What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in May

Madeleine Thien, Sufiyaan Salam and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the commentsLately I have loved Dorothy Tse’s City Like Water, translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce. It is an unclassifiable, sharp, ingenious, passionate novel in which the city that is dissolving is also one’s only home. I have been telling everyone to read Karen Hao’s Empire of AI so that we can understand the cost of the tools we’ve been told that we need. I re-read Hsiao-Hung Pai’s Scattered Sand: The Story of China’s Rural Migrants because it has stayed with me for more than a decade now. And I am reading Hannah Lillith Assadi’s moving novel, Paradiso 17, written in the weeks before and the year after her father, who was born in Palestine, passed away. Finally, Michael Ondaatje’s selected poems, The Distance of a Shout. This is a life’s work and a book to hold close. Continue reading...