What We've Been Reading: May 2026

Welcome to our monthly reading-round-up for May 2026! This is the place where we gather highlights from what the Lighthouse team have been reading each month.

This month brings with it a combination of timely writing on inequality - from why we need to tax the rich to workers rights at Amazon and the flaws of identity politics - and the most lush fantasy adventures, along with much else!

You can check out round-ups from previous months and years amongst our book lists.

Pao

Instead of reading books I should be reading, I have re-read every single available book and novella in The Bone Season series. Samantha Shannon has me in a chokehold and I think it might be time for me to give The Priory of the Orange Tree a go.

I highly recommend everything she writes; The Bone Season is complex, well-written fantasy with elements of steampunk and Greek mythology. I was obsessed at 19 and I will continue to be obsessed until the day the last book in the series comes out.

Christina

I am still reading Is A River Alive by Robert Macfarlane which I'm enjoying very much! I'm listening to the audiobook on Libro.fm and it's read by the author AND has a beautiful river soundscape in between chapters. I'm finding it so exciting to learn about rights of nature movements in various contexts, and the writing is lush and inspiring.

I am ALSO still reading Middlemarch, we're up to part 6 now in my book club! Everything is happening! It is still sharp and interesting and exciting, and I still recommend it!

Noor

We Need to Tax Billionaires by Gabriel Zucman - a teeny tiny book about why we should implement a minimum 2% tax on wealth for those with wealth over €100 million - I agreed before I started reading but it's a helpful explainer of how unfair the current tax system is and why this would be a good policy. Also, conveniently pocket-sized and would be a good one to slip into the hands of sceptics!

Minority Rule by Ash Sarkar - I'm late to the game on this one but I'm glad I got here in the end! Sarkar has definitely jumped in the deep end, being critical of identity politics as leaned on by the left and right wing. She makes a compelling case for the critical and nuanced understanding of identity within a framework of class and worker power in the face of growing wealth inequality and far right power. It's enjoyably readable, definitely recommend!

Teddy

Pornotopia, edited by Louis Armand, Jane Lewty, Andrew Mitchell- a fantastic collection of essays arguing that every utopia is pornography and every pornography imagines (someone’s) utopia. Image, apocalypse, desire, metaphor, embodiment, sex.

Trans*migrations: Cartographies of the Queer by Vit Bohal - using queer temporalities, libidinal materialism, and non-linear feminisms, Bohal argues towards a new, non-normative understanding of identity, rooted in the idea of transness - change, transformation, identities rooted not in ‘naturalism’ but in technologies.

A Gothic Soul by Jiří Karásek, translated by Kirsten Lodge - Czech decadence, fin de siècle nihilism, and fragmentation shine through this proto-modern journey for identity amid Prague urbanisation, Hapsburg Rule and religious crisis.

Nothing Personal?!: Essays on Affect, Gender, and Queerness by Matthias Lüthjohann, Sophie Nikoleit, Omar Kasmani, Jean-Baptiste Pettier - using Sara Ahmed’s affect theory, this essay collection delves into the intersection of the private and public - emotion.

Sinkhole: Three Crimes by Rosanna McLaughlin - Britain is submerged in a swamp, decaying from the ground up, and three crimes occur: someone steals Stonehenge, a ghost writer faces a ghost from her past, and a tropical village becomes the scene of a murder. Grotesque, absurd and funny!

Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth - Scotland becomes the backdrop for a road trip as two middle-aged sisters take on a caravan and phantoms from their past. I read this so quickly!

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs - nothing happens and everything happens! Surreal, satirical and psychoactive. Just read it.

Mairi

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe - fascinating investigative journalism with the pacing of a true crime podcast, carrying an incisive critique of the structures - from state to finance, police to schooling - that uphold wealth inequality and the impunity of the ultra rich. Radden Keefe has a gift for weaving intricate research and rich detail into a bigger picture, he pulls back the curtain on Russian Oligarchs, family trauma, London’s crooked real estate moguls and our corrupt Parliament (from thatcher era forward) and paints a picture that reaches back from the death of teenage Zac Brettler in 2019 to Idi Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s Asian minority, the finance boom of the 90s and beyond. Immensely readable, tragic and enraging.

Handbook for the revolution by Derrick Palmer - Fuck Jeff Bezos - if you needed any more insight into the rot and violence at the heart of Amazon’s success this is a brilliant playbook for organising from one of the founders of Amazon’s first labor union.

Shannon Chakraborty - ahead of Chakraborty’s appearance at Cymera next month (with the brilliant Katalina award) have just started and am LOVING Amina al-Sirafi’s epic adventures! Mayhem and pirates and magic and cunning adversaries!

Nic

Radical New Enlightenment: Philosophy for a Common World by Marina Garcés Garcés attempts to vindicate the Enlightenment by resituating its more noble aspects against what she calls the present ‘posthumous condition’: that is, an epoch of omni-crises that thinks of humanity as increasingly veering towards the apocalyptic and dystopian (e.g. the looming ecological crises, disruptive technologies [i.e. the internet, social media and AI], growing inequality and the trend of far-right support worldwide). Despite pointing out how the Enlightenment has brought about this era of omni-crises and the condition of posthumous thinking, Garcés nonetheless goes on to argue that there exists a new and more radical lineage of Enlightenment thinkers who hold some of answers to our present ills. Drawing from “Diderot, Baron d’Holbac, John Toland, Helvétius, Voltaire [...] Spinoza to Marx, and even including Nietzsche” (21), she argues that these thinkers all had one invaluable attitude in common: a commitment to the improvement of humanity, with the goal of helping us to free one another from forms of oppression and degradation. This attitude is the crux of her re-positioning the Enlightenment as a purely emancipatory educational program – as opposed to a project of domination under the pretence of objectivly grounded values and the heirarchies these are built upon. By drawing on this vast canon of influences, Garcés does what any great philosopher does: transmutes them into her own compelling pedagogical project for a vast readership of philosophers and non-philosophers alike. This book is an important reminder for those invested in the future of the humanities, who wish to decentre education from the purely institutional, and who wish to question the absurd dialectic between theory and praxis, philosophy and action. I would highly recommend every student and teacher of a humanities subject – at whichever level – give this a shot. It is the first of the emerging new wave of post-critical thought in that it blends deconstruction of what has gone wrong in pedagogical thinking with novel constructions of what might still go right! This was read within the Lighthouse Philosophy & Social Hope Bookclub, which I also host! I’ll leave the link to our next read for June here if you’re interested!

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