January Reading

Westerns, Audiobooks, Virginia Woolf, and Humble Suspensions of Disbelief

Hello all! We made it through January, a highly contested month. I feel some hate the first month of the year, the dead of winter and all that, while some relish in its invitation for a new beginning. I fall somewhere in the middle, glad to have made it past the solstice with the ever increasing days, and yet startled by how slow time moves through this month. I tend to get some of my best reading done in January, probably because I spend more cold nights hunkered down than wanting to go out, while also feeling a fresh surge of reading energy with the new year.

I ended up reading nine books this month. A good chunk of this was accomplished through audiobook format; I had a fierce need to be listening to stories while endlessly crocheting one beanie after another (I have made 7 since December; I need help). I will talk a little bit more below about my audiobook listening experience this month and how there are some books I can only tolerate if listened to, while with some I need to read with my own eyeballs in order to make them more enriching. This is not to say that listening to the audiobook “doesn’t count as reading,” but listening to a book is a different experience than the quiet intimacy between my eyes, my brain, and a the words on the page. Okay, now to the books!

If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino

This book lost me and I stopped reading it after getting 75% of the way through. This is my second Calvino I have read and the second one I have not liked. I am not sure I will give this man another chance. His work is too surreal and meta for my taste. The book within a book within a book within a book concept started to get old after the 4th iteration. I know this is a beloved, modern classic, so please don’t hate me for disliking it!

The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry (audiobook)

I am hoping to read more Westerns this year and The Heart in Winter served as a perfect introduction to this goal. I listened to this book on audio and it made the text read much grittier than I think it would have translated if I had read it myself. Despite the grittiness, the book is an adventurous lovers-on-the-run tale and a refreshing take on the Western genre. Barry, an Irishman, was able to uniquely highlight the immigrant experience in the American West, giving echoes of In The Distance by Hernan Diaz. What other literary Westerns should I read this year? So far I have Annie Proulx, Larry McMurty, and Willa Cather on my list. And I would have preferred to read this book rather than listen to it; it was plot-forward, but the prose was very rich and beautiful so I think an eyeball read would have been more fulfilling.

Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf

Since 2022 I have been committed to reading one Virginia Woolf per year at the start of each year. This has turned out to be such a rewarding project because beginning the year with her now seems to provide some sort of literary recalibration. I am reminded of the gift of language and how Woolf’s particular art peers into a mysterious tear in the fabric of life. Every year I read her, I find new portals through her language. Last year I read A Voyage Out (1915), her first novel written in a more “traditional” format. Her trippy stream of consciousness really starts to take off with Jacob’s Room, published in 1922. Now that I have read a good chunk of her work, I start to see the patterns and themes used within her work, something she doesn’t try to hide. Waves and clocks and secret worlds hiding under London streets. Ideas floating on the wind through time, houses creaking and decaying along the way. I love her earnestness and authenticity, her commitment to her style and way of seeing the world.

Jacob’s Room reads like a precursor to her great modernist works to come. The exploration of everyday London which shines in Mrs. Dalloway, the time traveling, European adventures of Orlando, and the grief and family dynamics in To The Lighthouse. The premise of Jacob’s Room is simple in that it follows young Jacob Flanders from boyhood to manhood, with the looming threat of WWI. We follow Jacob from his childhood in Cornwall, to his education at Cambridge (where I see some of the ideas in A Room of One’s Own start to unfurl), and to his young adulthood in London and travels through Italy and Greece. The prose is astounding and in true Woolf fashion, the books ends tragically.

I could go on and on about this book but I want to sit with it for a bit longer before I write more. I am also planning to attend the Literature Cambridge lecture on Jacob’s Room in February, where I hope to get more context about the book. Who wants to be my patron and fund my ability to attend their summer course on Virginia Woolf and the natural world this August?

The Bombshell by Darrow Star (audiobook)

I recently found a Substack list about books where women have fun and I was hooked by the additions of Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados and Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki, two books I adored. Plus, I feel like I could do better at reading books where women are not absolutely miserable, so I chose The Bombshell by Darrow Star from the line up. This was a perfect juicy and plot-driven book to listen to while I worked on my little crocheted beanies. The Bombshell is a loose reimagining of the Patty Hearst kidnapping, set in the 90s on the island of Corsica. I am not sure I would have had the patience to read this book as the choices by the main character were infuriating and it took some humility to suspend my disbelief around the plot in general, but alas I listened and enjoyed myself along the way. Read if you liked The Girls by Emma Cline or American Woman by Susan Choi

A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux

In 2025 I did not read any Annie Ernaux, which is probably why the year felt cursed. In an effort to eradicate and dissolve all curses in my life, I am committed to reading at least two of her books this year, a spell I am sure will be effective. The curse already feels lighter after completing A Girl’s Story, Ernaux’s reflection on her life from age 19-23. The book is a stunning and breathtaking exploration of early womanhood and the shame we bury within ourselves. Ernaux makes it clear this is a time in her life she has struggled to revisit and is haunted by the idea she may die before she does so. Of all her autobiographies, this part of her life felt the most tender, the most sacred, and it took her 56 years to write about it. She writes about “the failure to understand what we experience, at the moment we experience it” and how the “opacity of the present” leaves us unaware of our own reality. A Girl’s Story uses the tool of memory of reflection to try and put the pieces together, but Ernaux knows this will never provide the complete story.

“I do not know what this piece of writing is. Even the thing I was pursuing by writing this book has dissolved. Among my papers I found a sort of note of intent: Explore the gulf between the stupefying reality of things that happen, at the moment they happen, and, years later, the strange unreality in which the things that happened are enveloped.”

On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle

The third volume of Balle’s seven installment novel. I am very glad to have read I & II last year; these weird little books are making my brain at ease, despite the uneasy subject matter. If you don’t know the premise, On The Calculation of Volume follows Tara Selter as she endlessly repeats the same November 18th day over and over again. We follow her as she tries to learn the rules of her new reality and adapt her life to endless repetition. Volume III brought in new elements that I am hesitant to go into for not wanting to spoil things, but it did make this volume stand out from the first two. I am excited to see where Balle takes us in the next four installments!

The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers (audiobook)

Another audiobook where I humbly suspended my disbelief and let myself get swept away in the juicy plot of it all. I feel like this book got a lot of buzz last fall, and while I think the blurb calling it “the best book about adultery since Madame Bovary,” is a bit of a stretch, the book definitely had some compelling things to say. The book follows Cora and Sam, two young parents with their owns families, who despite being happily married to other people, feel a magnetic connection to one another. The book is told through parallel timelines spanning a decade, one based in reality, the other a fantasy. One where the affair takes place, the other where it does not. The parallel worlds merge and blend throughout the book, with the affair moving in and out of reality. This narrative technique shed light on the evergreen and thorny problem of affairs, when does it stop being an escape from one’s dissatisfaction with reality and turn into reality itself?

Passing by Nella Larsen

I am starting a classics book club at the public library I work at and this was our February pick. Passing is a very internal book, fully inside the mind of Irene Redfield, a light-skinned black woman living in 1920s Harlem. The book begins with her encounter of an old childhood friend, Clare Kendry. Clare is also light-skinned like Irene, but has chosen to “pass” for white. Clare continues to haunt Irene, like a vampiric doppelganger infiltrating her life. Clare wants access to Irene’s blackness, without having to actually live with the reality of it, a prophetic analogy for the future of race relations in America. The subtle ambiguities in the novel will make for great book group discussion.

Deep Cuts by Holly Brinkley (audiobook)

Another contemporary, romance-adjacent audiobook! I tried to read the physical copy of this sometime last year, but could not stomach the prose or the plot (too much corny cheese for me unfortunately). I saw it was being made into an A24 movie recently so I thought I would give it another shot, but in audiobook format this time. It was still hard to stomach, and yet I listened to the whole entire thing. I think it was the heavy nostalgia for the early 2000s indie music scene that got me hooked. I didn’t really care for the characters or the plot or the romance, but I did need to listen long enough for the term “indie sleaze” to be mentioned. The book was meh, but it got me listening to Modest Mouse again so it wasn’t a total wash.

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So that was January. Here’s my potential February lineup, what do we think?

Thanks for reading!

-J