Jo Walton’s Reading List: March 2026 - Reactor

March was an excellent month that started in Florence, doing some tweaking and revision of my novel (Sunlit Uplands, coming next year from Tor) and seeing the spring begin. Then I came to Chicago, where I still am, which is alternately winter and spring as if it’s rolling dice. I read just seven books, and some of them were amazing.

Malafrena — Ursula K. Le Guin (1979)
This is a very strange book. It’s about a young man in an imaginary Eastern European country, Orsinia, who goes to the capital to try to make a better world, and… then things happen that are very like things in an Eastern European novel, like those by Miklós Bánffy, or even Milan Kundera, but very unlike things that happen in SF or most historical novels. They do not have the revolution. They do not make the new life. Itale is a wonderful character and somehow the book isn’t depressing even when it is. I love it. But I don’t quite understand it and what Le Guin was doing with it and how it works. It’s full of very specific time and place that feels absolutely real, as if I read a book set in the 1820s and I could go there now and take a slightly run-down and overcrowded train to those locations. I don’t generally have any difficulty telling what’s set in the real world and what’s in a secondary world, because this is a thing that fiction does by register, and Malafrena is in the register of the real world, so surely that lake is there, those mountains, and the city of Krasnoy away over the plains.

A Model World and Other Stories — Michael Chabon (1991)
Mainstream short stories, all of them very well written, all of them kind of depressing meditations on the futility of life and the impossibility of communication. It’s hard to say whether or not I enjoyed it, because I really enjoyed a lot of the sentences and paragraphs, the characters were extremely vivid and memorable, and there’s no question it was good, but the more I think about it the less I feel I enjoyed it. Chabon is a dynamite writer, but mainstream lit isn’t a genre I like very much.

Inventing the Enemy — Umberto Eco (2011)
A collection of essays about literature, politics, the world, things Eco likes, ideas—this was a lot of fun and made me feel fond of him. Most of them were originally talks given in various places, and would have very much worked in that form.

The Tall Stranger — D.E. Stevenson (1957)
I do like Stevenson. Her books are gentle and insightful and relaxing in a good way. This one is about two girls sharing a flat in London, getting you used to one of them and then switching abruptly to follow the other one. It has an actual villain, and an aunt in the country, and work/life balance, and flowers, and I found the heroine’s dilemma interesting. This is neither a genre romance (though you won’t be surprised to hear that both girls find love in the course of the book) nor a genre mystery, but it has some things in common with both of them. Inheritance plays a large part. I liked it, and I enjoyed reading it.

Buried Heart — Kate Elliott (2017)
Third and final in the Court of Fives series, don’t start here. YA fantasy, and I think I’d describe it as post-colonial YA fantasy. The magic is well-thought-through and integrated into the society, the war and politics and slavery are more realistic than you normally see in this kind of book, and the resolution of all the plots came together very well, as you’d expect from Elliott. If you want to try Elliott and you’re a little intimidated by the length and size of many of her books, I recommend this series. They’re short and good and they have much of what makes her a really interesting writer who is always worth reading. She’s great at worldbuilding, and this is an exciting, fun story of two cultures with the colonized one throwing off the yoke of the colonizers, told from the point of view of a girl who is of mixed heritage.

In This House of Brede — Rumer Godden (1969)
Re-read, and I’ve written about it before. I just felt like reading it. This is a book about nuns, a small genre, but one I always like. Godden is one of the great underrated female authors of the twentieth century, and this book is one of her best. It centers on a woman who goes from a successful career as a civil servant to becoming a contemplative Benedictine nun, but it’s really the story of the whole convent over years. It’s full of details of how they live, why they become nuns, what nuns do all day, and it’s also a character study of the people, who all feel absolutely real. I love this book and have loved it for decades. The kind of SF readers who enjoy entering into the strangeness of other cultures and alien worlds might find this worth their while.

Less — Andrew Sean Greer (2017)
This is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and I read it because I was thinking about the Chabon and what litfic is as a genre. I will have more thoughts about this at greater length later. Meanwhile this is the story of a novelist going around the world, and you’d think I’d like that, wouldn’t you? But it’s a very zero-sum world that he goes around, cautiously avoiding connection and communication. Well written. Great characters. Bits of it are funny sometimes. On the whole I hated it.

Books I read and recommended in earlier months that are out now and available for you to enjoy: Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch and John Chu’s The Subtle Art of Folding Space. They’re both great, don’t miss them. And best of the lot, Cameron Reed’s What We Are Seeking, one of my very favourite books I read last year, the kind of book you never want to stop reading. Avoid spoilers, just plunge in and enjoy.