I feel like I blinked and suddenly the aircon is back on, and I’m spending every late afternoon in the pool. I don’t really know where the winter and spring months went. I have a toddler now, so my days of calmly reading during the many contact naps are well behind me and I spend all day quite literally running to stop the next catastrophe.
This year I have been working at reading books from my physical TBR and have made some great progress! This is continuing for the foreseeable future, because I am aiming to get to TBR Zero… eventually.
It’s my birthday tomorrow (I’m going to be 30!) and I decided to make a TBR that would be some of the books I am most excited to read for June:
- Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan
- Cruel Illusions by Margie Fuston
- Mina’s Matchbox by Yōko Ogawa
- The Possession of Alba Díaz by Isabel Cañas
- The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
- The Way of Kings Part 1 by Brandon Sanderson
Here we have a whole selection of predicted 5-star reads. The Third Policeman I am reading this for Henry Eliot’s classics bookclub. If you are interested in reading a classic each month I highly recommend it! My husband and I have been reading along since November and have both found some new favourites. Although I am only 30 pages in so far, I am really enjoying The Third Policeman‘s quirky writing style.
Mina’s Matchbox is probably the book I am most looking forward to reading as everything I have read from Yōko Ogawa has been 5-stars so far. Also included in my TBR are a lot of backlist fantasy books that I am really excited to finally get to.
Because I am late in writing this post (I planned to publish it mid-May), I have already read one of my highly anticipated reads, Butter by Asako Yuzuki this week which I thought I would love but it ended up not winning me over. There was lots to like in the food descriptions, but the dialogue and characters felt very flat and lifeless. I can’t imagine recommending it to anyone.
Also for Henry Eliot’s bookclub, I will be reading Book VI of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky as part of year-long read. I am enjoying this book much more than I ever thought I would. I found Book V pretty gruelling, but by the end of it I was completely hooked.
And to finish, here are some thoughts on bookish content creation today:
I enjoy writing about what I’m reading. I used to be very active on Instagram but have found it to be completely unrewarding these last few years. And with such limited time now, it couldn’t be lower priority for me. I have a much smaller audience here but perhaps one a little more meaningful? There’s no AI to be found, no reading according to trends, or depressingly decreasing number of likes.
I tried to block out my disappointment as to how my Instagram page has died a rather pathetic death, but it does hurt to have something I put a lot of time and effort into fade into obscurity because of algorithmic nonsense. And Twitter has also gone completely down the drain. I’m still trying to find the right avenue for what I want to do. Probably a good place to start is to be a little more consistent on here.
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