Every book has something in common with every other book, or does it? When I recap my reading for the month, I try to find connections between what I’ve read so I challenge myself to find a link to the book I read before and the book I’ll read next. Below are the 11 books I read in March and the segues I found:

Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo

Both of these books have a mother who isn’t being truthful about the identity of her child’s father.

Winter by Ali Smith

Both books feature women telling stories in short bursts. In Winter, Charlotte hacks into Art’s Twitter account and sends fake messages to the world and in this collection of flash fiction, the character Lydia Davis is also sharing her thoughts in snippets.

Can’t and Won’t: Stories by Lydia Davis

Some of these stories show how the fictional Lydia Davis rejects the perspective or the reality that the world projects – like when she writes letters to companies challenging their claims, and showing how she can prove what she thinks instead, it’s like her saying I’m not blind. Which contrasts with these characters who have been blinded and so have to accept whatever society says “…blindness is to live in a world where all hope is gone” p.209  whereas Lydia always has hope.

Blindness by Jose Saramago

Both of these are translated works of fiction – Blindness from Portuguese and Lost Child from Italian.

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

Both of these have a political revolution brewing in the background of personal relationships. Ferrante writes about the Italian experience of fascism during the early 1980s and Roy writes about Marxism and a workers’ protest in 1969.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Both of these plots are based on a child character dying and how the death impacts the other people around them.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Both of these include a fictional depiction of a real president – one of President Lincoln in the US and one of President Indira Gandhi in India

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Both of these are about children examining their parents choices and while they are intent on repeating their parents’ mistakes, finding themselves unable to escape some of the generational curses.

Surrender My Heart by L G O’Connor

Both of these have main characters that are functional alcoholics. In Surrender, it’s John the police officer who goes right up to the legal limit before he drives. In LaRose, it’s Landreaux and Romeo and many other Indians who use alcohol and drugs to deal with their problems but whose abuse often causes more problems than it helps.

LaRose by Louise Erdrich

Both of these novels are written to encompass the local language – LaRose has the Ojibwe language and Brief History includes lots of Jamaican dialect.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

And of course Brief History and Stay With Me are both set in third world countries around the time of government elections and discuss some of the corruption that exists in that political world.

Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo

 

Click to watch my March recap on Youtube