On Books & Reading: My TBR List for Mid-May 2022

As you know, I am a guy who loves to read. I have been reading books – and magazines, and other media, print and digital – for as long as I can remember. Family lore has it that my maternal grandmother taught me how to read using ABC blocks and pages from magazines even when my father was alive. Dad died on February 13, 1965, a few weeks before my second birthday, so if that version of history (it came from my mom) is true, I was a prodigy at reading.

Now that we are nearing the middle of the merry month of May, let’s look at my (quite considerable) To Be Read (TBR) pile.

Like my late mother before me, I read more than one book at a time on any given month. I rarely go to a suitable reading corner in this house to read a book, nor have I been able to read an entire book from cover to cover in a short time.

Now, if most of the books on this list seem familiar to you, it’s because they are holdovers from my last TBR pile-related blog post. Because of my routine and the way I stick to it like a barnacle on the hull of a boat, I have not made much of a dent in the lineup of books I wrote about in late March.

I’m still reading:

• The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain, Stephen Dungay
• Watergate: A New History, by Garrett M. Graff
• The Bay of Pigs, by Howard Jones

I put aside, for the moment anyway:

• The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It, by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague

And I added:

• Who Can Hold the Sea: The U.S. Navy in the Cold War 1945-1960, by James D. Hornfischer

I wasn’t making much progress with the Bowden-Teague book; I enjoy well-written books about history, but until recently, political history was not one of my “passion topics.” And as much as I like Mark Bowden (in my book collection, I have five other books that he wrote), I think I’m suffering from “Trump Exhaustion Syndrome.”  In its place I have been reading – with more enthusiasm – Hornfischer’s final work, To Hold the Sea.

I don’t have much else to report, Dear Reader, so I’ll close for now. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.