What I read in May, 2025, with notes
Grafiti on the walls of Swallows Cave in Vava’u, Tonga. Chosen in honour of drifty, dreamy ocean narratives and accounts; of disruption and repair; of our early attempts to leave a mark, and our later attempts to erase them.
May 2025
I read so many good books in April that May’s faltering start was frustrating. I tried to read Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad and Entitlement by Rumaan Alam but struggled with both and finally gave up halfway through each. I went online and sought out reviews mentioning what I was struggling with and found several from readers like me who had wanted to enjoy these books but found that the way to enjoying them was barred for some reason. It may have been only a matter of mood as this month marked one more month — nearly a year — of a significant challenge I’ve been facing. I will attempt these books again another time.
I saw Rumaan Alam speak at the Auckland Writer’s Festival and bought a copy of Leave the World Behind which I read sometime in the last year or two and enjoyed. I loved hearing him speak. Listening to the articulate speech of certain Americans feels so much like home to me, like all the voices that surrounded me as a child. I’ve brought home a huge pile of delicious books from the Writer’s Festival.
I’ve been reading each of the two books below as reference material over the last month or so. They’re both helping me centre my life around my body more, by focusing on my cycle (Period Queen, Thanks Anny!) and on the balance of chemicals in my brain and body (DOSE: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins). Both books are practical and punchy. I keep them beside the bed to dip into whenever I need a reminder.
Period Queen by Lucy Peach (Periods! Cycles!)
The DOSE Effect by Tj Power (DOSE: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins)
The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes (a quite funny Irish novel that seemed incomplete in some way but was entertaining and nuanced. I grabbed this one randomly at the library).
The Ministry of Time by Kailane Bradley (This one!! Favourite read, a ripping good time but also extremely deep, nuanced and very sexy. I saw her speak at the Writer’s Festival and was so impressed. She was so charming and had me in stitches and if I hadn’t already bought her book I would have immediately done so. It’s a pleasing combination of sci-fi, thriller, romance, mystery, historical-fiction, pandemic-fiction. I loved it and would have read it again immediately if I didn’t have a huge stack of books from the festival.)
Exit Wounds by Peter Godwin (memoir. Peter Godwin was born in Zimbabwe and later lived in England and the US. I went to his workshop at the Writer’s Festival and enjoyed his style of teaching and storytelling very much. This book is a beautiful, quiet and meditative, weaving lots of seemingly disparate threads together to generate moving metaphors about belonging and unbelonging, war, migration, family, rupture. I have found myself thinking about this book several times in the weeks after reading it. It is also sprinkled with interesting facts, about birds and scurvy among other things. When someone today asked me if I knew why geese flew in a V formation with only one at the point, I knew the answer because of this book. I will definitely read his earlier memoirs.)
Twist by Colum McCann (an interesting novel by an Irish author about the destruction and repair of undersea cables, freediving, being at loose ends, disrupted connections. At times it felt like I was reading in another language, that I couldn’t quite grasp the meaning, but I think the mystery of that and any oddness in the language contributed to the novel’s drifty, dreamy weaving of narrative threads. It mimics life in that we aren’t offered much resolution or clarity, and while this is a little bit disappointing, it is a worthwhile world to be immersed in, bringing us near to deeper worlds that could have been explored but aren’t here, which isn’t so different at all really from the lives we each lead. I love being immersed in stories about the ocean and while the protagonist in Twist doesn’t often himself become immersed, much of the story either is or feels as though it is taking place underwater.)
I listened to Chelsea Handler’s Life Will Be the Death of Me and I’ll Have What She’s Having while I did gardening work also. She’s hilarious and has a great attitude which makes the hours of weeding fly by.
Happy reading xo