So ends the merrie month o’ May; the green buds are no longer swelling, but bursting into full flower. Summer is here, what I….lovingly….call the Great Sticky Siege. The outside world is quickly becoming not a place of warmth and flowers and gentle breezes, but oppressive heat, despairing humidity, and enough mosquitos to supply a blood drive. May was shaping up to be a very busy month at first, but adverse reactions to a new medicine took me out of the running for a few days. In book-adjacent news, one of my favorite authors has just moved to Birmingham and has mentioned his interest in hanging out with readers, so I’m looking forward to that. He and I have met and talked several times in person (…in Birmingham, when he was doing events at Samford), but I’d much rather hang out at Miss Myra’s and have real fellowship. The month featured three five-star bolded titles, one of which I’ve not yet reviewed, and the other of which marked the end of the Harry Potter Full Cast Audio Editions. Sure, I started listening to them again, and I’ve talked two friends into trying them, but the first time is always the most special. The bolded titles were: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Being Nixon, and Maverick, the latter a biography of Thomas Sowell. It’s hard to summarize an intellectual biography, but I really don’t want to short-round him. While I haven’t read a lot of Sowell, the two titles I have read (Black Rednecks and White Liberals; Basic Economics) played a huge role in my own intellectual development.

America @ 250

I’m not going to list titles because almost all of my reading this month was America @ 250 adjacent, aside from Harry Potter. The project is not developing as I’d intended — with multiple tracks — but has been mostly fixated on biographies, particularly of presidents with some outliers like Thomas Sowell. The Midwest Survival Guide could technically count as a celebration of American ‘places’, I suppose. One highlight was beginning to read Gore Vidal’s “Narratives of Empire” series where he tells the story of the American Republic from Burr to the mid-20th century via character-centered novels.

Science Survey

Finally, blood in the water! I read Neil deGrasse Tyson’s work on alien encounters.

Coming up in June

For those who are weary of biographies, Doug Brode is releasing Shelli: R-Evolution in mid-June, so I’ll definitely be reading that. (I haven’t read any SF this year.) It’s third in a series following a human and synthetic detective team. I’ll also be reading more biography and history, though probably more oriented toward the Revolutionary period. Part of me wants to jump back into my formal Hail to the Chief trek, though, picking up with Garfield, but I haven’t read ANY of the niche topics I wanted to cover — like the role of Indians in the Civil War, that sort of thing. I also need to get to my copy of GIRLS by Freya India, finish my Birzer history of the Declaration of Independence, and check out End of the Road, which is very intriguing to me because my family is full of truckers.

Brace yourselves for Moviewatch….