Books I read in March. Weirdly plowed through a bunch of nature/natural history books, all of them weirdly referencing each other in surprising ways. Rachel Carson name dropped in the Svensson & Meiburgs book, the Sargasso sea popping up in Carson and Meiburg’s while being the star of Svensson’s. All of them pointing me to W.H. Hudson which I will address this month. Was he gay? No, of course not says history, he married a much older woman, his land lady, and they were estranged for a majority of their marriage, and remained on good terms as pen pals, which is of course, very normal for heteros to do. In so many of the excerpts from his journals and books in Meiburg’s book an urgent, quite blip on the gaydar goes off. I know these sentiments, this alienation, this resignation. I ask Levi, who recommended The Book of Eels and is also reading Meiburg: “oh, same vibe for sure.” Who knows!

Several People are Typing was the surprise darling this month — I think I discovered it on a booklist for fans of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. A very fun, very wild, but very thoughtful manic meditation on existence, the body, and modern life. I found myself getting surprisingly choked up towards the end: somewhere between the actual sentiments being conveyed and the marvel of a book like this getting made, the achievement; something got to me. Loved it.