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

My wishlist/tbr has 1032 books on it 😳

It only exists on Goodreads and Storygraph. I need to split between TBR (books I already own) and wishlist (books I don't already own).

But there doesn't seem to be any easy way to check the latter for price drops. You'd think Amazon would make it easy to convert a Goodreads wishlist into an Amazon wishlist to encourage more buying! But there doesn't seem to be a shortcut of any kind.

Probably just as well as I already own WAY too many books.

I loved Curtain Call, but there were definitely diminishing returns on the rest of that loose trilogy. The other of Quinn’s books I really enjoyed was London Burning, which is entire different in style and subject matter.

44.Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. Natalie is a successful trad-wife influencer, with a seemingly picture perfect organic farm lifestyle propped up behind the scenes by hot and cold running nannies, immigrant farm labours, and her father-in-law’s millions. One day she is mysteriously transported back, Life on Mars style, to rural 1850s America to live the Pioneer life to which she claims to aspire for real.

This started brightly, and I initially enjoyed the satire on influencer life, with its nod to the increasing societal pressures that are placed on women to overachieve in the domestic sphere regardless of other demands they are facing. The sections set in 1855 were less compelling, and I thought there was a striking lack of period detail to bring them to life. And then came the Big Twist ending that explained Natalie’s experiences of life in 1885, which was so stupid and clumsy that I wanted to throw the book out of the window. I think @VikingNorthUtsire and @OllyBJolly felt similarly. It’s a shame, as I think there was a decent book buried somewhere in the nonsense.

I've had a Kindle since 2011, and many but not all of the books I've bought on Kindle or read through Netgalley (and quite often I buy a Kindle copy of something I've read on Netgalley/from the library when it's 99p. It's also often much easier to download a Kindle purchase than to find most of the books I've bought since I ran out of shelf space (within a couple of years of moving into this house, plus one set of shelves had to go to make way for stairs to the loft extension we had done 10 years ago). I've only read Curtain Call once but I really liked it, and have read most of Anthony Quinn's novels since. I still have 3 or 4 of his earlier books TBR.

I definitely felt similarly @StrangewaysHereWeCome the author wrote a cheque she couldn’t cash

Do you use ereaderIQ? I'm not sure there's a way to transfer a list but once set up it works well to notify you of price drops.

Thank you, I have had a good look at their FAQs but there doesn't seem to be any way to import an list. I keep saying I need to start working through, a handful of books each day. Then I remember that I don't need to buy new books 😂

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit @StrangewaysHereWeCome I think a cheque she couldn't cash is exactly right. She had a killer idea and couldn't make it into a plausible plot. I did think that a lot of the commentary, including the sneaky details, was spot on though.

That is hilarious. You do realise we can never trust your opinion ever again. At the very least you need to read the Bloody Boring Butler again in case you were mistaken last time 😂

Never! 😂

73.Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
Lara was once an actress and starred in several productions of Our Town. Her three grown up daughters have returned to the cherry orchard where they grew up to help with the harvest. She tells them about her relationship with a man who then became a big Hollywood star.

I am not an Ann Patchett lover and didn’t get on with The Dutch House. I enjoyed this much more- possibly because I know Our Town quite well as a play (I played Emily in my own high school production and my step-father directed a local theatre version last year). I liked the echoes between the play and the novel and the shared themes of nostalgia and the joy to be found in the ordinary every day. I didn’t totally love this though. I find the melancholic tone a bit cloying somehow (same with The Dutch House).

Fwiw it might not help that I don’t really rate Our Town. I find it too schmaltzy and I think the characters (Emily in particular) lack depth and nuance.
Glad I read it but I stand by my opinion of Ann Patchett as... alright.

74.Into the Wild by Lucy Shepherd
A plucky young blonde girl from Suffolk decides she is going to become the female Bear Grylls and darn it if she doesn’t just manage it. I hadn’t heard of Lucy Shepherd but enjoy this sort of autobiographical adventure book. This was very adventurous indeed. And well written and enjoyable. Shepherd gets together a crew and crosses some very sketchy mountains in Guyana. There are snakes, wild boars, tarantula wasps, electric eels galore. I felt very grateful to be in my own bed at night. I wanted to hear more about her other adventures and will definitely be watching the TV series she has made about this and also an adventure in Tanzania.

75.On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Ingalls family move to a dugout house while they build their own homestead. Laura and Mary go to school for the first time where they meet the hateful, spoiled Nellie Oleson. The descriptions of particular events are very memorable- Pa getting stuck out in the blizzard for three nights and having to eat the Christmas candy to survive. The family eventually move on as a plague of grasshoppers destroys their precious harvest.

76.By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Mary has lost her sight to scarlet fever so Laura is her eyes as they move to South Dakota via the railroad. They live in an encampment for men building the railroads. Laura is told not to go near the men lest she hear rough language (as an adult one can now see that her parents were worried about far more than rough language). Pa is in charge of handing out wages and is nearly lynched at one point as he has only been given enough money for one month of wages (the postmaster in the next town is strung up). It’s all very vividly told and great to revisit.

I am very tempted by the Booker shortlist this year. There is much more that I want to read than there normally is. I really enjoyed John of John. I might try to read them all but I suspect they will be full price on Kindle until the winner is announced. Is that likely or do they sometimes do the odd daily deal for those on the shortlist?

I have just finished The Treasures by Harriet Evans. apparently she is a well established author and the 'doyenne of commercial literature' (not sure on whose say so).

Reviews are very positive on the whole but I am afraid I did not like this family epic (and I often quite like dysfunctional family stories).

Firstly, she irritated me (or her editor did) by not spotting two spellings of the same name across several pages (Betsy/Betsey). Secondly. there was a detailed description of a 'Waldorf Salad' which was a Caesar Salad.

I checked after about 50 pages and she is English. The book begins in Galloway and then goes to Upstate NY on the Hudson River Valley. The Scottish setting was geographically accurate but the accents and dialogue not so much - it was also really not a necessary setting. The American parts really grated. I am by ancestry from that part of the US and she had details wrong (not just salads) especially , to my reading ears, of the way Upstate New Yorkers speak. It was very generic American and just not right. The main mother was really irritating and sounded about 60 when she was probably 40 at most. the clue is in the cutesy all Amurrican name Bets(e)y.

The whole thing, historically and locationally (?) was inauthentic. It wears its own research heavily. The plot had people appear as major characters and then vanish. At the heart of it was some genuine concern and outrage about the treatment of 'wild' women which should have been interesting.

Suddenly towards the long awaited end there are 6 pages of a sex scene. I admit I am a bit prudish (excpet funny sex - that's fine ) and I did not enjoy it. It could win the bad sex award and , in isolation, you'd probably assume a man had written it (who is the pervy author? Not Faulks? Comes up in discussion on here occasionally?).

Oh, some people will like it , I guess. It's a trilogy. I feel no need to read parts 2 and 3.

I think I am a curmudgeon. Given how awful my own typing is - one typo appears in a published book (this one is a Penguin!) and I have conniptions.

@Piggywaspushed Ken Follet for pervy writer? Or at least one obsessed with heaving bosoms.

@elspethmcgillicudddy the Booker shortlist books may well come up on Kindle deals. So far I got Rebecca Parry on there but quite a few months ago, before she made the longlist, and I think Black Bag was on there. I don't think the others have been yet. I listened to Strout and Stuart and both were good audios.

102. Switzy - Emma Cline. Another long lister. I listened to this and slightly confusingly, it has the same narrator as The Things We Never Say, which I also listened. Both also have old white men as their central character. But they are quite different. This is about David who has dementia and is going to Switzerland to die while he still can. The book is solely narrated from David's perspective and I think captures a decaying mind very well. There are lots of repetitions of childhood rhymes - Divorced, Beheaded, Died - and parts where he thinks of doing something, doesn't do it and then is sure he has.. So lots of reflection on memory and understanding. The wiring is excellent but it wasn't necessarily a book I wanted to pick up. I also think that a rich old man isn't a character that I particularly care about. Solid 4 for me though and wouldn't have been surprised if it had made the shortlist.b

Argh, how have I fallen a month behind with posting reviews? I don't know... I've been struggling a bit with low mood, though nothing too serious. It's ironic as during the academic year I always complain about having too much work, but during the summer when the pace is less intense, I have to struggle in order not to fall into a mental slump. Never mind. I've been doing a lot of reading and lurking, just not a lot of writing and posting!

@DesdamonasHandkerchief lovely reviews of the Mark Haddon memoir and of Wind in the Willows.

I'm excited both about the imminent Oliver Twist read-along, and about next year's Middlemarch read-along. I've read Middlemarch once and thought it was amazing; would love to reread it.

Thanks to @Stowickthevast and @ÚlldemoShúl and others posting Booker reviews. I was planning to read the Perry, the Stuart and the Kennard. I wasn't planning to read the Marlon James one, as I hated his previous Booker winner, A Short History of Seven Killings. It was just so violent, I couldn't stomach it. But the Disappearers has good reviews and maybe I'll give it a go after all. I also was planning on skipping The End of Everything, as it has so many negative reviews, but hmm... Am disappointed that The Renovation wasn't shortlisted as I've heard so many good things about it, and it would have been good to see a Turkish writer shortlisted.

I notice that every novel on the shortlist has a male protagonist or protagonists, including the Strout one. The only exception is May We Feed the King, where the gender of the characters is apparently left undetermined. Can I cope with that much testosterone, ha? Strout's male hero is very gentle, however.

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie I'm frequently unable to remember whether I've read a book before or not! That's why I started recording my reads on goodreads some years ago - I'm sure there are better platforms than goodreads, but I needed a record to remind myself of what I had actually read!

The good thing about having a bad memory is that I can reread a crime novel and have no recollection of whodunnit, so the ending isn't spoiled😂This was the case most recently with Gaudy Night.

54. Scaffolding, Lauren Elkin 4/5
    A delicate, cerebral novel about two women, both psychoanalysts, who make their homes in the same Paris apartment 50 years apart. The evocation of the Belleville neighbourhood in Paris is enjoyably vivid. Elkin writes with impressive clarity about feminism, about tension-fraught monogamous relationships (though they don’t always remain monogamous!), about Jewish identity, and about Lacanian psychoanalysis (her characters’ takes on Lacan are insightful but fortunately not too reverential). I would happily reread this one day. Thanks to the MNer who recommended this - I think it was @TimeforaGandT ?

55. Quand tu écouteras cette chanson [When You Listen to This Song], Lola Lafon 5/5
    In one of those curious reading convergences, I had this book in French on my TBR pile, and when I looked to see whether it had been translated into English, I discovered that it had been translated by Lauren Elkin, whose own novel I had just read! I haven’t actually read her translation of Lafon but I’m sure it’s excellent.

The Lafon book itself is great. It’s quite short (under 200 pages) and recounts how the author spent a night in the Anne Frank House where Frank and her family were confined in Amsterdam (the building is now a museum). Lafon meditates on her own Jewish identity, but the book’s main focus is on Frank’s life and writing, and on how her diary was heavily edited and turned into a powerful but overly simplistic myth. Anne Frank emerges not so much as a naïve, earnest young girl, but as a daringly transgressive writer who carefully crafted her work and produced multiple drafts. The parts of her diary deemed too sexually explicit were expurgated by the diary’s first editors, and the play and film based on the diary also shaped her story into something that would be palatable and not too disturbing. Lafon also criticises the tendency to turn Frank into a universal symbol of suffering: ‘If we are all Anne Frank, there is no more Anne Frank.’ This is quite a harrowing read (it’s about the Holocaust after all) but it’s sensitive and thought-provoking.

56. A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage, Asia Mackay 3/5 Read for work book group. This is a dark comedy about two sympathetic serial killers, a man and a woman, who decide to give up killing, start a family together and lead a conventional life. It’s mostly narrated by the wife Hazel, but the husband Fox chimes in as narrator of some of the chapters as well. This was a fun beach read, with some good satire (eg Hazel being bemused at the dynamics of mother/baby groups) and a thoughtful strand about female friendship (because it can be very hard to make friends with other mothers, especially when they are painfully conventional and you’re not). That said, a lot of plot info is withheld in order to create a contrived surprise ending, and the whole thing is madly implausible … this isn’t really my genre.

Ah yes... him.

I am falling behind with my reading - making slow progress on Rebecca and need to catch-up on Les Mis (again).

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie- that’s hilarious about Curtain Call which I have read but can't recall at all. You were obviously in a different frame of mind then or have raised your standards!

@cassandre - yes, I read Scaffolding - your review is much more highbrow than mine which said there was a lot of sex and it was very French.....

Ooh @cassandre the first two books that you've reviewed both sound very interesting. Thanks for the great reviews.

60 Ripeness, Sarah Moss

Two bold reads in a row? < fans self >

This wasn't perfect but it was definitely one of the best, and most enjoyable, things that I've read so far this year. Dual timeline: young Edith, in a gap year before going up to Oxford, is sent to Italy to support her unmarried (this is the 60s) sister who is about to have a baby; old Edith, living in post-Covid Ireland, helps a friend with the appearance of a possible long-lost sibling. Much musing on belonging, and identity: Edith's mother was Jewish and lost her family in the Holocaust; the Irish section is peopled with refugees from Ukraine and (less welcome) further afield. Moss, as always, is fantastic at writing awful people and fraught family relationships. I liked Edith's literary musings (the title comes from King Lear, and young Edith's comments at her Oxford interview on Shakespeare's characters attitudes to death - she's comparing Lear to Hamlet, and so, I suppose, we compare the old and young Ediths) - there's a fair bit about Middlemarch too.

It didn't always hang together perfectly, and Edith's slightly smug privilege was actually all the more annoying because she kept pulling herself up for it. But really what do I want from a book? That the author uses language well, that the plot engages, that it's funny occasionally, makes me think, makes me feel - and that those last two continue after I stop reading.

@Stowickthevast I do have both Spotify and also three audible credits so could plausibly listen. But I feel like I want to read them with my eyeballs. I’ve been listening to crap on audible (GoT and ACOTAR) which I can sort of zone in and out of….

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas

Second in the original trilogy. I thought book one was fine. Better than I expected.

Book two is gripping.

A threat from book one builds, and the main characters must be willing to risk everything to prevent war.

The style is young adult as the action moves quickly but this feeling is somewhat at odds with the occasional chapters of filth. Erm, I don't know how to say this really, but those scenes really worked for me! Very much better written the heaving bosoms.

It's not high literature, I'm not learning about a period of history, it's not changing my perspective on my life. I am enjoying a strong female lead, excellent world building and not cringey sex.

I might even pay full price for part 3. Not sure how long I want to wait for it to turn up at 99p. High praise indeed!

@cassandre it is quite a male dominated shortlist. And even though the narrator is non gendered in May We Feed The King, a lot of the book is about the male king. Though Black Bag deals with themes about being a not particularly masculine male, I think you'd enjoy the campus settting.

ETA - also a disappointingly undiverse longlist in general - no writers from Africa or Asia.

@VikingNorthUtsire loved Ripeness too, was very disappointed it didn't get a nod from the Woman's prize as Moss has shown repeatedly what a great writer she is.

@elspethmcgillicudddy I pretty much only listen to literary audios! But I do get what you mean. i do find it more tricky rewinding to find what you've missed when you've been distracted.

@RazorstormUnicorn great review, I definitely preferred the second book. The third is ok but 4 and 5 degenerate into soft porn IMO!

39 - Sisters of the Midnight Sun - Fiona Valpy

This was an ARC and I believe today is publishing day!

I have often given my Mum Fiona Valpy’s books as gifts as they always sound like 'nice, interesting and emotional reads'. This is the first time I've actually read one and Sisters of the Midnight Sun was exactly that. The Shetland traditions and landscapes, alongside the Norwegian traditions woven through the story, were gorgeous and the two main characters at the heart of the book are very easy to become invested in. Their similarities are, admittedly, quite a coincidence — and the success of the story depends on that coincidence — but I was happy to go along with it.
I learnt a lot about the Norwegian experience during WWII, as well as the important part played by communities on the Shetland Isles. There are some incredibly brave men and women in this story, and their courage and sacrifices really brought the historical elements to life.
But this isn't just a historical story. It's also a very emotional tale about relationships, grief, loneliness and the battles that different generations have to face.
This was atmospheric, emotional I learnt a lot of fascinating history.
And I may never look at daisies in quite the same way again.

I don't mind a Ken Follet, loved Pillars of the Earth but he does write awful sex. His new one Circle of Days was dreadful - about the building of Stonehenge. Lots of bosoms and far too many historical impossibilities to make it a good read.

42. The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyles In the 1930s, English woman Alice marries a handsome American man hoping to lead an exciting life in America away from her boring life in England. However, her husband turns out to be distant and uninterested in her and living with her overbearing father in law becomes unbearable. So when Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library scheme puts a call out for volunteers to deliver books to rural families on horseback, Alice signs on enthusiastically.

The lead librarian is Margery, self-sufficient woman from a local family with a poor reputation They are joined by three other women who become known as the Packhorse Librarians of Kentucky.

Interesting and based on a true story.

Also knocking off the Maeve Kerrigan books - have finished The Cutting Place (#10) and nearly finished The Close(#11) not sure how many more there are.
I will have a Maeve break though because London Falling has just arrived in my Borrowbox after a bit of a wait, so that will be my next one.

Big Little Truths - Liane Moriarty

Sequel to Big Little Lies, set ten years on. An intro makes it very clear that it’s a sequel to the book, not the TV show, so we’re back in Australia and Madeline’s son still exists. However, the character of Celeste’s mother in law (created for series 2 of the TV show) is included.

Anyway, it’s more of the same really (and for me this is a good thing). They’ve all got their individual dramas going on but there’s also an overriding plot relating to the school all their teenagers attend. It probably could have been a bit shorter, but I really enjoyed revisiting their world again.

Night Road - Kristin Hannah

Lexi and Mia are inseparable as teens, until a tragic accident when they’re 18 throws everyone’s world upside down. I really enjoyed the first two thirds of this - the friendship between the two girls and Mia’s brother Zach, and the initial story after the key event. However, the ending was far too perfect and saccharine, with people behaving in ways which just didn’t ring true and things all happening far too quickly to be real. If all you want from a book is a happy ending then this definitely delivers, but if you’re after a bit more realism in your stories this probably isn’t the one for you. A shame when the initial story was good.

@RazorstormUnicorn I am reading this at the moment and I agree that it is much better than the first. It’s gone in a completely different direction than I expected and I’m glad I picked this one up.

Hag- I agree about Ken Follett. Once you notice that he describes the breasts of every female character as one of their main defining features you can’t unsee it!

I also loved Ripeness earlier this year.