How was your week? What are you reading?
Some of the best reading weeks happen when life forces you to sit still and last week delivered exactly that. Between the last few days of vacation in St. Maarten, flights home, a road trip on the weekend to North Carolina for my youngest son’s graduation, and a flight on Sunday to Chicago, I logged serious reading hours.
What I Read
I continued with the fantasy with Brigands & Breadknives (Legends & Lattes #2), Travis Baldree and The Astral Library, Kate Quinn. I enjoyed the World building of both those books so much! They both really came alive in the audiobook versions and I’m glad I experienced them that way.
Brigands & Breadknives is actually the 3rd book in the Legends & Lattes series (there’s a prequel as well) but in my opinion, you can jump in here. You don’t have to read the other 2, but I do recommend them. This story follows Fern, who has weathered the stillness and storms of a bookseller’s life for decades, but now, she is just craving something different – and boy does she ever find it – as one night, after drinking her sorrows away, she falls asleep in a wagon, and wakes far from home in the company of a legendary warrior and an imprisoned chaos-goblin with a fondness for silverware.
Cue the action, near death experiences and strong friendships forged along their journey. I loved Brigands & Breadknives and rated it 5 stars.
The Astral Library is for book lovers! Imagine if you could escape into a book World?! Which book would you choose? Alix stumbles through a hidden door in the high-vaulted reading room at the Boston Public Library, and meets the Librarian: the ageless, acerbic guardian of a hidden library where the desperate and the lost escape to new lives … inside their favorite books.
This book was rife with adventures that Alix got up to in different books and it was enjoyable to feel her delight as she visited different book Worlds. I didn’t love the ending, and I felt the author could have done more with the story. Some reviewers didn’t like that it was pretty “preachy” about some of the topical issues of today (there was a lot), but I didn’t mind and thought it was well incorporated into the story – for the most part. I’ve seen Stephen King also do this too with some of his more recent books.
It wasn’t all fantasy last week though. I read a debut novel, Plum, Andy Anderegg. It follows “J” as she grows from kid to teen in a house ruled by her abusive, alcoholic dad and complicit mother.
The author takes us through what feels like every day and it is so real. So vivid! Not just the trauma, but the scars / the effects they leave, as they are being left. We follow “J” from her childhood through adulthood. She is not OK. No one in this book is OK. So it was hard to read at times.
Currently Reading
The 2026 Locus Awards are at the end of this month (May 30, 2026), so I’m reading some of the novellas nominated for an award. I’ve just started Automatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz.
While San Francisco rebuilds from the chaos of war, a group of food service bots in an abandoned ghost kitchen take over their own delivery app account. They rebrand as a neighborhood lunch spot and start producing some of the tastiest hand-pulled noodles in the city. But there’s just one problem. Someone – or something – is review bombing the restaurant’s feedback page with fake “bad service” reports. Can the bots find the culprit before their ratings plummet and destroy everything they created?
Reading Recommendations for May
⮕
⮕
⮕
⮕
⮕
⮕
Bookish Events in May
⮕
⮕
Reading Life
⮕
⮕
⮕
—- That’s it from me. Cheers to the week ahead!
