What (else) I read in March

A very European spring

Between Sheldon, Zadie, Evelyn, and Barbara, I feel as if I’ve spent the beginning of spring in Oxford.

It is not a wholly unpleasant feeling.

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

I realized that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.

I think of Jane Austen, Nancy Mitford, and Barbara Pym as a set of literary sisters. Nancy is the eldest - full of confidence and razor sharp judgment. Jane is the middle sister, who’s perfected the art of observation and romance. Barbara is the youngest - often forgotten but full of talent and a fair bit of wisdom.

I first read Barbara Pym’s Less than Angels several years ago after stumbling upon this piece in The New York Times. I loved it and couldn’t wait to read Excellent Women, widely considered her best novel. I loved her heroine Mildred Lathbury and the way she sees people’s motivations (and even their faults) so clearly and helps them anyway. Pym shows again that high drama is not required to illustrate human resilience.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

I realized that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.

Another Well-Read Mom selection! I’ve always wanted to read Waugh’s classic (especially relevant after all the Saltburn controversy!) and was thrilled when I saw it on the list of books we would read this year.

I’d also reached such saturation with post WWII Britain over my reading this year that everything was in conversation. The novel begins in Oxford, where I’d just spent a great deal of time with Sheldon Vanauken. A character references Nancy Mitford, who’d I read early this year. I could almost hear Mildred Lathbury’s tutting at the exploits of the Flyte family while I was reading.

It always feels silly to expound on the brilliance of what is widely believed to be a classic of English literature so I will just say the themes of faith, doubt, and grace intertwined with reflections on beauty and society and love were nearly perfect to me. This postWWII era where I have been spending so much of my reading life feels hyper-relevant to our current time. They were also post-pandemic and caught up in global conflicts. Societal structure and the currency of status was undergoing dramatic changes - including the presence of new technologies and slackening standards of decorum. They all seem to be asking - what should go? what should stay? and I find reading the way they (both the characters and authors) struggle with these questions illuminating and comforting.

The Lover by Marguerite Duras

He smiles. Says, Whether people love each one another or not, it’s always terrible.

I joined Kaia Gerber’s Book Club.

This was not what I had on my 2024 bingo card. As a general rule, I dislike the celebrity-laden book club circuit (especially the ones just locking up movie rights #isaidwhatisaid). So, when one of my favorite substacks After School by Casey Lewis mentioned that Kaia was starting a book club, I’ll be honest and say I clicked prepared to sit in snarky judgment of the reading tastes of the model (and child of Cindy Crawford).

Well, I was wrong. Apparently, Kaia takes her reading seriously.

“I started working when I was pretty young, and I always had this insecurity that I didn’t end up going to college, because for my whole life, that was my goal,” she says. “I felt that I wasn’t going to have the education that I wanted and that I desired, so I really started reading a lot just to educate myself.”

And sister has some serious taste. The Overstory. A Year of Magical Thinking (one of my all time favorites). The Stranger.

Ok, I thought. I’ll give it a try. Gerber’s favorite book is The Lover so that’s where I started. It’s an autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras about a young girl in 1930s Indochina and her affair with a man twice her age.

Duras’s writing is thick and disorienting like the heat that permeates the jungle setting of the novel. There are no easy villains or heroes in this novel and the very French orientation to sex might be off-putting to some but I loved it.

In other words, I’ll be reading more of Kaia’s recommendations.

Now, I'm off to a week at the beach with four (yes four) novels in tow.

Let’s see how many I get through!

What is everyone reading over Spring Break?