Reading is my oldest and favorite hobby.  I literally can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love to curl up with a good book.  Here are my reads for May, 2018…

The Untelling, by Tayari Jones – While I wait (and wait, and wait) for my library hold to come in on An American Marriage, Jones’ new release, I picked up The Untelling from her backlist.  The Untelling is the story of Aria, a young woman whose family was torn apart when her father and baby sister died in a car accident when Aria was a young girl.  Aria, her mother and her sister survived the accident.  Now in her twenties and working as a literacy instructor, Aria believes she has put the past behind her and found a way to uneasily coexist with her remaining family members.  But when she discovers that she may be pregnant, wheels are set in motion that will eventually bring a reckoning for everyone.  Well – The Untelling was beautifully written, but left me a bit cold.  It may be library deadline reading, which is never a great way to read.  But I felt that the plot was a bit contrived – the only way to have a book was to have Aria make a long string of terrible and illogical decisions, and it began to feel farfetched.  I mean, no one makes that many insane choices.

Second Class Citizen, by Buchi Emecheta – I’ve been trying to read more classic African writers, and I’d never read anything by Emecheta – plus this immigrant narrative looked really interesting.  The story focuses on Adah, a resourceful young Nigerian woman who is driven by a dream to live in England.  Adah will do anything to make her dream come true – even marry a gigantic jerk.  She does make it to England and, of course, finds that the immigrant life is much harder than she expected.  Adah is strong and could probably have thrived even in the very foreign London of the 1960s, had she a partner who was deserving of her.  But her husband Francis is a cruel and lazy man, who insists on Adah single-handedly supporting the family even as she has baby after baby.  Spoiler alert, and warning: don’t read this if you need a tidy ending.  By the end of the story I was very invested in Adah getting away from Francis and becoming her own woman, and the end was singularly unsatisfying.

Sailing Alone Around The Room: Collected Poems, by Billy Collins – I’ve been reading this collection in snatches (on my phone) for a couple of months now, and meh.  I didn’t really like it.  Some of the poems were quite lovely and thoughtful, but a lot more were just Collins drinking orange juice, listening to records and thinking about naked ladies.  I know that he has quite the fan base and was the poet laureate of the United States, but Collins just didn’t do it for me.  I like my poetry touched with the sublime, and this collection was just too mundane for my taste.  I have heard that it’s not his best, and that there are better examples of Collins’ writing out there.  Maybe at some point I will seek one out, but I don’t see that happening soon.  I’m more content to wander hedgerows with Betjeman or charge through Camelot with Tennyson.

The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, by Michael David Lukas – Finally, four books in, I hit on a May read that I just loved.  This was totally expected, because I adored Lukas’ first novel, The Oracle of Stamboul, but I’d have been crushed if The Last Watchman of Old Cairo was disappointing.  Happily for me, it was even better than its predecessor.  Lukas can spin a tale, no doubt, and he does so here – following three sets of characters through three time periods – Ali al Raqb, the first watchman of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo in 1300 AD; two sisters from Cambridge who travel to Cairo to save priceless documents that are being looted from the synagogue’s geniza in 1875; and Yusuf al Raqb, the son of the last watchman of the synagogue, who has just passed away and left his son with a mysterious scrap of paper and a lot of grieving to reconcile.  I loved every second of this gorgeous story and have been telling everyone I meet to go read it immediately.  So I will tell you: GO READ IT.  IMMEDIATELY.

Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward – I’d been waiting months to get the latest from Ward; the library holds list was a mile long.  (I live in a city of readers, which I love, even if it does mean that I sometimes have to wait for the anticipated new release.)  Ward tells the story of Jojo, a young boy on the cusp of manhood; Leonie, Jojo’s tormented mother; and Richie, a ghost.  When Leonie learns that Jojo’s father is about to be released from prison, she packs up Jojo and his sister and drives with a friend up to collect him.  Perspectives switch back and forth between Jojo and Leonie, and eventually Richie, in a sad and spellbinding story.  So – this was not a comfortable reading experience, especially the Richie parts.  My aunt picked it up after she asked me what I was reading and I told her and she texted me a few chapters in: “Is it this depressing the whole time?”  The answer is yes, but it’s also beautiful.

To Die But Once (Maisie Dobbs #14), by Jacqueline Winspear – World War II has officially begun, but when the latest installment in the Maisie Dobbs series opens, London is in the throes of “the Bore War” – the early days, before the Blitz, when most of England just baked in the sun and stewed with apprehension, wondering when something (anything!) would happen.  (Eventually, something does: the Dunkirk evacuation, which catches a few of the characters up in it.)  Maisie and Billy are investigating the disappearance of a neighbor’s son who was apprenticed to a painting company working with untested flame-retardant paint in a top secret location.  Meanwhile, Maisie is working on formally adopting her orphaned refugee, Anna, and trying to be present for Billy and Priscilla as they worry about their sons, who are old enough to go to war.  The Maisie novels keep getting better, and I tore through this one as usual.

Brensham Village (Brensham Trilogy #2), by John Moore – The second installment in the Brensham Trilogy (of lightly fictionalized memoirs about the market town where Moore grew up and the constellation of villages and hamlets that surrounded it) was a dream to read.  I loved Portrait of Elmbury, and Brensham Village was, if anything, even better.  The book opens with Moore and his three friends (“the young varmints”) discovering Brensham Hill, which rises above its namesake village about four miles outside of Elmbury (where Moore lives).  There is a folly on top of the hill, complete with hermit, and there are “lolloping” hares and a mad Lord (who was one of my favorites amongst Moore’s cast of delightful characters).  Having conquered Brensham Hill, Moore looks down over the thatched rooftops of the village and dreams of being part of the life there – and as a young man, he fulfills that dream by joining the cricket team and being informally adopted as one of Brensham’s own.  He trades jokes with the landlords of the Adam and Eve and the Horse Narrow pubs; plays darts and scampers over the outlying areas in search of insects with his old Latin teacher, Mr Chorlton (a beloved character from Portrait of Elmbury), mourns with the villagers when a freak frost destroys their fruit crops, and shudders at the shady Syndicate that is quietly buying up land around the village.  Brensham isn’t a real place – it’s an amalgamation of villages around Tewkesbury – but in Moore’s hands, it breathes and teems with life.

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon, by Robert Kurson – There are a few books that I just can’t resist, and “dad books” about the golden age of space travel are in that category.  In Rocket Men, Kurson covers Apollo 8 with aplomb.  I thought I knew pretty much what there was to be known about Apollo 8 after reading Lost Moon (which was retitled Apollo 13 after the movie came out) but there was a lot more to tell, it seems.  Kurson digs up every interesting, funny, hair-raising or disgusting anecdote he can find (and I kept stopping Steve in whatever he was doing so I could read them aloud).  My favorite was definitely the anecdote about Bill Anders flipping the bird at a Soviet flight while stationed in Iceland, and the Soviets’ months-delayed response.  This was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed every minute.  (It would also make a great Father’s Day gift for the nonfiction-inclined dads out there.)

Pretty good May in books, if I do say so myself!  There were some excellent highlights – The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, the new Maisie, Brensham Village and Rocket Men all come to mind.  I had a couple fall a bit flat, but them’s the breaks, sometimes.  Looking ahead, I have a few books on the go already now, at the start of June, and I think it’s going to be another good reading month.  Tootle pip!