Well, so ends May, an extremely wet month here in Alabama, with most places receiving 10-12 inches of rain — the historic average being about 5 inches. I managed to watch two baseball games and one play (“The Mousetrap”, Agatha Christie — Montevallo Main Street Players) After a two-month obsession with CJ Box, Wyoming, and Joe Pickett, my May reading was more of a return to my usual mix. I finally went to work on my Opening Day stack (a metaphorical stack in this case, since there was only one physical book, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty), then made progress on my reading goals, including….
……okay, it was mostly politics and baseball. Reviews were quiet in the last week because I was absorbed in Provoked, which, if its Kindle pagecount can be believed, is the largest book I’ve ever read at 2316 pages. The print version only runs to ~700 pages, but reviews say the print is tiny. I’m close to the end, though: even though I’m only halfway through percentage wise, there are thousands of footnotes and I suspect they’ll constitute at least the last 20% of the book. I’m in 2023 with frequent mentions to 2024, so the end is near — at least for the book. Can’t say as much for the people of Ukraine. I’m definitely going to be looking for some light reading after this, as I am very tired of reading about death.
New Acquisitions
The Presidents and the Pastime, a history of American presidents and baseball; One of Us, a seven hundred page history of Nixon; and Original Sin, a history of Biden’s cognitive decline and how his staffers did their dead-level best to conceal it. I promise I’m not going off on another presidential tangent like the one that consumed July 2023. One is in-progress and something if a leisure read, if big; one is read already, and One of Us may be deferred because it’s a chunkster and I’m most of the way through The Nixon Conspiracy, a history of Watergate from a White House staffer.
BookTube Highlight
This is a new thing and I’m not sure how long it will last since I don’t spend a lot of time on booktube, but recently I found a channel so lovely that I want to share it — Jess of the Shire. She does video essays on Lord of the Rings and storytelling in general, and is often in LOTR cosplay.
Coming up in June…
SF readers may remember SHELLI, a thriller featuring a synth/human detective team. Doug Brode has a sequel coming out in mid-June, so I’m definitely looking forward to that. Another cool cover! I haven’t read any science fiction this year, though I did have a Becky Chambers title checked out for a while. I’m also itching to read some Star Trek and still have two un-read releases from last year to get to.
Reading Freely 
Sounds WET there! We’ve just had our *driest* Spring for 170 years…..! Which probably means that we’ll be having our *wettest* Summer for 200 years…. [lol]
With Britain, though, does “dry” mean anything?
VERY occasionally…….. [lol] We STILL talk about the summer of 1976. That was DRY DRY DRY….
I believe this past May was the 4th wettest in the history since records have been kept track of in our area. It was crazy.
Glad you survived Star Wars night and no rogue Vader cut you down 😀
We were more worried about the teams! They both kept sending the balls backward . Obvious sith influence at work…
Sounds like the insidious work of Darth Umpirus.
You’re lucky you survived at all 😉
After an exceptionally dry start to the year, we clocked just over 8 inches of rain here in my part of NC! You win with the double-digits though … soggy, soggy, soggy.
Kindle books with footnotes/endnotes are always deceptive for me, because it’s like “I feel like I’m almost finished, but there’s still waaaaay more left in the book” and then you get there and realize there’s like 10% of end matter things 🙃 {That said: my current Kindle read – a novel – has footnotes 🤣}
I still want to read Shelli.
I read an amazing scifi in May: https://wordsandpeace.com/2025/05/31/2025-may-wrap-up/