Books Read: May–June 2025

Here’s everything everything I read in May and June of 2025. It’s not much: I blame my heavy workload along with the fact that my ancient Kindle died somewhere in there—and the replacement I got happens not to have a backlight, which is annoying since I usually read the Kindle at night. Besides all that, I also spent a chunk of May quite ill from some medications I was on, and we were also busy with editing meetings on a book-length translation of our own (which we edited by committee, which can be great, but takes a lot of time). 

I returned to Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ series Saga, reading everything available up to the present—namely, Volumes 4–12. As more than one person advised me, these books are better when inhaled a bunch at a time, but really, it was an enjoyable read all the same. The adventures of this family and those around them are by turns funny, surprising, touching, and violent as hell, and there’s a fine cast of characters that keeps things rolling along. I especially like how so many of the minor characters and villains have just enough backstory that they become compelling characters in their own right, without the story being overburdened by those backstories.

I’ve read that Volume 12 marks the halfway point as far as Vaughan’s and Staples’ plan for the series, and yeah, it feels about like that. Of course, that means we’re years from a conclusion, but that’s okay, I can catch up on the series eventually, assuming it does run that long. I remember seeing the first few volumes in Singapore during a visit there (in perhaps 2013 or 2014?), and not having any inclination to read them, so I’m sure I’ll be fine waiting out the rest of the series… though I must admit I’m curious to see where it goes next. 

Björn Kurtén’s Dance of the Tiger is a book that was given to me by Justin Howe. (Thanks, Justin!) It’s about Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals living on the edge of one anothers’ territories, and how they might have interacted. The stylization is fascinating: Kurtén’s Cro-Magnons are a lot more like us than you might expect, with a complex culture involving etiquette and tribal politics, and a whole knowledge economy. The Neanderthals, meanwhile, are even more different than you might expect: they’re fully developed, have a rather markedly different culture from the local Cro-Magnons, and have quite a bit of interaction with them. While the book is written so as to suggest a reason why Neanderthals died out while Homo sapiens didn’t, mainly it sets out to tell a rich story about interaction between different human lineages in a world absent of most of the technology we take for granted. I found the book downright fascinating.  

And… that’s it. I’m halfway through a few other books, including works by authors as diverse as Han Kang and Mark Rogers (yes, of Samurai Cat fame)—so I expect there’ll be a fair bit more to write about in July/August, especially since I have five weeks of work in there—but I guess we’ll see!