What I Read in March 2023
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.
A Playlist of Latter-Day David Bowie Songs
Below is a playlist of my favorite Bowie songs from the ‘90s on. We’re starting with 1993’s Black Tie White Noise and ending with Blackstar (his final album) in 2016. After that, I’ve highlighted three songs I think should get some particular notice. Each track should, really, but you’re not here to read a whole book on Bowie. Three highlights it is. Listen, though, to all of them. They deserve your time.
What I Read In February 2023
February certainly was a month! I didn’t do as much reading as I did in January — things are just a little bit busier here at A Turn of the Page HQ — but I’m still happy with the books I finished. Some of them were very serious. Maybe most of them were very serious. I look for that in the middle of winter sometimes. Do you? I’m not sure why I think weighty tomes belong to the season that’s also most likely to leave me feeling VERY SAD, but I do.
Anyway, you can still say hi anytime. You can still follow me on The StoryGraph. I’d be happy to hear from you!
Ten Years of David Bowie’s The Next Day
It was 2012, the drive home from college was five hours, and I was still using a CD player. I burned The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars to disc and got sucked in, listening to it on repeat over and over and over again as I drove. I’m sure I picked it out because Bowie was a canonical artist I’d never heard, because the album was on some greatest records of all time list, something like that. It doesn’t matter, really. I got sucked into the record. It might have stopped there, but then David Bowie came back.
Cécile McLorin Salvant's Ghost Song
In a New York Times profile written around the release of her most recent album, Ghost Song, jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant describes the record as a project that should match the feeling of rifling through a notebook, of reading someone else’s diary or letters. When I first heard the record, I found this feeling unsettling. I didn’t care for the sequencing. The opening cover of Kate Bush’s “Withering Heights” was grand and evocative, but “Optimistic Voices” (from The Wizard of Oz) irritated, spoiling the beauty of Gregory Porter’s “No Love Dying.” I didn’t get it.
The New York Times profile, written by the excellent Giovanni Russonello, helped. For me, Ghost Song makes sense as an artistic notebook. It coheres as a whole, even if it doesn’t flow from song to song. It has real texture, too, real materiality, and the more time I spend with it the more I appreciate that it doesn’t go down smoothly. The children’s choir at the end of the title track bothers, but I like it alongside the exasperation of “Obligation.” “Wuthering Heights” was recorded in a church. The acoustics on the track are great, but its open acoustics sound out of place alongside the intimacy of much of the rest of the record. So? The intimacy and the openness both sound great. They both sound like Cécile McLorin Salvant.
Somehow, somehow, somehow, I have made it this far without talking about the voice that drives this record. McLorin Salvant is a tremendous singer. She can belt, she can wail, she can scold, she tell a thrilling story, she can play a character, she can do whatever she wants. Her voice is a versatile instrument, but she never sounds like anyone other than herself. No, Ghost Song doesn’t flow perfectly. Cécile McLorin Salvant pulls it all together, though. It’s her notebook, after all.