Because I am a person who derives energy and motivation from inventing goals and assigning them to myself as homework, January is a month in which I tend to be wildly energetic. Everyone else is lying in bed huddled up against the cold as they try to recover from the holiday season, while I charge around like the Energizer Bunny doing so many tasks it gives my mother a headache to hear about1 and being really, truly, genuinely annoying to my friends. But they have to deal with it because they know that the next time they want to make goals, I will be their enthusiastic goals consultant. On the second Monday of January (the 10th), I was updating my reading spreadsheet and realized that I had read twelve books thus far in the month, so then I was like “JANUARY JENNY CAN READ ONE BOOK PER DAY THIS WHOLE ENTIRE MONTH. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOALS,” and now January is over and I have read one book for every day in the whole entire month of January.
There was no reason for me to do this. I just felt like attaining an arbitrary goal that made me feel clever. Do I still have more than 30 books checked out from the library? Yes. Do I have multiple ARCs that I’m supposed to be reading and reviewing and they’ve piled up and I’m starting to worry I’ll never catch up? Yes. But January Jenny read one book per day this entire month. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOALS. So here comes a lightning round of all the books I read in January.
There are thirty-one of them.
I’m a goals genius.
Week One
Noor, Nnedi Okorafor – A heavily augmented woman called AO is attacked in the marketplace, after which — she is extremely strong due to all the augmentations — she goes on the run across Nigeria with a Fulani herdsman she meets. A whole world of surveillance follows.
Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, Tamsyn Muir – What a weirdo Tamsyn Muir is. I say it with love! Princess Floralinda is the story of a princess imprisoned in, yep, a forty-flight tower. On every flight there is a different monster, and at the bottom there is a dragon, and none of the princes make it very far. With the help of a horrible little fairy, Floralinda slowly begins to make her way downward. But as she’s changing the state of things in the tower, she changes the state of things in herself as well.
Where the Children Take Us, Zain Asher – This was a Booklist read! It’s Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sister’s memoir. Did you know poor Chiwetel Ejiofor was in a horrible accident with his father when he was a kid? He and his dad were on a road trip around Nigeria to help Ejiofor connect with his heritage, and there was a car accident, and the dad died and the son was very badly injured; and anyway, then Zain Asher’s mum raised them all by herself while running a pharmacy in London. The book’s a love letter to Asher’s mother, although I am not personally a huge fan of memoirs.
The Thief on a Winged Horse, Kate Mascarenhas – I got this for Christmas! The author of The Psychology of Time Travel, which I was so in love with, wrote another book that only (curses!) got published in the UK and not in the US. It’s about a dysfunctional family that makes magic dolls, a young dollmaker who comes to town and insists on joining them, and a daughter of the family who wants to learn her family’s dollmaking secrets too, despite family traditions that reserve those secrets only to the men. It’s a slightly chillier book than The Psychology of Time Travel, but fascinating and enjoyable anyway.
Silence Is a Sense, Layla Alammar – A sort of literary Rear Window, from the point of view of a Syrian refugee with post-traumatic mutism. From her window in a council flat, she watches her neighbors and writes essays, anonymously, about refugees and Muslim identity. When her local mosque is the victim of a vicious attack of vandalism, she’s drawn further into the community. The writing in this was gorgeous, although the ending was maybe just a little pat.
Just Last Night, Mhairi McFarlane – My first time out with Mhairi McFarlane! Recommended by my lovely pal Katie, McFarlane’s a Scottish author who writes lovely books about friendship and romance. Just Last Night follows Eve and her group of friends in the aftermath of one of their deaths. As Eve grapples with the loss of Susie, she’s also forced to reckon with her feelings about Ed — which everyone in the group has known about for years. The romance in this one is slightly back-burnered, and I’d more call it women’s fiction, much as I hate the term?, because it’s really more about Eve’s journey of self-acceptance.
The Dating Playbook, Farrah Rochon – I read this out of order! Which is a shame, because the inciting incident of the series sounds delightful: Three different women discover they’re dating the same man. They ditch the man and become the best of friends, and each of the books in the series focuses on the romance of one of them. The Dating Playbook follows Taylor Powell, a personal trainer who gets her big break when NFL player Jamar Dixon hires her to get him in shape to rejoin the league after a major injury. It’s funny and sweet and contains fake dating: everything you want in a romance novel! I can’t wait to read the others in the series!
The Perishing, Natashia Deon – This one’s a literary fantasy novel about a girl who shows up in 1930s Los Angeles with no memory of how she got there or who she was before. She heals with inhuman speed and — later on — realizes that she seems to possess memories from former lives. Lou’s story, which is vivid in its depiction of the time and place, is interspersed with glimpses of a woman called Sarah in the 2100s, who reflects on her past relationships and the generations-long struggle for equality. The novel’s light on speculative elements and is definitely more on the literary fiction side of things, which suits its plotting (uneven), characterization (wonderful), and writing (gorgeous).
Week Two
Assembly, Natasha Brown – A short novel about refusal.
The Days of Afrekete, Asali Solomon – I read and enjoyed Solomon’s first novel, so I thought I’d pick this one up! It was fine though perhaps not quite my thing. It’s a novel that alternates chapters between a rather fraught dinner party (delicious) and the protagonist’s college career and tumultuous relationship with one of her exes. Both bits were interesting, but I’d actually have loved it to be just a dinner party book. Y’all know my feelings on bottle episodes!
Diary of a Provincial Lady, EM Delafield – A very long time ago, all the cool bloggers were reading this. It is perhaps not surprising that it took me like ten years to get to it. I found it tiresome when I started, but then I realized that the trick was to read it as it was written — in brief installments, like a newspaper column. Once I caught wise and started reading it like that, a few entries at a time, I quite enjoyed it. Not to reread, but it was an amusing entertainment of an evening.
Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville, Akash Kapur – Only once ever have I been so intrigued by the book featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review that I’ve read that review in its entirety, the front page bit and the rest of it that you have to skip to, before reading the rest of the book review. This is because I am fascinated by cults. Auroville wasn’t a cult, but it was, at least, cult-adjacent. Kapur and his wife both grew up in Auroville, and his wife’s parents died there under troubling circumstances. Better to Have Gone tells the story of the founding of this intentional community outside of Pondicherry in India and the deaths of the two people who raised his wife. (Whiskey Jenny and I went to Pondicherry when we were in India, but not to Auroville. I did buy a comforter for my bed, though, that was made in Auroville!)
The Road Trip, Beth O’Leary – Remember how I said a minute ago that I love bottle episodes? Beth O’Leary’s The Road Trip is one, and it was great. Addie and her sister and a stranger who’s hitching a ride with them are on their way to their friend’s wedding when she’s in a car crash with her ex-boyfriend Dylan and his horrible posh friend Marcus. They all pile into the car to go to the wedding (it’s a bank holiday weekend, so! no trains!), and everyone is mad at everyone, and I, obviously, loved it. Easily my favorite of Beth O’Leary’s books thus far. Par for the course with her, it deals with some heavy issues, including alcoholism and sexual assault. But also: ROAD TRIP.
Peter Cabot Gets Lost, Cat Sebastian – I mean! As I was already on the road trip theme! It just made good sense to read Cat Sebastian’s latest, Peter Cabot Gets Lost, in which a rich queer Cabot boy goes on a road trip with a (not rich) former classmate he doesn’t have a crush on. As they make their way across America, they’re forced to reassess their initial ideas about each other and also sometimes there is only one bed. Great stuff. Classic. It’s a very very soft book, as Cat Sebastian’s books always are these days, mainly comprising conversations and sex and occasional stops to check out weird Americana. Also, is it a journey to California or a journey to self-acceptance? YOU DECIDE.
Our Wild Farming Life, Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer – Another memoir for Booklist! This one about farming. My God, farming sounds hard; equally, I bet James Herriot would have liked these two women and their animals. Food for thought.
A Lesson in Vengeance, Victoria Lee – omg so fun. This is the lesbian witch YA dark academia book you’ve been dreaming of. It’s got similar vibes to Hannah Abigail Clarke’s The Scapegracers, except for it’s more focused on academia — our protagonist, Felicity Darrow (they all have names like this), is studying but pretending she’s not studying a bunch of dead witches who once attended her school. She’s also grieving her girlfriend’s death the previous year, a death in which Felicity and witchcraft may or may not have been complicit. Ellis Haley, for her part, wants to write a book about the dead girls, for which she needs to research how to get away with murder. Setting aside the question of whether anything in this book makes sense, it was fucking fun as hell and I will certainly read more by this author.
The Eternal Audience of One, Rémy Ngamije – I loved this! It’s about a Rwandan Namibian guy and his family and his friends. Actually I have a pretty hard time describing what it’s about! But what I will say is that it made me laugh out loud several times, and I am n o t a person who typically laughs out loud at books. Also, love to see Namibia getting its flowers for welcoming refugees from other parts of Africa that were experiencing unrest in the late twentieth century. What a great country.
Week Three
Subtle Blood, KJ Charles – This is the third in a romance series I generally liked but also felt kind of weird about because it’s set in England between the wars, and the Big Bad is a giant international conspiracy of all-knowing people who are highly placed in government and they want to hoard all the wealth. JUST FELT WEIRD. Anyway, Subtle Blood was my favorite in the series because there is the least amount of the giant international conspiracy, and moreover, Kim’s really excellent former fiancee shows back up and I love her.
The Flatshare, Beth O’Leary – Delighted by my success with The Road Trip, I tried the final Beth O’Leary book I hadn’t read yet, so I read The Flatshare. I loved it more than The Switch but less than The Road Trip, and I was very touched by the friendship between Tiffy and Richie.
Mr. Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater – After my absolute adoration of the Raven Cycle, the first book in Maggie Stiefvater’s new Dreamers Trilogy kinda left me cold. Mr. Impossible is just a way way way better book (it contains the following sentence, which I loved: “She was dressed in a cocktail dress that said, Look at me, and also said, Now that you’re looking, did you notice I think you’re stupid? It was a good dress.“), but I still did not feel emotionally connected to it. Everyone is mad at everyone else! The only bits where I felt emotionally connected to the book were when two characters liked each other, so it was pretty much just when Matthew was helping out Jordan and they were bonding. I’ll read the third book though!
A Lot Like Adios, Alexis Daria – I maybe loved this a scootch less than Daria’s prior book, mainly because the previous one was about a telenovela and that’s my jam. This one was still really fun though. It’s also a solid entrant in the “people with jobs” genre, so there was a lot of stuff about the central couple achieving professional satisfaction. I love that shit.
The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales, Yoon Ha Lee – I am not 100% convinced that I’m smart enough for flash fiction. That’s all, that’s the review.
Lore Olympus, vol 1, Rachel Smythe – Maybe Lore Olympus was too hyped up for me to love it and/or maybe I needed to have read further into it. As I was reading it, I kinda had no idea why the characters were Greek gods at all? Readers please weigh in: Should I press on? Does it take a little while to form a true emotional connection to this book and these characters?
Once More Upon a Time, Rokshani Chokshi – I really should have paired this with Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, as they are both novella-length twists on fairy tales. This is about a couple who were once in love, but because of magical shenanigans, they no longer are. In order to get the life they want, as non-married not-in-love people, they have to go on a road trip to do a favor for a witch. You’ll never guess what happens over the course of the road trip! Never ever once will you ever guess!
Week Four
School Days, Patrick Chamoiseau, trans. Linda Coverdale – Look at meeeee I picked up a book while browsingggggg at the libraryyyyyy! I do this all the time, but usually only from the new book shelves. Doing it from the old book shelves felt very smart of me. I have been meaning to read something by Patrick Chamoiseau for ages, and this story about a young boy attending an extremely colonial Martinique school that does all sorts of colonial things. It evoked a really vivid sense of place, despite being overall way too slow-paced for me.
Don’t You Forget about Me, Mhairi McFarlane – Another repeat author in January! I liked this one more than Just Last Night, because the romance was more central, plus there was a pub. It weirdly also had a lot of similarities to The Road Trip. Reading synergy? It’s about a woman leaving an emotionally abusive relationship, and she gets a job in a pub that turns out to be owned by her first love. Great stuff. Plus there is a dog.
Radha and Jai’s Recipe for Romance, Nisha Sharma – I love this type of YA romance, but this specific one didn’t work for me. The central characters were constantly blowing up at, lying to, or misunderstanding each other, so it didn’t feel like a satisfying or coherent relationship arc. I loved all the stuff about cooking and dance though!
Deaf Utopia: A Memoir — and a Love Letter to a Way of Life, Nyle DiMarco with Robert Siebert – Why am I suddenly reading so many memoirs for Booklist? I was not familiar with Nyle DiMarco, but reading the book caused me to get to watch a bunch of quite cool performances on Dancing with the Stars. Also I love that he represented ASL conversations with the structure and syntax of ASL. I haven’t seen that before!
Future Feeling, Joss Lake – For such an allegorical story (I don’t like allegories) with at least two daddy-kink-heavy sex scenes (I am from the South, where adults call their fathers Daddy, so therefore I cannot with it as a sexual thing), Future Feeling was unexpectedly enjoyable for me. It was funny and heartfelt, and also I loved the escapist fantasy of a global network of trans minders looking out for all trans people.
L.A. Weather, Maria Amparo Escandon – I am actually not sure why this has been getting such a huge marketing push! It’s enjoyable, but I expected there to be more there there, somehow. One thing I did love was the representation of Jewish/Catholic syncretism within this Mexican American family. Apart from that, it’s a perfectly fine family novel! It’s everywhere because publicity decisions were made that it should be everywhere!
The Annual Migration of Clouds, Premee Mohamed – OH how skin-crawly this book made me, in a good way! It’s set in a post-everything-disaster world, and its protagonist, Reid, gets an acceptance letter from a university, her ticket out of the life that keeps her and her family and everyone she knows working flat out to just barely get by. Her mother doesn’t believe the university is even real, but Reid is determined to take her chance at a better life. The truly special thing about this book, though, is Mohamed’s depiction of the Cad, an infection that lives under the skin of Reid and her mother and numerous others, and it might be semi-sentient. The Annual Migration of Clouds is about hope and choice in the most fascinating ways, a very very strong book to end the month on.
WHEW that was a lot of books. I feel like that song “88 Lines about 44 Women.” How was your January?
- for real ↩