May 2025 Reads

Can you believe how small that book stack is? One reason for the scant pile is that I took a one-week reading hiatus early this month (as part of The Artist's Way). For the whole week, I set aside all book reading, plus limited online reading, podcast listening, and TV watching (i.e., cut way back on other people's words going into my brain). This was made much easier than it would otherwise have been because my sister was visiting for most of that week, so I was busy visiting museums and beaches and bakeries. Another reason, is that when the week ended, I didn't want to return to the book I'd started at the beginning of the month and was about halfway through with. I rarely *intentionally* quit reading a book in the middle (though I sometimes set one aside and just never pick it up again), but this one had just gotten really boring and I didn't even care what might happen next. I only paid $2 for it at a used book store, and I just might return it to them. This is kind of revolutionary for me (I usually force myself to finish books even if I don't like them). I'm actually excited. (Oh, and because I know you're now dying to know what the book is, it's Lauren Groff's Matrix. I hate to diss on another author's book, but she's pretty successful and I don't think my opinion will harm her sales--and no doubt lots of people find the book more interesting than I did.) I also spent a week in Colorado, so while I read a lot on the plane and in airports, I didn't read much while I was there. Finally, I have a big, fat nonfiction book that it's taken me more than a month to read, and ditto a long poetry collection, both of which will show up in next month's list. But what did I read this month? It was all fiction:

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. I don't often read fantasy, but C had put this in a pile of books to give away, and I remembered enjoying the movie when I was a kid, so I gave it a try. It's a beautifully written story, and it felt a bit like an allegory for our times (the angry mad king alone in his castle, with his dopey son, two clueless but semi-loyal henchmen, and a raging, uncontrollable bull who has driven all of the unicorns out of the land as his only companions), although the king, the son, and even the bull possess far more intelligence, integrity, and valor than our current cast of kooks and weirdos running our national sh*tshow. The old movie (screenplay also written by Beagle, along with the old Hobbit and Lord of the Rings cartoons that used to appear on network TV annually when we were kids) is hard to come by these days, but C has ordered a DVD through his college library (because after I read it, he decided to read it again, having forgotten, apparently, that he'd put it in the discard pile), and I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

The two books I read while traveling to and from Colorado are both thrillers that take place in Maine and revolve around the summer tourist season in coastal towns. The Summer Guests by Tess Gerritsen is the second in the Spy Coast thriller series, in which the disappearance of a young girl and the discovery of a skeleton in a lake lead the retired CIA gang into a tangled historical mystery. I enjoyed it a lot. In The Last House Guest by Megan Miranda, the main character, who doesn't quite fit into either the "summer people" or "townie" category races to uncover why her friend died falling from the cliffs the previous summer before she succumbs to the same fate. It was also a page turner, and perfect for a 10-hour travel day.