May 2024 reads
I was formally diagnosed with ADHD last month. The diagnosis put a lot of things into perspective for me – I’m not just a lazy, unproductive human, a bad employee, and a flaky friend. My brain is a bit different, and task initiation, prioritization, and completion are inherent challenges.
I started on Vyvanse, the standard first-line treatment for this condition, in the middle of the month. I was curious to see how it impacted my reading. Vyvanse is a stimulant, but counterintuitively I found it slowed my reading down and gave me the permission to sit and just be in the world of the book for a little longer.
The crushing weight of my to-do list – that it was self-indulgent to read, that I should be doing something ‘more productive’ with my time – was quiet. I can’t remember ever really being able to sit with such focus, even when I was juggling grad school, a new full-time job, and writing my thesis.
Lots of thoughts coming up about my ADHD diagnosis, but those are for another post. Until then, here’s the May reads recap.
Reading around the world:
Big thanks to everyone who sent recommendations of books set outside of North America. I’m waiting on library holds for a bunch of them, but some came in this month.
Total 2024 count: I’m at 17 countries of my 20 countries goal. Here’s the recap:
New countries this month: Switzerland, the Congo (Victorian-era, during Belgian colonial rule), Antarctica
Repeats: India, Canada (Alberta oilsands), US, UK
Fictional: Prythia the faerieland where everyone is hot
Stroke of Insight – Jill Bolte Taylor
My mum had a stroke in early May (she’s recovering well), and I coped by trying to learn everything about how strokes work. Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist who suffered a massive stroke in her mid-forties. Over eight gruelling years of rehabilitation and brain-training, she recovered. Her first-person account – of the stroke itself, of the wild sense of present-moment-awareness she felt immediately after, of her recovery – is stunning. She writes about the topic with both the expertise of someone with a PhD in brain function and the compassion of a stroke-survivor who wants others to understand how best to support people post-stroke. A+ read for stroke survivors and their caregivers.
Recommended by Rosemary
Yellowface – R.F. Kuang
Kuang continues to be one of my favourite authors writing today, both for her incisive social commentary and her exquisite expertise with language. No one can craft a gut punch of a sentence like she can, and this contemporary satire might be one of the most uncomfortable books I’ve ever read. Kuang puts us in the shoes of June, a White author of limited success. When June’s acquaintance and fellow author Athena Lu dies and leaves an unpublished manuscript about Chinese labor corps during WWI, June decides to pass it off as her own. A trainwreck ensues in which Kuang makes us almost empathize with June’s plagiaristic position. An expose of publishing industry, the Twitterverse, and the role of race and racism in authorship. A thoughtful, unsettling book about the question of who gets to tell what stories.
Gifted to me by Milana <3 Recommended by just about everyone
Ducks – Kate Beaton
Picked this up for Canada Reads last year. A graphic novel by one of my favourite comic artists. Details the bleak two years Beaton spent working in the Alberta oilsands. Beaton is a Cape Breton native, but like so many from the east coast, she was lured west by the promise of well-paying jobs. As one of few women working a nearly all-male environment, Beaton experienced daily microaggressions and major sexual assaults like rape. Ducks takes a long, hard look at what happens when normally good people are transported far from family, placed in remote work camps, and tasked with dangerous, repetitive, mind-numbing work. Cynical, painfully real, and powerfully illustrated.
Banyan Moon – Thao Thai
From wartime Vietnam to the sweaty bayous of south Florida, Thai’s story follows three generations of Vietnamese women. In Minh, the family matriarch, readers watch a love story unfold against the backdrop of embattled south Vietnam. In Huong, the hard but fiercely loving mother, we see the struggle to belong as refugees in America and the way that hate swells in a marriage when feelings of inadequacy grow. And in Ann Tran, the contemporary narrator, we see a woman’s quest for self-identity when she has always defined herself by others. At times bitter, at times soft – a memorable family drama.
Recommended by Justine
The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle
This book – basically required reading in the wellness industry – is subtitled ‘a guide to spiritual enlightenment.’ Am I enlightened for having read it? Absolutely not. Did it make me put it down to pause and think multiple times while reading? For sure. As much as I, at times, resisted Tolle’s heavy-handed truisms – there is no such thing as time, the only thing we have is the now etc. – I found myself weaving concepts form this book into my yoga teaching. A thought-provoking read on our relationship to the present. Caveat – this book was published in 1997 and its dualistic representation of gender and gender norms was painfully out of touch.
Lent to me by Margareta
It’s Not You – Ramani Durvasula
A deep dive into the psychology of narcissism. The truth is many of us have narcissistic tendencies, but Durvasula, a clinical psychologist, defines what makes a narcissist and where such people derive their value from. By helping her patients understand the brains and value-centers of narcissists, Durvasula prepares them to set stronger boundaries and to develop realistic self-care strategies. A useful guidebook if you have a narcissist in your life.
Recommended by Emily
Everfair – Nisi Shawl
An ambitious, decades-sprawling alternative history set in the Belgian-occupied Congo of the mid-19th century. I’ve read Shawl’s Writing the Other handbook and listened to her co-host Brandon Sanderson’s Writing Excuse podcasts. I greatly respect her anti-colonial lens as applied to genre fiction. It was satisfying to finally read her work, and this massive novel does not disappoint. POV characters represent a variety of sexualities, races, and disabilities, and the narrative coheres into a tale of resistance against oppression. What if the anarchists and socialists from Europe, Congolese resistance fighters, and curious steampunk inventors allied against the Belgian create their own liberated state? Whose side would they fight on during WWII? A complex, compelling novel about how the empire fights back.
The Enigma of Room 622 – Joel Dicker
The wackiest murder mystery I’ve read this year. Joel Dicker inserts himself as a character in this novel, travelling to a fancy hotel to get over breakup blues. There, he discovers the cold case of a murder that occurred decades ago during a bank party at the hotel. Readers are treated to a layered narrative – we follow the staff of the bank as they jaunt around Europe pursuing dreams, falling in and out of love, and marrying the wrong people. Then, in present day, we follow Dicker and his vacation-friend as they attempt to solve the crime. Disguises, secret identities, and caricature-like depictions of evil and good abound in this complicated tale told across time.
Recommended by Becky
How to Solve Your Own Murder – Kristen Perrin
An inventive premise for the saturated cozy mystery market. At eighteen, a fortune teller told Frances Adams she would be murdered. Sixty years later, the fortune comes true. Frances’ great-niece Annie is charged with the task of solving the murder that her great-aunt failed to prevent. A great set up followed by an okay execution.
A Court of Wings and Ruin – Sarah J. Maas
The last book I will read in the ACOTAR series (I think). I like the fantastical world Maas has built, but I hated the one-dimensional, tokenistic attempt at bisexual representation that she tacked onto this book in Mor. The story was epic in scale, but the battles and political intrigue were strangely not the focus. Instead, we’re treated to more of the same interpersonal drama we got in books one and two. Rhys and Feyre have such ridiculously stellar sex that the scenes are in fact boring. The bad guys all get redemption arcs even though they have been serial abusers. And everyone tries to stoically sacrifice themselves for the people they love… again. Even the introduction of a handful of ridiculously hot characters (the rest of the fae court) can’t make me come back for more. It’s hard to keep all these smokin’ faerie babes straight in my lil’ neurodivergent brain, after all.
Midnight – Amy McCulloch
A thriller that spans rocky sea voyages, kayak-assassination attempts, and Antarctic ice shelves. Olivia, a burnt-out, highly anxious actuary, and her art dealer boyfriend are running a high-stakes art auction on a cruise ship to Antarctica. Things go awry quickly, and Olivia fights for her life while trying to determine who would want her and her boyfriend dead. She’s a bit of limp noodle of a protagonist, I’ll admit, and the culprit was pretty obvious, but the depictions of Antarctica and the novelty of the setting made this book an addictive page-turner.
Recommended by Elizabeth
A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD – Sari Solden and Michelle Frank
After my diagnosis, I put about 10 ADHD books on hold and was sad this was the first one that came in. From the title alone, I knew I was in for a deeply gendered read. Indeed, the back of the book proclaims, ‘Live boldly as a women with ADHD!’ The authors dig into why some women resist their diagnosis – how shame and the expectation of fulfilling ‘womanly’ or ‘wifely’ duties makes coming to terms with a diagnosis more challenging.
I thought this book was written in the late 80s or early 90s. I was shocked to see it was published in 2019. Gender is a spectrum and some of the assumptions made by this book were too simple for folks navigating identity, neurodivergence, and belonging. That said, I’m a millennial with a supportive family and peer network who have normalized talking about neurodivergence and reject gender structures. I recognize this is a privilege.
This was a self-help book, more full of affirmations that ‘your differences are beautiful’ than of clinical insights or psychosocial strategies for ADHD management. Wouldn’t recommend.
The Perfumist of Paris – Alka Joshi
This third book of the Jaipur Trilogy follows Radha, a mother and apprentice perfumer kickstarting her career in Paris in 1974. A warm hug of a novel that tackles familial responsibility, the struggle between motherhood and career, and cost of societal expectations. Brings the storylines from the previous books to an elegant conclusion – I highly recommend this trilogy for anyone who likes historical fiction.
