10 March Books for All Your Reading Needs
Updated: Feb. 19, 2019
10 new releases worth adding to your reading list this month.
1. Best Oscar Prep
Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick
The movie adaptation was the hit of awards season, largely due to the double hotness of Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. That said, the subtle, sensitive source material might have something to do with it.
2. Best Canadiana
The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
Davies, who would be 100 this year, wrote three epic small-town trilogies, but the Deptford edition is his masterpiece. It’s a brilliant blend of quaint provincial manners, Jungian psychoanalysis and page-turning suspense (you won’t be able to put it down until you find out who killed Boy Staunton).
3. Most Mythic
Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson
The Jamaican-Canadian fantasy novelist delivers the story of a particularly complicated family: a demi-god father, a siren sister and, our heroine, the mojo-less squib Makeda, who must save them all.
4. Best Monkey Love
A Beautiful Truth by Colin McAdam
Fiction has a long tradition of characters taking in primates as pets, from Curious George to Sunset Boulevard to Rise of the Planet of the Apes. McAdam weaves a sweet tale featuring a childless couple who adopt a chimp from Sierra Leone and raise him in their Vermont home.
5. Best Russian Import
The Tragedy of Mr. Morn by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov spoofs Shakespeare in this previously untranslated play about an unnamed European country ruled by an anonymous king. Have fun acting this one out at dinner parties.
6. Best Bedtime Story for Grownups
My Brother’s Book by Maurice Sendak
The Where the Wild Things Are author died last year, leaving behind one unpublished manuscript. It’s a beautifully illustrated fable describing an Odyssean journey to the underworld in which Guy-a proxy for Sendak-must sacrifice himself to Death (in the guise of a giant polar bear) to save his brother.
7. Best Non-Fiction Debut
The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon
Best known for the lyrical novels Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project, Hemon tackles his own as-fascinating-as-fiction life in this memoir about emigrating from Bosnia to the United States.
8. Most Monumental Read
Ulysses by James Joyce
In honour of St. Patrick’s Day, why not cross one item off your bucket list and finally read the most Irish novel ever written? It covers a single day in the lives of Leopold and Molly Bloom, though it’ll probably take you all year to finish.
9. Best Reason to Keep Journalism Alive
Going Clear by Lawrence Wright
Wright has expanded his 25,000-word New Yorker Scientology exposé into a full-length book that features more scandal, more indoctrination and, of course, more Tom Cruise.
10. Best Fitzgerald Fix
Z by Therese Anne Fowler
Baz Luhrmann’s much-anticipated Great Gatsby movie doesn’t come out for a few months, but you can get your requisite dose of Jazz Age glamour and misguided optimism through this fictional biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fragile wife, Zelda. (She provided the inspiration for Rosemary Hoyt, the unstable heroine of Fitzgerald’s finest novel, Tender Is the Night.)
