May 2024 Reading Roundup

It’s been a while since I did these monthly reading roundups, so I thought I’d restart the habit. Read on to see what I read last month, and let me know your best books of the month in the comments below.

The Future by Naomi Alderman

I started the month with this bold fictional imagining of possible futures amid escalating climate crises and Big Tech malfeasance. Despite starting on the day the world ended, it’s not a dystopia. Read my review of The Future.

Red Sky in Morning by Paul Lynch

Beautiful, beautiful writing. That’s the main impression that Paul Lynch’s debut novel made on me. I can see why he went on to win the Booker Prize four books later. Red Sky in Morning is a kind of historical thriller, an 1820s manhunt that starts in rural Ireland and ends on the other side of the Atlantic. But it’s probably the most poetic, literary thriller you’ll ever read.

912 Batu Road by Viji Krishnamoorthy

This is a paperback I picked up on my travels in Asia earlier this year, at a bookshop in Penang to be precise. It’s two stories in one: a modern-day tale of forbidden love across ethnic lines and a historical narrative about the Japanese invasion of Malaya in World War II. I enjoyed the historical part more than the modern strand, but overall it was a good read.

The Echoes by Evie Wyld

I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by British/Australian literary fiction writer Evie Wyld, and The Echoes was no exception. It’s another multi-stranded novel that spans different generations and in this case weaves back and forth between the Australian outback and a London flat inhabited by a ghost. There are multiple themes and traumatic memories echoing across time and space, and it all works brilliantly.

Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth by Kohei Saito

Hey, don’t we all want to slow down sometimes? Perhaps this is why this book applying an updated understanding of Marxism to the climate crisis became a surprise best-seller in Japan. I need a full review to do justice to all the ideas presented here, and I plan to write one soon. Perhaps that will help me to clarify what I really think about degrowth communism too. I do remember from this book, however, that Saito did a very good job of demolishing pretty much every other alternative out there along the way.

Over to You…

Have you read any of these? What were your favourite books of May 2024? What are you looking forward to reading in June? Let me know in the comments below. And check out what other book bloggers have been reading over at Feed Your Fiction Addiction.

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.