Spring made its official entrance this month, and with it came the season that drags me back outside. So my spare time (read: reading time) was split among outdoor activities I’d been craving all winter, hobbies I keep circling back to, a small army of seedlings that picked the busiest month to demand my attention, and a lot of events scattered around the city. Even though my free hours got pulled in too many directions, I surprisingly read quite a lot of books.

The Books I Read in May

I read fourteen books this month, and most of them were popular titles, such as Dream Count, The Correspondent, Strangers, Heart the Lover, and a few others that have been making the rounds across every book platform and community I follow. Unfortunately, I found that my preferences do not match the popular ones. Well, we all have our own style, right? And that’s what makes books more interesting. Of the bunch, Strangers was the one that sank its hooks into me.

Strangers, A Biography That Left Me Furious and Curious

I should say upfront that this isn’t the first biography that wreck me emotionally. Clarice Lispector’s Too Much of Life still holds that throne, and I doubt anything will dethrone it anytime soon. Strangers by Belle Burden worked on me differently. While Lispector left me with a lingering ache, Burden left me furious and curious. Furious at the situations she was forced to navigate, curious about how she carried them, both the surface composure she had to keep and the inner reckoning that ran underneath. From the first page to the last, I was in it.

My Dreadful Body, The Passage That Stopped Me Cold

The other standout book this month for me was My Dreadful Body by Egana Djabarova. Not quite book of the month for me tho, maybe a 4.5 out of 5, but it handed me one of those reading moments that flattens you. I came across a passage so uncannily close to a transcript of my own inner life that I had to set the book down. I read it again. Then a third time. I sat there tracing each letter on the page, wondering how a sentence from someone else’s book had managed to describe my entire interior world.

Here it is:

“My hands knew how to wash and cook, but they liked writing more than anything. They always liked writing, which is why even in my childhood I had notebooks where I wrote stories and thought up characters, even attempting to draw them. Writing gave me conversation partners I could talk with at any time, writing didn’t depend on anyone but me, and writing was always with me, like an invisible amulet. If someone wronged and upset me, I’d wait until evening to open my notebook and write a story where something bad happens to a bad character and something good happens to the good character. Only later did it become obvious to me that this is not always how things are: bad things happen to good characters, too, and life adds all kinds of people into its soup, tossing in spices without asking who likes what.”

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Well, this was a fuller reading month than I expected. I made my way through plenty of the popular titles everyone’s been talking about, but only Strangers and My Dreadful Body were the ones that truly lingered with me.

As for June, the days are about to get a lot warmer, and between the summer events filling up the calendar and the steady stream of new releases slowly creeping into my to-be-read pile, it’s shaping up to be a busy one. Here’s hoping both my reading and my time outdoors make for an exciting summer. See you in the next recap!