5 Good Books from March
The Glass Hotel, Finna, A Bright Ray of Darkness, and more
Ethan Hawke, a Swede, and a Chilean walk into a library…
and that’s kind of how my reading month went—all over the place. One book of poetry, four novels, and a lot of wonderful sentences.
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel (2020)
We open with a woman’s disappearance from a large ship and spend the next 200 pages working back to this moment as we wonder how the unraveling of a Ponzi scheme might lead back to this tragedy and that of countless other characters affected by one man’s greed.
Bonus: If the past year has somehow turned you on to apocalyptic novels, check out Mandel’s Station Eleven.
A Bright Ray of Darkness by Ethan Hawke (2021)
Yes, that Ethan Hawke. His third novel is lived material and it shows. Film star William Harding is making his Broadway Debut in Henry IV at the same time his marriage to an equally famous recording artist is exploding spectacularly. Every day is a struggle to survive increasingly self-destructive acts, but every night there is the welcome escape of the stage’s familiar embrace.
It’s a special look into the actor’s mindset via accessible, human prose. What’s better than an artist pulling back the curtain on their art?
Finna by Nate Marshall (2020)
When Morgan Parker, Roxane Gay, Hanif Abdurraqib, Eve L. Ewing, and Saeed Jones blurb a book of poems, it’s time to read those poems. This is poetry for readers who’d rather absorb culture at the pace of the present day than adhere to rules made by voices of the literary past. In the opening poem, “Nate Marshall is a white supremacist from Colorado or Nate Marshall is a poet from the South Side of Chicago or i love you Nate Marshall,” we join the speaker on a journey to unpack what’s in a name, what’s in a family, what’s in a history, and what’s next for Nate Marshall and others on the same journey.
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (1985 - English Translation)
If you like the minute details of a multi-generational saga like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the del Valle/Trueba clan has a story for you. The Trueba patriarch, Esteban, is the one common thread across the three generations we get to to know throughout the book, and he is, to put it generously, a difficult man. His rash and rapacious decisions, while providing financial security, alienate his more empathetic family members for most of his life and set in motion the vengeful responses that continue to befall his family.
His wife’s supernatural gifts (not to mention her husband’s roaring voice and behavior) most likely allowed her to see some of the tensions that would eventually drive them into separate wings of their home and bring tragedy to their future generations, but this ability would have also shown her that she was fated to marry this man and be party to what follows. She respects the calling of fate and familial duty too much to abandon this destiny so she works within their limits to complete the acts of love and charity that can reach far outside them and run much farther through a bloodline than anything wicked.
Anxious People by Fredrik Backman (2020 - English Translation)
This book is absurd, and the sooner you can get past that, the more you’ll enjoy it. The unlikely scenario of a bank robbery turned hostage situation in a nearby apartment showing is merely an excuse to get a bunch of messed up strangers in the same room. As the motives of the bank robber are revealed to the group, the empathy extended to their accidental captor is contagious and spreads through the apartment. It’s a little on the sweet side, but you’ll be touched, and I recommend that diversion for each and everyone of you.