Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics from different genres. Here are the books I read in May 2024. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on MORE TO COME. Enjoy.

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Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection (2024) by Charles Duhigg is the best-selling author’s most recent deep dive into ways we can navigate the basics of life. Similar to his exploration of habits, Duhigg blends timely research and top-level storytelling chops to help us understand how to connect with others. Whenever we speak, Duhigg asserts, we’re actually participating in one of three conversations: practical, emotional, and social. In this insightful and very practical book, Duhigg makes the case that we have to understand what kind of conversation we’re having before we can connect.

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Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos (2024) by Leah Rampy comes from an “intersection of spirituality, ecology and story.” In helping us understand why our souls ache for a deeper connection with the earth, Rampy invites us to think, contemplate, live, and act differently. She travels to edges—where sea, land, and sky meet—because these thin places are sacred. There “the division between heaven and earth, past and present, living and dead can blur, and a sense of oneness permeates time and place.” These liminal places are where we can choose our stories for the future, stories that will last long beyond our lifetimes. In this latest edition of my author interviews on MORE TO COME, Leah answers my questions about her work.

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The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers (2024) by Samuel Burr is a delightful tale of a group of extraordinary minds gathered together by Miss Pippa Allsbrook: polymath, a professional enthusiast of crossword puzzles, creator of The Sunday Times puzzles using the pseudonym Squire to conceal her gender, and—most importantly—Chief Cruciverbalist, Founder and President of The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers. She is one of thirteen members of the Fellowship who live together in her historic family estate in the English countryside. In this uplifting debut novel, the cast of characters moves through the many puzzles put before them, ultimately addressing the puzzle each of us faces to belong, to find our own missing pieces, to discover who we really are. 

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My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future (2024) by Alice Randall is memoir, history lesson, and manifesto by the first Black woman to cowrite a number one country hit. Like the author, this is a story that upsets the stereotypes about Country Music. Randall’s life goal is to make certain that everyone recognizes and remembers the First Family of Black Country Music: “DeFord Bailey, the father; Lil Hardin, the mother; Ray Charles, their genius child; Charley Pride, DeFord’s side child; and Herb Jeffries, Lil’s stepson.” This engaging and enriching book—along with a companion album featuring young Black female artists playing the Alice Randall songbook—is an important step along that path.

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No Man is an Island (1955) by Thomas Merton reflects on the vital nature of community and the commandment to love our neighbor. In a series of sixteen essays with titles such as “Love Can Be Kept Only by Being Given Away,” “Sentences on Hope,” “Mercy,” and “The Inward Solitude,” the twentieth century American monastic and writer looks at the life of the spirit and makes the case that “by integrating us in the real order established by God,” this life puts us “in the fullest possible contact with reality—not as we imagine it, but as it really is.”

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

• Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey by Robert “Mack” McCormick and John Troutman
• The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture by Michelangelo Sabatino
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg
• Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

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NOTE: Click to see the books I read in April of 2024 and to see the books I read in 2023. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

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Photo by Syd Wachs on Unsplash