Books Read: May 2015

The beginning of a new month brings with it the opportunity to look back at the month gone bye and to give one last glance at what I most recently read. The below listed books are what I read during the month of May, I have reviewed nothing.

1. Scale-Bright, by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
2. Signal to Noise, by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
3. All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
4. Heritage of Cyador, by L. E. Modesitt, Jr
5. Wastelands 2, by John Joseph Adams (editor)
6. The Rebirths of Tao, by Wesley Chu
7. The Grace of Kings, by Ken Liu
8. Foreign Affairs, by Alison Lurie (unfinished)
9. The Dark Between the Stars, by Kevin J. Anderson (unfinished)
10. Early Warning, by Jane Smiley
11. Ring of Fire, by Eric Flint

Best Book of the Month: Can we have another novel from Sylvia Moreno-Garcia soon, please?  Her debut, Signal to Noise was simply excellent and it's on my slowly building  Hugo longlist right now. 

Disappointment of the Month: After all the praise of Sriduangkaew's prose, and specifically of Scale-Bright, I was surprised that with each page, I more and more did not want to read the book. Happily, it was short. I'm not sure why I bounced off of Scale-Bright, but it fell very much into the category of "I'm glad you liked it, but it's not for me", which is where I also put Sofia Samatar's A Strange in Olondria.  I do still have Sriduangkaew's The Archer Who Shot Down Suns on my Nook, but I'm not inspired to push it up my reading queue anytime soon.

Discovery of the Month: Signal to Noise. Go check it out.

Worth Noting: Modesitt's Recluce novels are still solid reads, even after all of these years. I maintain that one should not read more than a couple of the books in short order because the writing and narrative style is so similar that some of the joy of reading can leak away, but if you space them out a touch - this is good, solid fantasy. Modesitt slowly fills in some of the gaps in the chronology of his long running series (Heritage of Cyador is volume 18). I've rather enjoyed Lerial's story and I feel there is enough room for one more book told from his perspective, though I don't know if that is Modesitt's plan or not. There are still a handful of stories / points in the timeline I would love to see him touch upon. 

Gender Breakdown: My library requests hit very weirdly and all at once where I expected some of them to be spaced out a bit better. This messed up my attempt at gender balancing the month.  Like April, there were two books I did not finish, though I gave solid effort to each. May marks the first month this year I did not read more books written by women than those written by men. Only four out of the eleven were female authored.  This brings me to 32 out of 55, which drops my percentage from 63.64% to 58.19% of my reading.  Still a good year, still holding firm with just a small slide.  I would say that I am still on track for hitting my goal of my first year where I've read more books written by women.


Previous Months:
January
February
March 
April