Issue 102: Everything I read in December

Introvert problems.

Happy New Year, friends! Who else is just SO FUCKING RELIEVED that the holiday madness is over?! As someone who needs A LOT of alone time but isn't particularly disciplined about routines, the holidays absolutely took me OUT. Between end-of-year work parties — which in my industry means socializing with anti-social people 😅 — visiting family for Christmas, and a vacation to Puerto Rico with friends and our kids... I feel like I burned through all my 2025 extrovert energy by January 5th! I sound like a brat, but my fellow introverts will relate.

I apologize for bending the cover so aggressively, I know this would be triggering for some of you.

Despite my whining, December turned into a solid reading month. Even better — during my flight back from Puerto Rico, I devoured my first book of 2025, which feels like an excellent omen for the reading year ahead!

Books mentioned:

• Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

• 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

• The Door by Magda Szabó

• So Late In The Day by Claire Keegan

• Heartburn by Nora Ephron

📚 Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar — When

Sara Hildreth

asked about must-read 2024 books in November,

Michelle Martin

and I decided to tackle this together. The novel's poetic style worked great for me both on audio (for its musicality) and print (for proper annotation) — there's just so much to unpack. At its heart is Cyrus - poet, recovering addict, and Iranian American - navigating his "big pathological sad" after losing his mother in the Iran Air Flight 655 crash. His story weaves together poetry, vibrant dialogue, and Persian mythology with shocking seamlessness and humor. Yes, every single review of this book has called it stylistically unique and hard to describe. It is. What continues to linger with me a month later:

• The portrait of self-respect through Cyrus's mother and her soul-preserving unconventional choices.

• The raw tenderness around immigrant single parenthood and generational sacrifices surrounding immigrant families.

• The resilient artist's heart imagining ways forward through everything — withholding here a little because I don’t want to spoil this for you if you haven’t read it yet.

While it drags slightly mid-way, this book is a beautiful piece of art that had me alternating between tears and laughter. Also, I know that this is an odd thing to say but to me the book smelled like dirty hair… in a good way. I suspect it has to do with the vivid language in all the scenes involving drugs and alcohol??

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Anthony Hopkins as Frank Doel, the store manager of Marks & Co. These days the bookstore that inspired the 84 Charing Cross Road book and movie is, sadly, a McDonald’s. 😢

📚 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff is pure charm - an epistolary memoir chronicling Hanff's decades-long correspondence with a London bookseller. What starts as a simple request for some old books (by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch), evolves into a deep friendship between Helene and the book shop staff, built on shared literary passion and mutual generosity. The conversation continues for years, we get a sense of evolving political and economic circumstances for all parties involved and as the friendships deepen, you find yourself absolutely rooting for these people to meet. Their connection is truly so wonderful and their casual intelligence completely awe-inspiring.

After

Kate Jones

’s recommendation led me to devour the audio version in one sitting, I ordered five copies as gifts for fellow readers¹. The movie adaptation is next on my list, thanks to

Donald Neil Leitch

’s suggestion.

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📚 The Door by Magda Szabó confirms my newfound devotion to her work after reading Katalin Street earlier this year.

Szabó was a poet before she became a novelist. She moved to Budapest toward the end of the Second World War, in her late twenties, as the Russians were driving Hitler’s forces out of Hungary. She fell in with a group of other young writers there, and, in 1947, published a collection of poetry, “The Lamb,” documenting the ravages of the war, followed by her second collection, “Back to Man.” In 1949, she received the Baumgarten Prize, Hungary’s highest literary honor at the time. The prize was withdrawn the same day. The country had come under Soviet control, and the Stalinist regime of Mátyás Rákosi, taking its cues from the Kremlin, began a brutal crackdown on all artists who wouldn’t produce state propaganda. Szabó was declared a class alien. She and her circle of fellow-writers—they called themselves the New Moon group (Újhold)—were banned from publishing.

The Door delves into the fraught relationship between an intellectual writer and her enigmatic housekeeper, Emerence. A richly layered exploration of power, loyalty, and human vulnerability and interdependence, this haunting novel unravels secrets and moral ambiguities that leave an indelible mark. I didn’t know this when I picked up the book but I later realized that the writer character must be inspired by Szabo's experience of being closely watched and falling in and out of favor with the communist regime over time. It was the character of Emerence, however, that made the deepest impression on me and made me very homesick for Bulgaria.

Over many years these two women become completely enmeshed with each other’s lives, showing each other tremendous love and support but also insane co-dependence and dysfunction. I felt SO INVESTED in their relationship and my anxiety was through the roof watching them bare witness to each others’ deepest fears and regrets but also showing their love in the most illogical, hardass ways. Szabó writes with great insight and precision about the lives of women East of the Iron Curtain — their force of character but also their anger and their loss of softness (maybe??)… If you were raised on tough love, this book may feel somewhat triggering.

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📚 So Late In The Day by Claire Keegan — This was the last of the little Claire Keegan books that I owned and I had specifically saved it for a time when I knew I would be busy and life would feel hectic and hard and I would need a RELIABLY good book. This one fit the bill because Keegan never misses — she writes these surgically precise little stories about ordinary people going through extraordinary things that happen to them as they are minding their own little business. The story Antarctica in this collection — in which a married woman travels out of town to see what it's like to sleep with a man other than her husband — completely wrecked me. Honestly, if you are in reading slump … just buy yourself a Keegan.

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📚 Heartburn by Nora Ephron — At the end of the year, I wanted to read something lighter and picked this up on the recommendation of a bookseller in a tiny bookstore in Stinson Beach, CA. She said that Ephron cares about the similar issues as Didion but is actually fun to read. I laughed at her blurb and of course had to buy the book.

Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep in the movie adaption of Heartburn. Meryl Streep also narrates the audiobook version of this book which makes for a great listen while you’re doing the dishes.

Heartburn is a classic, blending humor and heartbreak as it chronicles a food writer’s messy divorce. Inspired by Ephron’s own life, it mixes recipes with witty commentary on love, betrayal, and resilience, offering a funny and relatable take on personal reinvention. As I read this, I could see why so many people love it but I can’t say I was one of them.

Towards the end of the book, the main protagonist Rachel (based on Nora Ephron) is telling someone how her ex-husband used to make up little stories he told to their baby while still in utero and she says how she remembers those stories being very silly and charming and how they made her laugh and think he would make a great dad and how now, thinking of them from this end of divorce, she could still remember the feeling of listening to those stories but none of the characters or the plotlines… And then says that’s how she felt about the relationship itself… remembering some of the feelings but starting to forget the plot lines. I loved that. But as I was reading it, I felt like Ephron is one of those woman who say they don’t need feminism because they don’t need a movement to stand up for their rights, they got it under control thank you very much. Similarly, the protagonist of this book chooses to deal with the heartbreak of her husband’s infidelity with jokes and telling silly stories — she, of course talks about THAT with her therapist who calls her out on it — which felt very 1980s to me and I think we have learned that we need MORE than that.

I know it was just meant to be a funny story but a lot of the anecdotes in it made me feel proud of us as a culture… like, ok, we have clearly learned some things about emotional processing and have collectively grown up. It’s a book that I don’t believe has aged well.

Favorite books of 2024:

• January - Foster by Claire Keegan

• February - Small things like these by Claire Keegan

• March - Stoner by John Williams

• April - Clear by Carys Davies

• May - Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

• June - All Fours by Miranda July

• July - Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin

• August - Playboy by Constance Debre

• September - Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

• October - Autumn by Ali Smith

• November - Boulder by Eva Baltasar

• December - Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar

According to Storygraph, in 2024 I engaged in introspective musings, traversed landscapes of the heart, and dipped into wells of melancholy:

• 74 books read

• Top 3 genres: literary, contemporary, LBTQIA+

• Top 3 authors: Claire Keegan, Sally Rooney, Joan Didion (based on number of books read by the author)

• To 3 moods: reflective, emotional, sad

I mean. No shit.

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A question for you:

1. When I read a book that delights me, especially if it is SMALL, I love to get a bunch of copies and just have it ready for gifting. I think a small book is a perfect gift because it is a lower commitment and the recipient is more likely to read it.