March 2026 Reads—Doris Lessing, Han Kang, Silvia Federici And More

I'm back home after a month's holiday. Well, almost a month. Apparently, a single woman on vacation for a month, who is not a social media influencer, is a red flag with the immigration officer.😄

What did I read during my vacation?

These:

1. Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women by Silvia Federici

I was looking for Caliban and the Witch and found this instead. Gave it a go. It is on similar themes anyway.

"..because 'globalization' is a process of political recolonization intended to give capital uncontested control over the world's natural wealth and human labor, and this cannot be achieved without attacking women, who are directly responsible for the reproduction of their communities.

The book serves as a reminder that reconstructing the memory of the past is crucial to the struggles of the present.

2. When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy

A semi-autobiographical novel. Involves domestic violence and sexual abuse. Ugh!

It makes me mad angry to think many women are suffering in silence, often encouraged by family and social expectations to "make the marriage work".

"People use politeness as a way of mutually permitted deception in order to help each other save face."

3. My Seditious Heart by Arundhati Roy

 I first read My Seditious Heart in June last year. I knew I had to reread it. Not because it was a pleasant read. Far from it. 

It is a collection of nonfiction works, speeches, and essays written over a period of twenty years, about nuclear weapons, dams, imperialism, colonisation, capitalism, militarism, terrorist strikes, government-backed massacres, and the rise of Hindu nationalism. 

4. Greek Lessons by Han Kang

Reading this during my vacation felt just right. Not the story or the theme, but the prose.

"Have you tried walking in the morning half-light? The morning hours when you move through the cold air, one foot in front of the other, with a real sense of just how warm and tender the human body is. The morning hours when a blue-tinged light seeps from the bodies of all material things, penetrating your newly sleepshorn eyes, miraculous."

5. The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

I wanted to read a book set in Vietnam or by a Vietnamese author while travelling in the country. This was perfect. This is gonna make you cry.

"If I had a wish, I would want nothing fancy, just a normal day, when all of us could be together as a family; a day where we could just cook, eat, talk, and laugh."

Simple things many of us take for granted are what some people wish for.

And this novel has one of the cutest love stories ever. :)

6. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Have you seen the cover of this book? I be reading the book like the woman in the cover, sitting like that, with that expression. Yeah, something like that. I have a feeling other women read this book like that too.

The book was a torture, specially towards the end. I was afraid I was going mad along with the protagonist. But I had to read it.

About the book, the author wrote "any kind of singlemindedness, narrowness, obsession, was bound to lead to mental disorder, if not madness." 

I also read two time travel stories-Tourmalin's Time Cheques and The Meaning That You Choose. The first one was fun. The second, I started to enjoy but it ended abruptly. Too short.