My Bookish Month of May 2021

Hi and welcome to another monthly overview!

Why oh why do these months keep going by so fast?! People would say that time speeds up as you grow older and I’d laugh at them, but bloody hell were they right or what! Aaaaanyway, I had a pretty good month, with less (work) stress than usual. The weather has been absolutely atrocious, more November than May, but these last couple of days have been glorious so things are looking up!

Overall I had a great bookish month. I worked on various challenges and although I felt a tad disappointed by one very hyped book, I also had quite a few cracking reads. Reading Don’t Turn Around and Eight Will Fall made me crave the world of The Host, a craving I decided to give into, so I read not one but two Spanish books in May. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read The Host, both in English and Spanish, it has very mixed reviews on Goodreads and it may not be perfect, but I love it to bits and it leaves me with a book hangover every time I read it.

These were my favourites:

In figures May looks like this:

May
Novels: 6562 pages across 18 novels
Audiobooks: 74 hours across 8 audiobooks

And here’s what I did in May, and some of what I’ll be posting in June:

What I read:

The Last House on Needless Street, Catriona Ward
The Castaways, Lucy Clarke
Girls Who Lie, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir
For the Wolf, Hannah Whitten
Sleepless, Louise Mumford
Tuya, Claudia Piñeiro
Rupture, Ragnar Jónasson
Don’t Turn Around, Jessica Barry
The Pact, Sharon Bolton (review to follow)
A Girl Made of Air, Nydia Hetherington
All the Murmuring Bones, A.G. Slatter
Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie
Eight Will Fall, Sarah Harian
The Kingdoms, Natasha Pulley (review to follow)
The Killing Kind, Jane Casey
Every Little Breath, Keri Beevis
La Huésped (The Host), Stephenie Meyer
The Skylight, Louise Candlish

What I listened to:

She Has a Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be, J.D. Barker
The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde, Eve Chase
The Arctic Fury, Greer Macallister
The Garden of Angels, David Hewson
Playing Dead, Matthew Costello & Neil Richards
Chosen, Kiersten White
Revelation, C.J. Sansom
Chocky, John Wyndham

What I read earlier but reviewed in May:

The Perfect Lie, Jo Spain
Such Pretty Things, Lisa Heathfield
The Therapist, Helen Flood
The Shadow of the Gods, John Gwynne
The Midnight Bargain, C.L. Polk

I also did a cover reveal and shared what I’ve learnt from reading fiction.

Let’s have a look at the books that landed on my lap in May:

Three proofs, courtesy of UCLan Publishing and Orenda Books:

A paperback I couldn’t resist (even though I already own the eBook) because I loved it so much and I love the cover, Elizabeth Macneal’s long-awaited second novel, and a FairyLoot hardback:

A NetGalley eARC, a short story collection by one of my favourite authors and a whole bunch of bargains:

Only the one audiobook as it was on sale and I remembered Nicki @ the Secret Library Book Blog recommending it ages ago so I decided to snap it up:

I hope you had a good month and that you are safe and well! Thanks for joining me today and happy reading xxx