March 2025 Reads

In this lovely post about managing stress during this horrific time, the writer Janisse Ray notes that "during stressful times reading becomes more difficult." I have the opposite problem, and have been plowing through books as an antidote to and escape from stress. On leaving a bookstore one day last month, I chided myself for having purchased a book when I have so many TBRs at home. In response, I justified the purchase with the literal phrase, "I drank five books this week." I kept on drinking books all month, totaling 14 by the end of March, not counting those I began and didn't finish until this month. Here's what I read:

Fiction
I had picked up Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen at a used bookstore some time ago, and finally read it last month. It's the fun, funny, first-in-a-series about a minor royal (34th in line for the crown) but broke young woman trying to make her own way around 1930, engaged by The Queen to spy on the married woman the Prince of Wales has gotten himself involved in, and then ends up getting mixed up in solving a murder. I enjoyed it so much I went out in search of more and found one much later in the series, Heirs and Graces, which was also a treat to read. I'll be on the lookout for more of these. I love a humorous take on murder.

Speaking of humorous, Four Aunties and a Wedding is the sequel to Dial A for Aunties, which I read back in November. In this installment, the narrator, Meddie, is getting married in England, and she, her mom, and three aunties once again get involved in a ridiculous, mad-cap, and hilarious plot to prevent members of the Indo-Chinese mafia from killing a wedding guest.

In The Postscript Murders by Elly Griffiths, an old woman and a famous author are both killed within a few days of each other, and a rag-tag group of unlikely friends goes to work solving the crimes. It has a bit of Thursday Murder Club vibes, and I enjoyed it a lot, although the ultimate solution is a little on the complicated/convoluted side.

A friend gave me another of the Paul Doiron novels about the loose-canon Maine Game Warden, and after I devoured it I went out and bought three more. These are real page-turners, although Doiron paints a grim picture of Maine as a hellscape of pill poppers, gun nuts, and various other deranged people.

Silver Alert by Lee Smith is about an old man who facing putting his wife in memory care while dealing with his own existential health issues who forms an unlikely friendship with a young woman who has escaped a life of sex trafficking. It's a sweet story, but I found the co-protagonist (the young woman) to be unrealistically naive and well-adjusted considering her traumatic past.

Finally, in Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym, an amusing "comedy of manners," a young cleric moves into the home of a spinster and her companion and things get silly as everyone gets into everyone else's business. It's like a less-ridiculous Jeeves & Wooster caper.

Nonfiction
The book I justified buying because I'd already drunk five books that week was Windswept by Annabel Abbs-Streets (say that five times fast), after I happened to see it on a table display at a local bookstore. I'm so glad I grabbed it! It's about "forgotten" women walkers in history, mainly writers but also artists, featuring women like Simone de Beauvoir, Georgia O'Keefe, and many whom I hadn't heard of before. Abbs-Streets notes that few women are included in the anthologies of walking writers, and as part of her biographical profiles, she goes to the places where these women went on their walking adventures and follows parts of their routes as she explores their relationship to walking and how it related to their creative work, as well as the adversity they faced as woman walking long distances in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A few years back, I read a similar book, Wanderers by Kerri Andrews, and I'm amazed that there's only one woman who is featured in both books (Nan Shepherd).

Birding to Change the World by Trish O'Kane is the memoir of an amazing woman who, after a career in journalism, covering wars in Central America, becomes interested in nature and birds after she loses her home to Hurricane Katrina. She takes this interest into a PhD program at the University of Wisconsin, where she grows deeply involved in getting local kids out into nature and preserving a nearby park and access to nature for the communities that surround the park. O'Kane is an indefatigable student, teacher, advocate, and activist, and she does incredible work throughout the book to involve local people and ensure that their voices are heard in park planning decisions. 

Books and Islands by Louise Erdrich tells the story of her travels with her young daughter to various islands in Minnesota and Canada, including one that houses a massive collection of books.

Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her is a strange and fascinating lyrical exploration into the history of patriarchy, including a long litany of the many ways that "science" has been used to "prove" that women are inferior to men.