Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics and from different genres. Here are the books I read in May 2023. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy.

Caste: The Origins of our Discontent (2020) by Isabel Wilkerson is the latest work by a writer who takes stories we thought we knew and pushes us to look at them through a different lens. Author of the landmark The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson’s earlier book reminded us that the exodus of blacks from the American South deserved to be seen as part of refugee stories of displaced and marginalized people stretching back over thousands of years. Instead of focusing on the misunderstood and often misused word racism, she writes in Caste of our unwillingness to see that the hierarchy built only on skin color — the “infrastructure of our divisions” which has been in place since our founding as a nation — is just another manifestation of caste, as seen in India and Nazi Germany. Wilkerson writes persuasively, clearly, and honestly about the American failure of character. In this important and timely book, Wilkerson notes that “caste makes distinctions where God has made none.”

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Never Say Whatever: How Small Decisions Make a Big Difference (2023) by Dr. Richard A. Moran reveals how the W-word is a career — and life — killer. We have a chance to make a big impact in both, but to do so we have to make the numerous daily decisions that everyone faces. The choices we make, even the small ones, help us pivot toward the life and career we want. But that becomes much harder if we tend to rely on “whatever” as a substitute for decision-making. It is a word that “can be a whole sentence, an attitude, an ‘OK,’ or nothing at all.” It can also be habit forming, with disastrous long-term consequences. I’ve known Rich and his wife Carol for more than a decade, and I was pleased and honored when Rich agreed to share insights he’s uncovered with readers of More to Come in my most recent author interview.

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The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World (2021) by Patrik Svensson is one man’s attempt to get to the bottom of what scientists and philosophers have for centuries dubbed as “the eel question.” Very little is actually known about the European or American eel, except that they are somehow mysteriously spawned in the Sargasso Sea. The first glimpse we get of them is as tiny willow leaf-shaped larvae only a few centimeters in length floating along in the great ocean current until some peel off to live in North America and others head to the Mediterranean, the coastal waters of Northern Europe, or Scandinavia. We still don’t understand what drives them, after living for decades in freshwater, to swim great distances back to the ocean at the end of their lives. Even in an age of great scientific discovery they remain a mystery. Which makes them utterly fascinating and a great subject for a writer who wants to explore what it means to live in a world full of questions we can’t always answer.

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Maigret and the Lazy Burglar (1961) by Georges Simenon begins on a cold night in Paris when detective chief inspector Jules Maigret receives a telephone call from inspector Fumel telling him about the discovery of a body. There is something oddly off, which leads Fumel to break the new rules of French law enforcement and call his old colleague before notifying the prosecutor. As it happens, the body is that of Honoré Cuendot, an old burglar acquaintance of Maigret’s, who only breaks into homes that are occupied. The story includes a woman and her son-in-law who were lovers, just as her husband and their daughter-in-law were lovers (this is France); a mother who doesn’t seem too concerned to be left without any visible means of support when her son is found dead; and a bar/brothel owner — the “lovely Rosalie” — who has an “obscenely picturesque way of expressing herself.” The Times of London has called Simenon’s books “gem-hard soul-probes,” and this certainly fits the bill.

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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018 with a 2020 afterword) by John Carreyrou is the story of the building of the myth and the ultimate disgrace of Elizabeth Holmes. The Theranos founder dropped out of Stanford while still in her teens to focus full-time on the health tech startup which claimed to have invented technology that could accurately test for a range of conditions using just a few drops of blood. Theranos raised $945 million from a well-known list of investors and was valued at $9 billion at its peak. Yet her story began to unravel after Carreyrou’s 2015 Wall Street Journal investigation reported that the company had only performed roughly a dozen of the hundreds of tests it offered using its proprietary technology, with questionable accuracy. Carreyrou takes the reader through this sordid story of how the thirst for money, fame, and control — “Apple envy,” he names it, in honor of Holmes’s pursuit to become the next Steve Jobs — wrecked lives, endangered patients, led to a man’s suicide, and wasted almost a billion dollars of investment.

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What’s on the nightstand for June (subject to the last minutes changes at the whims of the reader):

• A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan

• Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity by Leah Myers

• The Fourth Man by K.O. Dahl

• The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson

• The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings by Amy-Jill Levine

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

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NOTE: Click to see the books I read in April of 2023 and to see the books I read in 2022. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

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The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

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Image of library from Pixabay.