May 2024 Reading Recap
Creative mysteries, family drama, and the joy of arbitrary limitations.
I am a person who is easily paralyzed when I have too many choices. When I’m feeling stressed about my life, that can make my shelves of unread books feel overwhelming rather than exciting. To reduce the overwhelm, I often make up some arbitrary rules to limit the number of options in front of me and make choices easier.
In this case, the first two books I read in May had blue covers, so I decided to read only books with blue covers for the rest of the month. This was a delightful and arbitrary choice that led me to a few books I may not have otherwise picked up. Here’s what I read last month:
📘 Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty
Murder seems to follow Mallory Viridian everywhere she goes. To stop this from happening, Mallory finds a way to leave Earth and make a new life as one of two humans on a sentient spaceship. It’s a little lonely, but at least no one is dying. When a shuttle of humans comes to the spaceship for the first time, Mallory finds herself in the middle of an extraterrestrial whodunit where humans, aliens, and the ship itself are at risk.
This book was a ton of fun! It flies along, setting up a series of fantastical alien species, a very gentle romance, and a big space-focused conspiracy, without ever losing sight of Mallory as the heart of this place and this story. I am jazzed to read the second book in the series.
📘 To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories by Sarah Viren
As the title suggests, this is a memoir of two stories – Sarah Viren’s attempt to understand her charismatic high school philosophy teacher, and what happens when her wife, Marta, is investigated for sexual misconduct at the university where they teach.1 The stories align over explorations of truth and what it means when memories don’t align and facts seem to have no meaning. I really liked almost all of this book, but felt it didn’t quite stick the landing when trying to resolve Viren’s complicated feelings about her former teacher. Still, I thought this memoir was a great read that deftly explores what it means to live in a world where truth is made deliberately complicated.
📘 The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett
Decades after the gruesome end of the Alperton Angels cult, true crime author Amanda Bailey hopes to revive her career with a book about the case.2 In addition to forcing her way through dead ends and secrets that want to stay buried, she also has to contend with a rival author trying to find the same scoop she’s pursuing. This book is told entirely through found objects – emails, text messages, and interview transcripts, which was so fun as the story unfurled. And the ending was genuinely a surprise, which made for a satisfying read too. I’m excited to read more Janice Hallet books!
📘 Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen
Kin Stewart appears to be a normal family man, working in IT while maintaining relationships with his wife and teenage daughter Miranda. But he’s actually a time-traveling secret agent who got stuck in the 1990s after a mission went awry. When suddenly pulled back to 2142, he must figure out how to reconnect with his original life and maintain a relationship with Miranda despite the personal and world-threatening risks that creates. I loved that this book didn’t get too bogged down in the science parts of this story, and instead really focused on Kin, his daughter, and how these kinds of losses and relationships might be affected by this fantastical scenario. It was really good!
📘 Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur
Raised by the widowed father, siblings Ken and Abby Gardner were close as children, but have a strained relationship as adults. As their father’s 70th birthday approaches, a mental breakdown and even more family secrets threaten to throw the their careful equilibrium into disarray.
Adrienne Brodeur has a way of capturing the essence of people through both their physical descriptions and actions – I knew from the very first page the kind of men, in particular, that this story was about, and grew to understand the complexity of the women in their lives as the story progressed. I liked Brodeur’s memoir (Wild Game) better, but this book was still a page-turning read that spooled out in a way where you can see the disaster coming but can’t do anything to right the ship. Check this footnote for a content warning.3
📘 Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach
As a kid, Sally Holt was fascinated by her older sister, Kathy, even as a high school relationship pulled the sisters apart. When Kathy is killed in a tragic accident, Sally finds her life intertwined with that of her sister’s boyfriend, Billy Barnes. The book follows their stories over several decades as they ricochet in and out of each other's lives. In an interview, author Alison Espach said the book explores the central question of her life after her brother died – how do we go on living and loving the shadow of someone’s absence? That particular question resonated with me as part of my own journey as a young widow, and so I appreciated much of the book for that reason.
Final Thoughts
I’m feeling all over the place right now, so we’ll just wrap this up with a few bullet points:
I’ve read 10 books from Mount TBR (the books I owned before 2024), which has me on pace to meet my goal of reading 24 of those titles by the end of the year.
I’ve read 30 books for the year, which is an average of six per month, and puts me on pace to read 72 books for the year.
I’ve only listened to six audiobooks, but I haven’t really been in the mood to listen to anything when I’m walking or commuting, so I don’t know if that number will increase much.
This year’s summer theme is “Summer of (Slow) Fun,” which really just means I want to chill out for the next few months. I’m imagining more weekends at the cabin, more time at the pool, more weekday evening activities, and more time not feeling guilty for doing nothing. We’ll see how it goes!
What was your favorite book of May? What are your summer reading plans? What books are at the top of your TBR for the next few months?
These accusations are false and aren’t described in detail on the page, but as a content warning this book does deal with accusations of sexual misconduct.
As you might expect from the description, the cult murders at the center of this mystery are described on the page in the book, which could be upsetting.
It feels like a spoiler to give a content warning, so that’s why I pushed it into a footnote. In Little Monsters, be prepared for allusions to childhood sexual abuse.
how fun. i love the idea of just picking a color like that. maybe i'll do green in july! i have a lot of green books for some reason. :) have a great summer.