It’s the first Thursday of the month. Time to report!
What’s the best book you read in May 2023 and why did you love it?
It doesn’t have to be a newly published book, or even SFF, or even fiction. We just want to share some great reading material.
Feel free to post a full review of the book here, or a link to the review on your blog, or just write a few sentences about why you thought it was awesome.
And don’t forget that we always have plenty more reading recommendations on our Fanlit Faves page and our 5-Star SFF page.
One commenter with a U.S. mailing address will choose one of these prizes:
- a FanLit T-shirt (we have sizes M, L, XL)
- a book from our stacks.
- a $5 Amazon gift card (this is the only option for non-USA addresses).
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Best novel in May: The Book that wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence
Best Collection: The Essential Peter S. Beagle Vol I and II
Best non-fiction: The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green
The Book That Wouldn’t Burn was quite good. Love that library. Reread Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Really great. Also liked Project Hail Mary much more than I had been led to believe I would. Easily as enjoyable as The Martian.
The first two books I read in May also seemed like the best ones, looking back: Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, a “last woman on earth” novel about a widow who finds herself in an invisibly walled off but huge enclave in the Austrian Alps while all life outside the wall has been snuffed out; and a non-genre runner-up, Jessica Au’s Cold Enough For Snow, a moody novella about an adult woman and her mother visiting Japan. There were some other genre novels that were “okay” but had minor issues despite being enjoyable: The Basilisk Throne (Greg Keyes), Emperor of Ruin (Django Wexler), and The Scourge Between Stars (Ness Brown). And some others that I enjoyed less but will not detail here in a “best books” post.
The Wall sounds very interesting. I love books and movies with the “last person/people on Earth” plot.
Best two of May were “Upstairs in the White House” by J West – he was Chief Usher at the White House, working with Eleanor Roosevelt through Pat Nixon and it was so interesting – who knew such a job existed; and L M Montgomery’s “The Blue Castle” – knowing Montgomery as the author of “Anne of Green Gable,” this was not at all what I expected, but a great story about the awakening of 28-year old Valancy.
I enjoyed the five books of Anthony Horowitz’s “Power Of Five” series. Like most or all of Horowitz’s books, it was quite fun and exciting, although I found the final victory of (spoiler alert!) good over evil a bit abrupt and not adequately explained or developed.
Only read 5 in may but managed to finally finish 2 series. Three of my reads were NetGalley advance reads from Orbit: Alexander Darwin’s THE COMBAR CODES, RJ Barker’s GODS OF THE WYRDWOOD, and another series closer, Anthony Ryan’s THE TRAITOR.
The other series closer was Django Wexler’s EMPEROR OF RUIN. But my book of the month was far and away the middle book in Anthoby Ryan’s Covenant of Steel series, THE MARTYR, which earned a nice 9/10 rating (it was a grear reading month, the lowest rated was 8/10!). Somehow Ryan combined exciting action scenes and character development with the best prose I’ve seen from him yet . Really knocked it out of the park, even more than the series conclusion I read next.
Witch King! Although I really wanted more information/story from between the two timelines.
That was my view as well, as you’ll see in my soon-to-post review
In the first part of the graphic novel series “Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Promise”, we see that after the cliffhanger where Zuko interrogated his father about his mother Ursa’s whereabouts at the end of the final episode of the show, Ozai annoyingly refused to be helpful, which is a bit of a letdown but the plot veers into completely different territory. During a celebration of the end of the war, Zuko makes his friend Aang promise to kill him if he ever turns into a tyrant like his predecessors, which given the title of the trilogy is bound to become a point of contention.
I’ve been reading The Everything Learning Russian book to help with my novel set in Russia. The structure of the book is very useful and introduces you to concepts within the language and facts about traveling in Russia as well.
Scott Turow’s second book, “The Burden of Proof”, is a semi-sequel to “Presumed Innocent”. The psychological darkness of the situations and characters in Turow’s work can make it hard to read at times despite its quality. Still, you have to keep on to see what twists will be revealed about the seemingly innocent and wholesome.
Have not read Turow’s fiction but his book One-L, describing the entry level law school experience and featuring the prifessor who inspured Kingsfield in the novel, movie, and tv show The Paper Chase is a great read!
The book that wouldn’t burn by Mark Lawrence and a reread of the murderbot diaries.
Michael Voss,if you live in the USA, you win a Fan Lit T-shirt (please specify 1st and 2nd preferred sizes) OR a book of your choice from our stacks, OR a $5 Amazon gift card. If your address is outside of the USA, you will get a $5 Amazon gift card.
Please contact me (Marion) with your choice and a US address. Happy reading!