March Preview

Hi All, we’ve made it to March! Does it feel like spring where you are? Or are you still under a layer of snow? We had some snow last week but now it’s forecasted to be in the 50s this week … so it looks like a massive melt is already on. The only trouble is mud season is not that glamorous. The dogs paws constantly have to be toweled off whenever they come in from being outside, but at least it’s one step closer to spring. Meanwhile over the weekend I was busy officiating the U12 provincial indoor tennis tournament here, so I’m a bit late posting my March Preview. But it was a good event and the kids behaved and played plenty of tennis.

Of course, my mind is also on all that is happening in the Middle East. War is a scary, dangerous thing and I don’t think it should be up to any one person or executive branch to decide on waging a major conflict. I thought that’s what Congress was for. Who knows what will happen, but I hope that it won’t turn into a lengthy expanding awful dreadful thing. Don’t you miss the good old days when it was just the Olympics?

Let’s turn to books and new releases for a brief diversion. March has much on the horizon including new fiction from such notable authors as Tana French, Colm Toibin (stories), Yann Martel, Louise Erdrich (stories), Elizabeth Berg, Mieko Kawakami, M.L. Stedman, and Cecile Pin among others.

You can see Tina’s good review of Cecile Pin’s novel Celestial Lights (due out March 24) here — about a man who becomes an astronaut and reflects back on his life. And I read an advanced copy of Stedman’s novel A Far-Flung Life (out on March 3), which was an absorbing — albeit grim — family epic set in 1958 on a remote sheep station in Western Australia. After tragedy strikes the family, an incident follows that turns into a dark secret that has ramifications for all. It plays out in somber kind of ways.

Other novels I’m looking at this month include Woody Brown’s debut Upward Bound (due out March 31) about the interlocking lives of residents and workers at a care facility for autistic and other disabled adults in Southern California. Each chapter tells a member’s story that draws you in.

I’m not exactly sure why this book appeals to me right now but from all the praise it’s received it sounds like quite a moving and illuminating portrait of a community often overlooked. The author — who apparently was the first nonspeaking autistic graduate of UCLA — is said to capture the humanity of his characters in insightful, funny, and tender ways. I’ll be checking it out.

Next up I can’t decide between Karan Mahajan’s novel The Complex (due out March 10) and Frances Crawford’s gritty crime novel A Bad Bad Place (out March 3). The Complex is about a prominent family from Delhi who amidst political upheaval in India are constantly at odds with one another. It looks to be a weighty novel with a large cast of various dispersed family members from an author I’ve liked before from his 2016 novel The Association of Small Bombs.

While A Bad Bad Place is said to be a coming-of-age novel about “a young working-class girl in 1979 Glasgow who happens upon the body of a murdered woman—and must face an insular community desperate for answers, as well as herself.” It’s said to be an exciting debut from a new voice in crime fiction, so I’ll be looking at that as well.

There’s also Tara Menon’s debut novel Under Water (due out March 17) about a woman’s attempts to move on after surviving the 2004 tsunami in Thailand … just as she experiences Hurricane Sandy bearing down on New York City in 2012. It’s a story said to involve a close friendship with a person the woman grew up with in Thailand and the natural world they explored together there.

Author Katie Kitamura says it’s: “A novel of remarkable delicacy and power … about grief, friendship, home, and longing.” The cover is beautiful too, so what are we waiting for. Apparently the author Tara Menon grew up in Singapore and now teaches English at Harvard University.

On the screen in March, Nicole Kidman takes on the role of forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta in the eight-part TV series Scarpetta (on Prime, starting March 11), which is based on the crime novels by Patricia Cornwell. In the series, Scarpetta juggles her complicated relationship with her sister Dorothy (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) while trying to catch a killer. I remember when Cornwell started writing these crime books set in Virginia (her first being Portmortem in 1990) … and I moved there in 1993. They were sort of scary or chilling — Scarpetta’s crime cases, but I haven’t read one in many years.

Then the Academy Awards are on March 15, if you plan to watch any of the nominees. We saw the ping-pong movie Marty Supreme with Timothy Chalamet, which was a bit weird, but I sort of want to see the movie Hamnet. Though the big movie of the month is Project Hail Mary (coming out March 20) based on the novel by Andy Weir, starring Ryan Gosling as science teacher Ryland Grace who wakes up alone on a spaceship light-years from Earth. He’s on a mission to save the planet — but will he be able to do it?

Leave it to Canadian Ryan Gosling to try, lol. The great German actress Sandra Huller will play his superior in the movie and the head of the Hail Mary project. I still haven’t gotten around to the novel, which everyone has really liked, but the movie should be a winner too.

Also for those reading the Alexandre Dumas classic The Count of Monte Cristo, the eight-part TV series will begin March 22 on PBS. (It was originally released in Europe in Dec. 2024 but now it’s finally here.) This time actor Sam Claflin stars as Edmund Dantes who is wrongly jailed, and Jeremy Irons plays Abbé Faria, his mentor in prison.

Apparently this famous and popular classic has seen at least 15 TV and movie productions over the past century. I remember as a kid loving the 1975 movie version with Richard Chamberlain, who I think will always be the real Edmond to me, lol.

Other TV series to look for this month include: Season 5 of For All Mankind (on AppleTV+ starting March 27) and a sort of funny one called Bait (on Prime, March 25) about a struggling actor played by Riz Ahmed who learns shockingly that he’s being considered for the role of the next James Bond, which lands him with a full-blown existential crisis and conspiracy at the same time.

Also there’s the four-part TV series The Lady (on BritBox, March 18) that tells the story — based on true events — of Jane Andrews who came from humble beginnings to work as a dresser for the Royal family, only to get caught up in a murder trial that ended her fairy tale dreams. If that’s too dishy for you, you can always watch the three-part documentary on naturalist Henry David Thoreau starting March 30 on PBS.

Lastly in music for March, there’s new albums by such notables as Harry Styles, Morrissey, James Blake, the Black Crows, Kim Gordon, The New Pornographers, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, David Gray, and Melissa Etheridge among others. I like several of these artists, but the bluesy soulful voice of Susan Tedeschi is tough to beat. So I’ll pick the band’s new album Future Soul out March 20. Here’s the single Who Am I performed live from Red Rocks and the song I Got You as well.

That’s all for now. What about you — which new releases are you looking forward to this month?