Just a quick reminder to say that there’s no audio for my wrap-up posts.
This past month I wrote about the many side effects I experienced while taking lithium for bipolar disorder. I also wrote about how crochet helps with my depression and anxiety. Finally, I wrote about falling out of love with poetry and hoping to rekindle the flame.
Here’s the list of books I read in May. I also finished Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng and She’s Not Sorry by Mary Kubica (Goodreads links). I haven’t read as many thrillers this month as I have in the past because I’m participating in Ohio State’s summer reading challenge and there are categories of books to be read. For example, a book by an Ohio author, a National Book Award Winner, and so on. So here’s what I’ve read:
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
Dust Child by Nguyen Phan Que Mai (the keyboard won’t let me add diacriticals)
Out of the Pocket: Fatherhood, Football, and College GameDay Saturdays by Kirk Herbstreit
The Hunter by Tana French
Deadly Scholarship: The True Story of Lu Gang and Mass Murder in America’s Heartland by Edwin Chen
The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
Symphony of Secrets by Brendan Slocumb
The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard
Currently, I’m reading Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson and hope to read one more book this month. As always, I write mini-reviews of these books on Bluesky.
take more chances in your reading
Hang in there, Barb! Glad you read HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE. For readers (OK, some readers) of my generation, we were blown away by THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, and stuck with Irving afterward--some of us felt a moral attachment to the issue at the heart of THE CIDER HOUSE RULES (at our house anyway); A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY accrued him a new batch of readers, I think. After that several things began getting in the way: Irving's repetition of motifs (I don't mind Murakami's cats, but Irving's bears, dunno). And during the course of his writing life, fiction has had a profound shift toward women's concerns--social and aesthetic--and Irving began to seem old-school, part of the Big Male Novelist camp. I haven't read a novel of his in the 2000s, but I probably should do one more at least. He's a major writer, even with the reservations I have.
And thanks for being a loyal followers of DAVID'S LISTS 2.0! I hope your body is better to you than it has been!