By all rights, I ought to be telling you about five books I’d finished in May. There is no excuse for why I haven’t finished The Book Thief, except that it takes place during World War II, we’ve reached 1943, and I’m afraid. It’s hard not to be worried when your book is narrated by Death. So, instead, I keep plodding along, a few pages at a time, and offer you my reviews for the books I *have* finished.

Before I talk about my May reads, I realized there was one more book hiding in my shelves that I read earlier this year (late February? early March?) that was inadvertently omitted from last month’s summary:

Swim to Me, by Betsy Carter

From the jacket: “Welcome to Weeki Wachee Springs, located in sunny Florida. The fabled Springs has been attracting tourists since 1947, but business is drying up…. It’s a fresh start for Delores Walker when she steps off the bus in Tampa to become a mermaid. The family arguments, the father who walked out, and the dingy apartment are a thousand miles behind her in the Bronx. And with her arrival at Weeki Wachee, luck seems to be changing for everyone. Soon, Delores and the rest of the mermaids are getting more attention than they ever imagined.”

My take: This was an interesting story of four people trying to find their place in the world. Delores and her family travel to Florida when she was a little girl and she had one of those idyllic family vacations that stand out in vivid photographic contrast to the reality faced in everyday life. Shortly thereafter, her family falls apart and she spends the next five years trying to figure out how to recapture the wonder of that weekend at the theme park. While most people might leave it at wondering, Delores determines that she will only be happy if she is able to return to Florida and she sets about becoming an expert swimmer in order to become a Weeki Wachi mermaid. This decision will ultimately affect everyone she comes into contact with — but particularly her family and the woman who runs the theme park.

The novel raises questions — Is there such a thing as a perfect moment? Can you go home again? What does it mean to be family? How do you pursue your dreams without sacrificing others’? How do you learn to become yourself and be comfortable in your own skin? — and generally is successful at answering them, at least for Delores and the prominent secondary characters in the novel.

Oh, and as an interesting side note Weeki Wachi and its mermaid performers really exist. I thought it was fictional, but it is, in fact, a real place.

Pages: 304

Now on to the May reads:

The 20-Minute Vegetable Gardener: Gourmet Gardening for the Rest of Us, by Tom Christopher and Marty Asher

From the jacket: “Everyone loves garden-fresh vegetables but who has the time or energy to grow their own? You do — if you adopt Tom and Marty’s tried-and-true schemes and tricks for twenty-minute vegetable gardening.”

My take: I am a lazy gardener. I love having a garden. I love eating garden-fresh produce. I just dislike things like watering and weeding and planting. Okay, that’s not true. I just dislike spending as much time on them as seems necessary to produce a thriving vegetable garden. So when I saw this title at the library, I knew it had to come home with me to share its secrets.

Its hints came a bit late for this year’s garden. I already had plants in the ground when I started to read, so the suggestions for how to create the ideal soil were out. But its suggestions for high-impact crops and tasty varietals of tomatoes were interesting and worth seeking out for future years. I learned that my favorite style of watering — just a light watering, so as not to waste water — is actually worse for my plants than none at all, as it doesn’t get the water deep enough to nurture the roots, but instead just weakens the plants and encourages all sorts of garden nasties to come and attack. I found out that I could grow peanuts. (Yes, they’re already on next year’s list of potential plants.)

What really sets this book apart, though, is the tone. The co-authors have very different approaches to life and you can see how combined creative projects might drive each of them mad. On the other hand, though, two distinctly different styles often create a stronger outcome than either one alone would have. Tom is a little too by-the-book and Marty is way too laid back for either to have succeeded as they did without the other’s influence. Each chapter includes a mini essay by each co-author — sometimes sharing a recipe, sometimes a spectacular success or failure — that I think are the highlights of the book. Tom and Marty intersperse their factual information and tips with teasing jibes at one another, leaving the reader grinning a little too much for a work of non-fiction.

This is one of those rare instances where I will be buying a copy of a library-borrowed book. I totally recommend it to every aspiring vegetable gardener, lazy or not. A great start to my Non-Fiction Five Challenge.

Pages: 284

Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen

From the jacket: “Northanger Abbey, generally agreed to be Jane Austen’s earliest major work, grew out of her distaste for the absurdities of the novels of her time and, in particular, for the conventions of the ‘Gothic novels’ with their impossibly perfect heroines and unnatural events. At Northanger Abbey Jane Austen’s charmingly imperfect heroine, Catherine Morland, meets all the trappings of Gothic horror and imagines the worst. Fortunately she has at hand her own fundamental good sense and the irresistible but unsentimental hero, Henry Tilney. Disaster does eventually strike, in the real world as distinct from the romantic one of her imagination, but without spoiling for too long the gay, good-humoured atmosphere of this most delightful of books.”

My take: I re-read this for a read-along on Ravelry that I was moderating. We parsed it out over six weeks, reading five chapters at a time.

At the start of the read-along, my copy was on loan to a friend, so I downloaded the Librivox audio version of the book and listened along. I’m glad I did. I’m one of those people who doesn’t consider audio books to be reading, but only on a personal level. I’m fine with anyone else considering it reading, but I process the two experiences in totally different ways, so they can’t be substituted one for the other for me. As such, I picked up on different things when listening to the book than I did when reading it. The dry humor of the author, who narrates the book, is much more evident when hearing it — almost akin to listening to Shakespeare — and resulted in several public laugh-aloud moments.

Catherine is a teenager who gets the opportunity to travel with wealthy family friends to Bath. She overindulges herself in Gothic fiction, makes friends with the younger sister of a friend of her brother’s, and engages in banter and dance with a young man, Mr Tilney, but, by and large, lacks the experience with the wider world to get herself into too much trouble. She is a little old-fashioned and naive with her opinions and expectations, but that comes to endear her even more to Mr Tilney and his sister, Eleanor, whose father invites her to visit their estate, Northanger Abbey. She is silly enough to get herself worked up with imagined scenarios when left to her own devices, but sufficiently sensible to recognize the folly of having done so when reality kicks in, which just makes readers love her that much more for recognizing similar behavior in our modern-day selves.

This work was the first Austen ever completed, and it shows. It is less subtle than some of her later works and, because it was only published after her death, it is unclear what other changes Austen might have made to the text if she’d lived long enough to complete another draft. The fifth chapter, for instance, is a whole diatribe from the narrating author about the (male) public’s disdain for novels, which feels out of place and jarring.

Nonetheless, Austen has survived 200+ years for a reason. Her characters feel like real people — both the intelligent and the foolish — and she treats the silly, but well-intentioned, with kindness and sympathy. Her grasp of dialogue is spot on and could just as easily have been penned last week for how modern it feels. And her pacing is unparalleled — she fits so much into such a small amount of space and then wraps it up tidily (if hurriedly) at the end with a bow.

Pages: 252

The Titan’s Curse, by Rick Riordan

From the jacket: “When Percy Jackson receives an urgent distress call from his friend Grover, he immediately prepares for battle. He knows he’ll need his powerful demigod allies, Annabeth and Thalia, at his side; his trusty bronze sword, Riptide; and … a ride from his mom. The demigods race to the rescue, to find that Grover has made an important discovery: two new powerful half-bloods whose parentage is unknown. But that’s not all that awaits them. The Titan lord, Kronos, has set up his most devious trap yet, and the young heroes have just fallen prey.”

My take: Is it wrong to love a fourteen year old fictional boy? Because I do. If you have not read The Lightning Thief, stop right now and exchange cash for services at Powells or your local bookstore or put it on hold at the library. Seriously. Rick Riordan is clever in the same way Jasper Fforde and J.K. Rowling are clever. He’s taken a known entity — in this case Greek mythology — and combined it in a perfectly reasonable way with the modern real world.

This is the middle book of the series and holds up well to the first two. Percy is getting older, as are his best demi-goddess pals, and normal adolescent problems continue to plague him. His mom still has to drive him on his quests. And, speaking of his mom, there seems to be a new man in her life. Plus there are the other irritations — like certain Olympian gods and all the Titan ones wanting him dead — to keep him distracted from important questions like what was up with that girl at the Hoover Dam who could see the invisible bad guys?

This was an action-packed book that just demanded to be read straight through. I can’t recommend the entire series enough… Honestly, what are you waiting for?

Pages: 312

The Man with Two Left Feet and Other Stories, by P.G. Wodehouse

From the jacket Wikipedia: “…First published in the United Kingdom on March 8, 1917 … most of the stories had previously appeared in periodicals…. It is a fairly miscellaneous collection — most of the stories concern relationships, sports and household pets, and do not feature any of Wodehouse’s regular characters; one however, ‘Extricating Young Gussie,’ is remarkable as the first appearance of some of Wodehouse’s most well-known and beloved characters, Jeeves and his master Bertie Wooster … along with Bertie’s fearsome Aunt Agatha.”

My take: This was my DailyLit selection for the spring. It was significantly shorter than Barchester Towers and short stories instead of a novel. It was … okay. Wodehouse’s keen eye and trademark dry wit peek through, but these stories are obviously the attempts of a green writer, one who has not yet found his confident voice. I thought some of these stories, particularly the title piece, were a little reminiscent of O. Henry without the bittersweet endings that defined the American’s work. “Extricating Young Gussie” was the most enjoyable simply for its familiarity, and I believe that it was eventually mined for an episode of the Fry and Laurie BBC show.

A worthy introduction to Wodehouse’s work, particularly knowing that these were early writings. I’ve already picked up another of his books.

Pages: 224

Books read so far this year: 19
Pages read in May: 1,376