And like that, we’re almost halfway through the year! It already feels like summer outside, with it being in the 90s for the past week. And that after a cold, cold April!

Thanks in great part to the return of my health after two months of being sick with one cold or another, May was a good month for reading. I finished seventeen titles. One was a small book of poetry, five were novellas, two were audiobooks, and the rest were novels.

Books I finished in May:

• Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente
• A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse
• The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
• The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart, audiobook narrated by Derek Perkins
• The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima
• A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Abbot’s Tale by Conn Iggulden
• Home (Binti #2) by Nnedi Okorafor, audiobook narrated by Robin Miles
• Queens of the Conquest: England’s Medieval Queens by Alison Weir
• The Four Seasons (Japanese Haiku, series II) by Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa, Shiki
• The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar
• Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Portrait of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire by Julia Baird
• Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord
• Grey Sister (Book of the Ancestor #2) by Mark Lawrence
• Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan Maguire
• The End We Start From by Megan Hunt
• Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed

Of the seventeen books I read this month, eleven of them are by women, and five count toward my Read the World Challenge. I’m doing great with my goal of reading more books by women, but I’m not doing so well with my goal of reading more books by authors from outside the US/UK. At the beginning of the year, I challenged myself to read 75 titles by authors from around the world, and so far this year I’ve read nineteen. I have a lot of catching up to do.

 

 

2018 Read the World Challenge:

• A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse (France)
• The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima (Japan)
• The Four Seasons (Japanese Haiku, Series II) by Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa, Shiki (Japan)
• The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar (Iran)
• Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord (Barbados)

 

I don’t declare too many books as DNF, because if I do that, it usually means that I do not plan to go back to that book ever again because I hated an element or elements of the story. I had one of those in May with Cassandra Clare’s Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1). You can find my review and explanation of why I didn’t like it here.

 

I bought more books than I planned to in May, thanks to a trip to Jackson Street Booksellers in Omaha:

• Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene
• Confusion by Stefan Zweig
• Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson
• Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (French edition)
• The Four Seasons (Japanese Haiku, Series II) by by Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa, Shiki (eBook)

 

 

My current reads include:

• Traitor’s Blade (Greatcoats #1) by Sebastien de Castell
• Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life by Helen Czerski

 

 

Books I intend to read in June:

• The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville
• Iza’s Ballad by Magda Szabó
• Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende
• My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
• Samarkand by Amin Maalouf
• The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

 

 

There are several other books I hope to read in June, but these are titles I’ve been intending to read for months now, so I should get to them and stop putting them off! I have a busy first weekend ahead of me with a friend’s wedding later today and book club tomorrow, but the rest of the month is relatively quiet. Hopefully I’ll not be such a mood reader and actually read these books!