Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your March reading list.
Winds of change show up this month. One author considers why our brains take sides and how they can switch sides too. A novel set during the Dust Bowl sends urgent messages on how climate affects community. Meanwhile, a woman told she’d never write again crafts a haunting memoir of recovery.
Wonder also breezes in, with a billionaire’s crash landing into a swimming pool, a fabulous debut novel about womanhood and a gorgeous cookbook that celebrates California’s bounty. Happy reading!
FICTION
Woodworking: A Novel
By Emily St. James
Zando: 368 pages, $28
(March 4)
Erica, a high-school English teacher, has something in common with her student Abigail — but in 2016, as a new presidential administration looms, neither one of them knows how to break through their South Dakota small town’s ideas to support each other. As they slowly and cautiously develop a friendship, their different modes of identity challenge a conservative community to talk about difference instead of trying to make people hide in the woodwork.
The Antidote: A Novel
By Karen Russell
Knopf: 432 pages, $30
(March 11)
Although Pulitzer winner Russell’s second novel takes place in the Dust Bowl, its messages for the 21st century United States come through loud and clear. For the outsiders of Uz, Neb., April 14, 1935’s “Black Sunday” blizzard not only upends their lives and livelihoods, it offers the author the chance to ruminate on how European settlers’ theft and exploitation of land resulted in territory that can’t sustain lives depending on it.
Hot Air: A Novel
By Marcy Dermansky
Knopf: 208 pages, $27
(March 18)
How can a simple mechanism like a hot air balloon bring so much joy and wonder? How can Dermansky pack so much incisive humor into 200 pages? Some things prove ineffable, like this multi-perspective story of a woman, her daughter, her personal assistant, her so-so suitor, her long-ago camp crush and his wife — all of whom spend a weekend together. Not only does it get off the ground, it soars, alternately fueled by cluelessness and bombast.
Theft: A Novel
By Abdulrazak Gurnah
Riverhead Books: 304 pages, $30
(March 18)
Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature as his novel “Afterlives” was released. With “Theft,” he continues to turn over the history of his home country, Tanzania, with the awe of a geologist examining a rare, flawed and inimitable specimen. Karim, returned home after years away, marries Fauzia; the two take in Badar, young like them but on a different socioeconomic path. Which man will embrace his nationality and which will abandon it?
Twist: A Novel
By Colum McCann
Random House: 256 pages, $28
(March 25)
Rejoice, fans of McCann’s 2008 novel, “Let the Great World Spin.” “Twist” tells a completely different story, but the author’s unusual control over his prose and elegant cadences remain as a jaded Irish writer named Anthony Fennell embarks on an assignment to cover underwater fiber-optic cables on the African coast. If you think those cables carry echoes of Joseph Conrad and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you’re on the right wavelength.
NONFICTION
Pieces You’ll Never Get Back: A Memoir of Unlikely Survival
By Samina Ali
Catapult: 272 pages, $27
(March 4)
Most of us understand that narratives go through many drafts. But writer Ali had to go through multiple drafts of her very self while she recovered from a stroke suffered as she delivered her first child. When Ali awoke from a coma, she could no longer speak English, only her first language, Urdu. She didn’t recognize her husband or remember giving birth. Doctors believed she would never write again. She proved them absolutely wrong.
Coastal: 130 Recipes from a California Road Trip
By Betsy Andrews and Scott Clark
Chronicle Books: 384 pages, $35
(March 11)
Follow award-winning food writer Andrews and chef-proprietor Clark as they start at the latter’s Dad’s Luncheonette in Half Moon Bay and wind up in Ventura County, missing nary a delicious stop along the way. Between lush photos from Cheyenne Ellis, gorgeous descriptions from California native Andrews and recipes that make the most of local bounty (think perfect Meyer lemonade and Dungeness crab rice), it’s a treat for all senses.
The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts
By Anne Lawrence-Mathers
Yale University Press: 368 pages, $38
(March 11)
Our medieval forebears saw nothing inconsistent between devout Christian faith and deep belief in magic. Scripture and natal charts existed in tandem, along with palm-reading diagrams, recipes for potions and instructions for alchemical reactions. Lawrence-Mathers not only shows the bonds between religion and sorcery but examines the sheer beauty of the manuscripts involved, from illumination to illustration.
We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine
By Alissa Wilkinson
Liveright: 272 pages, $30
(March 11)
Did you know that iconic writer Joan Didion wrote the script for “A Star Is Born,” Barbra Streisand’s 1976 star turn? It was an adaptation of Didion’s 1970 novel “Play It as It Lays.” As film critic Wilkinson explains in her book, not only did Didion take advantage of its last gasp for paying work, the Sacramento native and UC Berkeley graduate observed and documented the national transition from print culture to video culture.
The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking
By Leor Zmigrod
Henry Holt & Co:. 304 pages, $30
(March 25)
How do human brains negotiate difference? Dr. Leor Zmigrod, a prize-winning scientist in the field of neurology, explains how ideologies give individual people shortcuts that make things seem easier to understand. Of course, that can also mean buying into conformity and intolerance. Zmigrod suggests that we can change our neural networks and become more open to difference simply by observing our inclinations to go along with or resist authority.
