Five books good for March break reading
Some picks well-suited for group talks, escaping, road trips and imagining you’re in Paris
When you want to hang out with the gang: “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernardine Evaristo is one I’ve been recommending lately. You’ll remember that Evaristo co-won the Booker Prize for this, along with Margaret Atwood for “The Testaments,” last November. Amma has written a play, which is now onstage; we hear from her first. Then come eleven other Black women to see it; each gets a chapter — they’re from all over England in terms of class, profession, locale and age — and shares her particular experience. Evaristo’s wonderful prose is experimental — her sentence breaks look more like long-form poetry in some ways. It doesn’t necessarily make it more difficult to read, but rather adds another dimension that gives a rhythm to your reading.
When you want something you can pick up and put down: Michael Melgaard’s debut collection of short stories,
“Pallbearing,” takes us into life in a small town. Many of the characters are struggling to make ends meet — they are the working class and the poor — some of the stories are poignant, some funny, with insights into what it means to be poor, what it does to a person. I read the book a while ago and I’m still thinking about the lady who bought the gumball machines. The characters stuck with me; that’s why the book’s on this list.
When you want a character you can get to know: Zalika Reid-Benta’s “Frying
Plantain” travels throughout midtown Toronto, set in the Eglinton Avenue West neighbourhood of Little Jamaica, but straddling the divide between Little Italy, “the area where the Caribbean and Europe converged.” These linked short stories follow high school student Kara Davis, who’s trying to figure out where she fits. Great dialogue, sensitive writing, readable stories, this book hits a March break sweet spot.
When you’d really rather be in Paris:
“The Man in the Red Coat” by another U.K. writer, the incomparable Julian Barnes, tells the story of the Parisian era we’ve all fallen in love with — the Belle Epoque — by telling the story of a surgeon Samuel Pozzi. It starts like this: with a prince, a count and a commoner. But instead of a punchline you get a portrait of the era with cameos from the likes of Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Proust — better than reading fiction, Barnes takes you on a grand tour of the city: close your eyes and you’ll see it, and when you finally get there yourself, you’ll see it differently.
When you’ve got lots of driving time: Listening to Erik Larson reading his “The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz” biography is kind of like listening to an old-school documentary, with a fine British-accented narrator — and a really well-told story. It’s incredibly valuable to understanding today’s politics — if Britons were fondly looking back to previous eras and leaders — and the idea of English stoicism — it was this time.
What Larson shows is Churchill as a leader who held his country together; he also mines diaries and other documents to show his domestic life, making this an intimate read, too. Probably not for long car trips with the kids, but if you’re into history, it’ll keep your brain occupied for 17 hours.