April Book Report and a Look to May

April was a weird month of reading! Up until the Readathon last weekend, my reading was really slow. It felt like I was right on the edge of a major reading slump, which would be a bummer because I have so many great books to read. I started a lot of books that I never got around to finishing, even though for the most part they were really good.

All that said, I still finished nine books last month, which is nothing to look sideways at. Here’s the list:

1. The Song Poet by Kao Kalia Yang (memoir)
2. Bachelor Nation by Amy Kaufman (nonfiction)
3. Circe by Madeline Miller (fiction)
4. Stuck in the Middle With You by Jennifer Finney Boylan (memoir)
5. Love and Death in the Sunshine State by Cutter Wood (true crime)
6. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (true crime)
7. The Merry Spinster by Mallory Ortberg (short stories)
8. Odd Girl Out by Laura James (memoir)
9. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (memoir, audiobook)

There were a lot of strong picks this month. Madeline Miller’s new book, Circe, was my only fiction book, but it was truly remarkable. I loved revisiting Greek myths, which I was obsessed with as a teenager, from a new angle and with a distinctly feminist lens.

On the nonfiction side, The Song Poet, Stuck in the Middle With You, and Odd Girl Out were all amazing memoirs from people in lives I’ll never get to experience — Hmong refugees, a transgender mother, and a woman with autism. I highly recommend all of them. Oh! And Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime, was also great — I almost forgot that one because I listened to it on audio book and somehow that makes it different in my head.

And finally, I can’t say enough good things about I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, an account of a journalist’s quest to identify the Golden State Killer, a serial rapist and murder who terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s a detailed, empathetic, remarkable work of true crime reporting that I won’t soon forget. Highly recommended.

A Look to May

I feel like one of my priorities for May needs to be reading a bunch of the nonfiction I started in April and never actually finished:

• The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson — True crime about the theft of hundreds of rare bird skins.
• The Extra Woman by Joanna Scutts — A look at the rise of self-help books in the 1930s, and the life of Marjorie Hillis, the first guru for single ladies.
• Beneath a Ruthless Sun by Gilbert King — Historical true crime about a racist sheriff, a crusading journalist, and a mentally disabled black kid accused of rape.
• The Girl Who Smiled Beads by by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil — A memoir by refugees from Rwanda who came to the United States as teenagers.
• The Recovering by Leslie Jamison — A recovery memoir that also interrogates the entire recovery system.

Usually I’m not that terrible at getting through books, but I just could not concentrate on much until the Readathon. Fingers crossed those good vibes continue!