50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Seven

[Southeastdweller]

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

I’m not particularly interested in reading A Suitable Boy so would prefer to go with Middlemarch in January - but will go along with the majority.

Oh, it's soooo good!

Why, why WHY can’t I finish this book?

Cruel Acts by Jane Casey - Another good read in the Maeve Kerrigan series, kept me turning the pages, though I couldn’t always suspend disbelief.

Congratulations @bibliomania on walking the Pennine Way! I grew up quite near the starting point. Did you do it in one trip, or multiple goes?

Up for Oliver Twist readalong. Possibly not Middlemarch or A Suitable Boy though - both of those were formative reads in my early 20s and not sure if I want to revisit as they are firmly cemented as belonging to that stage of my life.

52 Snake-eater - T. Kingfisher
30-year-old Selena catches a train out to the desert to track down her aunt, leaving behind an emotionally abusive boyfriend, only to find her aunt has passed away. Moving into her aunt’s cottage and befriending the eccentric locals, she starts to build her confidence and find her place - if only the supernatural inhabitants of the desert would leave her in peace. Cosy with very little real peril and a bit repetitive in the mid section, but a good read if you want something non-stressful in a busy week.

53 Mrs Death Misses Death - Salena Godden
Stressful. A bipolar poet records their encounters with Death - who appears as a poor black woman cleaning up the destruction humanity inflicts on itself. Poetic and ranty by turns, and won’t let you look away from your own mortality. Approach with caution.

54 Training for your Old Lady Body - Elizabeth Davies
Approaches exercise as payments into a ‘pension’ for your wellbeing into old age, focusing especially on resistance as key to maintaining muscle and bone density. Very convincing, but haven’t actually picked up any weights yet (I do get a good amount of cardio though).

Thanks @noodlezoodle . Multiple goes - mostly day/weekend trips for the first two-thirds, then finished it in a one-week burst.

Have finished two books so far in September and am hoping I’m going to get my mojo back! I’m not sure if I reviewed the first one here. It was Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Reading for Dominic and Tabby! Nice prose and a good build up of tension but I never love allegorical books because the characters never feel entirely real. Piggy was the only one who felt fully like a real person. I’m not as pessimistic as him about human nature either!

Black Bag by Luke Kennard
Booker longlist. An actor is hired to attend psychology lectures dressed in a black suit bag only that covers his face. This is part of a psychology experiment. This explored some interesting themes like loneliness, what creates our sense of self and the monetisation of yourself which is very relevant in today’s society. It also did this with a light touch and a humorous tone which I enjoyed. It’s overlong but I’m fairly sure it’ll be on my shortlist.

I read a non-fiction book about how people react in isolated disaster situations & human nature generally. It was a much more positive outlook than Lord of the Flies, but I can’t remember what I thought of it generally. I’m sure I reviewed it on one of these threads, but I can’t never find old posts with the search function.

59 Les Cahiers d’Esther: Histoires de mes 15 ans - Riad Sattouf French BD (graphic novel) about a real-life Parisian girl (though her true identity hasn’t been made public) whose accounts of her daily life are turned into comic strips by family friend Sattouf. I read the first of these when we first moved to France, and it’s become a tradition for DD1 and DD2 to read the instalment which corresponds to their new school year at the start of September. In this one, Esther is in 3ème, the equivalent of year 10 but with the GCSE equivalent as their French exams are a year earlier. Her experience is slightly different as it takes place in 2020 so the exams are cancelled and grades are based on schoolwork through the year, but there’s still plenty of normal teenage life (first boyfriends, an illicit puff on a cigarette, female friendships…). Clever and funny, and feels very real.

By the way, the Penguin Classics version of Oliver Twist is 99p on kindle at the moment, for anyone interested in the planned readalong!

I read MIddlemarch last year, so it might be a bit soon for a reread, and there is not enough money in the world to make me want to read A Suitable Boy again, I might well got for an OT readalong though.

@CornishLizard I am about half way through Cruel Acts - it's not my fav MK, too many dead women to keep track of

64. The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon

Scout is an intelligent vacuum cleaner within a world of AI appliances whose primary job is to care for their human owners. This started off deceptively simply and I thought it was going to be a dull story of a brave little AI vacuum who circumvents her AI overlords but it turned into much more than this.

Gradually the writing became a bit more complex as Scout’s understanding of the world around her grew. It becomes apparent that House and the network are a Big Brother type presence and starting to control and corral the human population. I enjoyed this in the end. Not a patch on Annie Bot but a decent read.

65. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Read for Dominic and Tabby. I never studied this at GCSE and it has sort of passed me by. I didn’t love it. The lessons about humanity are obviously well presented but... I can’t remember who called Shakespeare ‘cliched’... I feel like I have come at this too late to really appreciate its ground breaking message of the evil lurking in all of us.

Didn’t warm to any of the characters enough to care that much about their fate and I found the prose style over complex and, at times, almost unreadable. It was ok. Ticked it off the list.

66. Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth

Elsie is living a quiet life in an Australian suburb when it comes to light that she was a notorious murderer as a child. An elderly neighbour dies and she is again accused of murder.

Didn’t love or hate this. I thought the relationships with the neighbours (esp the young girl) were too saccharin to be believable and felt very ‘chick-lit’ and a bit flimsy.

67. Shambolic by Ben Forbes

Memoir by a safari guide in Botswana in the 1990s. A few interesting snippets about the trials of living in the wild but not enough to compensate for quite a smarmy ‘look how clever I am’ tone which I didn’t care for.

68. Trebizon books 11-14

I finished off the series. I had never read the final installment before because it was always very difficult to get hold of- now on Kindle so much easier. I was disappointed with who she ended up with. It was inevitable it would end up that way but I just felt she could do so much better. Strike out on your own, Rebecca. You don’t need a boy to make you happy!

69. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I watched the Netflix TV adaptation and was left a bit cold so thought I would revisit the books. Wow do I love these books. This is probably my favourite because I just love the cosy tone and the simplicity of... this is how we live in the woods. An absolute joy.

70. Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder

An excellent companion piece to Little House in the Big Woods. This is the childhood of Laura’s eventual husband, Almanzo. It is a very similar story to LHIBW and takes us through a year in the life of a nine year old boy in upstate New York. A few things struck me.... Almanzo’s family are really quite well off. They have a big house and horses and money. His childhood is quite different to Laura’s back woods existence. It is striking how much a child just assumes this will be the case forever. We can see how much he loves the horses and his skill as a horse breeder and trainer like his father is just sitting below the surface. And yet we know this won’t be his fate as their crops fail and he will be forced to give up so much and move West.
This was also a joy.

71.Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

There is more tension in this book as the family move into Indian territory. It’s still lovely but LHITBW will always be my absolute favourite.

On another note I am tempted by a Middlemarch read along. I'm not convinced I would be very good at keeping up with it though. I may well attempt it and see how I get on. Count me in.

Also I am one of those who has always put Ann Patchett to one side because I didn't enjoy The Dutch House. I'm about a quarter of the way through Tom Lake and I think I am going to love it. It certainly has a lot of promise. (I may also have played Emily in a high school production of Our Town some years ago so there is a bit of resonance....)

Oliver Twist readalong October to December hopefully linked below:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/5576573-oliver-twist-readalong-october-to-december-everyone-welcome?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=app_share

Well thank you !

@elspethmcgillicudddy have you read Prairie Fires ? So interesting about the real stories of the Ingalls family (the Little House books were my absolute favourite books as a child and I have re-read a few of them with great joy as an adult). For a more lightweight read, I also enjoyed The Wilder Life by Wendy McLure.

The Island of Missing Trees - Elif Shafak

Liked this a lot.

A Greek boy Kostas and a Turkish girl Defne meet and fall in love in Cyprus at the time of the partition of the island. When they leave for England, they take a cutting of the fig tree at the tavern where they met secretly. They have a child called Ada, and the story opens on her as a sixteen year old, struggling at school after losing her mother and watching her father batten down the fig tree in the garden to protect it from an upcoming storm.

And then we hear from the fig tree…

I loved There are Rivers in the Sky and this had some similar qualities of language and dreaminess.

The Opposite of Murder - Sophie Hannah

A Zailer and Waterhouse book in which the plot almost makes some kind of sense? Amazing.

Six Little Words - Sally Page

Easy holiday read following the author’s standard approach of a midlife woman needing a new angle on life. This time, it’s Kate, who has an empty nest after her three DDs have grown up and post both divorce and breast cancer. Enter a creative community group in Norfolk to kick start the oil painting Kate has always wanted to do.

59 . Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman

A disgraced knight and a shambolic priest accompany an ethereal orphan on a mission in plague riddled France.

This was recommended on two YouTube channels I watch and for the first part I was absolutely loving it but then I sort of burnt out with it at the halfway stage, completely stalled and couldn't get moving.

I really couldn’t tell you how it ended, though I did finish, and I couldn’t care less either. A shame, because the beginning held a lot of promise.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit glad you did get to the end. Do you think the book was at fault or were you just not in a reading headspace? I am intrigued by the premise and trying to work out whether it deserves a wishlist space.

@VikingNorthUtsire Definitely me. Some of the writing was first rate. Get a sample?

I also loved The Island of Missing Trees @SheilaFentiman.

Very lukewarm warm reviews about Lord of the Flies below. It’s almost certainly in my top five books ever and it’s very read it at least twenty times. I think it’s remarkable.

@VikingNorthUtsireIt’s on my kindle and I will have a look once I finish my re read. Thanks

Stoner by John Williams
This is the story of an ordinary man, William Stoner, who grows up poor on a farm, goes to Colombia eventually becoming a lecturer there in English Lit. It’s an ordinary story of an ordinary man which sometimes moved me to tears. So beautifully written, a life of an Everyman but told with such compassion for the kind of lives that most of us leave. The restraint and the things left unsaid are as resonant as those expressed by the author or Stoner himself and the people in his lives. Reminiscent of Ishiguro in some ways. A very bold bold.

74. Cop Killer - Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö, transl. Thomas Teal

I’ve been rationing these excellent books but broke out the penultimate one in honour of the new Beck showings on BBC4 (even though Beck isn’t even in the police force anymore). A woman disappears without trace in a rural part of Sweden and Beck is sent to investigate. Separately, three policemen on the beat get involved in a shooting, and the two cases unexpectedly converge.
As ever, this is a mixture of the bleak, the droll and the realistic, with touches of sudden violence - an addictive series (and very well translated).