The month of May 2020 has entered my personal history of being the one with the most books ever read within a month in my entire life! And you know what made it possible? The entire COVID-19 crisis situation! So as dramatic, tragic & sad these events are, I’m still trying to see the positive in these circumstances & to appreciate the one of a kind moments we got to experience in our lives 🙂

Throughout the beginning of the lockdown, I felt a bit frozen in time, putting off doing things, saying to myself that “I’ll still have time for this & that later!” It’s only when the French government announced that from the 11th of May on, we will be allowed to leave our homes for more than 1h, more than 1km away from our home address & more than once a day that I realised, that I might not have as much precious time for reading available after that date. That was exactly the moment when I turned on my reading turbo & squeezed in about 2 books into each week of the month.

My 2 main takeaways of this month were:

• That it’s worth giving book club picks a chance, even if it’s not something I would’ve normally gone for myself because that’s exactly one of the reasons why I’m a part of them!
• That I needed to make some serious changes about my behaviour with my phone in order to read more efficiently & I by chance came across a book that helped me do that. It’s the highest rated one this month & it will probably make it onto the list of my top books of 2020.

For the books that I got through in May 2020:

• Female authors were in the lead, with 6/8 books;

• All the 8 books that I read were in English (2/8 were translated into English);

• I finally managed to make it a non-fiction focused month with 5/8 books;

• I managed to break down the mainly American author trend a bit, with just 3/8 American authors this month.

Here the list of all the books read in the order of the ratings that I have given them, from the best to the worst (the complete reviews are linked within the titles of the books):

• 5/5 ★
  “How To Break Up With Your Phone” – Catherine Price⁣

• 4/5 ★
  “Unorthodox” – Deborah Feldman⁣
  “After the End” – Claire Mackintosh⁣

• 3/5 ★
  “The Hidden Life of Trees” – Peter Wohlleben⁣
  “Normal People” – Sally Rooney⁣
  “Educated” – Tara Westover⁣
  “Invisible Cities” – Italo Calvino⁣

• 1/5 ★
  “Three Women” – Lisa Taddeo ⁣