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

@AliasGrape The Hoarder by Jess Kidd has a supernatural element. As do many of her novels.

I do like the phrase "Monk lit habit" - as one of this group's nun lit fans!

33 The Talisman - Stephen King & Peter Straub
34 Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger - Stephen King

Starting a Talisman/DT reread in eager anticipation of the new book which ties up both storylines apparently… perhaps with some other SK books thrown in that are connected to the DT multiverse. (@Remus I would be interested to know which others you think are worth adding to my read-through!)

@AliasGrape
I still have The Raptures TBR but have read and enjoyed two of Jan Carson's other books - her most recent novel Few and Far Between, which came up as a Kindle deal while I was reading a library copy, and a collection of linked short stories all about people living/working on a caravan site (living long term, not holidaying). She's a Belfast writer, and I'd defnitely recommend her to people who like Wendy Erskine's work and vice versa - they both write with a sharp humour but their subject matter is also quite dark and serious. I also really like the slightly younger Lucy Caldwell, but while they share a way of writing about place, women's lives, themes, Caldwell doesn't use humour in quite the same way (which is not a criticism).

@AliasGrape I second the Ink Blood Sister Scribe recommendation. I really enjoyed it and it's sort of witchy without being cosy or horror.

On the subject of reading trash, how can you tell the good books if you don't read the bad books too?

Also one man’s trash is another man’s treasure 😊

True, @ÚlldemoShúl !

90. Dungeon Crawler Carl book 1 by Matt Dinniman

Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut suddenly finding themselves on a quest to travel through a RPG style 18 floor dungeon after aliens take over the Earth. And the whole thing is being televised for the entertainment of the aliens.
Fast paced and thoroughly entertaining.

91. Marvel Zombies: Resurrection by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Leonard Kirk

A team of superheroes go to investigate the floating corpse of Galactus. Things go horribly wrong, and there’s soon a zombie apocalypse spearheaded by zombie superheroes.
In the midst of all that, we’ve got Spider-Man accompanying Franklin and Valeria Richards (children of two of the Fantastic Four) as they hope to find a cure for their zombified parents. Lots of action, even if it is (unsurprisingly) gory in places.

92. Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson

Jet is attacked and left for dead. She wakes in hospital to be told that her injuries will cause a fatal brain aneurysm in 7 days time, and she resolves to solve her murder before she dies.
I struggled with this one. I’m not medically trained, but Jet seems surprisingly active for someone who received a traumatic brain injury days previously. And better at being a detective than the actual police officers. But my main problem was that I found it difficult to care much about any of the characters.

93. Strong Female Character by Fern Brady

A memoir. This was well written, but she’s clearly had a difficult and chaotic time of things growing up as an undiagnosed autistic girl, so it was a bit difficult to read in places. The humour in the book is definitely more in the dark humour line.

Salem’s Lot is probably the obvious one, due to Pere Callahan. And Hearts in Atlantis for Ted, although I must admit that I can’t remember anything at all about this one! Insomnia is a great read and has Crimson King references.

@cassandre I wonder if the Booked commenter is the poster who always invokes Harold Bloom as the only literary critic who she trusts.

I quite liked Sense of an Ending.

I have avoided the deals and bought barely anything for much of the year (my actual book buying has increased exponentially and is rather more expensive), but this month I bought.

The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
Discontent, Beatriz Serrano
Crampton Hodnet, Barbara Pym
The Magus, John Fowles
Mr Penumbra's 24h Bookstore, Robin Sloan
The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough
The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq, Thackeray
Tropic Death, Eric Walrond (happened to see his grave and it said he was a writer so looked him up and here we are)
Crome Yellow, Huxley
The Reef, Wharton
A Room with a View, Forster

So I have made up for it.

Ha @AgualusasL0ver you're almost spot on: she wasn't that poster, but she was posting in agreement with a comment by that poster! Lovely virtual book haul by the way.

@bibliomania I'm also a fan of All Passion Spent. I love the idea of a character in her 80s suddenly deciding that she's had enough, and will live life on her own terms.

Your review of The Last Samurai was very interesting. I just read that novel recently and am still pondering what to make of it. I agree with what you say about the neurodivergence. There's something appealing about the way the characters aren't explicitly characterised as neurodivergent; they're just allowed to be the way they are. It's a massively original novel but I'm not sure I liked it exactly. I found it extremely sad in some ways. The mother and son are clearly both geniuses, but so isolated... Maybe I should have paid more attention to the side stories of the seven samurai and I would have found the novel more pleasurable!

I have an embarrassing weakness for internet gossip (in case people hadn't noticed, cough cough) and I was fascinated by a rather sad saga earlier this year, when Dewitt was offered a huge ($175k) literary prize (managed by Yale) but turned it down because her mental health was so poor, she didn't think she could meet the promotional requirements involved in accepting the prize (international travel, a day of filming, etc). She wrote an eloquent piece on substack explaining her decision. I felt very sorry for her, because I don't think she's exaggerating her mental health troubles at all (she has attempted to take her own life in the past). She's probably neurodivergent as well, which means that public appearances don't come as easily to her as they do to many others. It seems like a story symbolic of our times, in that it's not just being a genius writer that matters, it's being able to engage with all the ruthless self-marketing that comes with being a writer. Still... damn, for $175k, if I were an impoverished writer, I think I'd pop a lot of sedatives and try to jump through the promotional hoops 😳I do respect her decision to say no. The Guardian did a piece about it: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/apr/09/helen-dewitt-turns-down-windham-campbell-prize-unable-promote

The story has a happy ending, sort of, because upon learning of her plight, a libertarian think-tank called the Mercatus Center stepped in and awarded her the same amount of grant money, with no strings attached, which she accepted. The think tank seems rather politically dodgy, but who am I to judge.

My impression is that DeWitt's portrait of the amazing but troubled mother Sibylla in The Last Samurai is more than a little autobiographical (even though DeWitt herself doesn't have children).

[Edited because I put pound signs when I should have put dollars]

That's interesting, @cassandre . I agree that there is a seam of frustration and sadness running through The Seventh Samurai, and a strong refrain that's it's better to die if the alternative is less appealing. Oddly, I didn't find it bleak though. Maybe it's because there is a still a sense of interest in life.

I love Crampton Hodnet, @AgualusasL0ver . And I'm contemplating reading Crome Yellow at some point, so will be interested to know what you make of it.

I've just seen Crome Yellow for 21p on kindle, so I reckon I can take the risk.

@AgualusasL0ver- hope you enjoy The Reef (I need to reread it). I read it (& lots of other EW) after really enjoying the In Our Time episode on Edith Wharton.

On genres, I agree with @elkiedeeabout writing by women being more criticised than by men & it has always been thus (Jane Austen writes about novels being criticized for similar reasons in comparison to manly writing in Northanger Abbey). Detective novels can be very skilfully plotted (especially if a writer wants to give a reader enough clues to work out the ending) & people have been enjoying love stories for millenia & are unlikeky to stop (even if Joyce Carol Oates disdains them (thanks to @cassandrefor that).

Writers & critics have been disdaining “inferior” genres for a long time, & it doesn’t always work out how they expect - see for example Voltaire, who aspired to be a great poet & dramatist & was critical of authors not writing in the classical style (Shakespeare) but despite his vast output is actually only remembered for one slim volume whose bon mots are endlessly quoted by journalists.

I had similar thoughts when I read Valley of the Dolls. It's spoken about like this trashy bonkbuster but really, is it that different to a John Updike or Tom Wolfe?

(I mean, possibly, because it's a long time since I read either of those two. My point being that women writing about sex and bad behaviour seem automatically to be categorised as trashy, while male writers were absolutely filling their boots with similar content and being lauded as Great American Novelists)

I was toying with getting The Magus too - was in Lyme Regis recently and saw John Fowles house so was thinking of him - but I seem to remember finding it quite annoying in my early twenties when I first read it, and my tolerance for overly intellectual men has definitely decreased since then. My then boyfriend was obsessed with him though.

I’ve owned a copy of The Magus unread for 20 years. I have read The French Lieutenants Woman again 20 years ago and remember NOTHING even though I had to present at a tutorial

I read both The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman when staying with my book loving aunt in either my early teens or twenties. It was she who introduced me to so many authors and books. I think I loved them both at the time, although distinctly remember not having a clue what The Magus was about.

I did consider picking it up in the deals and trying again, but like @Stowickthevast hesitated on the grounds that I’d likely find it insufferable. I didn’t realise that’s what had stopped me until you put it so well - no tolerance for overly intellectual men indeed.

I have read The French Lieutenant's Woman and I am still not sure exactly what I think about it, but is has stayed with me, maybe because of the film but i only read it in the last 2 years or so. I have had some of those sitting in my wish list for a while and they have been 99p before but I just didn't click - today I got click happy.

I read & quite enjoyed the French Lieutenants Woman as a teen. It helped that I also watched the film & liked the setting of Lyme Regis due to Persuasion. It didn’t incline me to read any more works of John Fowles though.

91 . Corpus by Rory Clements, a Cambridge professor is drawn into a murder investigstion in the 1930s, which may have connections to Nazis &/ Communists. This was an enjoyable mystery and I liked both the setting & the spying connections. This is useful as the reason I’m reading it is that Vol 3 in the series is called Nemesis, which is very useful for the 52 book challenge.

92 . Audition by Katie Kitamura - this is from the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist and I have no idea why it was nominated. It begins promisingly, with an ageing actress meeting a mysterious young man and the author writes with some style. The problem is the plot. Part 1 procedes on a premise of how the characters are connected, but for Part 2 this premise is altered so that the characters have a completely altered relationship. There’s no obvious explanation (I reread part of the book to see if I missed one) & presumably ths reader is meant to tolerate the resulting disjointed plot as the book is classed as literary fiction so does not need a coherent plot.

The Neverfear by Katherine Rundell
The third in this series of children’s books, in which a human boy finds himself with a strange gift in a strange world. These are rather sweet and very readable, although sometimes a bit too arch and knowing to necessarily work fully for children, perhaps. I don’t know many/any children who would understand a joke about a Greek Chorus, for example.

The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga

I really enjoyed the previous book Nervous Conditions which I read three years ago, and have been excited for this follow up but it didn't draw me in at all. I found the writing a little disjointed and hard to follow. Some of the plot points are not spelled out, and I found i wasn't exactly sure what had happened and then I couldn't figure out if I was a bit stupid or if it was deliberately ambiguous.

Planning to read lots of crime/ gothic/ hist fic/ horror over the next few months which will help me wind down from all the book prize reading and to improve my RwYO stats (in my rules I had to have already owned them on 1st January 2026 to count)
For my first read from that plan- Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Wow. This was as good and better than Wolf Hall. I love how Mantel’s writing style lets us get right into Cromwell’s head and makes all the detail fascinating. In this instalment we see the ruthlessness of his machinations more as Anne Boleyn moves ever closer to her death. Tremendous. Very very bold. I’ve read a few cracking books this year and will struggle to make a top 10 I think. I’m planning to read The Mirror and the Light over the Christmas holidays.

Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson
Very pleased to report this wasn’t a crashing dud for me like a couple of her other books have been.
Harry Flynn was never in the armed forces, but nevertheless as a journalist in the Far East he saw out WW2 as a POW on the Burmese Railway. Now he is plodding through the days as a cog in the machine bringing the 1951 Festival Of Britain to life. It’s an intriguing mix of grandiosity and petty bureaucracy and Atkinson uses a rich source of research to sprinkle unbelievable incidentals throughout (exploding snakes, whole sections closed off as being too fabulous for ‘commoners’). Harry is then embroiled in a murder without a body, on top of everything else he has to deal with.
I loved all the characters in this. Some amazing female characters and in that way it apes her Jackson Brodie series. Harry is almost constantly fending off a battalion of formidable females. In those books this irritates me, but a better balance is struck here imo. She’s rather unfair to Fanny Craddock though! There’s absolutely nothing new in it and I always have a sneaking suspicion that Atkinson pays very close attention to what works for other writers - fair bit of ‘Magpieing’ going on, but it has a gripping plot and a gentle undercurrent of yearning for a lost Britain that never was is very apt in today’s political climate. She states in the afterword that she originally intended to put more in about Harry’s POW experience but felt that wouldn’t be appropriate and I’m glad she didn’t. His memories are fleeting and squished down quickly when they occur, as are those of his colleague, Evans, who spent a week surviving in the sea awaiting rescue. The experiences of that generation are what informs the attitudes to the Festival but aren’t exploited.