Friday Reads — May 1st, 2026

It's Friday again, and time for Friday Reads!

This week, LibraryThing staff are reading:

Tim / @timspalding: How England Began: From Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons by Nicholas J. Higham
Abby / @ablachly: The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke
Kristi / @kristilabrie: Gallant by V.E. Schwab
Lucy / @knerd.knitter: Richard Matheson's I Am Legend by Steve Niles
Zeph / @ZephCraven: Uprooted by Naomi Novik

What about all of you? What are you reading this Friday?

Margarita, a Legend of the Fight for the Great River is nearing its conclusion - it's been a good adventure story, though I continue baffled at why it's titled after a secondary character.

I also started The Queen of Ieflaria today.

Last week I began Little Men but Margarita was far more interesting and I sort of forgot to keep reading the Alcott, lol.

Via Kindle
Beloved / Toni Morrison
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Pt 3, p 351- / Haruki Murakami; translation Jay Rubin
Via the Kindle app
The Age of Napoleon: The Story of Civilization, Volume XI Pt XXV- , p 887- / Will & Ariel Durant
Hardcover remainder
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self / Claire Tomalin

Bedtime reading:
Hardcover Everyman
The Romany Rye. Everyman's Library No. 120, Ch XXX-, p 177- / George Borrow

Finished SPQR & The Abyss late in the week, so dipping into various TBRs to add to the remaining reads. Both the Morrison & Tomalin are last minutes, subject to change. Can't believe I hadn't read Beloved -- still reading the introductions. Considering an Ian Frazier recently downloaded, admittedly because of the title The Snakes That Ate Florida to add to bedtime reading since it appears to be, at least at the beginning, Frazier's New Yorker "casuals," the short bits that used to (still?) open the print issues; perfect bedtime reading I should imagine. The 2 books that just got barely bumped at the last minute by the Tomalin bio: My Struggle Book One by Knausgaard or Annals of the Former World by McPhee. Mostly because I've never engaged w/Pepys & the clock's a'ticking. SPQR reminded me of all my ancient world TBRs. The Abyss turned out to be a philosophical novel that echoed for me: Julian Sorel's last days in the Stendahl, Camus's L'Étranger, the only French novel I recall reading all the way through in the original, & Plato's Socrates Apology.

This morning I started Orbital Resonance and Confessions of the Fox. I had a very solid reading week, though it was a bit all over the place tonally.

Hardcover = Prague by Arthur Phillips
Audio = Occupation Spy Eight Full-cast BBC Spy Thrillers by Ted Allebeury
Ebook = What Happened Next by Edwin Hill

>2 keristars: Last week I began Little Men but Margarita was far more interesting and I sort of forgot to keep reading the Alcott, lol.

haha. I can't even begin to count how many times I forgot to pick back up a book that I just wasn't digging. Eventually, I donate it or put it back on the shelf for another day, and lots of guilt.

After a month of finding something daily to write about on LT for National Poetry Month, having a splendid time doing that, I confess I'm a little relieved too. With all that rabbithole reading on the screen, it was shameful how very little "real" reading I got done.

Hello May! I look forward to my normal amount of reading, which is slow, but I can get at least 1-3 books done in a month normally.

Poetry Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems by Billy Collins
Science themed short stories Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino ⬅️ LOVING THIS WORK. I dread when it will end.
And a bunch of cookbooks which I go through in order to cull but I have some fault in my DNA, I just can't seem to let go of a cookbook. That would make sense if it were a book that actually cooked....

Finished reading Sniffing out Murder by Kallie E. Benjamin and now continuing with London by Edward Rutherfurd

>6 DebiCates: And Margarita really is interesting, too! 😄 I've never read so many details about the colonisation of the Gulf Coast, or the interactions between the French and Spanish there.

Of course, it's a fictionalized account so I've had wikipedia open to verify facts, a nice feature of living in The Future - something the original readers of 1902 couldn't do!

I finished reading A Briefer History of Time on 1st May, bigger goal is to read A Brief History of Time, and now a tiny step closer.

This weekend continuing with short stories, part two of Faust.