march bookmarks

from near-future unease to everyday comfort

March’s reading has been a bit of a melting pot of genres, moving from dystopia to memoirs, with a mix of literary and healing novels along the way. Every month, as I write these bookmark catch-ups, I keep noticing the same common thread. My stack doesn’t have any genre barriers but often revolves around one theme, identity. What it means to be human, what it involves, how we come to understand ourselves and others, and the subtle ways we connect, whether through friendship, food, or other small moments. My reading mood seems to move in one direction: inner worlds over action, reflection over rush.

March started at full throttle with Gliff by Ali Smith, a dystopia in a near-future Britain, so near that it feels like our next step forward, in a world where we are becoming numbers and data files rather than human beings with feelings and individuality. And it ended in softness, with slices of life reads and introspective reflections on one’s purpose.

Even though one book was a miss for me, I truly enjoyed this month’s selection. I’d love to know if you’ve read any of these and what you thought of them.

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march reading menu

• Gliff by Ali Smith (dystopia)

• Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali (classics/romance)

• I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying by Youngmi Mayer (memoir)

• Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash (literary fiction)

• A Thousand Feasts by Nigel Slater (memoir)

• Hot Chocolate on Thursday by Michiko Aoyama (healing novel)

• The Walking Man by Jirō Taniguchi (manga/slice of life)

• The Elsewhere Express by Samantha Sotto Yambao (fantasy)

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Gliff by Ali Smith

Gliff is a northern word, a Scottish word, and it means a lot of things. Gliff is “a short moment, a momentary resemblance, a sudden or chance view. A transient glance, a sudden fright, a faint trace or suggestion, an inkling, a wink of sleep, a slight attack or a touch of illness. A whiff, a puff, a sudden perceptible smell. A sudden passing sensation, either of pain or pleasure. A scare, a shock, a thrill, a sudden violent blow, a wallop. A nonsense word, a misspelling of G L Y P H. A substitute word for any word.”

Gliff is also an abattoir horse freed by two children, Briar and Rose.

Gliff is a weird little book that messed with my head in the best way.

Last year, I attended an event at the Edinburgh Book Festival with Ali Smith, and the talk completely put me under a spell when she mentioned something along the lines of words being amazing things. All we have to do is question them, nudge them, and out comes the most extraordinary history. I found it fascinating that she built a story around a word, around language, in an odd dystopian way, and gave it so much meaning.

Set in a near-future Britain, we follow two young siblings, Briar and Rose, who are on the run after they discover that their home is encircled by a line of red paint that signifies their status is unverifiable.

The story is a bit confusing, unsettling, but oddly relatable. You always get the feeling that something bad will happen to the characters, and it often does. Ali Smith combines philosophy and playfulness while exploring themes of surveillance, technology, and language, as well as critiquing capitalism, authoritarianism, and dehumanisation. I love how she has fun with language here, especially with Rose, who plays with words and gives them her own meaning. It shows how meaning is attached to words only if we choose it. I’m unsure how I feel about Gliff, but it definitely made me feel things and will stay in my mind for a while. And sometimes that’s enough.

Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali (tr. Maureen Freely & Alexander Dawe)

When the book starts, we meet our nameless narrator, who is jobless. A school friend recruits him, and that’s how he is introduced to Raif Efendi, the man who will later fall in love with the Madonna. It’s a little unsettling at first, since Madonna in a Fur Coat is sold to us as a romance, and yet a quarter of the book is not romantic at all, but centred on this encounter and how the two men interact. The new clerk and the enigmatic Raif, who has been in his role for years without any pay rise or growth. He does his job, never takes pride in anything, never gets angry, goes home, returns to work, and repeats the cycle. He seems to go through life without much feeling or emotion, almost like an empty shell. At first, this frustrates our narrator, but then he starts to become obsessed with it, and Raif Efendi becomes like a puzzle to him. He finds him fascinating and wants to solve him, or at least understand him.

Through a chain of events, our narrator gets his hands on Efendi’s diary, and the story turns into the usual synopsis we get of a young Turkish man in 1920s Berlin who becomes obsessed with the self-portrait of a young woman, the Madonna in a Fur Coat.

At first, the story within the story threw me off, because I really liked the exploration of society in the first part. The character study of Raif Efendi that our narrator starts captivated me. I also didn’t find the transition from the present to the past seamless. Something was missing for me, and that feeling stayed with me throughout my reading. I closed the book and let it sit in my head. The next day, I returned to it to review the many, many underlined passages, and suddenly everything clicked.

Madonna in a Fur Coat is about life, how performative it can feel, how sometimes you can feel like an outsider, a spectator in your own life. It’s also about love, obsession, connection, and art, how it brings people closer and gives you hope. This book has a subtle philosophical layer, with questions around meaning, societal alienation, loneliness, the self, and love.

I was, in effect, watching the most beautiful bird in all creation and keeping perfectly still for fear of frightening it away with a sudden movement.

I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying by Youngmi Mayer

This raw and funny memoir explores the author’s life as a biracial person (Korean and White American) and her chaotic childhood, focusing on the intersection of trauma, cultural identity, and humour.

I had never heard of Youngmi Mayer prior to this book, and undeniably, the quirky title drew me in. It refers to the idea of Koreans laughing while crying as a survival and coping mechanism. As a whole, I found this memoir both heartfelt and inspiring, reflecting on mental health and the ways humour is often used, especially by women, to mask deeper emotions. No notes, I enjoyed it.

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

This book has been on everyone’s TBR even before it got published, and of course, I was curious too. I put a hold on it at the library, thinking I would probably get it in a few months, and a week later, it was in my hands. I was the first one to crack it open. I love that feeling.

Sadly, it very much ended there, as I didn’t resonate with the story or the characters.

Madeline Cash’s debut novel is about the chaotic lives of the Flynn family in a small town in America. It follows three daughters dealing with personal crises while their parents navigate an open marriage. The family suddenly becomes entangled in a criminal conspiracy involving a local billionaire. The concept is there, but the execution felt a bit lacking for me. I got the feeling that the author threw together a bunch of ideas, shook them, and put them on the page. It was super wacky, but not in a way I personally vibed with (although that’s just personal preference, many people loved it), and it felt a little on the nose, even predictable at times. I do think, however, that it would make a great film, and that I would prefer it in that format.

Abigail detected, above the stench of fish and oil, that love was in the air.

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A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts by Nigel Slater

What a delight this book was. Once again, I knew nothing about the author, but the title drew me in. A Thousand Feasts is a collection of intimate essays and diary-like entries focusing on small moments of joy found in cooking, gardening, and travel. It doesn’t follow a linear thread, but rather jumps from one snippet of memory to the next, all wrapped in beautifully sensory writing. No matter the time of day, whether I had eaten or not, this book made me hungry, made me smile, and reminded me to appreciate small moments of joy.

A cake will tell you if it’s ready or if it needs longer in the oven. You must listen carefully for a cake can only speak in whispers. A cake cannot shout. Get close and you will hear a soft crackle. Like that from the froth on a freshly poured beer. Your cake is talking to you and you should listen. A silent cake is an overcooked cake.

Hot Chocolate on Thursday by Michiko Aoyama (tr. E. Madison Shimoda)

Hot Chocolate on Thursday is set around a small Tokyo café called Marble Cafe. The novel is made up of 12 little life vignettes of ordinary days and ordinary people, showing the domino effect of human connection and small acts of kindness.

Sometimes that’s all I need. A simple, heartwarming story in which little threads of wisdom intertwine with the words.

‘It’s your usual spot,’ I say. ‘Just being in a place you like can sometimes give you strength.’

The Walking Man by Jirō Taniguchi (tr. Shizuka Shimoyama, Elizabeth Tierman & Kumar Sivasubramanian)

I continued the slice-of-life theme with this manga, which follows an ordinary man who wanders through his neighbourhood, quietly observing everyday moments and finding meaning in small details. Some stories had words, others were carried only by beautiful drawings. It truly feels like a love letter to the everyday. Although I must say the last three stories felt a little disconnected from the previous ones, but as a whole I liked it.

The Elsewhere Express by Samantha Sotto Yambao

Last year, I read Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao (find my review here), and I loved being transported into this Ghibli-esque story. So I was very much looking forward to her new release, The Elsewhere Express, which sounded as magical as Water Moon.

In this book, we follow two main protagonists, Raya, a med student, and Q, a painter slowly losing his eyesight. Both are lost souls who suddenly board an enchanted train designed to help passengers find purpose and peace. It’s not the type of train that you hop on and off once you find your purpose. Instead, you enter this magical train, leave your baggage behind, and live a peaceful life on board. As you can imagine, things are not as they seem, and they are suddenly thrown into a quest to save the train and its passengers from a dangerous, dark stowaway that could destroy everything.

I was amazed by how vivid the descriptions were in Water Moon, and Samantha Sotto Yambao does it once more, transporting me into the train’s coaches, each one as whimsical as the next, where they meet the most interesting passengers along the way. This also has its downside, as it felt almost dizzying, since we jump from one place to the next, and structurally, it felt a bit scattered. It’s the type of story where you need to put your logical mind aside and go along for the (train) ride, as a few things don’t quite make sense.

In similar books, where protagonists are thrown into a fantastic world, they don’t often question things and are just happy to start an adventure. I’m always fascinated by that, because surely, if it were happening to me, I would be a bit more reluctant to trust whatever a stranger tells me. Here, it was more nuanced, especially with Raya, who kept questioning what was told and demanded from her, and who wanted to get back to the real world. It also has that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vibe, exploring how memory, both the good and the bad, shapes us, and how getting rid of it may not lead to a better life.

Overall, I found that The Elsewhere Express perfectly blends whimsical fantasy and emotional themes such as grief, loss, finding purpose, and human connection. I didn’t see the ending coming and would definitely love a ride in this pastel world, but not a one-way ticket.

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March was a month that started with a just-around-the-corner dystopia and landed in the softness of the everyday. I’d call it balance.

What have you been reading lately? And which stories have stayed with you?

Until next time,

Amandine

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