Read:
The Ladies of Grace Adieu & Other Stories – Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury, 2006)
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You – Neko Case (Hachette Audio, 2025)
Dept. of Speculation – Jenny Offill (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)
Sunbirth – An Yu (Grove Press, 2025)
Far to Go – Alison Pick (Anansi, 2010)
All the Little Monsters – David A. Robertson (Harper Collins Publishers Ltd, 2025)
The Pursuit of God – A.W. Tozer (One Audiobooks, 2020)
The Red Chesterfield – Wayne Arthurson (University of Calgary Press, 2019)
Madwoman – Chelsea Bieker (Little, Brown, & Company, 2024)
The Passengers on the Hankyu Line – Hiro Arikawa (Berkley, 2025)
The Railway Children – E. Nesbit (Puffin Classics, 1983)
Pearl – Sian Hughes (W.F. Howes, 2023)
The Maid – Nita Prose (Viking, 2022)
Sleep – Honor Jones (Riverhead Books, 2025)
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self – Carl R. Trueman (Crossway, 2020)
DNF:
O Beautiful – Jung Yun
Was listening to this on audio and stopped about halfway through. Everyone was terrible and the main character was awful and made so many bad decisions and also nothing was really happening.
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim – Jonathan Coe
I had a different Jonathan Coe novel on my TBR but this was the only one I could find at the library so I got the audio version and listened to maybe the first third. I quit around the time it felt clear to me that either the first person narrator or the author was a complete misogynist and, frankly, I don’t really care which one it turns out to be.
Unsettled Ground – Claire Fuller
I’ve read and enjoyed other books by Fuller but this one wasn’t for me. I couldn’t figure out where in time we were but the final thing that made me give up was that all the tension came from the main characters simply not doing anything! They could have solved their own problems with a little bit of action!
A Well-Trained Wife – Tia Levings
I had this book on hold for quite a while, waiting for the audio copy through the library app. It’s a memoir of the author’s experience in fundamental Christianity. In the end, the descriptions of abuse were too much for me, at least in the audio format, and I DNFed at 24%.
Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
After DNFing A Well-Trained Wife, I needed a new audio book and picked this off of the library app. I abandoned it at 11% really purely because of the narrator. The voice grated on me and the way she pronounced names drove me crazy. Does “Charmaine” really have 3 syllables? And has anybody else in the English language every pronounced “Dylan” as “die-lin”??
Currently Reading:
Honeydew – Edith Pearlman
Anne of Windy Poplars – L.M. Montgomery
Good Dirt – Charmaine Wilkinson
2025 Reading Goals:
Pages Read: 14, 769 (3,176 pages in May)
Hours Listened: 207 hours, 29 minutes (33 hours, 13 minutes in May)
Goliaths Conquered: 5 (none in May)
Translated Works: 7 (The Passengers on the Hankyu Line translated from Japanese in May)
Pre-2024 TBR: 15 (Dept. of Speculation (from 2023), Far to Go (from 2016), Pursuit of God (from 2015), The Red Chesterfield (from 2020) in May
Current TBR: 201 (previously 205)
Thoughts:
May added another 15 books, bringing my yearly total to 69. I seem to be able to consistently hit this 15 number this year and I’m still not entirely sure why it’s been easier in 2025 than in previous years. I am reading a lot of short stories this year and I do find that, for me, they pair nicely with reading other books at the same time because I can dip into them as I’m able.
I did have a lot of DNFS this month, 5 in total with all but one being audio. I find that I’m pickier about my audio choices, probably because it’s harder to jump forward or skip a section in an audiobook than it is on the page. Narration also matters a lot and sometimes certain pronunciations or voices just take me too consistently out of the story to continue.
This was a month of solid reading and I enjoyed the books I did finish but nothing was really standing out until I reached the end of the month and read Sleep by Honor Jones. I’m not sure yet if I’ll review this one as it hit some personal notes for me that I’m not sure I know how to approach in a book review (or if I want to). But I was deeply impressed by this debut author and highly recommend the book.
What’s Next:
The 20 Books of Summer Challenge, obviously!
This will be my third year participating and so I (hopefully) have honed my goal-making. Obviously, the making of the list is one of the most fun parts but at the same time, I know I have a tendency to be a little bit too optimistic. As I’ve done the past two years, I emphasized titles that have been lingering on my TBR for a long time (years) and books that I already own. 14 of these are books that are already physically in my house. I also tried to pick books that, as I sorted through the stacks, I felt excited to read. I intentionally didn’t choose any Goliaths or dense theological reads!
From there I divided the 20 books into 4 sections: Non-Fiction, Audio, Translations, and General Fiction. Obviously there is some overlap between the sections but this helped me narrow down my options. The last criteria I had was No Americans. I shared previously that despite the tensions between our two countries (or between the USA and just about every other nation in the world) I wasn’t going to avoid American art. I still don’t plan to and I expect that I will read more books this summer than just the 20 listed below. But as I was crafting my list, I was trying to include a few authors from our local Writers Fest, all of whom are Canadian. Along with trying to choose books translated into English, it felt natural to emphasize the options on my TBR that come from all around the world.
So, here is the list:
Non-Fiction:
- Why I Write – George Orwell
- The Riches of Your Grace – Julie Lane-Gay
- North of Normal – Cea Sunrise Person
- Run Towards the Danger – Sarah Polley
- Room for Good Things to Run Wild – Josh Nadeau
Audio:
- 6. Snap –Susin Nielsen
- 7. 52 Ways to Reconcile – David A. Robertson
- 8. Universality – Natasha Brown
- 9. White Nights – Fyodr Dostoevsky
- 10. Song of the Sun God – Shankari Chandran
Translations:
- 11. Compass – Mathias Enard
- 12. Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki – Haruki Murakami
- 13. A Guardian Angel Recalls – Willem Frederik Hermans
- 14. The Cursed Friend – Beatrice Salvioni
- 15. I Who Have Never Known Men – Jacqueline Harpman
General Fiction:
- 16. The Weekend – Charlotte Wood
- 17. Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster
- 18. The Golden Age – Kenneth Grahame
- 19. The Sea – John Banville
- 20. The Hand that First Held Mine – Maggie O’Farrell
Anyone else participating in the 20 Books Challenge? How do you pick your list?
What was the best book you read in May?
Karissa Reads Books 
How did you find the AW Tozer? Someone gave it to me years ago and it’s been on my shelf ever since – for unknown reasons I’m intimidated by it, despite the fact that it’s slim, but I do want to read it sooner or later!
Re Memento Mori, that character’s name is actually Charmian on the page, not Charmaine – so that one’s not a mispronunciation. I am as perplexed as you about that pronunciation of Dylan, though! I am definitely more likely to DNF audiobooks – the narrator has to be right for me to get on with the book, and there can be other things that don’t work as well in audio form.
I listened to the Tozer on audio which probably wasn’t the best format but I did think it was good. I was amazed by how timely it felt. The things he says about the Western church could have been written now!
Ok, I feel better about Charmian vs Charmaine. That’s one drawback to audiobooks! The narrator’s voice was too nasally for me so the the weird pronunciations just put it over the top!
OK, totally weird and random, but I was JUST thinking and talking about Neko Case (I loved her album Middle Cyclone in my last year of high school) and here I find out she wrote a memoir! Serendipity.
You should read this then! It has increased the amount of Neko Case I’ve been listening to lately!
I’ll be looking forward to your review of The Weekend from your 20 Books of Summer challenge.
I believe it might have been your review that put it in my TBR!
😀
It’s so odd how narrators affect us all differently If it was Eve Karpf, I loved her narration and I see Loulou has already mentioned that the character’s name is three-syllabled Charmian. I don’t remember a character called Dylan, so maybe I missed a mispronunciation of that one. But I always find Juliet Stevenson’s narrations irritating to the point where it takes away most of the pleasure, and yet she seems to be highly popular as a narrator, and there’s an Irish narrator too that everyone loves and I find unlistenable (temporarily forgotten her name – Aoife Somebody). I agree totally with the inability to skim audiobooks and I abandon far more of them than paper books too. I find audiobooks a different experience to reading altogether, more akin to watching a film.
I didn’t think about how much narrators matter until I started listening to audiobooks regularly. It is a really different experience than reading a book. There’s content I can deal with on the page that I struggle with with audio, rather like watching movies, you’re right.
Months have 30 or 31 days, meaning your finishing a book every other day if you get through 15 per month. That’s wild because I know you’re not sitting around with mass-market paperback beach reads, either. I also have Run Towards the Danger by Sarah Polley on my TBR because I loved her in the Dawn of the Dead movie. Since then, I’ve seen that she’s doing the work to uplift women in cinema. I did read The Weekend by Charlotte Wood and thought it was a total flop. The characters kept revealing important information way too late in the book, but for no reason that connected to the plot. I’m not doing 20 Books of Summer this year because I always make my list based on all the book clubs coming up and then changing a bunch of things, so I started to wonder what the point of me creating a post was. Well, aside from my total glee and looking through book lists and creating lists.
Making the lists is part of the fun! I don’t really care if I read all 20 of these books this summer but sorting through my stacks of unread books does help bring some of the forgotten ones to the fore and I’ll read some I might not have otherwise!
Here in Canada, I’d say Sarah Polley is based known for her childhood role on a show called Road to Avonlea. I always feel delighted to see the work she’s doing now, like she’s a distant acquaintance I knew as a child.
I love that she was basically the hero in Dawn of the Dead, and she wasn’t one of those “badass chicks” who are basically a dude with boobs. She was a nurse and had empathy.
I’m looking forward to reading her book because I expect her to be very take charge in her real life too. She’s also been in the industry since she was a child and I think her perspective on that will be interesting.