished book 37. Transcription by Ben Lerner. Short book which needed a close reading, and I had to spread it over a few days. I bought it for DH but then read it first myself. I think a strong contender for the Booker prize.

It's crafted carefully, with overlapping memories of three men (although two of them blend into one and you start doubting which is which - or if indeed they are separate). It's about what we remember, how we record it and how we understand it. I definitely need to digest it for a few days.

Started on Jane Eure but I had forgotten how much horrible abuse is in it and I might not finish it

26 The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher and the end of the Cold War by Archie Brown
An immensely readable book with the thesis that the Cold War ended when it did, the way it did, substantially because of the qualities of these leaders - above all of Gorbachev. Also inconveniently honest that when Russia protest the expansion of NATO, they do have some reason for that. Very persuasive.

@VikingNorthUtsire what a fabulous review! It sums up perfectly what I liked about the book. I'm definitely going to look outdoor more Emily Henry-Ann Patchett mash-ups, I think it's a sweet spot for me as well.
I did think it managed the future climate decline really well - that doesn't really fit in your mash-up and I'm really not a fan of anything futuristic or dystopian at all but it was still one of my favourite reads this year so far.

That sounds v interesting @PermanentTemporary

88. The Society of Unknowable Objects, Gareth Brown
A small group of people battle to stop powerful magical objects falling into the wrong hands. Lots of globe-trotting, revelations, magic battles etc etc. A decent enough example of the genre, but don't think I'll commit to any sequels.

89. Answer in the Negative, Henrietta Hamilton
Crime fiction published in the 1950s but set in 1940s London. Husband and wife duo of amateur detective enquire into crime. I was more interested in the domestic details than the unravelling of the whodunnit - they have a nanny but do the cooking and housekeeping themselves, with the former commando husband seemingly taking his fair share.

90. The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole
The first ever Gothic novel. A lot more fun than I expected - the author is winking at us knowingly throughout, from the introduction where he purports to be the translator of an ancient manuscript, and praises the beauty of the prose but tells us that he wishes the moral was better. There's a dramatic new development in every paragraph (Supernatural curses! Revelations about parentage! Dramatic escapes through dungeons!) and it's all wildly over the top. Reminded me of The Princess Bride, although the villain is like Alan Rickman hamming it as the sheriff in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

91. Mr Norris Changes Trains, Christopher Isherwood
1930s novel set in Berlin. The narrator becomes fascinated by Mr Norris, a man of dodgy enterprises, masochistic proclivities, and urbane utterances. The author later castigated himself for heartlessness in how he portrayed people working in Berlin's seedy underbelly, not seeing the real suffering going on at the time, but I still found it an oddly likeable book.

92. Muv, Rachel Trethewey
A portrait of the mother of the Mitfords, with the author trying to reconcile the contradictions - some daughters thought she was terrible, some wonderful. She had good qualities, but awful political views. Like most readers of this book, I imagine, I've read quite a lot about the Mitfords, so it was familiar territory, but competently done.

93. Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland, Jen Hadfield
The author had spent around 18 years in Shetland before writing this. Lots of collecting shellfish, wild swimming, becoming part of the community, all the things you'd expect. She's a poet, which isn't always a good thing for a memoirist - it does get fairly self-consciously literary at times. I liked her rejection of lazy labels such as "remote" and "bleak".

94. The British Museum book of Viking Poetry of Love and War, Judith Jesch
Translations of Viking poetry. Pretty illustrations but most of the poems lauded the joys of piling up bodies on the battlefield, so I didn't entirely relate. I did laugh at one, called "Ingolf is popular with the ladies". It reads:
All the grown girls wanted
to go with Ingolf,
those who were of age.
The wee ones were wretched
"I also" said the old woman
"want to go with Ingolf
as long as I have two teeth
still wobbling in my gums".

95. The Scientist who wasn't there, by Joanna Briggs
Fascinating memoir by a woman about her father, who seems to have landed big jobs after faking his research credentials. He was associated with a pharmaceutical scandal and may have been involved in spying. I particularly enjoyed the author's exchanges with her brother as she tries to understand their childhood. Well written and gripping.

96. The Heart-Shaped Tin, Bee Wilson
As the author's husband leaves and her mother starts to fade away with dementia, she writes these essays on the emotional heft of kitchen objects, and their association with what we've loved and lost. Touching.

97. The Correspondent, Virginia Evans
Extensively reviewed on here. Woman in her seventies writes letters that reveal her life. I did warm to this and thought it was worth the read.

@bibliomania- I’m impressed you read the Castle of Otranto - it’s one of those books that are written about but nobody actually reads.

@PermanentTemporary- The Human Factor is going on my wishlist. I found the description of how tactfully Mrs Thatcher dealt with the Russians in Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor completely fascinating.