This is a little bit late — last week I was swamped with last minute projects and opportunities that I couldn’t pass up! I read a lot in May, and here are my favourites from the month….

Best Novel of the Month: Warlight

Disclaimer: I’m a huge Ondaatje fan. I went to the launch of this book, got it signed while barely containing my fangirl glee, and then immediately devoured the book. It has a lot of the hallmarks of a quintessential Ondaatje novel, but it took me a while to really see where we were going with the plot – In the immediate aftermath of WWII, two teenagers are left in the care of some odd characters while their parents go to Asia for work, which is quickly revealed to be a rouse. The payoff is worth the perseverance, the second half of the novel is brilliant.

Best Short Story Collection of the Month: That Time I Loved You

This is a collection of short stories set in a suburban Scarborough neighbourhood in the 1970s, after a trio of suicides take place. Each story shifts around to different characters, tells different perspectives, and reveals the complex inner lives of various neighbours. Reminds you that you really don’t know your friends and neighbours as well as you think you do. I always like when short story collections interlink like this, and I was completely sucked in from the very first page.

Best Nonfiction: The Beauty of Discomfort

What makes successful people so successful? They seek out the discomfort of a situation and learn to get comfortable with it. We all have different ways of dealing with challenges and discomfort in our lives, but the way we choose to handle those events help shape us. THis book is mainly about developing the mental tools to help increase our resiliency, but also is about happiness – happy people are those that are resilient when life throws curve balls, and they are able to not take things personally, and can to meet those challenges head on.  Some of the key takeaways for me were about how detrimental it is to internalize criticism (ever play out a negative scene in your head over and over? Yeah, that’s make you miserable and distracting you from moving forward), what to do instead, and how stretching outside of your comfort zone in the direction of your goals means you are making progress, not stagnanting. Because sometimes I need a reminder that not every waking moment of my life is supposed to be easy.

Currently Re-reading: The Summer Book

This is a deceptively simple book about a six year old girl and her grandmother spending summers alone in a cottage on an island. Tove Jansson (of Moomin creation fame) drew heavily on her own experiences, and at times I feel like she is keenly aware of having been both the little girl and the grandmother. This is the kind of book that hold up well to re-reading, and I’m glad I did- I originally ordered it (It was hard to find) as a birthday gift for a friend, then ended up reading it myself and couldn’t part with it. It’s a great vacation read, if you like your vacation reads to be murder-plot-twist-free.

The One I’m Recommending to Just About Everyone:

Rising Strong: How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead

Whoa, this book. You don’t need to be going through a major challenge in your life to learn an incredible amount about how we process our our failures.  It covers all the hard stuff of being human and what it means to really look at the how and why of our feelings when we stumble in life (in both big and small ways), and how taking a deep look at those moments helps us actually learn and grow so that we do better, rather than stuffing down feelings of guilt, shame or assigning blame elsewhere. It’s basically all about getting really honest with your feelings and your experiences, so that you can get back up from whatever setback and be a better person for it.  Basically if you are a human and you have feelings, read this book.

What are you reading this month? I just got a copy of The Alice Network (which came so highly recommended from the comments in a previous post), and it is already so good!