March Reading Wrap-Up
Two WOW!-reads and five others worth mentioning.
Stats:
Seven books total: Six completed, one DnF'd (did not finish).
Four audiobooks; two paperbacks; and one e-reader.
Three borrowed books from my local library (Hoopla or Libby included), one one from a used bookshop, and three full-priced audiobooks.
I selected four of my seven March reads because there was a chance they would be comps for my novel manuscript. One is a great match! The others? One DNF, one an unlikely comp, and one not a comp at all.
In 2025, I am participating in two reading challenges. Both are available on TheStoryGraph if you are interested in participating. They are silly, but they push me to read books I might otherwise skip.
The Reads Good Challenge:
March Prompt (a book with 15 letters in its title): Dinosaurs: A Novel, read earlier this year.
April Prompt (a Women’s Prize nominated book): I read The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright, but sadly, I DNF’d it. And so it didn’t count for my prompt. I then picked up, Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout, nominated this year. I’ll make it to the end—stay tuned.
Savidge Prompts Challenge:
March Prompt (a book with a kitchen utensil on the cover): I finished Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, by Anne Tyler, on April 1. My thoughts on that one—next month.
April Prompt(a book with a sound in the title): The Echo of Old Books, by Barbara Davis.
I bookended the month of March with five-star reads. I am going to dedicate an entire blog to the first one, so I’ll only briefly mention Wendy Moffat’s book here.
A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E M Forster, by Wendy Moffat. A nonfiction work about the hidden sexual life of E M Forster and how it informed his creative output. I borrowed it as an ebook from Hoopla. Incredible writing and captivating storytelling of his remarkable life and its poignant struggles. Again, more to come in a separate post about this smart book, because I want to convince you to find and read it for yourself!
Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner. Winner of the 1984 Booker Prize. I borrowed a paperback copy from my library. Somehow its creased cover and rounded corners added to my sense of the stale atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac. The titular hotel is in Switzerland, overlooking a lake, likely Lac Leman. Our protagonist, Edith Hope, at the advice of friends and her literary agent, passes a summer at the Hotel, after having created a scandal amongst her London social circle. This is a story of observation, self-discovery, and limitations. It reads like a longish short story, not really needing its chapter divisions. Like the long stretch of summer ahead for Edith, the story moves along a similar ribbon. I found the ending satisfying and kind of delightful, so there is that to look forward to. I mention that because the writing was technically not my taste. It’s fine, and you might like it. But I found some pages quite dense with sentences that never seemed to end. There were long narrative passages where Brookner told me what Edith was thinking -- and why. I prefer to be shown a character’s behavior (or rely on dialogue) to deduce their emotional state from what I know of human nature. But the action of this book happens in Edith's head and therefore Brookner took her narrative there. She has a real gift for realistic, yet quirky, characters and scene building -- two things I really love. 3-stars.
I listened to The Echo of Old Books, by Barbara Davis, read by Vanessa Johansson, Steve West and Sarah Zimmermann. I found this book compulsively readable. The characters are well-drawn and believable. There isn’t a lot of voice on the page so the audiobook version may be preferable since the actors breathe so much life into the three main characters. The Echo of Old Books feathers dual love stories, both complicated and with overlapping timelines. It is also a multigenerational family saga with historical and mystery elements. It borders on melodrama. There is an element of magical realism which is not distracting, nor absurd. It’s a entertaining cozy read that doesn’t ask much. A good read for a lazy vacation. 3-stars.
I really looked forward to The Wren, the Wren, by Anne Enright. It would fulfill one of my reading challenge prompts and I hoped it might be a comp title. The first-person narrative is beautiful. I loved Enright’s prose. But the story lost me as the protagonist, the I in the story, remains with a violent sexual partner. I know this happens in real life, but it’s a weak spot for me. I object to media that ratchet up the tension and force their audience to live it, blow by blow. If you are willing to spend time in that kind of tension, I feel certain this is a masterful book. Many readers have loved it. It did after all earn a place on the 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist and won The Writer’s Prize for Fiction 2024. DNF
The Complete Short Stories of D H Lawrence Vol 2. This is one of those books you'll likely find in the classics section of your favorite used bookstore. It’s a thin volume packed with stories printed in 7-pt type on brittle and yellowed pages. Years ago, I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover and found it pleasant enough, although not as steamy as expected. I prefer the prose of Dickens, Hardy, Eliot or Forster. But Lawrence popped up in the E M Forster biography I read at the start of the month, and since I already owned the old $2 book, I decided to finally read it. These are mildly unsettling stories of dark thoughts and awkward domestic situations, with settings ranging from rural England, London, and the Southwest United States. Somewhat interesting. 2-stars
It's likely you have already read Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders, as it was a NY Times bestseller and recently made The Times’ Top 100 Books of the 21st Century list. Saunders won the 2017 Booker Prize for it, too. I listened to it on audio with its cast of 166 big-shot readers. It is a fascinating effort, both its writing and its audio production. Unfortunately, I didn’t relish the reading experience. I felt the ache of parents (in this case, Mr and Mrs Abraham Lincoln,) for their lost son, and for the other souls drifting about in the Bardo Cemetery. Although I believe that I did catch the central thesis, I nevertheless found this book challenging. The story is not emotionally wrenching. Instead, Saunders manages to make the unfortunate death of a child funny, often employing sophomoric laugh lines. The book is overproduced and chaotic, with its 166 actors contorting their voices to sound otherworldly; to my ear, unpleasantly so. Saunders alternated his fiction with the quotes of scholars, historians and contemporaries of Lincoln, some of which are true and some of which are made up. These offered relief from the voices and held the bubbles of narrative in place but he used so many that they, too, grew tedious. Give Lincoln in the Bardo a try. It’s just not my thing. Barely 2 stars. If you’ve read it, please leave your thoughts in the comment section below. So curious!
Still Life, by Sarah Winman, is a complex and meandering novel, longlisted for the 2022 Walter Scott Prize and winner of the InWords Literary Award. I listened to it on audio. I fell for this book in its first chapter. There, we meet Evelyn Skinner, a 60-year old art historian, sipping cocktails with her lover in a café. She tells us of a nighttime raid during WWII when she hid in a wine cellar and met Ulysses, a young British soldier. The story then moves to Ulysses' former life in England, which he steps back into after his war service ends. We meet his wife, friends, pub-mates, a rollicking cast of oddballs. As we meet each one, I re-felt the interruption Evelyn’s story, and was annoyed by it. If you experience the same, forge on ahead. You’ll need the details that are disclosed in those early chapters later on. The story blossoms about a third of the way in. And OMG! It is such a delightful story! Not an Under the Tuscan Sun delightful—but a story of real challenges and imperfect solutions that somehow add up to lives well-lived. And throughout, art and literature flow like the Arno. Do read it. 4.9-stars.
What did you read in March? What are your reading now? Have you started planning your summer reading?
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Lincoln in the Bardo was a DNF for me. There was too much going on.