January books

I have a problem.

I’ve gotten some comments about my book lists from people who think I’m judging them for not reading enough, or that I’m showing off how fast I read — I’d actually like to read more slowly, but I just can’t make myself do it. This is more about them than me, but I’m thin-skinned and it has made me reconsider sharing them. But then I think about how much fun these lists are for me to read, and how much I enjoy reading, and talking/writing about reading, etc., and I’ve decided to keep doing them.

That said, this month’s tally is ridiculous. Keep in mind that I only had one day of work until January 8th, and also, January is 60 days long. (Look it up, it's true!) Also, I added audiobooks into my routine this month, which gave me more opportunities to inhale words.

This year’s tracking mechanism is also ridiculous - I got an incredibly detailed spreadsheet as a Patreon perk. I’m using it in a more minimalist fashion, along with StoryGraph, but now I can track things like how much using the library has saved me ($478.87, which by book math means I can now purchase $478.87 of books! 😁). This year, I’m also experimenting with adding a star rating, from one to five, in full star increments. These are ratings of my personal experience, not an objective measure of the book’s “worth.”

For this list, I’ve annotated the four and five star reads.

1. Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke - four stars
   This was a really beautiful graphic exploration of loneliness, particularly American loneliness. We have a new librarian at our biomedical library who is an expert in graphic medicine and building a collection, so my copy will be going to that collection.

2. The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami - two stars

3. Company by Shannon Sanders - four stars

4. Death of the Great Man by Peter D. Kramer - two stars

5. The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland - five stars
   This is a really fantastic memoir/narrative nonfiction work about blindness, from an author who has been growing blind since his teen years.

6. A Day in the Light of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall - three stars

7. Razorblade Tears by S. A. Crosby - three stars

8. The People Who Report More Stress by Alejandro Varela - three stars

9. The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea - three stars

10. Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano - three stars

11. All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky - three stars

12. Holler, Child: Stories by LaToya Watkins - three stars

13. Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman (audio) - three stars

14. The Years by Annie Ernaux - four stars

    I really liked the structure of this and want to read more Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize in 2022. There are so many references to French history that mostly went over my head.

15. Erasure by Percival Everett - five stars
    This is such a complex book, including within its covers an academic article and a whole other book. There are also dialogs between historical figures. Some of it went over my head, but it was such a great satire of the publishing industry in particular and American society in general. I had a chance to sit in on a class with the author yesterday and had the opportunity to ask him some of the backstory about writing the book, which was an amazing experience. This was also the pick for the January Stacks book club.

16. Y/N by Esther Yi - four stars
    A really weird story about a woman who suddenly becomes obsessed with a K-pop star and writes really weird fan fiction. In this context, Y/N means “your name,” not “yes no,” and it was hard for me to keep that in mind. Weird. I like weird.

17. Happiness Falls by Angie Kim - three stars

18. Biography of X by Catherine Lacey - five stars
    Have I mentioned I like weird?

19. Big Swiss by Jen Beagin - three stars

20. The New Naturals by Gabriel Bump - three stars

21. Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman - three stars

22. King: A Life by Jonathan Eig (audio) - four stars
    This was a 22 hour commitment on audio but I thought it was a really good biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

23. The Trees by Percival Everett - five stars

    Parts of this novel about lynching are deeply funny, which is a weird thing to write. When I saw Everett talk a few days ago, he called himself “pathologically ironic” and that comes through in this book. The ending of this book is one of the best I’ve encountered in recent memory.

24. Ultra-Processed People: Why We Can’t Stop Eating Food That Isn’t Food by Chris van Tulleken (audio) - three stars

25. Blackouts by Jusin Torres - five stars

    The National Book Award judges got this one right.

26. New People by Danzy Senna - three stars

27. Rabbit Hole by Kate Brody - three stars

28. What You Are Looking For is in the Library by Michicko Aoyama - four stars
    I read this in one sitting and found it delightful, though I admit that I do have librarian bias.

29. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides - three stars

30. Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America’s Modern Militias by Kevin Cook (audio) - four stars
    I’ve read a few things about Waco, Ruby Ridge, the general militia movement, etc., and I thought this was a good addition to the genre. The author is very balanced in how he presents the story and I thought it was well done.

31. The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice by Elizabeth Flock - three stars

32. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar - five stars
    I was stunned. It’s just a beautiful book, and I’m going to read it again soon, perhaps on audio.

33. American Girls: One Woman’s Journey Into the Islamic State and Her Sister’s Fight to Bring Her Home by Jessica Roy - three stars

34. They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us by Prachi Gupta (audio) - four stars
    This is both a memoir and an examination of the “model minority” myth in the United States, and I thought it was well done.

35. A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib - four stars
    Wonderful essays!

January reading statistics from StoryGraph