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

Thanks @SpunkyKhakiScroller . I will see how many of this year's reads I can fit into the 52 list.
I find Goodreads a bit clunky and end up keeping my own notes as well. I'll have a look at Story graph.

Happy birthday @EineReiseDurchDieZeit for yesterday!

Thank you @Southeastdweller and well done to all the mini 50 bookers on their exam results. I’m assuming the Scottish minis are all too young or too old for exams? Or did I miss that earlier in the month?

@BestIsWest – I really enjoyed Five Star Weekend. Have you read anything else from Elin Hildebrand? @FruAashild I also loved The Fair Botanist, but then I love anything by Sara Sheridan.

Belated Happy Birthday @EineReiseDurchDieZeit

95 Finders Keepers – Stephen King. Second in the Bill Hodges trilogy. This was a fast paced book, the tension is almost unbearable for a scaredy cat like me. I’m now off to return it to the library and get out the third book.

Thanks as always to southeast for the new thread!

My latest reads:

66. Lynn Morrison - What's a Little Blackmail Between Friends
67. Lynn Morrison - What's a Little Duelling Between Friends
68. Helena Dixon - Murder at Midwinter Farm
69. Andrew Lane - Lost Worlds
70. Andrew Lane - Lost Worlds: Shadow Creatures
71. Alex Scarrow - Time Riders
72. Sophie Hannah - The Mystery of Three Quarters
73. Susanna Gregory - The Habit of Murder
74. Aleema Omotoni - Winners and Liars
75. Anthony Horowitz - Stormbreaker
76. Fiza Saeed McLynn - The Midnight Carousel
77. Alis Hawkins - The Skeleton Army
78. Joseph Delaney - The Spook‘s Apprentice
79. Robin Stevens - A Stocking full of Spies
80. Robert Harris - Pompeii
81. TA Williams - Murder in Tuscany
82. TA Williams - Murder in Chianti
83. TA Williams - Murder at the Leaning Tower
84. Elly Griffiths - The Frozen People
85. Elly Griffiths - The Killing Time
86. Alan Johnson - One of our Ministers is Missing
87. Anthony Horowitz - A Deadly Episode
88. Janice Hallett - A Box full of Murders: Death at the Museum
89. JM Hall - Murder on the Cornish train
90. Richard Armitage - The Cut
91. Rachel Rowan - The Duke‘s Discovery
92. Emma Orchard - The Second Lady Silverwood
93. Michael Crichton - The Lost World
94. Matt Baker - A Taste for Murder
95. Caroline James - The Arctic Cruise

Also, congratulations to everyone with GCSE and A Level results, and belated happy birthday to Eine!

I missed a whole thread as school was just too intense towards the end of term, but at least we had nothing like the hoarding going on at some other academic institutions - @cassandre I was amazed by how entitled your colleague is

@SpunkyKhakiScroller I enjoyed the first few Inheritance Games books, but am utterly lost by now with all the spin offs...

@Arran2024 I read Fair Play and can't say I entirely 'got' it. I mean it was clever and everything, but would I re-read it to pick apart clues etc? No, probably not.

From my recent reads, I was a bit disappointed by The Cut - I enjoyed Geneva by the same author but The Cut just seemed very rushed, and very much stretching plausibility! By the same token I probably didn't give Murder on a Cornish Train as much of a chance as I usually would as I do love the author's Retired Teacher Detective series (and also, confusingly, there was no murder on the actual train). The Andrew Lane books were YA thrillers - I picked the first one up in a charity shop and ordered the second - but sadly no more are planned, which is a shame as I thought the premise was really good; young, partially paralysed Calum Challenger has the funds to look for DNA from supposedly extinct creatures to hopefully effect a cure for his paralysis. He is the great-grandson of George Challenger in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, which then led me to re-reading the Michael Crichton version too

I think opinion on here about the Elly Griffiths time travel books was mixed? But I definitely got more out of them second time round, hence the bolds!

I'm only on Goodreads because some online/offline friends still post reviews of what they've read on there and I'd like to be able to read them. I had librarian access removed years ago because I think people objected to corrections to book details. It's really annoying because they're often really slow to add some of the editions that exist now, or data's uploaded from Amazon and never corrected, so I might be reading a book from the library/my own shelves/a charity shop, and the cover, page numbering etc is wildly wrong.

People who do still have librarian access mess things up all the time, too.

57 . Molka by Monika Kim

Molka in South Korea used to refer to a practice of candid camera pranks, since then an epidemic has emerged in the country of women being filmed without their consent and molka has acquired a double meaning.

Waste of human skin Junyoung is filming women in the toilets at his work. One of these unsuspecting women is Dahye who in turn is dating Hyukjoon who has his own transgressions.

I was simultaneously finding this a page turner but one with weak writing until the final third when a horror element gets shoehorned in. It doesn’t work. I’m sorry to say that after a good journey with the book the ending was garbage, utterly ludicrous. A real shame as this was an idea with potential.

31 Handel in London: The Making of a Genius by Jane Glover
Very enjoyable biography of Handel, usually my favourite composer. I liked this because it’s lots of detail about the music and I had Spotify on the go whenever I could when reading it. Fascinating life. I’m bad at 18th century history, really vague about most of it, except that there are lots of Georges and lots of Walpoles involved (though no George Walpoles), and this has helped.

First post on this thread!

How how had I never heard of Pachinko by Min Jin Lee until a couple of weeks ago? I decided to but it because soon to be released American Hagwon reviews alluded to this as if everyone knows it. Apparently there is an excellent TV adaptation but it was on Apple TV so not widely viewed.

I presume it is less well known in the UK . I picked it up because Obama likes it, which I know is shallow. What an extraordinary book. I have been waiting a while to fill an Amy Tan sized hole in my book reading and this more than satisfied me.

I thought this when I was reading Flashlight - that I know so little about Japanese or Korean history: live in total ignorance really. This was very enlightening. And what a good narrator Lee is - she describes herself in a Q and A at the end as aiming for 'fair' and she does this so well.

I cried numerous times and actually threw the book on the ground in my garden because she had killed a beloved character again. I don't think I have been so audibly distressed since LP Hartley SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER killed Ted. This one is done quite similarly so if anyone has read Pachinko they probably know who I mean.

Towards the end I got a bit bored (modern life was not so interesting) but she pulled it back with a beautiful, tender closing.

I loved this. Worth the 530 pages.

@Piggywaspushed Pachinko was universally loved at our bookclub a few years ago. I've read it twice. Brilliant book. I am aware of the TV series, but I don't have Apple TV unfortunately. My DD who works in Asia Pacific policy and is well versed in Korean history thought it was good too.

Fell off the last thread due to the epic read I've just finished, so congratulations to all the mini 50-bookers on their exam results and happy belated birthday @EineReiseDurchDieZeit (I've had mine since I last posted and got 2 books, which I am unlikely to get to whilst on holiday).

Bringing my list over:

1 Edenglassie – Melissa Lucashenko
2 All the Colours of the Dark – Chris Whitaker
3 Boymum – Ruth Whippman
4 Bramble Fox – Kathrin Tordasi
5 Salem’s Lot – Stephen King
6 Scattered – Aamna Mohdin
7 Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
8 Due to a Death – Mary Kelly
9 The Reckoning – Jane Casey
10 The Last Girl – Jane Casey
11 Factfulness – Hans Rosling
12 The Stranger You Know – Jane Casey
13 Recitatif – Toni Morrison
14 The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin
15 Whites: on race and other falsehoods - Otegha Uwagba
16 The Sparsholt Affair – Alan Hollinghurst
17 The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club – Sepideh Gholian
18 The Kill – Jane Casey
19 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin
20 A Woman of Substance – Barbara Taylor Bradford
21 Chosen Family – Madeleine Gray
22 The Secret Hours – Mick Herron
23 The Hallmarked Man – Robert Galbraith
24 The Silence of the Girls – Pat Barker
25 The Women of Troy – Pat Barker
26 The Voyage Home – Pat Barker
27 The Gift of Rain – Tan Twan Eng
28 After the Fire – Jane Casey
29 Mani – Patrick Leigh Fermor
30 Brother. Do. You. Love. Me – Manni Coe
31 Almost Life – Kiran Millwood Hargrave
32 Minor Disturbances at Grand Life Apartments – Hema Sukumar
33 Let the Dead Speak – Jane Casey
34 The Pun Also Rises – John Pollack
35 Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
36 Violets – Kyung-Sook Shin
37 She’s Not There – Jennifer Finney Boylan
38 Watermarks – Tanya Shadrick (ed.)
39 Cruel Acts – Jane Casey
40 The Prime Ministers We Never Had – Steve Richards
41 The Edge of Darkness – Vaseem Khan
42 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
43 The Cutting Place – Jane Casey
44 An Unnecessary Woman – Rabih Alameddine
45 Conundrum – Jan Morris
46 Dusty Answer – Rosamond Lehmann
47 The Correspondent – Virginia Evans
48 The Close – Janey Casey
49 The Elements – John Boyne

And bringing up the 50 (and boy, do I deserve 50 after getting through this)

50 Harold Wilson by Ben Pimlott

I felt I didn't know enough about the post-war history of the Labour party, so decided to start with this. And now I know an awful lot more about it! Regarded as the definitive Wilson biography, this is very, very good but also very, very long. It is to Pimlott's enormous credit that I never got bored reading this, although there were a few moments during the seemingly endless devaluation crisis chapter where I came close. Pimlott is a fabulously witty guide to a turbulent period in both British history and the internal machinations of the Labour party. I was struck by how many parallels there were between the 1960s and the late 2010s/early 2020s. In Pimlott's telling, Wilson is ultimately praised as perhaps the only man who could have held the party together over that period; and of course after he left, it soon split. This biography was written in 1992, at a time when Wilson's reputation was still pretty dire, and is credited with prompting a re-assessment of his achievements. Pimlott seems sympathetic to what I think he sees as Wilson's central belief: you can have all the principles you like but you can't get anything done if you let the party fall apart. But it's easy to forget that Wilson also held the first ever UK referendum (on EU (in its former iteration) membership); basically invented SPADs in the form that we now know them; introduced the Open University and presided over fundamental societal changes including the legalisation of homosexuality and the Abortion Act. Quite the legacy - and what a supporting cast (Attlee, Churchill, Bevan, Healey, Castle, Benn, Crosland, Callaghan, Jenkins...). Fascinating.

Just caught up! My list:
1 Cuddy - Benjamin Myers
2 Falling Animals - Sheila Armstrong
3 Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton
4 North Woods - Daniel Mason
5 The Giant, O'Brien - Hilary Mantel
6 Jill - Philip Larkin
7 The Plague Dogs - Richard Adams
8 Digging to America - Anne Tyler
9 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
10 The Party - Tessa Hadley
11 Tom Lake - Ann Patchett
12 The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 - Sue Townsend
13 The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole - Sue Townsend
14 Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years - Sue Townsend
15 Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years - Sue Townsend
16 Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction - Sue Townsend
17 Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years - Sue Townsend
18 The Architect's Apprentice - Elif Shafak
19 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
20 Smoke - Dan Vyleta
21 Billy Liar - Keith Waterhouse
22 The Queen's Gambit - Walter Tevis

I really liked Pachinko as well @Piggywaspushed . Introduced me to a whole other hemisphere of history.

82. Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans - I really enjoyed Small Bomb at Dimperley last year and this book has settled it. I love Lissa Evans! It's a WW2 novel about Noel, a 10 year old raised by his suffragette godmother, who is evacuated to St Albans. He is taken in by V, dedicated daughter, mother, and conwoman who seeks to capitalise on Noel's limp to raise sympathy and cash. I love books about found families and this was a great one. Warm, clever, and witty, it made me smile and restored my faith in humanity. I will read the sequel soon.

I loved Pachinko the series is very good also

Congratulations on your 50 @Welshwabbit

Last time I read a book that talked a lot about pheasant shooting was Danny, Champion of the World! I adored that book (and my grandfather had a traditional vardo on the field at the back of his house which only fueled my obsession).

Checking in late as ever! Thanks for the new thread south.

Congrats to the mini-bookers on the exam results, GCSE exams are relentless so well done for just getting through them. Happy belated birthday eine and well done on reaching the magic 50 Welsh.

My reading has been curtailed slightly by dental issues resulting in an appointment next week for a new crown at £££££ - ouch in all senses! In the meantime, my latest Slough House:

39... Joe Country - Mick Herron

Another page turner featuring the Slough House team. We had an idea of the ending at the beginning of the novel so it was fun following the twists to get us there. A slow horse is approached to take on an unofficial mission in joe country leading to other team members getting involved. A Boris-like politician and the underhand behaviour of a shady royal, together with the plot twists and shocking resolutions put this at one of my favourite in the series so far. I have the next one lined up and will get round to it in the next month or so when library books are finished.

Something Light - Margery Sharp

Someone upthread (I forget who, sorry!) described this as a romp and that’s a good word for it. It follows the trials and tribulations of Louisa’s quest to find a husband in 1950s London. Good fun.

The Ruins - Becky Docton

In 1937, 7 year old Lucie is left with some relatives while her parents return to Malaya. The book then follows Lucie through her schooldays and unrewarding marriage, and her mother Ruth’s life in Malaya. I really enjoyed this - Lucie is an engaging character and I liked finding out a bit more about the history of Malaya during and after WW2. However just a warning - there’s several mentions of miscarriage so I wouldn’t recommend it if that is a sensitive subject for you.

😂

I am currently reading Broken Country and finding it hard work (20% in). I am not a fan of sweeping romances where passion and soulmates overpower real life and conversation. But I am curious about the mystery and whether it explains what feels like frankly bizarre behaviour from adult Beth. Has anyone read it? Does it stay this melodramatic all the way through? Does the hidden mystery explain the behaviour? Is it worth finishing?

This is my list:

67 . The Favourite by Ophelia Field - biography of Sarah Churchill
68 . The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez - my best mate’s girlfriend
69 . The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood - academic romcom with lots of office politics
70 . The Quantum of Menace by Vaseem Khan - Bond spinoff
71 . Coming Home by Rosamunde Pilcher - predictable yet highly enjoyable war saga but…
72 . A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute - this one is the classic
73 . The Pied Piper by Neville Shute - an old man protects children as France falls to the Nazis

54 Shakespeare: The man who pays the rent - Judi Dench & Brendan O’Shea This was lovely - a compilation of chats that O’Shea had with his friend and colleague Dench about acting Shakespeare, categorised by play and role (she’s done so many of them over the decades!), as well as more general bits and pieces on topics like rehearsals and audiences. Interesting insight into how Dench approaches her roles, as well as plenty of snippets of famous people doing interesting things (though it never feels name-droppy). I really enjoyed this and I bet the audiobook is even better (like watching a play compared to reading it).

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

Similar to Wild Dark Shores this is set in the (near?) future when many animals are extinct, and plant life will soon follow.

Riley wants to go to sea to follow artic terns on what might be their last migration, but it's a hard sell to fisherman who are losing their livelihoods.

Alongside the story are flash backs to her past, which are labelled so one doesn't get confused. We see flashes to her childhood, her husband and the dark parts of her past which go some way to explain her brooding and destructive nature.

I enjoy books where landscape and the animals living in it are characters themselves. However this isnt 5 stars for me, as the believable future with announced extinctions a regular occurrence is heavy enough, that once Riley's death wish is added, I'm left feeling quite bleak.

However I liked it enough I have added her other book, Once There Were Wolves to my wishlist, but I will leave a gap to gather myself.

I believe I checked in on the first thread in the series. Have made steady progress (as my school report would say) but doubt I will get to the 50 unless I head to more easy reading territory. Sometimes my book club leads me this way but I usually end up regretting it so.... Will probably just be satisfied with where I'm at which is:

1. David Nicholls - You Are Here
2. Henry James - The Bostonians
3. Robert Harris - Pompeii
4. Maggie O'Farrell - Hamnet
5. Anna Maxted - Behaving Like Adults
6. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - The Leopard
7. Florence Knapp - The Names
8. Lyse Doucet - The Finest Hotel in Kabul*
9. Kristin Hannah - The Women

10. John Burnham Schwartz - Bicycle Days 11. John Updike - The Witches of Eastwick 12. CJ Cooper - The Bookclub 13. Sarah Winman - When God Was a Rabbit 14. Keri Hulme - The Bone People 15. Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 16. Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 17. Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 18. Glen Duncan - Weathercoxk 19. Perival Everett - James 20. Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome 21. Tracy Chevalier - The Glassmaker

The only 5 star book I've read this year is coincidentally the only non-fiction - Lyse Doucet’s Finest Hotel - a recent history of Afghanistan.
Four stars include the Mark Twains, Bicycle Days, Hamnet, The Bone People, Ethan Frome, Weathercock and Miss Jean Brodie.

Edited above for formatting and even worse! Apologies.

Thanks for the new thread @Southeastdweller. Well done to all the exam-takers and a very belated happy birthday to @EineReiseDurchDieZeit - enjoy all those lovely books!

36 - Normandy ‘44 - James Holland
A non-fiction account of D-Day and the weeks afterwards as the allies fought for Normandy. I picked it up from a station little library at the urging of DD just after we'd visited the British Normandy Memorial. It was incredibly detailed, and equally harrowing to read when the soldiers went through and how many - on both sides - died so needlessly. It's written for military buffs really though and so the chapters detailing the pros and cons of the weapons both sides had got a bit much. Really interesting though, especially as I have relatives that were involved in D-Day and this definitely gives great insight into what it was really like.

37 - Coastliners - Joanne Harris
I wanted something lighter after all the death and destruction of the above, but nearly DNF this. I've read a couple of Harris' books and was expecting / hoping for lovely descriptions of French life, scenery and food. And while it delivered a little bit, it wasn't quite the book I was hoping for.

It's about a young woman returning to the island on which she grew up after ten years away. Her village is slowly dying and she takes it upon herself to try to improve their fortunes. I didn't find her very likeable though - in fact, I'm struggling to think of any likeable characters - her dad is inexplicably rude, her sister seems awful too and lots of the villagers and small-minded and continue unnecessary feuds because 'that's what islanders do'. Belief must be suspended too. There is a half decent twist but I wouldn't recommend this one.

Thanks to @DuPainDuVinDuFromage for mentioning A Traveller in Time, by Alison Uttley. I didn't read it as a child but I'm enjoying it now.