Books Read March 2026
This Is Not a Novel [reread] & Vanishing Point by David Markson. Books two and three in the so-called Notecard Quartet. Meditative, weirdly incantatory collages of thought and trivia and quotations. A first-person narrator who styles himself in the different books as Reader, Writer, Author and Novelist. Not novels, but somehow not-not novels, they are uniquely seductive page-turners.
Colditz by Ben Macintyre. Another banger from Macintyre, the master of real-life ripping yarns told with empathy and skill.
The Child That Books Built by Francis Spufford [reread]. Is this excellent book the first modern "bibliomemoir"? (This article. doesn't mention anything published before 2003; Spufford's book was published in 2002.) The first time I read it was for university so it was nice to revisit and not have to do silly things like take notes for an essay.
Bear by Marian Engel. Yes, the protagonist of this novel fucks a bear. As in an actual bear, from the forest. If you know this going in you might avoid making a fool of yourself on Goodreads. What's interesting is that Bear isn't in any sense magical realist or fabular. It is a straight-up realist novel with a straight-up realistic bear that is not anthropomorphised or depicted as anything more or less than a big, smelly, perpetually shitting semi-wild animal that a lonely, alienated woman forms a strange (to put it mildly) bond with. It's not saying "go out and fuck a bear" or "it's ok to fuck bears" or even "isn't it great when this character fucks this bear?" Suggested topic for book club discussion: you're literate, you work it out.