I just finished March by Geraldine Brooks. I'd read her splendid Year of Wonders so knew I wouldn't be disappointed. It's a fictional account of Mr. March, the father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Brooks takes us to the first year of the Civil War and uses words to color way outside the lines of any glorified perceptions of war. Reviewers have likened March to Crane's Red Badge of Courage, which coincidentally I reread last summer.

Yesterday I picked up The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. It's a hefty book with 543 pages and an additional 75 pages of notes. Good thing I'm doing weight training! I was hooked with the first sentence. It's that good. I know it'll be a nonfiction page-turner like Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time I recently read. I find it interesting that these two books flesh out a forgotten or ignored period in our history.