May 2026 Reading

New month, new book report.  In May, I read thirteen books.  As usual, the audiobooks are not in the picture, but neither are the two books I read at my mom’s house while I was visiting.

I suppose I’ll start with fiction, and specifically, those two books.  I arrived at my mom’s house on a Thursday and she invited me to her book group meeting, which was Saturday.  As a result, I read Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt quickly.  It is a wonderful book.  There is love and redemption and interspecies understanding and humor.  We all need some octopus intervention in our lives.

 

The other book I read at my mom’s was Delivering Apple Pie by Bill Reichert.  Bill happens to be one of my mom’s neighbors.  I’ve never met him, but she thinks he’s fab.  His book is pretty fab, too!  It follows a group of characters from the end of World War 2 through the 1960s.  At first, I thought it was going to be one of those sanitized historical fiction books, but it didn’t duck the issues of racism and sexism.  His characters face real obstacles and sometimes triumph and sometimes not so much, but I cared about them all the way through.  Highly recommend.

 

I finished off the Grantchester mysteries by reading Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil, Sidney Chambers and the Forgiveness of Sins, and Sidney Chambers and the Dangers of Temptation.  I enjoyed them all.  I think, having read the lot now, that I would describe them as stories that happen to have mysteries rather than mystery stories.  The emphasis seems to be on the characters.  Bonus points for a role for Roger Waters and early Pink Floyd?

 

I’ve been thinking about the construction of mysteries lately, so I reread Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side.  It is, like most of Christie’s books, an intricate device.  The story itself is interesting and all the usual suspects show up.  I had forgotten how the book differed from the very entertaining film version with Angela Lansbury, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and Kim Novak (check it out!), but the overall mechanisms are the same.  Might be my favorite Miss Marple.

 

I had managed to get to this point without reading any John Grisham.  My husband cleared out a bunch of books and said I’d probably like Ford County, so I stuck it on my shelf and just got around to it.  I had somehow missed that Grisham is a southern writer.  Now I know.  The short stories in this collection are funny and sad and good.  I may read more of his work now!

 

The last fiction I read was Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.  It is a good book, but perhaps not the most cheerful ever, since it posits that humans are pretty much guaranteed to destroy themselves.  It’s not entirely surprising that it is an extremely male book, in that it was written in 1959, but I’m pretty sure the first female character doesn’t show up until about two thirds of the way through.  The idea of the church as the repository of knowledge and the keeper of humanity is not a new one, but the way it is expressed in this book is interesting.  Apparently it’s a classic work of speculative fiction and I see why.

 

In audio, I continue to listen to Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series.  I finished A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith.  I love the Nac Mac Feagles.  I love Pratchett’s conception of witchcraft as mostly noticing and doing the right things.  I laugh.  Go check these books out, now.

 

My younger son moved out at the end of May, which means that he did a big clear out before he left.  The rules of my house are that I get first right of refusal on all books.  (I also got a bunch of my own books back!)  I’ll be reading most of them over the next while, but I stopped what I was doing to read the one picture book I acquired in the process.  It’s called Warning:  Do Not Open This Book! and it’s by Adam Lehrhaupt.  It is a funny and silly variation on the classic The Monster at the End of This Book, which I have read approximately ten gazillion billion times and love dearly.  This version would be a great gift to any little monkeys of your acquaintance.

 

My older son gives me books for all holidays because he is a wonderful human.  For my birthday, one of the books he gave me was Jenny Lawson’s How to be Okay When Nothing Is Okay.  This was amazing, because I was actually considering buying it for myself and it showed up in the mail!  Lawson is hilarious and deep, which is pretty much my favorite combination.  This particular book is about how to be creative when life is difficult.  Spoiler alert:  life is almost always difficult.  Check it out and feel hugged and inspired.

 

The book I got for Mother’s Day was S. Bear Bergman’s Special Topics in Being a Human.  This book is super useful in these difficult times.  I don’t think I know anybody who doesn’t know a marginalized person (or who isn’t one themselves!).  The cultural climate at present is extra terrible for those who are not cis/white/hetero etc. and this book offers useful, gentle, practical advice about how to love and support all humans.  Plus it has cool illustrations.  Check it out.  Deploy it.

 

On to summer reading.

 

May total:  13

Spring total:  42

2026 to date:  42