The Reading List: 10 Marvelous Books for May
Updated: Feb. 19, 2019
10 new releases worth adding to your reading list this month.
1. Teen Wolves
The Rising by Kelley Armstrong
A TV adaptation of Armstrong’s werewolf series, Bitten, is currently in production. While you’re waiting, check out the latest instalment of her Vancouver-set follow-up series, about a group of shifters running from government goons who want to use them as test subjects.
2. All That Jazz (and Baz)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Baz Luhrmann’s blindingly flashy Gatsby adaptation hits theatres this month. It’s got the bathtub gin, orgiastic revelry and fringy flapper gowns; what it seems to be missing is the novel’s achingly restrained, transcendently tight prose.
3. The Golden Years
David Bowie Is edited by Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh
If you can’t make it to London for the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Bowie exhibit, this will satisfy your yen for all things Ziggy Stardust. The beautiful volume features photography by Herb Ritts and Helmut Lang, handwritten lyrics and set designs, and essays from Camille Paglia on gender and podcaster Mark Kermode on film.
4. Legend of the Fall
The Fall of Arthur by J.R.R. Tolkien
This never-before-published poem from the Lord of the Rings visionary depicts the later years of King Arthur’s reign in alliterative verse. An epic form for an epic subject.
5. Best Dieting Tool
Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss
This intensely researched, intensely readable new book about the ubiquity of processed junk food is as hard to put down as that bag of salt and vinegar chips.
6. Rich Girl
The Astor Orphan by Alexandra Aldrich
Aldrich is a direct descendant of fur magnate John Jacob Astor, best known as the richest man to die on the Titanic. In this, her debut memoir, she chronicles her family history, going back to the obscene wealth of the Gilded Age and moving forward through her childhood, spent in the servants’ quarters of the family’s New York estate with her grandmother (a modern-day Miss Havisham).
7. Raising the Bar
Drinking With Men by Rosie Schaap
The perfect dive is an elusive unicorn. In her new book, the New York Times‘ booze columnist recounts a trip around the world in search of the quintessential local.
8. Texas Forever
The Son by Philipp Meyer
In the taxonomy of Texas mythology, there’s The Searchers, Giant, Friday Night Lights and, now, The Son, a sprawling door stopper that covers one Texan family over a 100-year span. Come for the Comanche raids, stay for the oil booms and cattle barons.
9. Writing 101
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
Malcolm’s new collection of essays on artists, Forty-One False Starts, is delightfully lightweight. For something a little grittier, this 1990 book-about writer Joe McGinniss and the friendship he forms with his subject, accused murderer Jeffrey MacDonald-is as much a treatise on journalistic ethics as it is a true crime caper.
10. The Next Hunger Games
Divergent by Veronica Roth
Katniss is old news. The new paradigm of kickass teenhood-and soon to be movie heroine-is Tris Prior, the heroine of this apocalyptic sci-fi soap, in which humanity is organized into five tribes, each defined by a human virtue.
