March-ing through my Reading Journal: A Month’s Worth of Books

March Reading:

17. Siberian Haiku  Jurge Vile; Illustrator, Lina Itagaki; Translator, Jura Avizienis. Graphic novel; Autofiction; historical fiction; YA/children’s literature;

18. The Alice Network, Kate Quinn. Historical fiction; Spy novel; romance; strong female protagonist; WWII

19. The Midnight Library, Matt Haig. Speculative fiction; sci-fi; philosophical fiction; depression/suicide; possibilities of life

20. The Wild Silence, Raynor Wynn. Memoir; Writing; Adventure; Outdoor Life; Illness; Spouse with Illness; Environmental Writing; Iceland; Hiking

21. White Ivy, Susie Yang, Contemporary fiction; thriller; romance; immigrant narrative; class/ethnicity/gender; American society

22. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, V.E. Schwab, Fantasy; Gothic; romance; historical fiction

23. Il n’est jamais trop tard pour éclore: Carnet d’une Late Bloomer, Catherine Taret. Memoir; self-help

24. The Searcher, Tara French. Mystery/thriller; Set in rural Ireland

25. Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga. Literary fiction; bildungsroman (coming-of-age); adolescent girl; (post-) colonialism; Africa; Zimbabwe; education

26. Unto Us a Son Is Given, Donna Leon. Mystery; set in Venice, Commissario Brunetti series

The first book in my March reading list was a serendipitous choice of a book I’d never heard of before, simply because the cover caught my eye from the New Books shelf at the neighbourhood branch of Vancouver Public Library.  I regularly tell myself that I should read more (some!) graphic novels, and this one’s cover illustration and its title (Haiku? in Siberia? how? why?) intrigued me

My Reading Journal entry for this book begins at the bottom of the photographed page . . .

It may be that the target audience for the story of a family’s WWII deportation from Lithuania to Siberia is children and young adults, say from 11 or 12 years and older, but I was engaged and moved and entertained and informed in so many ways throughout.  Despite the bleak historical content, the writing and images collaboratively construct a story full of warmth and humour, hope and joy, while never shirking the responsibility of witnessing the deprivation and insults and horrors experienced.

My Instagram post for this book includes a few more favourite pages.

Highly recommended, both for you and, perhaps, your children or grandchildren or young friends of an age mature enough to cope with the realities depicted.

The next book I read, Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network, was also historical fiction, also set during World War II . . .

As I wrote in my Reading Journal, I’ve long been wary of fiction that draws on war as a background for its narrative. This novel didn’t overcome that reservation, as you can read below, but I nonetheless found some merit in it, particularly in the strong female characters who defied social conventions for women of their day.

The 19th title of my year’s reading was Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library. Tough to assign genre to this one with its mixture of  philosophy, quantum physics, a Borgesian library and a suicidally depressed young woman wondering what it might mean to live a happy life.

There were a few points when I was on the verge of thinking it might become tiresome, overly tendentious, but instead I found it, overall, suprisingly charming, restorative even.

Posted about it on Instagram as well.

And I think I’d read it all again, simply for this page. . .

Raynor Winn’s The Wild Silence, is a book I bought — in hardcover yet! — on the strength of Winn’s first book, the marvellous The Salt Path. I’ve heard from other readers who were disappointed by her second title, so I suppose I began reading with lowered expectations.

And although I read the first few chapters waiting to catch Winn’s rhythm, to see where she was taking us this time, I was soon enough caught up in the memoir — which turns out to be as much prequel as follow-up to The Salt Path (something of a “the making/writing of”).  She recounts the process of deciding what she might do after the grand adventure of walking the path ’round England’s southwest coast. At that point, she and Moth, her terminally ill husband, had only a temporary home and little idea what the future would hold, beyond Moth trying to complete a teaching degree at the local university.  Tentatively, Ray begins to write and in so doing, confronts her shyness, tracing some of it back to her childhood and recognizing as she does so the strength she’d always drawn from nature and from books.  And she traces the long arc of her still-passionate love affair with a man whose strength she sees diminish daily.

I won’t tell you anymore, except to say that if beautifully observant, lyrical environmental writing appeals to you as much as narratives about women in their 50s realizing their strength and transforming their lives, add this one to your list. Oh, and if you want a bit of adventure as well? What about a strenuous back-packing hike through Iceland by a couple in their 50s, one of whom has a terminal, degenerative, neurological illness? Or the restoration of a dilapidated old farmouse, cider mill and apple orchard?

I put Susie Yang’s White Ivy on hold at my library after seeing it recommended as a thriller; I have to say that it’s so much more than this. Or perhaps, more fairly, it stretches the possibilities of what “a thriller” can be or do — this novel also explores identity and intersectionality (race, gender, class, ethnicity)  and immigration and American society! Very impressive debut, and I’ll be watching for other titles from this author (who, at 32, already has a doctorate in pharmacy and a tech start-up on her CV — author interview here.)

My Instagram post here.

 

I think I learned about V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue on my niece’s Instagram account, Pages_and_Pinots. I’d say this is not a genre I usually read, but in the last year (blame or credit a certain pandemic!), I’ve read and enjoyed books by Jess Kidd and Alice Hoffman and Erin Morgenstern. And I enjoyed Addie LaRue very much as well; perhaps it’s a bit bloated, but most readers will want every page of the 300-year-old Addie’s life. A gripping and indulgent novel to hunker down with next rainy day or take to your favourite hammock on a sunny one.

See my Instagram post for an example of the many felicitous metaphors in this novel.

Catherine Taret’s self-help memoir Il n’est jamais trop tard pour éclore: Carnet d’une late bloomer was on my list as a way to practise my French, and it did that. But if I’d picked up It’s Never Too Late to Hatch: A Late Bloomer’s Notebook in English, I probably wouldn’t have read beyond the first chapter.  I’m not the target audience, but if you’re well-educated, white, bourgeois, 30s/40s, attractive and serially monogamous with sufficient funds for extensive therapy and self-help workshops, and frustrated that you haven’t figured out what you want to be yet. . . .

I don’t need to tell you, do I, that Tana French’s mystery novels are always very good? If you don’t know them, you might want to begin with her Dublin murder squad books, but The Searcher (a stand-alone set in rural Dublin) could also be a good introduction.

See my Instagram post for a favourite passage and for other readers’ comments about this book.

The 25th novel I read this year will probably feature in my Top Five for 2021. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions was first published in 1988,  and is regularly acclaimed as an important book in the African literary canon. If you’re looking for novels that will deepen your knowledge and understanding of post-colonial Africa and particularly of African women’s lives, this coming-of-age story set in late 60s rural Zimbabwe provides a complex, nuanced, and compelling narrative that challenges and subverts stereotypes.

My Instagram posts here and here

Highly recommended, and I’m currently reading Dangarembga’s  Booker-nominated The Mournable Body which brings these characters back some twenty years later. But I’ll tell you about that next month. For now, I need to focus on finishing this post before April’s half done (I have one more day!).

Last March entry in my Reading Journal is Donna Leon’s Unto Us a Son Is Given, the 28th volume in her Commissario Brunetti series.  I posted a too-close-for-comfort passage on Instagram.

And that’s it for this month. . . . at least, that’s it for my reading, but what about yours? Can we talk books? Share titles? Compare responses? Have you read any of the books I’ve mentioned here? Agree or disagree with what I’ve written? Have “reads well with” suggestions? All comments welcome (well, unless you’re going to tell me about bargain sunglasses or some magical medical aid or such. Those will only be deleted).