Hi friends, we’re now in June so it’s time for me to look back on the previous month! May felt like a really short month to me, which I think means there’s a lot to look back on.

What I Read in May

May was a comparatively slow reading month, since I only finished twelve books. Although I have to remind myself that twelve is actually a really good number and the most important thing is that I enjoyed the books! I’ll be speaking about Wyrd and Wonder soon but before that, some books I want to mention:

• Dress Code was a very interesting collection of essays on how fashion and culture interact. I did feel like something was lacking, but that was part of why it gave me so much food for thought.
• The Silence of the Bones is the second book by June Hur that I read and I enjoyed this very much! It’s a historical mystery set in Korea and I loved how grounded in history it was.

Wyrd & Wonder

To be very honest, I started Wyrd & Wonder very late, so I really took a very chill approach to it this year! Thankfully the event is as chill or intense as you want it. Essentially, I only managed to make five posts this year, four of which were reviews and one was a list of diverse fantasy novels.

Surprisingly, two of my posts did very well! From my stats, it looks like Google’s Discover boosted the 7 Fantasy Novels based on 7 Mythologies post and my review of Children of the Nameless! I actually managed to hit over 5000 visits in one day, which is very huge for me. Interestingly, there was a lot more discussion on the post on books based on mythologies than on my review of Children of the Nameless, even though Children of the Nameless got a lot more hits!

More importantly, Wyrd & Wonder gave me a great reason to read another Chrestomanci book (though I did not post it in time for the event), it got me to read Gwelf, a kickstarter book which I misplaced for two years and might have procrastinated on reading if I hadn’t had this event, and basically the five fantasy books I read this month were books which were on my TBR so that’s great!

Also, I’m just throwing this out as a suggestion, but I looked through my bookish lists posts and I realised I have 3 different fantasy lists, so I might compile that as a PDF – I probably should have thought of this earlier to put it as a Wyrd & Wonder thing, but now that I’ve thought about it, I kinda want to do it ASAP.

What I’m planning to read in June

I normally don’t talk about future reading plans because I don’t have any, but ever since I wrote The Case for Rereading Books, I’ve been wanting to dedicate some time to rereading. But I had a pretty big TBR stack so internally, I decided to spend May finishing more of my TBR so I could spend June rereading (especially since it’s in the middle of the year and a nice place for a pause to revisit already read books). Well… I’ve still got one new book that I want to read; a mystery that someone lent me and which I’d rather not hold on to for too long (in case I forget to read it entirely!) but other than that, this month is going to be dedicated to rereading books!

I still have some book reviews queued up, so you might see up to two posts a day – how exciting is that? I feel so productive just typing that sentence. Anyway, I’m currently rereading The Little Book of Ikigai by Ken Mogi because I feel like I need a bit of a pick-me-up. I’ll talk more about the book in the rereading update tomorrow!

May Teas

The biggest part about my May teas is that I finished all the Lupicia samples that I received! So the Lupicia Quick Tea reviews series will be on a break until I meet Eetel and get more teas from her.

For tea-related posts, I’m most proud of the Milk Tea & Colonialism in Asia post I did, which was me diving as deeply into the topic as possible. That was actually an offshoot of the afternoon tea history in Singapore research thing I was looking at for the past two months, which in turn ended up as a post/question: why isn’t there a clearer history of afternoon tea in Singapore?

Off the Blog

In May, Wakin Chau came back to Singapore for a concert!! He’s technically an artiste popular with my parents’ generation, but my dad pretty much raised my siblings and me on a diet of his songs so my whole family are fans of him. We had a really good time at his concert; he did a mix of old and new songs.

One of my friends from EDHEC was also in Singapore on a family trip, so we got to meet up and had some yummy vegetarian food together!

I’ve also been thinking about how I spend my post-work time. This is something that I saw on XHS; someone was chronicling how they spent their time after work every day. I did wonder if I fritter away my time, but I do think that between catching up on emails, writing blogposts, and reading, there’s not much time to fritter away! So for now, I’m content with my post-work routine.

I think that’s about it for my monthly wrap-up. It always feels like I wrote too much and not enough; I have so many things I want to talk about before I start writing and then I forget them when I write!