March 2026 Reads

This is one of the shorter books stacks I've had in a while. I blame the Victorian novelist up there, plus a couple other longish books that I started in March and am still working on. Let's start with the Victorian.

Fiction
A friend of mine and I had both *wanted* to read The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins for a while, but neither of us had gotten around to it, and we decided the only way to make it happen was to read it together. It turned out to be not nearly the Dickensian slog I was expecting. It was in fact very engaging and humorous, and though it seems like there's not much to the mystery (it's hailed as the first detective story), the reader doesn't know *really* what happened until right up until the end, and there were several good twists. Plus the characters, who alternate POVs, are hilarious. Big recommend from me, and I'll be checking out some other Wilkie Collins works.

Nonfiction
I've been slowly working my way through Maggie Smith's Dear Writer, in which she references her memoir about her divorce. Intrigued, I picked up You Could Make this Place Beautiful and ended up reading it almost all in one (very late) night. It's written in very short sections, which read like mini essays or prose poems. It's a beautiful, heartbreaking book.

Finally, I reread Aimee Nezhukumatathil's World of Wonders for about the third time (you can read my review from of the book from a few years ago here). I still love Nezhukumutathil's exuberant, colorful style and the way she somehow combines a gob-smacked sense of wonder about the natural world, near and far, with a steely eyed awareness of humanity's darker side. I'd loved the book so much, I bought her second book of essays, Bite by Bite, as soon as it came out a couple years ago, but I had trouble getting through it. It's a collection of essays about different foods--mostly fruits but also some spices and a few dishes like waffles and halo halo. Maybe I couldn't get into it because I'd already read several of the essays when they first came out in Orion, or maybe we're all saturated with food writing because every time we look up a recipe online we have to read about the author's grandmother's aunt's sister's neighbor who first assembled the ingredients. Whatever it was, I seem to have gotten over it, because this time when I picked it up and started it again from the beginning, I enjoyed it much more, while gaining an appreciation for foods I eat regularly and learning about a few unfamiliar ones foods I'd like to try.