May 2024 Reading List

I usually post about whatever I’m reading. This week’s adventure?

The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Leta McCollough Seletzky, published by Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, CA (2023).

1st Edition.

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Now, what is everyone else reading?

Goodreads suggests these books for AAPI heritage month:

116 Essential New Books to Read for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

Penguin Random House suggests these:

New Books To Read in May

Audible is listening to these…

Editors Select: May 2024

… and on the top of the list is Stephen King, You Like It Darker which appears to be 12 short stories, some of which are new, some classics.

BetterWorldBooks simply suggests you read a mystery.

The Library Journal has a list of books being published this month…

Prepub Alert: The Complete List | May 2024 Titles

My favorite blurb from the list so far…

Oates, Joyce Carol. Butcher.

Knopf. May 2024. 352p. ISBN 9780593537770. $30.

Based on historical documents, this story from best-selling Oates (48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister) portrays a 19th-century women’s hospital where Dr. Silas Weir practices and experiments on patients as he establishes himself as a pioneer of surgery.

… and another intriguing first printing…

Grinspan, Jon. Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War.

Bloomsbury. May 2024. 368p. ISBN 9781639730643. $32. HIST

Smithsonian historian Grinspan (The Age of Acrimony) shines attention on the 1860s anti-enslavement movement that played a key role in starting the U.S. Civil War, illuminating how that political campaign, which grew to include hundreds of thousands, pushed the nation from rhetoric to war. With a 60K-copy first printing.

The New York Times has published a list of 18 Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists for us to consider… fortunately not blocked by a paywall…

Pulitzer Prizes 2024: A Guide to the Winning Books and Finalists

As a non-fiction fan, I found this one intriguing –

No Right to an Honest Living, by Jacqueline Jones

Jones, a historian and a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, examines the hypocrisy of Boston before the Civil War. The city was known for its antislavery rhetoric and as the center of abolitionism, but Black residents endured “casual cruelty” in the work force and were condemned to lives of poverty without the chance for equal employment.