March was very slim in reading but that was to be expected.
I spent a week travelling between family members and a few days sightseeing in Lyon in France. I have long learned that I do not read when I travel, not as much as I'd like anyway. I pack books, full of hope that this time will be different but it never is. I was too busy eking out every moment with my family or lying horizontal on various sofas to rest as conversations carried on around me.
There was the week before travel and the week after. Last minute preparations, gifts purchased late and needing collection. Stress grew and my mind was stuck on the one mantra to rest to rest to rest. I didn't want a repeat of my previous holiday in which I mostly spent time unwell. On my return there was all the unpacking, the laundry, the adjusting back to work and my partner falling ill.
Still, I managed to read before, after, and in small cracks in between the frenzy of travel and holiday.
I started the month with (you probably guessed it), a Maigret story. A pattern emerges this year in which I read one Maigret story as the new month kicks in. A marker of time, a reset in my reading, a small pleasure savoured for as long as I can. March story was Maigret et la Jeune Morte, a slow story in which the life and personality of the victim gradually unfolds as Maigret finds crumbs of information about the otherwise unnamed victim.
After this, I opened the pages of Ice Rivers A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness and Humanity by Jemma Wadham. My bookmark remains at the end of chapter one. I wanted to continue my exploration of cold landscapes but soon gave up as the pages filled with scientific data and explanation. It is not that I do not enjoy those but simply that my brain was not able to cope with such writing at the time. As April settles and I find the rhythm of the month, I am hoping to return to the book.
Post travel, I returned to the medieval literature challenge with Lais of Marie de France. A short book filled with stories of courtly love, I started it and finished it quickly, delighting in the somewhat absurd behaviours of knights and their ladies as seen with today perception of love.
Shortly after turning the last page of Lais, I charged my eReader and booted Matrix by Lauren Groff, a book that creates a life for Marie de France, an author about which we know nothing but the name. I am still in the midst of its pages and so far I am enjoying it. The prose is thick with life and rich in the details of life. Set in the Middle Ages and inventing a life based on very little, I enjoy how Lauren Groff ends up talking to us about women and their experiences of the world. The medieval setting sometimes feels incidental, closer to an imagined period than a real historical period. I do not mind this though. I don't think the book claims to be historically correct. It cannot be when all but the name of its main character and Eleanor of Aquitaine is made up.
April has kicked in as I write this and my calendar is wide open save for a long week-end camping towards the end of the month which I am hoping will mean a long week-end of lazing about and reading. In the meantime, I have started my research in earnest about the next book for the medieval literature challenge, Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion by Chrétien de Troyes, a book I am hoping to start over the upcoming week-end.