Like everyone else, I am wondering just how we arrived in June already. Seriously. Where does the time go? Why does it feel like it’s passing so quickly?

What I Finished Reading in May:

• City of Illusions (The Hainish Cycle #3) by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson
• The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
• The Ruba’iyat by Omar Khayyam, translated from the Persian by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs
• Winds of Change (Mage Winds #2) by Mercedes Lackey
• His Majesty’s Dragon (Temeraire #1) by Naomi Novik
• For the Love of Books: Stories of Literary Lives, Banned Books, Author Feuds, Extraordinary Characters, and More by Graham Tarrant, ARC provided by NetGalley
• Blameless (The Parasol Protectorate #3) by Gail Carriger, audiobook narrated by Emily Gray
• The Crystal Stair (Tales of Gom #3) by Grace Chetwin
• Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously by Jessica Pan (ARC provided by NetGalley)
• Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse #1) by James S.A. Corey
• A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré, audiobook narrated by Tom Hollander
• Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
• Blood of Elves (The Witcher #3) by Andrzej Sapkowski, translated by Danusia Stok

 

I read fourteen books in May. Perhaps not my best reading month in 2019, but not bad at all. It’s finally getting warm and dry enough to go out and do things, so I haven’t been reading as incessantly as I was earlier in the year.

Statistically speaking, I read seven books by women and seven books by men. I didn’t intend to have a perfect 50/50 divide, but there we go. Eight books were written by Americans, three by British writers, and one each by Persian, German, and Polish writers. 71.4% were physical books, 14.3% were ebooks, and 14.3% were audiobooks. The majority (5) were adult fantasy, followed by non-fiction, science fiction, and poetry (2 each), followed by YA fantasy, memoir, and thriller (1each). 57.1% came from the library, 28.6% were from my own shelves, and 14.3% were from NetGalley. The publication years stretched from 1120 to 2019.

So that’s that. I’m well ahead of my Goodreads Challenge for 2019, which was 100 books for the year.

How far ahead am I?

I feel like I didn’t do anything but read over the winter, but it was a long, bitterly cold season and there wasn’t much to do except read.

With that said, I have a ridiculous plan to finish off my challenge by the exact middle of the year, which is July 2. This is something I can definitely do, given that there were a couple of months earlier this year when I read twenty books.

Wish me luck!

What I Plan to Read in June:

I have a stack of books sitting on the shelf next to my desk, waiting for me to get to them and a new-to-me chair in my bedroom to read them in. The chair was given to me by a friend, who realized that she wasn’t using it anymore and that it was getting in her way. It took a bit of rearranging, but I got it settled into the corner of my bedroom, next to the radiator and between both windows. It’s sure to be a cozy spot where I can read or crochet. I am super happy with the new arrangement!

For my part of my 2019 Reading Plan, I plan to read Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I was assigned this in college during my English 305H class, but that was the semester where I had nineteen credit hours worth of classes and two part-time jobs. I didn’t get very much sleep during that semester, and I don’t recall very much about the book. I plan to rectify that this month.

The rest of the books in the photo have been on my shelves for a year or more, and I want to get to them. The Blade of the Courtesans by Keiichiro Ryu and Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk are my two selections for works in translation, and Parrish and Poetry is my poetry selection. This book is a collection from a variety of poets, with the works matched up with artworks by the early Twentieth-century American lithographer, Maxfield Parrish.

Otherwise, I want to read more of The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey. I’m in the midst of book two, Caliban’s War. I also plan to finish The Candle and the Flame by Nafiza Azad and A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness.

June is not a terribly busy month for me, and the weather has started out mildly, especially compared to last year, when winter lingered on into mid-May, and then jumped directly into summer. Seriously. It jumped to over 90°F before Memorial Day weekend, and just stayed that way through the beginning of October. Why do I complain about this? Because if I were a character from Game of Thrones, I would belong in the North as much as Sansa Stark or Jon Snow. Heat and I do not get along. At all.

What else do I plan to read? Well, I’m slowly getting through my back issues of National Geographic. I only have nine left, so hopefully, I will get to the rest of them this month. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long. Their bright yellow spines standout against the books on that shelf, given that I own very few yellow things.

In other news, I need to figure out where, exactly, I will be going while I’m in Iceland in September and then finish booking hotels/Airbnbs and a rental car. Last time I was there, I mostly stayed on the western edge of the country. This time, I intend to head for the eastern part and visit some of the spectacular waterfalls and other scenic areas in and around Vatnajökull National Park. I still have people who are baffled when I tell them I’m going to Iceland. “Why would you go there?” they ask.

But really, why wouldn’t you want to go somewhere where this is a roadside view?