March is a struggle anywhere, but Duluth, Minnesota does its best to make the month feel eternal. The advent of April has given us what will, I hope, be our final snow for the year, but March was still horrid. The inches of ice just past my front steps attest to that.

Reading-wise, I’ve picked things up again after February. I read the books below in a jumble, some of them on top of others, and in odd ways I thought they had a lot to say to each other. R.F. Kuang’s Babel, which depicts a colonialist Britain powered by the magic of translation, is an interesting read alongside the biting sarcasm and privilege of Mary Rodgers’s Shy and the shifting meanings of Anne Washburn’s post-apocalyptic fantasy Mr. Burns. An odd combo, maybe, but they clicked for me.

March! Yeah? You can still say hi anytime. You can still follow me on The StoryGraph. I’m still happy to hear from you.

The Book of the Month:

Checkout 19, by Claire-Louise Bennet

Not a novel with a plot, exactly, but a marvelous one anyway. In Checkout 19, Claire-Louise Bennet weaves together stories within stories, a grand sort of stream of consciousness that dips in and out of the work written by her central character. Threaded through the book is an obsession with reading, with the ways in which what we have (and haven’t or haven’t yet) read define us as individuals. Sure, it’s a bit of a soft pitch down the middle to me as a librarian, but a good book is a good book.

The Rest:

Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers, by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green

Mary Rodgers (composer, writer, chair of the Juilliard board, and daughter of the Rodgers of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame) seems like she was A. Lot. Her sarcasm, her privilege, her acid wit, and her dozens upon dozens of close friends in the world of New York theater? Wonderful, but overwhelming. In Shy, completed over the decade since Mary’s death by New York Times theater critic Jesse Green, Mary tells story after story after story, sometimes in chronological order, sometimes with an organizing theme, sometimes apparently at random. No matter the mess of the thing, though, the stories are a delight. The book is a treasure. To paraphrase Mary, everything is forgivable. Just not Arthur Laurents.

The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell

This book is not hugely different from Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s enormously successful pandemic novel. Is that a problem? Not really. I do enjoy historical fiction and O’Farrell does a wonderful job rendering her characters as well-rounded people. The exception to that in The Marriage Portrait, the malevolent husband who commissions the titular marriage portrait, drags the novel down somewhat. As a villain, he’s more than a little cartoonish. Regardless, O’Farrell’s depiction of a young woman struggling for the power to define her own place in Renaissance Italy is a great book — Hamnet just happens to have done it slightly better a couple of years ago.

The Sky Watched: Poems of Ojibwe Lives, by Linda LeGarde Grover

I am not at all sure how to write about poetry, which I can’t claim to have spent an enormous amount of time with. What I do know is that I love this book for the way it captures beauty and agony of the past while looking firmly toward growth and to the future as well. If you want to read it, seek out the edition from the University of Minnesota Press, which contains a few additional poems.

Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, by Anne Washburn

Meaning changes over time. Signifiers cease to signify or take on new significance. I don’t want to spoil Washburn’s wonderful play at all — just know that it begins with a recitation of an episode of The Simpsons and ends somewhere else entirely. See it if you can, but at least read it.

Recipe for Persuasion, by Sonali Dev

My wife tells me that Dev’s series of modern spins on Jane Austen improves as it goes along. I agree! Recipe for Persuasion is better than the first book!! It is still well narrated! It is also still too sad! I will still probably read the next two in the series anyway. I mean, this one featured a Food Network-style cooking competition. Delightful.

Babel, by R.F. Kuang

The idea of translation as forming a sort of appropriationist, imperialist, colonialist magic is a great one. This book, though, needed to be longer? Somehow? I loved so much of it, but it felt rushed, start to finish. The world of 1830s Oxford? More of it needed to be built up before it got pulled apart. The same goes for some of the core relationships between the exploited/exploiting students and professors of the translation institute at the core of Kuang’s magical Britain. The plot also spun up and down far too quickly. Maybe it should have been two books? I’m not sure — no matter what, this is a wonderful, smart, well thought out premise with pacing that does all its ideas a disservice. Try episode #652 of The Incomparable podcastfor a longer discussion that captures some of my ambivalence about the book. The folks over there do a great job!