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

@RazorstormUnicornI also loved Not a Penny More and I also loved Kane and Abel- there was a mini-series of it in the 80s with Sam Neill and Peter Strauss which was great. I loved those dramatic 80s mini-series- Patrick Swayze in North and South, Mistral’s Daughter and all the other bonkbusters, there was even a crazy one in Australia where a woman was thrown into a croc infested river by her husband to kill her but she escaped, had plastic surgery and became a well renowned fashion designer and model before taking her revenge. I’d love to rewatch reread some of those!
Edited to add of course Jeffrey Archer was a shit!

I think that is a very accurate epitaph for him @BestIsWest ! His Matter of Honour was one of my favourites as a teenager. Read most of his books because my mum has them all.

All the best in your comfort reading quest @elkiedee
My mum died in 2020, and I stopped reading for a while apart from the occasional audible. We had the same taste in books and used to pass paperbacks back and forth before the days of Kindle.
Not long before she got ill she had discovered the Cormoran Strike books and was really looking forward to troubled Blood coming out, but she didn't get to read it. So the Strike books make me feel a bit sad because I know we would have been chatting about them.

Jeffrey Archer, absolute shit of a man, but spins a good yarn, I remember reading Kane and Abel years ago and not being able to put it down.

Another one who read Not a Penny More and Kane and Abel as a teenager. Loved them at the time and I would credit JA for getting me back into reading for pleasure after being completely put off at school doing EngLit. He wrote so many more but I don't think I've read any in 50 years .

@ÚlldemoShúl Bonkbusters. Obviously Jilly Cooper, but a bit earlier there was The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCulloch. Made into a mini series starring Richard Chamberlain as a hot vicar.
Then Lace by Shirley Conran with the immortal line " which one of you bitches is my mother?" They certainly got the younger me hot under the collar.

Parents were big Jeffrey Archer fans and I remember reading them growing up. Also loved The Thornbirds and Lace that @NotWavingButReading mentioned. Talking of bonkbusters, there's a load of Jackie Collins in the Kindle deals today. The only one I remember is Lucky, but she's definitely one I associate with Lace etc.

107. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë. I last read this as a teen so was inspired to re-read as my Y10 is now doing it for GCSE, and the Book Club did it recently on their podcast. Presumably no need for a plot summary. I liked it a lot more than I did when I was a teen (much preferred a bonkbuster in those days) and had forgotten what a page turner it is. It's such an impressive achievement really, though perhaps could do without some of the random coincidences/spirituality - particularly the end part. Still a rollicking good read, will be interested to see what teen thinks.

I never read Jane Eyre but have it on my kindle now tbr.
Also on today's deals is a Wes Markin. I've only read one of his but it fits with the "books in places" theme. All his crime books are set in Whitby which I know quite well.

@NotWavingButReadingI think The Thornbirds was one of my favourites. I also loved Judith Krantz who was half bonkbuster/ half Danielle Steele.
@Stowickthevasti read Jane Eyre for the first time a couple of years ago and was surprised at how much of a page turner it was. I recommend Wide Sargasso Sea as a companion novel if you haven’t already read it.

This is so exciting! We should have a meet-up there next year :)

Great idea!

Someone mentioned Judith Krantz a few threads ago. I adored her books (I learned so much from them 😬) and still have a few and was very excited to find a copy of Scruples in a National Trust bookshop last week. Sadly they are not on Kindle in the UK.

It was me! Till we Meet Again was my favourite! Jealous of your Scruples find!

I had forgotten about The Thorn Birds! That, Gone with the Wind, and The Far Pavilions completely blew my teenage mind!

101. All Change by Elizabeth Jane Howard - Oh dear. Maybe if I had read this when it came out, almost 20 years after Casting Off, I would have liked it. A reunion with the beloved Cazalets. A trip down memory lane.

But I read it as part of a reread before reading The Golden Hours. Coming on the heels of the luminous writing in Casting Off, All Change is really not very good.

EJHs talent has always been precision character work. After four books, it felt like you knew each Cazalet - not just their stories, but who they were. You knew how they thought and how they would behave and react. You knew things about them that taught you something about yourself.

All Change reads like someone is moving Cazalet shaped dolls across a storyboard. They have the right names and they have the right faces but they aren't people any more, they are cardboard cutouts. Part of the problem is that there are so many of them now! EJH does try to get rid of a few but there are too many left. None of them get enough page space for you to truly know them and I suspect after the long gap in writing them, EJH didn't really know them either.

So it ends up as a lot of recapping and a lot of 'this happened and then this happened', which is fine for nostalgia value but for me went from boring to frankly ridiculous (the Clary-Archie story is nonsense for anyone who has read the first four books).

One exception is the last chapter featuring Rachel and Sid. That was beautifully done. But overall, I sort of wish I hadn't read this book.

Hopefully Louisa Young has channelled the earlier books in the series and not this one. I have been carefully avoiding all reviews of Golden Hours so far so I am going in blind. Will report back what I think!

I was going to share this news so I'm glad to see others are looking forward to it.

As for meetups, I'm already talking about meetups to a friend who lives on the other side of London from me. She also works only a mile or so from this site. If we get it together to meet before Christmas, say, I will share that here in case anyone else wants to join in.

@elkiedee 💐

@SheilaFentiman A Bloomsbury browse is one of my favourite London things to do.

I’m potentially up for a pre-Christmas London meet up.

Finished another two:
Murder at the Vicarage- Agatha Christie
Book group read which is three shorter horror/ crime reads- this is the first. Much more fun than I thought it would be. Not keen on the pompous Poirot but Miss Marple is much more fun. I liked the tongue in cheek tone of this and while I guessed some of the twists and turns, I didn’t guess whodunnit
Thomas Cromwell- The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant by Tracy Borman
A comprehensive history of Cromwell without going into too much depth which perfectly suited my purposes of getting some further knowledge to go along with my Wolf Hall series read this year (plan to read the final one in Christmas holidays)

Forgot to say I'm very excited about Persephone and would definitely be up for a pre Xmas meet up. I find summer ones trickier as weekends get booked up very quickly, but a November/December afternoon feels more achievable.

btw has anyone got any good audible recommendations? I was considering The Disappearers but think I would prefer something less gritty.

@ÚlldemoShúl i must go back to that Tracy Borman, I read it up to the end of Bring Up the Bodies and then put if down so I didn’t spoiler myself for The Mirror and the Light (which I read five years ago now!)

@Stowickthevast I only do crime or lightweight reading on audio so nothing like The Disappearers. But I very much enjoyed Tana French's Cal Hooper series, starting with The Searcher. Roger Clark's narration is excellent.

83. Other People’s Letters - Mina Curtiss

This was an absolute delight from start to finish. After my Proust labours I still haven’t quite got it out of my system, and this account of one woman’s quest to meet the last survivors of Proust's circle in the Paris of the 1940s and 50s somehow swam into view.
Curtiss was American, the sister of Lincoln Kirstein, the founder of New York City Ballet, and she knew just about everyone - Vita Sackville-West, Vanessa Bell, Rebecca West, Diana Cooper and Duncan Grant are just a few of the star names sprinkled about - but she was also a serious writer and researcher who translated Proust's letters and was determined to try and track down his friends, and more importantly any surviving letters and papers they might have, in post-war Paris.
Passages from her diaries recount the results, with tremendous élan, including a hilarious seduction by the notorious Prince Antoine Bibesco (she really, really wanted to see those Proust letters).
Later, she manages to meet the eccentric heir to a vast archive of priceless books and manuscripts inherited from the widow of Bizet, the composer (sparking the idea for what later became her biography of Bizet), kept in a huge ten-room apartment which lies unlived-in and crammed full of treasures. And in between all this, the ancient princesses and duchesses portrayed in Proust's masterwork receive her in their now-reduced circumstances, mostly living in tiny, freezing hotel rooms in postwar Paris, but forever gracious. It's brilliantly, wittily told, a picture of a vanished age, and I've already added Bizet and his World to the tbr list.

I loved Lucky and Chances at 13, and read a lot of her Hollywood books such as Hollywood Wives, but at c 28-30 (it was after I'd moved into my current home), a later book in the series was a crushing disappointment. Nonetheless I've bought all the Lucky Santangelo and Hollywood books, I think, in previous deals a few years ago - and others. Sadly I don't have the ones with the intros by some more serious authors to convey some kind of credibility. Not that I care about the credibility, but I love seeing all the books that influenced writers, not just the literary masterpieces.

I'm not drawn to Jeffrey Archer, and I agree with a Spycop campaigner Donna McLean (memoir of her experience of a fake relationship with under police officer Carlo Neri and the campaign for justice for women lied to by undercovr officers: Small Town Girl - and I follow her and she follows me back since I read it). We should remember Monica Coghlan, whose life was destroyed by the media's pursuit of profit in relation to Jeffrey Archer. Not all newspapers, not all journalists, but....

Also me although I didn't know who I was talking about. I have half memories of reading Mistral's Daughter at a very unsuitable age (library book) and someone here kindly identified it for me. It's on the Internet Archive and I am planning a re-read.

Oh I bought The Thornbirds in the deals, will have to bump it up the list @NotWavingButReading. I also have a soft spot for Richard Chamberlain after watching him as Aramis. I have a softer spot for Aramis generally, but that is another story. @SpunkyKhakiScroller Rhett Butler!! Though I also quite like Scarlett, even though she is distinctly unlikeable, but I suspect that was Vivien Leigh.

Very up for a meet up, agree it is a great combo with Gower Street Waterstones.

p.s @Southeastdweller I think we are on 947 or similar.

Haha? You think we're not going to blow enough money at Persephone? Gower Street is dangerous. I found quite a few remainders on ground and 4th floor at Gower Street including some fairly heavy duty non fiction from Verso and was tempted to gatecrash a book launch in the basement and a regular bookgroup at the top.

But yes, my last bookish meet up was with Librarything friends who love women's writing, to see an exhibition at the V&A - actually about 90s music fandom I think - but unfortunately the exhibition was shut that day! 4 of us had a great time and I hope I will see at least 2 of my friends again at Persephone (one from London, one from Birmingham who used to come down to London to Christmas shop, and one from Hull - we'd all talked to each other for at least 17 years but I don't think anyone had met our friend from Hull in person before.

True Colours by Kristin Hannah

Highlighting Kristin Hannah's unevenness in her writing, this one isn't very good. Three sisters, a guy gets between them, opportunity for redemption and all that. The relationship between the three sisters is very poorly written, they spend a lot of time calling each other a bitch, sort of joking and sort of to prove they fall out sometimes I think. And someone says the sentence 'we're sisters and that means something' approximately every other chapter. The teen character keeps a journal and every single teen boy expression is shoe horned into it. The font on kindle for it is basically unreadable.

It's such a step down compared to others of hers, I googled to check if it was perhaps her debut. It's not. It's the book before The Winter Garden which is an amazing piece of writing, emotional and weaving in threads of history and it's stayed with me which shows just how much I enjoyed it. It's surprising to me these two are released back to back! I imagined years of progress and perhaps some other books between the two.