The fact that I managed to read anything in May is clap-worthy. Not that clap. Regular clap. Keep it moving and behave yourself.

It’s been busy, is what I mean. So I, like anyone who read anything in May, deserve some sort of award. Not a major award. Just a tasteful certificate or a tasty pan pizza. Perhaps a small parade. Nothing extravagant, one small horse or large dog dragging me around town in a red wagon. Maybe we can be joined by a tuba player. Or maybe the dog can play the tuba while the horse drags me around. Look, I’ll sort out the logistics and report back.

And yet I ended up with a stack of books so good that I stopped treating reading like a little end-of-day reward and started ignoring actual responsibilities to read. Sorry to anyone who sent me an email, a text, a carrier pigeon, smoke signals, or did a cool semaphore flag routine in my backyard. I thought you were my parade and I was waiting for the tuba-playing dog.

These books were master classes on surviving broken systems. We’ve got intergalactic bureaucracy, Anglo-Saxon blood feuds, London publishing politics, and feminist rage. Basically, four very different ways of telling us that most systems are badly designed, the people running them are usually the least suited to the task, and women disproportionately suffer. Shocking.

This month’s reading was a refreshing reminder that humanity has, across centuries and galaxies, remained remarkably consistent and disappointing. Fertile ground for brilliant storytelling.

Which is all just to say, here are the books I finished this month:

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• Grendel’s Mother by Susan Signe Morrison
• Feminasty by Erin Gibson
• A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark

Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

This book is absolutely ridiculous. I am obsessed with it.

Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy explains the universe using a towel, a depressed robot, and several increasingly terrible planning committees. It’s a madcap extravaganza about space, improbability, bureaucracy, bad timing, excellent timing, strange people, and one bewildered Englishman.

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Grendel’s Mother by Susan Signe Morrison

You know the story. Big guy. Great hair probably. Sword. Mead hall full of dudes named something like Hrothgar son of Skullthumper, son of Other Skullthumper. Monster attacks. Hero flexes. History gets written by whichever man survives long enough to hire a bard. Classic.

But Susan Signe Morrison’s Grendel’s Mother walks straight into that testosterone-soaked corpse pile, picks up the narrative by its ankle, and drags it screaming into the deep water where it belongs.

This is, technically speaking, a retelling of Beowulf, which is itself a very old story about men hitting things with swords while suffering from what historians professionally refer to as “an absolutely catastrophic inability to process emotions.” Traditionally, the poem’s second monster, Grendel’s mother, is presented as a sort of swamp-adjacent horror woman lurking beneath a lake waiting to avenge her son, which everyone agrees is terribly unreasonable behavior, unlike, say, razing villages or hacking each other apart in ceremonial blood feuds.

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Feminasty: The Complicated Woman’s Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death by Erin Gibson

Erin Gibson’s Feminasty is a rage-song for the girls carrying keys between their knuckles.

It is sharp, furious, and profane. Thank God. Misogyny is not something women should have to discuss in a soft voice while reassuring everyone nearby that we’re still nice. Fortunately, Gibson has no interest in making patriarchy feel comfortable or palatable. There’s no “Now, to be fair…” or “Not all men” panic disclaimer tucked into the corners.

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A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark

Set in 1950s London, A Far Cry from Kensington follows Mrs. Hawkins, a wartime widow working in publishing amid cliques, office politics, anonymous letters, fraud, paranoia, terrible writers, love affairs, blackmail, and other sinister and morally ugly behaviors. It is all tea trays and landladies and little typed notes, but underneath the upholstery there are wolves gnawing bones.

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And there be the May reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! Read any good books lately?